I have just read today’s tabloids – the Murdoch rag, and the Fairfax thing (it’s hard to say what it is these days), which has certainly slid a long way from quality journalism. But there is still a hint of pretence about it. I suppose we have to face the fact that quality journalism is likely to be a victim of the internet.

In any case the slide to unprofitably has meant that these tabloids are more amenable to the influence of interested parties. In the case of Murdoch it’s easy to see where the interests lie. For Fairfax it’s anyone’s guess whose vested interests they serve. They are all over the place and figuring it out is like trying to kill a moth with one hand, mid-air.

Today the subject of most interest in the Herald is the federal government budget.

The Daily Telegraph’s position is to ignore any impact of the budget; there is a small story on page 2 and the rest is on page 77 and 78. The editorial basically says that the opposition’s anti-budget stance is stupid. So we know where Murdoch stands – well we knew that already. He clearly wants more favours off the coalition.

The Herald, on the other hand, has pages and pages about the outrageous budget impact on poor people and some not-so-poor people. It also describes how the opposition parties in coalition are going to bring the government down etc etc. A slightly different position than the Daily Telegraph.

One laughable report was that of Joe Hockey trying to defend the $7 fee for visits to doctors, even for those that are bulk-billed. He claimed that it was the cost of a ‘middy’. You reckon someone in his office would have rung the Rooty Hill RSL and asked what a bogan pays for a beer eh? A schooner is about $5 and a middy is about $3.75.

There was a time once when I would have been quite interested in these issues. But in the main they are first world problems. The sense of entitlement in Australia is quite remarkable and even people struggling near the bottom of mainstream society often have the full suite of consumer goods.

Rather than just balancing the budget I would have been more interested in a story about investment in growth in the economy, and also the removal of unnecessary costs to living. The former speaks for itself but the latter does not.

In our lovely country there is a massive hidden cost to just existing. Conforming to thousands of regulations and laws includes a massive hidden cost. For example we have tax, traffic rules, business reporting, rules, safety rules, health rules, audit rules, and the list is endless. All of this adds to the cost of all goods and services. These added costs concatenate through supply chains making goods and services for consumers more and more expensive. Until we get the ridiculous situations that Australia now has the highest cost of living in the world despite that the fact that we have more resources per person than anyone other country on the planet.

The threshold wealth requirement for just being alive in Australia is quite remarkable. For those people nearer the bottom of the tree life could be made substantially easier if the cost of living was eased off. And this could be achieved very easily by removing the layers of rules and regulations that have been created by government.

But most Australians actually want all these rules. How do I know? Well whenever something bad happens to an individual (like their child gets hit at a pedestrian crossing, for example) they become passionate advocates for the introduction of new rules to prevent the thing ever happening again. Basically we are country of people that wants our government to solve all our problems. And we feel this is a moral as well as a legal right and obligation.

And that has lead to a situation where, for example, it is almost impossible to drop out of society. If you go mad and decide to live on the streets without any worldly possessions then you will immediately be in breach of a zillion rules and very likely you will end up in a series of micro-incarcerations and you will also be constantly harassed.

In our lovely country one doesn’t even have the unfettered choice to own nothing, earn nothing and to be left alone. That is, in Australia it is now an offence to be poor and happy.

And it’s this stress of existence, the minimal bar that is quite high, which leads to the existential angst over such a banal event as a federal government budget.

I can’t see things getting better. We have backed ourselves way into a cul-de-sac of moral and legal turpitude. And entropy is against us ever getting out of it.

My two least favourite words are ‘should’ and ‘deserve’.

And people would be much better placed if they worried about their obligations rather than their rights.

Pissing into the wind, I know.

My daughter just finished her year-5 NAPLAN tests.

These are some standard tests done by all students in the country and used by government to justify all their devious education policies. What you don’t measure you can’t control.

Her essay question was something like “if you had to break one rule or law which one would it be?”

Lola wrote an essay around breaking the rule that kids have to do the NAPLAN tests.

She hasn’t fallen far from the tree it seems.

I have been writing blogs and essays since 2011.

Initially it started as an interesting diversion, a hobby. And it still is.

At some point I started writing about the basket case that is the Australian startup tech industry. And since 2011 things have got much worse in this industry so my writing has had no influence whatsoever.

I have found that I am essentially the sole media critic of the industry despite the fact that I know many experienced people share my concerns. However they keep their opinions primarily to themselves.

This morning I had an interesting debate with a colleague. Despite my best attempts to explain certain structural flaws in the industry he couldn’t see my point.

And that crystallised in me the realisation of the futility of this Quixotic effort. The audience is by and large not only unreceptive, but in the main it is also incapable of following the arguments.

This could be because I am am a crap communicator or because of deep vested interests on their side, or even because they simply don’t have the education to follow my arguments.

Being generous, I have decided that the problem is in my communication. I have tried my best and it’s not good enough.

To wit I hereby give it up, this mug’s game. I have decided to spend my precious time on other things.

And I wish the Australian startup tech community the best in their endeavours. Please prove me wrong.

Over and out.

There is one very strong similarity between the venture capital game and online content.

As industries they both conform to the ‘long tail’ principal whereby a few make money and the greater number lose money. See the plots below.

However venture capital has two such plots, one for investors and one for entrepreneurs.

One needs the intersection of successful investors and successful entrepreneurs for profits to be made.

If good investors intersect with entrepreneurs in the long tail then losses are assured.

If good entrepreneurs intersect with investors in the long tail then losses are assured.

If investors and entrepreneurs, both from their respective long tails, meet and do business then you can guess what always happens

Not surprisingly, these plots are self determining in that the good entrepreneurs will seek out the good investors and vice versa.

Both investor and entrepreneurs can only get into the ‘head’ of they are born with right stuff, are appropriately educated, and never get enmeshed with anyone in the long tail.

Those in the long tails can hope all they want but they mostly get what they deserve.

Switzerland is tiny yet they manage to make excessive money by exporting bullshit.

For example they make 2.5% of the world’s watches as measured by the number of units, yet this is 54% of the market for watches when measured be revenue. Annually they export $23b worth of watches, half the value of all Australia’s manufacturing exports. And these are just nice looking pieces of 19th century mechanical technology – they have the whole world fooled. They make massive margins on these dinosaur watches.

Another example is coffee. Switzerland imports raw coffee beans (2.6% of the world’s total), processes it, and then exports it as Nescafe coffee pods. By doing this Switzerland’s roasted coffee exports were valued at 49% more than the next largest exporter—Italy—even though the Swiss export 67% less volume.

Do you see the similarity in these two cases? These seemingly impossible scenarios are held up by a combination of quality, brand value, supply chain complexity, marketing, a little technology and a relentless drive to maintain and improve their market position. Oh, and they keep their manufacturing in Switzerland rather than outsourcing it to Asia. They can do this by making sure their margins are massive and by also investing in automated manufacturing technology.

