At TOIP I learned that the road and traffic authorities like to blame all road accidents and fatalities on three causes, namely speeding, drugs and alcohol and driver fatigue. This is pretty much all that they measure and indeed for each incident they like to assign a single one of these three causes to make the maths easier for the kindergarten-level statisticians they obviously hire.

Lies, damned lies and statistics eh? If this is all you measure and everything has to fit into this bucket then is it any surprise that the benefits of responding to these measured causes asymptote away after a few years?

You have to wonder if they are just stupid or, more likely, protecting a billion dollar legal services industry that have emerged around the fining of drivers associated with these three factors.

The government notes that “The annual economic cost of road crashes in Australia is enormous — estimated at $27 billion per annum—and the social impacts are devastating”. See – http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/

Well there are 17.2m registered vehicles in Australia so the cost of road crashes is appox. $1600 PER ANNUM PER CAR!

Now let’s see. A quick search of the internet finds:

1. A GPS enabled vehicle speed controller for A$55. See – http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Real-Time-Tracking-gps-tracker-mini_1785558320.html

2. An in-car alcohol meter ignition lock-out system can be got for $300 in volume (I asked) – http://andatech.trustpass.alibaba.com/product/111463430-101315460/AlcoSense_Vehicle_Ignition_Interlock_FR9000.html

3. An in-car driver fatigue system could be had for $500 per unit (I know the CEO) – see http://www.dssmining.com/what-we