We in Australia would see the Swiss watch and coffee pod industries as exports of manufactured goods and primary products respectively. The Swiss see these industries as complex and intricate machines that only they can build and manage.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

p.s. The team bus logos (painted on the side of the buses) for the Swiss and Australian soccer teams at the 2014 World Cup are respectively; “End Station: 13.07.2014 Maracana! Final Stop: 07-13-14 Maracana!” and “Socceroos: Hopping Our Way Into History“. Says it all really, doesn’t it?

A colleague of mine just wrote a gushing piece about the current batch of investors in Australian technology start-ups.

He is either deluded or maybe just spruiking the dead horse because it’s in his own best interests.

In truth, our tech investment community is so bad that it’s laughable.

Here are the problems in no particular order:

1. The funds are mostly undersized so we get the age-old problem of micro-investments by investors that end up choking their charges as they look to avoid excessive dilution in later rounds of funding.

2. Fund managers are deeply inexperienced. I can hardly think of a single person that has done the ten year apprenticeship as an associate or principal in a proper venture fund. In Silicon Valley this is a requirement before stepping into a GP role. You can’t learn this stuff in a text book and inexperienced fund managers almost by definition fuck it up, slowly.

3. You could throw a blanket over the amount of uncommitted capital in the system. My guess is that there’s only a couple of hundred million, or less, of genuinely uncommitted capital in the system. And that will be spread out over a thousand micro-investments.

4. Not one investor has any way of improving their deal flow. Australia’s tech dealflow is very bad which is reflected in a 30 year negative IRR on VC investment. Nothing has improved – it’s actually worse than ever right now. If you let the deals just spring out of the pavement like weeds in the manner that they always have then you are doomed. I for one would try something different like importing deals from Silicon Valley by offering great terms to them. Or something, anything, other than what has failed for 30 years.

5. I could go on, but what it the point?

Back to the gushing publicity that the tech sector receives. This is a business sector which is so sick that it’s almost dead. And yet about 99.9% of all media coverage is positive and upbeat. Like the publicity around an app yesterday that sets an alarm clock for your parking meter timing … really are people this fucking stupid that they think this shit is worth doing or talking about?

Why is the media coverage so upbeat? Well it’s delivered by or on behalf of vested interests seeking to extract money off fools. And the fools are either the government, ignorant investors, self-funded entrepreneurs (in the case of the incubators) and others. There is no vested interest in recognising the systematic problems. And there is virtually no educated altruism in the system either.

My view is that until there is a balanced and critical media coverage of this sector that things will not improve. As an example of what can happen one only needs to reflect on the sport of soccer which was until recently the basket case of Australian sport. The structural issues were written and talked about passionately in the media until eventually there was enough consensus for Lowy and the government to step in and invest in a genuine structural change and industry development. It looks like it’s going to work. See, we can do Chinese-style 5 year plans, but only in the business of sport.

In the meantime I would like to challenge the media outlets and the journalists covering the tech space to start practicing a bit of constructive criticism in the interests of the industry that they are serving.

At the moment the tech start-up sector in Australia is like the spoilt child that is always getting told that it is fantastic and never, ever, gets any discipline or constructive feedback. And we know how likely it is that these spoilt and deluded kids end up doing anything constructive, don’t we?

With debt you need to consider…

1. Not all government debt is bad. Sometimes it’s for investment into infrastructure or education or somesuch which generates profits above and beyond the cost of borrowing the money. This is good government debt

2. Bad government debt is stuff that is borrowed for spending on bribing voters and is not spent on anything that generates income to repay the debt. Social equity spending really should be funded out of recurring tax revenues so that it stays within our capacity to maintain it.

3. The total (all) government debt in Australia is about $650b. I reckon less than one third of this is ‘productive’ in that it pays itself back by generating wealth.

4. Business debt is $744b. Possibly over 90% of this wealth generating.

5. Household debt is $1500b. Housing debt is $1350b. and there are a few other categories. All up private debt comes to $2230b, dwarfing government debt. Most of this is not wealth generating but much less of it is foreign debt than government debt.

6. Savings via Superannuation are $1600B

7. I am not sure how much the banks have on their books. But all up the country balances, in a balance sheet fashion. By definition.

8. The govt needs to keep borrowing for a number of reasons. First, the cycle of bribing voters at elections. Second, the need to set a bond rate which then also sets the interest rates and is their sole micro-lever on the economy these days. Third, the ability to invest ahead of tax receipts in big wealth generating projects. It also allows them to respond to economic depression by investing in projects that stimulate private spending.

9. Our govt can’t devalue the A$ by ‘printing’ (actually created in the RBA and lent to the 4 banks) money because this would devalue our currency and our foreign repayments would go up, offsetting any economic benefits by having a more valuable export industry and lower demand for imports. The only way to solve this is to borrow locally from the super funds exclusively. They have the capacity to do this but the low returns to the superfund holders would be a political issue.

10. If our foreign borrowings (of all types) collectively get too large because the income from the borrowing do not repay the loans entirely (primarily because we are borrowing for lifestyle upgrades) then we run out the capacity to fully repay them> in which case we sell assets (like farms, houses, office blocks, national business etc). Which is what we have been doing for 20 years. Eventually we run out of assets and we then learn to readjust our lifestyle expectations or else face a horrible correction when our economy hits the wall.

I was recently introduced to a young technology entrepreneur here in Australia. I meet people like this almost daily.

She is working very hard on a new internet business that makes no sense from a technology or market view. However she has character and determination and could, in the right environment, have a shot at becoming a successful tech entrepreneur.

But here in Australia she doesn’t get the feedback she needs to make that transition. In fact she has micro-investors that like her business as it is and tell her so. Her board is a bunch of people that have never been serious investors or entrepreneurs.

She plans on doggedly sticking to the path dreamt up from ignorance some time back. She is guaranteed to succeed in building a very small business. Or not.

In Silicon Valley if, as a young entrepreneur. you have the right character investors don’t put money into your company when you first approach them. But they will introduce you to experienced mentors that will slowly (and hopefully) educate you, help you find a big problem to work on, and then get you surrounded by the right technical and marketing people, After a while you will return to the same investors and get serious funding.

What investors love is the right human capital – the rare ones that have the energy, intelligence, and the drive to succeed at founding and running start-ups. So the rest of the experienced community (that have been there, done that, but the energy is gone) have set themselves up to work through these young people. So long as they listen, and know who to listen to.

The difference between Silicon Valley and anywhere else is that Silicon Valley has a large pool of deeply experienced investors and entrepreneurs that can mentor young entrepreneurial talent. And when that talent is sufficiently educated the VC’s will invest heavily in it.

Here in Australia the odd young entrepreneur that has talent, drive and ambition and that doesn’t go to Silicon Valley gets spoiled by inexperienced investors and mentors. It’s very sad to watch.

When did the federal  budget become a spectator sport? Why the interest?

I am a student of economics and I am genuinely interested. But I wait until the next day to read the details. There’s no point watching the thing unfold.

The interest in Australia is pretty much based on ‘what’s in it for me?’ How much do I get taxed? What handouts do I get? Do I keep my pointless government funded job?

And also the fact that many mug punters are totally compelled by the tabloid media, right down to their interests and daily activities.

One thing I can assure you is that this government will cut the budget hard so they can ‘save’ some money for the next election. Basically they will splash cash to the fools in 3 years; the same cash they just took off them.

The debt will be cut because it has to be otherwise too much of our tax income goes to interest payments and then they don’t have any cash to bribe voters.

What we really need is investment in infrastructure and education, the selective removal of impediments to new business, serious anti-trust, devaluation of the currency via the printing presses, and more more local borrowings (by government from super).

And an Asian style five year plan to build a new industry would be great.

Fat chance.

The stats according to a friend of mine.

Just think, an ugly person can be six standard deviations uglier than a super model.

And I reckon that 68% of couples are within one standard deviation of each other. As are their children.

In marketing, and especially internet marketing, the concept of the ‘long tail’ is very well known.

Basically, a small fraction of popular products and services dominate the market (‘the head’) and a largish fraction of products and services (‘the long tail’) get very little revenue.

Selling things on the internet is essentially one big pyramid scheme, where a small number of lucky content providers make money and large number of content providers (authors, musicians, etc) lose money. All the profits are in the head and all the losses are in the tail.

The larger number of content providers in the ‘long tail’ lose money because they actually pay all sorts of service providers (website builders, hosting services, professional formatters etc) to get their content on the web in an appropriate format, and their revenues are less than their costs.

The small number of lucky content providers rely on a bit of virality to get initial momentum and then they get picked up by promoters who take a profit share but also invest heavily in marketing these guys’ products.

The whole thing is a pyramid scheme because the promoters that underwrite the investment in the winners also profit from the large number of losers. The promoters are the ‘big assholes in the middle’ like iTunes, Amazon and the like.

Trying to make money from content is a gamble not an investment.

I listen to a lot of people that ‘take the road less traveled’ or that are ‘unraveling the mysteries of life’ .

I have a suspicion that if you solve one mystery then you just replace it with another.

And for those that care this keeps happening until you are left with a set mysteries that you can live with.

Only a very few people complete this process and we call them prophets.

However only the true prophet understands that they end with just as many mysteries as when they started.

Nature’s way of getting people to reproduce as widely as possible is to make them complex and fucked up. And then nature uses that to drive the random sex urges.

Everyone that goes to therapy thinks that they have an entitlement to be free of emotional issues. They do not. It is part of being human.

Maybe we all have a god each.

That’s 7 billion gods.

Actually maybe we’re the gods and they’re the people.

Oscar Wilde said “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”

This is what I think

1. The desire for power is driven by human emotional issues, and
2. Almost 99% of these emotional issues also lead to exaggerated sexual behaviour,
3. Which is nature’s way of getting us to reproduce as widely as possible
4. So where you see the power-hungry behaviour you can assume there is also a correlated sexual-hungry behaviour

But

1. Many people with emotional issues are not power-hungry, and
2. They still may have the correlated sexual-hungry behaviour

So

1. Power-hungry behaviour is correlated to sexual-hungry behaviour, but sexual-hungry behaviour is not always correlated to power-hungry behaviour

And

1. There are some people with no real power and no chance of getting it
2. But yet they may have many emotional issues
3. So the only real option for them is to use sex as a tool for power

I think this all got muddled up in people’s mind and Oscar Wilde merged all the options into one catchy, but flawed, line and it stuck for good.

Have a read of this story – http://awareofawareness.com/2014/04/25/the-beauty-of-abandonment/

The girl had no choice but to deal with her father’s abandonment.

She has to go through all the stages of grief.

Otherwise she would go mad and some do.

Nevertheless she is scarred for life.

He on the other hand can’t reconcile with her because of his guilt. It always gets in the way.

Unfortunately she wants him in a way that doesn’t allow him to bypass his guilt.

I suspect that, without her father around, she fell right under the tree of her mother. Which is what he sees in her.

And her mother reflected the sins of his parents, which is why he was attracted to her in the first place.

And so it goes on.

We humans live in this merry-go-round of emotional trauma, struggling to inch ourselves out of the slime that we inherit.

And this effort is hampered by our inability to see ourselves clearly no matter how clearly we can see others.

Caravan park anyone?

Harbour bridge ca. 1940. The bikes just went straight across the bridge in the car lanes.

On further review I think the first bloke is driving a horse and cart.

“Genius retires to caravan park”

Google didn’t say it’s never happened. But it does say it has no record of it ever happening.

Same, same.

If a genius retires to a caravan park and Google doesn’t have any record of it, then it didn’t happen.

And that is a point that isn’t worth making.

The only act that can’t make a difference is the one that is sequestered away from the polluting influence of binary omniscience.

And the shit was sequestered by the aerofoil.

Sushi train
Reading glasses
Beer
OP’s smokes
The adjustable beard trimmer

Honourable mention: lube

Chooks v Tigers.

Hotdogs and beer won.

Have you ever noticed that the only two items ever immobilised on our overhead power lines are shoes and bats.

The shoes I understand; gee that’s funny eh?

But the bats – I guess they get electrocuted. But why not other birds?

Well only bats have the wingspan and the inclination to reach out with their wings and touch adjacent power lines.

It took me forty years to figure that out.

Chemistry is getting right down into the minutiae…which is OK I guess since it’s all about molecules.

But the pioneering days are long over. It’s all about discovering or inventing complex systems these days.

Hardly the stuff to rivet the masses with the genius of the scientist!

By way of example I have listed the last 10 and the first 10 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry below.

As a trained research chemist I can’t get excited about any of the last ten prizes.

They are, all of them, just another branch of research chosen above all the other thousands, to be important.

God knows on what basis. Given time, most of this will be forgotten and just absorbed into the body of knowledge.

I wonder if the Nobel Prize people should stop prizes in Chemistry and look into some field that is far more pioneering.

If they don’t the whole thing might become redundant.

Here is the last ten Nobel Prizes in Chemistry:

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013
Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel
“for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2012
Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka
“for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011
Dan Shechtman
“for the discovery of quasicrystals”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010
Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki
“for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath
“for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008
Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien
“for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2007
Gerhard Ertl
“for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2006
Roger D. Kornberg
“for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005
Yves Chauvin, Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock
“for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004
Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose
“for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003
“for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes”

Peter Agre
“for the discovery of water channels”

Roderick MacKinnon
“for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels”

Here is the first ten Nobel prizes in Chemistry:

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1911
Marie Curie, née Sklodowska
“in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1910
Otto Wallach
“in recognition of his services to organic chemistry and the chemical industry by his pioneer work in the field of alicyclic compounds”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1909
Wilhelm Ostwald
“in recognition of his work on catalysis and for his investigations into the fundamental principles governing chemical equilibria and rates of reaction”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908
Ernest Rutherford
“for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1907
Eduard Buchner
“for his biochemical researches and his discovery of cell-free fermentation”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1906
Henri Moissan
“in recognition of the great services rendered by him in his investigation and isolation of the element fluorine, and for the adoption in the service of science of the electric furnace called after him”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1905
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer
“in recognition of his services in the advancement of organic chemistry and the chemical industry, through his work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1904
Sir William Ramsay
“in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1903
Svante August Arrhenius
“in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1902
Hermann Emil Fischer
“in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his work on sugar and purine syntheses”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1901
Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff
“in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions”

All inventions are innovative but not all innovations are inventive.

The difference is subject to the prior art, your legal budget, the latest version of the patent legislation and the mood of the judge.

Chuck another prawn on the Barbie.

I was asked this morning about the role of ingenuity in patenting.

I suggested that ingenuity, for me, is more about how to get around problems rather than inventing new solutions.

Australians are very ingenious.

A hedge is a fence or boundary formed by closely growing bushes or shrubs.

But we know it better as a way of protecting oneself against financial loss or other adverse circumstances.

I suppose a bet on either side of the fence became a ‘hedge’ because the verb ‘fence’ had already been stolen.

But it would have been quite appropriate to use ‘fence funds’ given the behaviour of a few of the hedge fund managers that I know.

This is a great site – https://en.greatfire.org/

It’s a list of all the dates when a website is blocked by the great firewall of China.

You just type in the website of interest and the list pops up.

For example Google Drive has been blocked 100% of the time for the last 90 days.

The motivation for the Chinese government is three-fold:

1. To ensure their citizens don’t have unfettered access to certain information that may threaten the government’s position
2. To give Chinese web companies a chance against the foreign (American) raiders
3. To keep on top of the firewall technology so they can shut the whole thing down if they ever need to, in an emergency

India oughta join up with China and create a market as big as the rest of the world behind that firewall.

You can imagine a future where the Earth is divided into two warring IT communities. One side that opens the boiled egg from the big end and one that opens the egg from the little end.

Here is a list of recent and successful Australian tech companies that have bootstrapped themselves and then gone straight to the US for VC or PE funding:

Campaign Monitor
RetailMeNot
BigCommerce
Atlasssian
99Designs
Freelancer

As far as I know none of these had local interactions with any incubators, accelerators, IIF funds or other Australian VC.

The last three big successes which had Australian VC funding were:

Looksmart in 1995
Seek in 1997
Hitwise in 1997

Regression to the mean anyone?

You can’t say that cycling in Sydney is ever dull.

This morning I almost got wiped out by two nuns in a Toyota Corolla.

Which begs the question; would you rather be nailed by two nuns in a Corolla or two paramedics in an Ambulance?

I reckon 99.9% of all Australian would say the ambulance because they believe in the body but have doubts about the soul.

Truly religious we ain’t.

I have just swapped coffee makers.

My old system was a Rancilio Silvia with accompanying Rocky grinder. It’s retails for $1400 and derives from Italy.

It’s made from components that go into commercial machines that are surrounded by poor design and manual buttons and valves.

Using it was like using a 1960s Ferrari. Great when it worked. But much of the time it just leaked oil onto the garage floor.

Enter the Breville. Australian designed and made somewhere in Asia this machine is a combined coffee machine and grinder.

It’s fascinatingly easy to use, makes a consistent coffee, and doesn’t seem to have any maintenance issues. Using the automotive comparison it’s an upmarket Toyota.

The difference between the machines becomes very apparent at a dinner party when, on coffee duty, I only disappear for five minutes now compared to half an hour of swearing.

The only negative is brand perception. Which I don’t care about.

It’s easy to think of Australian business pretty much the same way that we think about footballs. Yes balls, plural.

Australia is unique in that we have four major codes of football and a gaggle of minor codes that we never hear about; gridiron, gaelic football, and a bunch even more obscure codes that you can see on wiki.

Most countries only have one code of major interest.

Oddly, Australian men are quite conversant with all four of our major codes, or generally at least three of the four. They might have one which is their pet project but generally speaking they will pay attention to what is going in in all four codes.

Back to the ASX Top 20. Here is a list of the types of companies that make up the ASX Top 20.

Finance, Insurance and Banks made up 8 of the ASX 20.

Resources make up 6 of the ASX 20.

Mixed Industrials and telcos make up 3 of the ASX 20.

Shops & Malls make up 3 of the ASX 20

In football terms we have:

Finance, Insurance and Banks is the biggie and in football terms this is the AFL.

Resources correlates to Rugby League; is the second largest code and from time to time seems to get near ascendency, always to slip back somehow.

Mixed Industrials is Soccer. It’s made up of anyone and anything and always seemingly chucking a phoenix rising. It has no chance in the global scheme of things because our market is too small for local teams to ever have enough scale to compete internationally.

Shops and Malls is Rugby Union. A smaller code that loves cartel-like behaviour and is always at threat from foreign equivalents and other codes with more money.

The Australian tech sector is represented by our local American Football code. Never heard of it? Well it exists – Wiki tells me that Gridiron was first played in Australia as a league in 1983. There are 2,500 registered players and 73 clubs. That seems just about right for our tech sector.

The desire to harness and wield power requires the possession of a character flaw.

However it’s not a character flaw if you have no interest in contemplation.

Contemplation is the death of stupidity.

I have been contemplating copyright for some time.

It seems to me that the original copyright laws were enacted in such a way because the policing of the medium (say books) was entirely possible. The medium was the content, but no more.

Enter the Internet and all the assumptions behind policing and control have gone to pot.

The ‘business model’ for the internet is primarily advertising – and the related data analytics model which is also for marketing purposes.

The idea of charging for content is being pursued by many groups on the internet but I think it will struggle because people will naturally gravitate to free content even if it is of lower quality.

That is, on the internet the purpose of content is to attract eyeballs in order to drives sales and marketing opportunities for products and services.

And hence I think that copyright as a concept should be restructured around this emerging reality.

What does this mean in reality? Well, the guys that are profiting from sales and marketing should share some of their profits with ALL content providers, be they books, movies, blogs, tweets, whatever.

This would work in much the same way as the recording industry has forever charged for the public use of music.

A cafe, for example, is charged a small fee for the use of music and that money is then distributed to musicians or the owners of the recording on some basis of fairness (based on frequency of playing). Note that the cafe makes it’s money by selling food and beverages and not by selling music. The music is just part of the many ways in which a cafe attracts customers.

In a similar way content is just one of the ways by which online advertisers and marketers attract eyeballs.

I can see a national or even global content distribution model where a fraction of the money made through the internet by advertisers and marketers is distributed to content owners on a basis that is related to the ‘eyeball traction’ of each and every unit of content. On the Internet this is quite easy to measure.

Sometimes it’s just so tempting to bite the hand that feeds. Actually all of the time.

What I have learnt though is that such unexpected behaviour that can be clearly rationalised (and is) usually pays off in the economic world that I live in.

I explain this by a combination of the ‘4 Unit maths’ and the ‘regression to the mean’ hypotheses.

The 4 Unit maths hypothesis was formulated while I was at school. We had a choice of remedial maths, easy 2 Unit maths, harder 3 Unit maths and the universally feared 4 Unit maths. Only a handful of brave souls took the latter. Including me.

All results in all subjects were scaled to a bell curve and then added up to give a score out of 500. I had noticed that the hidden scaling factors favoured the harder subjects and that even a crap score in 4 Unit maths resulted in a good scaled score.

As an aside, this conclusion took quite a bit of research, probably more effort than I put into the subject itself. And ironically this effort required skills consistent with the harder maths Unit.

Basically the lesson in life is, always do the hard things because there is less competition.

The regression to the mean is a simple concept. The longer you do something the more you will regress to a mean. Economically speaking this means that one should always tackle the hard problems with little competition.

Which is why biting the hand that feeds in a rationalised way actually pays off.

And it helps if you don’t give a stuff anyway.

I just read a story in the daily rag which involved a prominent Sydney lawyer.

Well I have never heard of him so he can’t be prominent, by definition.

Whilst on the subject of cycling I started commuting around this town over ten years ago.

Back then it was just me and the couriers and no bike lanes. Following the couriers’ lead I learnt to take no notice of any road rules. I even went in a couple of their cannonball runs…. another long story that.

Fast forward to today. Check out today’s traffic at the Pyrmont bridge. And the line was twice as long behind me.

Which is why I am unlearning all those bad habits that the couriers taught me. Especially since it’s only a matter of time before they licence bike riders and the whole deal becomes subject to criminal charges for serious offences.

This morning I saw a cyclist ride straight into a tram.

He was looking the other way and had headphones in his ears. No sight and no sound.

The scalar value of momentum is mass × velocity. In this case the two vehicles had about the same velocity, say 10 kmh.

One bounced and the other didn’t.

And then it bounced again a couple of times when it hit the earth which had an even greater mass than the tram.

Three bounces later it wasn’t moving and probably wishing it had hung onto the useful senses of sight and sound.

I wasn’t the first to the scene and, would you believe it, someone closer was an off-duty paramedic.

Thank God for that….I have always dreaded having to dredge up those intermittent medical emergency courses in a real situation.

The cat lived; hence all the bouncing. A few broken bones. Unconscious for a spell. Off to hospital for a few weeks.

Me, the police and the tram driver yarned for a while. And we decided there was no case to answer for the tram driver.

The police did note that, in any case, there was no procedure for booking a tram driver.

And that was my morning’s entertainment.

Geez it can be dangerous just wandering around the streets here.

It’s hard to know whether you can cut down or lop a tree in my local council region.

One thing is for sure; if you ask the default answer will be no.

So on the weekend I manually, with a hand saw, lopped a big old murraya down to a stump.

It was good old-school, Czech proverb style, manual labour for a man.

It’s a philosophical debate whether a murraya is a tree or a shrub.

And I wonder if shrubs can be removed without permission.

I do know that murrayas will regrow from stumps; they can’t be stopped.

So until I remove the stump I don’t think any by-laws have been breached.

In any case if a murraya is chopped down and the council didn’t see it, did it happen?

One wonders why, if found innocent of all charges, I am paying a ‘Victims  Support Levy’. Especially if there wasn’t a victim any way.

What I really object to is the shit grammar. It should be ‘Victims’ Support Levy’.

Our constitution needs to include a ‘grammar’ clause giving citizens the inalienable right not to be the financial victims of poor grammar.

But the true problem here is that they really did mean to leave off the apostrophe; ‘Victims’ in this context is a proper noun describing a financial line item. Not a group of people at all.

A taxi driver told me the other night that he fished for the first 25 years of his working life. With his old man who had emigrated from Italy.

He isn’t doing it any more because the financial returns are rubbish due to over fishing.

In fact he told me that if the old blokes didn’t spend all day fixing their son’s nets for free there might not be any fish to be had in Sydney.

On the subject of birth defects I have one other, well two; slightly clubbed little fingers.

Wiki is surprisingly ambivalent on the causes. There are many listed as possible but very little evidence for any.

I have no other family members with this condition. I don’t suffer any of the disease-related causes for clubbing. And I have had it since birth.

So it’s a mystery for now.

From the madhouse that is the USA…

I just heard President Obama label as ‘ignorant’ someone prominent who got caught saying something racist. Or something like that.

‘Ignorant’ implies a lack of education. Whereas I would suggest that racism is the result of a very active education.

A diphthong isn’t an Australian pub sport but one of those very odd nouns that hardly anyone knows but yet they all practice.

To wit, my mum says ‘pool’ as ‘poo-o-oo-l’. There are at least three different sounds in the ‘oo’, maybe more

Officially a dipthong is two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable.

But some Australians just love pushing those boundaries past two.

Justice = fairness – trust

Goodness = justice for all + minimal spread in opportunity and resources

Democracy = the right for all to attempt to correct a perceived absence of goodness

Note: assumes unlimited resources

I like to eat, talk, breath and drink. Sometimes all at the same time.

Why then did evolution stuff all these functions into one orifice?

Especially when some others seem quite under utilised.

There is another form of collective hypocrisy that I don’t like.

An example can be made in the context of a government programme for, say, investing in venture capital that has been going on for decades and clearly does not work.

How does this continue? Well it’s a combination of vested interests of the recipients of the money and those who hand it out, plus the fact that there is no upside for those in the know for whistle blowing on the whole deal.

Thus it continues as minister after minister kicks the can along the road.

The hypocrisy of all and sundry is manifest. And yet who can blame them? Unless there is a reward of sorts for suggesting an unpopular truth then the popular lies will thrive.

I used to stay quiet too but I just don’t give a stuff any more.

The learning here is that great leadership includes creating an environment that encourages alternatives views to be expressed.

Lola asked me why I have a black ‘hole’ in the iris of my right eye (see photo below).

I said ‘Lola, you may not have heard me say this before, but I don’t know’.

In fact it has never occurred to me to find out.

I think this is odd.

Lola thinks it is VERY odd in more ways than one.

p.s. a short web search later I find that it’s a small coloboma which is a genetic defect. In my case it hasn’t affected my vision.

This morning I was introduced to a couple of people that I hadn’t met before.

One, a public servant, proffered an opinion; that he didn’t like me.

Confused, as I had never met him before, I asked why.

The answer had something to do with something I had written – what specifically I am not sure.

I suggested that he might actually try talking to me first before finalising his opinions about me because it might be a case that he would like me even if we disagreed on the subject of whatever it was I wrote.

Nuh. No way. Nicht.

I always think one should play the ball not the man. But I know this view is not universally shared.

Poor man, he will go through life hating strangers simply because he disagrees with their opinions.

I wonder what he does when one of his loved ones comes up with a contrary opinion?

Life must be hell for the intellectually rigid.

Interesting plot below. It’s Australia’s electricity consumption (per capita).

Notice the drop off in the last couple of years? Well this is accompanied by a flattening of total electricity demand and is due to the economic recession and the increased use of energy efficient technologies – things like LED light bulbs and many, many business initiatives that have been driven by cost saving incentives.

So in an environment where we have an effective drop off for demand in electricity we have also installed about 3 GW of solar panels, most of that in the last 3-4 years and exactly when demand has dropped off.

Much of the existing capacity is old power plants (e.g. coal burning) which has been fully depreciated and are therefore generating power at very low costs. New solar installations generate power at a cost of at least 2-3 times that of old coal burning stations despite the recent drop in solar costs.

So on one hand we are installing solar panels we simply don’t need from a demand point of view. But on the other hand solar panels offer far less carbon emissions.

Even weirder still, for some consumers, previously with subsidies and now substantially without, there is still an economic argument for installing solar panels.

This has a lot to do with peak pricing where the supply and demand is more favourable to self-consumption but also due to the fact that the power generators and distributors don’t mind doing a bit of cartel-style gouging.

The whole thing is pretty messed up and it doesn’t look like a favourable sector for financial investment to be honest.

If the current government really gets rid of the carbon tax and any residual direct incentives for solar, then they should, via a direct action, simply buy and ‘nuke’ a handful of the older and more polluting coal burning power stations.

This would create a ‘real’ market for new energy demand and on an ‘apples and apples’ basis solar and wind are actually cheaper, so they would win out. And we might get more gas burning distributed base-load generators at the same time.

And the wealth-creating economic benefit from a peak in infrastructure investment cannot be underestimated.

Sometimes I feel like an eskimo in snowstorm; there aren’t any like-minded souls out there…

This from the Business Insider “The association which represents Australia’s venture capital and private equity firms has come out swinging over today’s Commission of Audit report …AVCAL is worked up because one of the seven bodies the commission has marked for abolition is the Innovation Investment Fund. While the other program AVCAL was hoping to sneak through unscathed, the Commercialisation Australia program, also made the grants to be abolish list.”

Well I have a different view entirely. I think that getting the sick, sick patient (the Australian tech sector) off the drip will either force the patient’s immune system to kick in and we will see a recovery. Or the patient will die and leave room for some new organism to thrive, undistorted by the sins of the past.

I have documented the 30-year failure of government investment in venture capital. Seriously, did they expect the government to spend another decade in attempt to achieve the record of the longest failed experiment in the global history of all experiments in any field of science, technology or business? Actually I think they already have the record!

Just as an aside the longest successful experiment in science, technology or business is also Australian. It was started in 1927 at the University of Queensland. It’s just pitch dropping very slowly from a funnel. Since the experiment started there have been 8 drops of pitch of which only a couple have been observed. Which begs the question did the others really fall? So you see, it’s not just an ignoble experiment in stupidity but a philosophical experiment! Who would have guessed.

I guess the government, directly or indirectly, sponsored both programs, the longest successful and the longest failed experiments in science, technology and business. Which is in itself an interesting philosophical puzzle. Why us?

Commercialisation Australia (CA) on the other hand has had only a brief existence on this planet. It was introduced by one the previous Labor governments (probably Rudd, after the magnificent 2020 Summit) and pretty much replaced the old COMET scheme. Somewhere in their makeup both of these organizations started with the assumption that (a) startups companies in Australia have great ideas, but (b) our entrepreneurs are babes in the woods, and therefore (c) the COMET/CA selective input of time and money will fix all of their problems and they will go onto to becomes the next global technology giants. Yeah that worked, not!

Whereas I could stomach taking money off COMET (and there is no reason not to take free money off the government if it is on offer) I could never get myself to seriously try with CA. There were simply too many hoops to go through and too many conversations with patronising ‘consultants’ advising me on how to run my startups. Worst of all was the weirdness in the selection process; you had to simultaneously prove that you deserved and needed the money but couldn’t get it off anyone else, but that you had tried. This was some odd version of Schrodinger’s cat in a box experiment, once again proving our government doesn’t mind sponsoring philosophical experiments in the guises of science, technology and business.

Well in this instance, my friends, the cat is well and truly dead!

Query: do you control your emotions or do they control you?

For all of us the answer can change from moment to moment.

But I have met people for whom the answer is that their emotions control them when they least need them to.

And it makes their life complex.

I don’t have an answer to this problem. I am just contemplating it.

It is sometimes far more effective to contemplate a problem than it is trying to solve it.

Sometimes the problem just goes away.

And solving problems is hard work, whereas contemplation can be a gentle activity that doesn’t spoil your beer time.

Riding past one this morning I couldn’t help but think that surveyors and their trade are ripe for dis-intermediation.

Google will probably sponsor some activity that automatically surveys whole cities and then post the data on the web.

On almost any subject Wikipedia is far more informative than the direct source, e.g. company website, organizational blog or broadcast news.

Due to the democratic nature of input, and where there is a balance of feelings on a subject, neutrality of description is approached.

However one wonders whether various interest groups with far reaching power have already moved to constrain Wikipedia on the sly.

I bet they have.

Semantically speaking Somatics shouldn’t wear muffs
Ears, eyes, hands or feet
Romantics reject rubber every time
Body, mind and other bits
Are all combined into one simple thing
Love

Hypocrisy annoys me more than it should.

However, only a subset of hypocrisy annoys me and that is hypocrisy of those in positions of authority and responsibility. You can always tell the hypocritical ones; they turn theses positions into ones of power and wealth.

Ask yourself this; which of the following does you current political leader use to describe his or her function?

“We/I lead/rule/govern this country/state”

You have to be very suspicious when a democratically elected representative of a small slab of suburban Sydney, who was at some point elected by his party to be their leader, says “I rule this country”. I once heard Johnny Howard say that on radio.

Academics, absent a wealth objective, act pretty much like politicians. Power, of a sort, is their motivating force and it expresses itself as a publicity-driven ego.

The hypocrisy of the politicians and academics is obvious when they pretend to be different to what they really are. However they aren’t very good at it.

Business leaders are far more subtle in the art of hiding their true colours. This is because the stakes are higher (personal wealth) and thus this arena attracts a far higher quality of candidate and is much more competitive.

Today most business leaders never get the language wrong. They are trained in the art of appearing to be what they are not. Having worked for a few, it does take a while to see through the facade. But it can be done. However the drive to achieve excessive wealth is all you need to watch for; this and power are the telltale signs.

So back to me. Why do I dislike this type of hypocrisy so much. It doesn’t really make sense actually. I am not now and have rarely been a victim of it. However I have seen many people who have been. That is partially it. No, my main problem is that I have the talents to be very successful and yet my journey has been made that much harder by my refusal to practice the hypocritical black arts, for reasons I don’t even understand. I just can’t stomach them.

Right that was a bloody long circle back to where I came from. This is a case of pondering the problem, Eastern-style, rather than looking for Western-style solution. Or as we Australia, it’s just the vibe of the thing.

Although this effort has made me realise that hypocrisy itself is just a marker for something else, namely greed and insecurities. Collectively, my natural disliking of these are the root cause of my apparent cynicism. I don’t suffer from either of these. Blog over.

The waiter at the local sushi train is a young Japanese boy with barely legible English.

Tonight, with a big grin, he said to me as I was leaving:

“Hoo roo mate”

As luck would have it (stupid expression that) today I got pinged for going through a red light on a pushbike!

The odd thing is, I didn’t go through a red light. I simply avoided one.

The light went red so I slowly drifted up into the footpath and rode along it for a while before entering back on the road. Super slowly without even going close to endangering any living soul.

I didn’t even bother trying to argue the matter with the police. They are on a mission to educate cyclists, they explained to me.

Besides I have this suspicion that they could have pinged me for riding on the footpath…I am not completely sure about this.

It’s a $67 fine and doesn’t have anything to do with my drivers licence, fortunately.

I have this feeling that one of the last relatively ungoverned aspects of living in our nanny state is about to be nailed.

The last Labor party introduced a carbon levy as a tax and got hammered for it.

The current coalition is introducing increases in income tax as a levy.

Which has the better marketing department I wonder?

The very last time I was in a church solely for religious purposes was for my christening.

Thereafter, thank Christ, my parents drop-kicked the whole caper.

Which means that my subsequent trips to the gateways of heaven have been for the purposes of weddings and funerals. Where you could always find me outside, bludging a smoke off another sinner.

Oh and there was the accidental drop-ins to services in the tourist cathedrals of Europe.

It’s bloody embarrassing flopping around in the middle of someone else’s conversation with the almighty.

I always got out of it by fluffing around the buying of a candle, lighting it and then exiting with some Mr Bean-like pantomime in attempt to professionally splash holy water around my thorax in what I imagined was the appropriate approximation of the correct polygon.

A friend of mine who is a social media writer and guru wrote a very female centric view of the males on tinder.

This prompted me to download the app in order to document the male view. Results attached. If you apply these rigorously you never get to swipe right; isn’t that just like real life?

Ultimately all decisions can be broken down into binary elements. Do I’s, or do I not’s.

I can imagine a day when all apps simply offer us a series of binary choices using swipe actions.

In the meantime I am going enjoy what’s left of rich complexity in life.

My head of sales for China just asked me to select one or two girls from the following selection.

We are ‘selecting’ girls because apparently in China at a Trade Show you need ‘booth girls’. Or the chances of customers stopping by your booth is reduced somewhat.

Here is the exact email I got on the subject:

“Enclosed pls find out No.1~No.4 show girl photos for your review, the cost is 500RMB(~$100 AUD) per day. The girls are >165mm hight, ~20 years old, basic English speaking. You could pick 1 or 2 for our booth.

BTW, what do you want the girls wear? Office lady style(maybe with same orange color scarf), or more sexy style?
The vendor said they have 1500RMB show girl if we are not satisfied with those girls. Let me know if any concern. Thanks.”

Why do I feel a little uncomfortable being the one to make these choices?

I have said for sometime that someone will figure out how to 3-D print houses and thus disintermediate the building industry. The problem with the current system is two-fold:

1. It takes months to get a house built (here in Australia), and
2. The materials now only represent around 20% of the finished costs (when you extract all the supply chain margins away) and the rest is layers and layers of expensive service providers. And a few non service providers.

Enter the Chinese, of all people with their low labour costs. A company with the catchy and very differentiated name of WinSun has developed a concrete 3-D printer for houses that can print 10 houses in a day. The printing looks like it’s still happening in a factory but lets hope they shrink it and make it portable enough to be taken on site.

The results look like rubbish now but come back in a few years and we won’t want our houses built any other way. Today it’s good enough for garages, dog houses, asylum seeker detention centres and the visually impaired.

I shall be more thoughtful of the sensitivities of others. Indeed I will.

I will use the travellers rule. Even if they, the other sentients, appear robust and humorous, I will halve and halve again my perceptions, to get to what I will then believe is their true self confidence and sensitivity.

If I keep this up I know, eventually, they will just have to give me sainthood.

I hadn’t thought about it but I before but I wonder if they give sainthoods to non-catholics?

Just like universities when they honour retards like Johnny Howard with an honorary doctorate; what’s that all about? It’s weird when you think about it. Its not like anyone believes that the clown has done enough deep thinking and contributed a body of work in absentia. Who is fooling who here? I think they are all fiddling with each other under the covers and none of them really like it but no one is prepared to go out on a limb and say it.

I think I just contradicted the first half of this blog entry and lost any chance of sainthood in the second. Well that was the shortest resolution in the history of blogdom.

As long as the tree gets a section ten when I am looking the other way your honour then I swear I can pretend until the cows come home that I am abnormal and totally absent of feelings which is as we know all and sundry a complete lie of course and of course but then it’s best to control these feelings than be controlled by them and denial is a useful means to achieve these ends in one universe but not always advisable according to some spiritual types who might say that I am bottling it up and it will spill out in other less useful ways somewhere else later on and in any case I know I am kidding myself but I am tough very tough and am practised in the art of toughness in love and life and love.

Sunlight, oxygen, water and food. Plants live off these but they don’t have to work for them. They just get them.

Whereas we only get sunlight and oxygen for free and have to work for water and food, especially food.

I guess when animals first evolved water and food were in abundance and the ‘work’ required to get them was minimal.

But our mutual tendency to overcrowd each other has meant that we have had to get stronger, faster and smarter in order to minimise the work involved in getting more than our fair share of the food and water.

This is the driving force behind evolution.

Eventually, left to its own devices, animals would evolve that also need to work for oxygen and sunlight.

By giving ‘away’ 100% guaranteed access to these things they would gain something useful, just in the same way that animals gave away unlimited access to food and water in return for mobility.

I suppose nocturnal animals have already given away sunlight and only have guaranteed oxygen. They must get their Vitamin D from things they eat. And deep sea fish have also given away guaranteed access to everything except water – they even have to keep moving to get their oxygen. I can’t think of any organism that has to work for all four key elements.

Just thinking out loud, O ether.

A section ten is what I got, which is a good behaviour bond.

My offence is quashed so long as a I don’t infringe again within a year.

If I do then the original offence is also put back on the table, so I then have two to deal with.

I like to think of this as a tree in the proverbial woods.

If a tree falls then it is given a section 10 and said not to have fallen unless another tree falls within a year.

The outcome of this? Well you run out of trees eventually.

So one moment the forest is there and the next moment it’s gone – poof!

I may as well go full disclosure on the awful shirt and tie combo.

As usual I rode my pushie to work and get dressed there. I have a cupboard with clothes in it at work.

Well my one good business shirt actually had a coffee or red wine stain on it so I had to switch to my ‘Silicon Valley’ shirt (it fits in nicely there although I can’t go the beige chinos).

Reflecting on this, it just wasn’t important enough for me to check ahead of time. Which is a reflection of how seriously I took the whole process.

My lawyer thought that the combo was inspired. It showed that I wasn’t a ‘silvertail’ who wore a suit and tie all day (silvertails suffer in Newtown court because the magistrates don’t want to be seen to be favouring them in front of the hoi polloi) but it showed that I had made the effort, and the ingredients were of a good class, if not the combo.

In fact, I found the whole process from start (being fined) to end (walking out of court and yarning with my lawyer) absolutely fascinating and probably worth the entrance price.

I was probably the only person in the courtroom that day, maybe this year, who didn’t give an arse if he or she was found guilty or innocent.

Sometimes I can’t see the phone for the planes. It makes it hard to grab a good selfie.

The five stages of grief are are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

If you get stuck in there you are likely to end up traumatised.

I figure if I can’t see the numbers then neither can the thieves. It’s tough though when you’ve had of couple of schooners and it’s dark.

So the magistrate let me off with a section 10.

Which means that I have been driving 32 years without major incident and he was in a good mood.

I have just been solicited on LinkedIn!

See message below from a Canadian beauty specialist with a business degree from Oxford who is probably a 40 year old bloke living in the Ukraine.

Proxy madness.

“Naming people saints reflects the enormous diversity of this planet”

Heard on the news and uttered by a confused catholic priest in response to a couple of recent popes getting the nod.

Just about all the isms, especially capitalism, are having troubles adjusting to the idea that, in the future, resources will become limited and therefore must be treated with absolute respect.

Our ism is still in total denial. Send us all your plastics China!

We still have anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance to go.

That’ll see us through to the end of this century by which time we will be totally fucked.

Philosophical thought of the day, O grasshopper.

Why does fruit taste that much better when it’s prepared by Rocco’s hired help and added to a plate of other stuff?

There’s a pissed bear somewhere in the woods, right now, that’s sitting on the answer.

The adjective “cross” which is used by the English to mean ill-tempered apparently had it’s origins in 15th century shipping.

It comes from annoying “cross-winds” which were a real pain in the arse for the old school sailing ships (they couldn’t sail very close to the wind).

In Australia we just say we are “pissed off” (shortened by the Americans to “pissed”) which is also nautical in origin and from the same period.

It relates to the shipment of cargoes of concentrated and smelly urine via boats for use in dying fabrics and gunpowder production.

Crews who had been assigned shipments of urine rather than more conventional wares were said to be “pissed off.”

Pity the poor bastards when they also met some cross winds eh?

Finsult

Futility is a devolved concatenation of ‘fuck all utility’.

Insults fall into three categories…

Those that are entirely unintended.

Those that are intended.

And those that are imagined.

In all cases they should be blithely  ignored because…

You have to forgive the unintended insults of others. It’s good karma because you yourself will undoubtedly do the same. However you can tell them, nicely, so there is learning.

It’s good practice to pretend that people that are prepared to intentionally offend you don’t actually exist. Eventually they will get the hint and cease to exist.

The imagined insults take more practice to ignore. People fill in the gaps of communications and often come up with the worst possible fillers. Try practising using the most optimistic fillers. Things get a lot easier at no real cost. There aren’t many free lunches in life, so grab this one.

I read an essay this morning which was quite long. As usual the message can be parsed into one paragraph, namely:

Force yourself to come up with ten new ideas a day, on any subject and care not about quality. Then when you really need a good idea you will be practised in the art and it will come to you.

This was in the context of technology startups.

It’s useless advice for me because I have had hundreds of great ideas a day, forever.

In fact my advice is quite different; do not propagate your own ideas but pick up the quality ideas of others.

Why?

First, there are over 7 billion people on the planet and a lot of good ideas out there. Restricting yourself to your own ideas is quite limiting.
Secondly, I tend to give my own ideas away (by email, by blog, by essays and by conversations) because I don’t trust myself to appraise my own ideas with total honesty.

I don’t think any one can.

Having said that, I suspect that the practice of coming up with your own ideas will VERY much help you properly assess the ideas of others. This is just a hunch.

When people who wear optical glasses are in an emotional state they often take off their glasses in order to contemplate.

It sort of suggests that vision gets in the way of feelings. So just close your eyes in order to feel the truth or to focus on just being.

Full disclosure.

Got pissed last night. Vaguely remember riding the pushie home early in the morning, no hands, chatting on the phone.

Slept on the couch. Nose totally blocked. Headaches. Toilet stops. Dehydration.

I haven’t got off the couch yet today. No plans to do so really until tomorrow.

So once again I am not buying into the Anzac day propaganda. But this time totally unwittingly.

Check out the Linkedin screenshot below.

Some fool gets noticed 30,000 times for a totally banal entry. Noticed by 30,000 fools.

I would rather have one lovely genius reading my blog than 30,000 people that are prepared to name a city without the letter A in it.

The inherent flaw of social media is the assumption that quantity is more important than quality. It rarely is.

I suspect that people that are generally open minded are less likely to have foods that they just don’t like.

Since truth is subjective the telling of it must be even more so due to the limitations of language.

But then the truth is whatever you believe or think. Or simply experience without questioning, which is probably the most honest truth.

In which case just blabbing the truth as you see it can’t be worse than, and is probably more useful than not blabbing or blabbing lies.

Unless this blog entry is all lies.

Yep. If you think about something too much you end up disappearing up your own orifice or stuck in a logical cul de sac.

Repeat after me, this quest for meaning is doomed precisely because it is a quest.

That’s the Zen spiritual approach to life.

And then there’s the Western left-brain super-ego thinking approach to enlightenment.

A quest ain’t a quest unless it’s been deeply thought about as a quest, described as a quest, discussed and written about as a quest, debated as a quest, hypothesised and theorised as a quest, and even commercialised as a quest.

These are two circles that do not intersect. Any attempt to hybridise the two is a lie within a lie, wrapped up with a lie, and tossed over the fence as a lie, to gullible fools that wouldn’t know a lie from a lie.

Some people can go to a therapist and just blab about everything.

Others prefer not to reveal all their secrets.

Orthodoxy would have it that the former get more out of the process of therapy.

But I wonder if people that are that free and easy with their own truths also have trouble properly valuing the truths that come back at them on the couch?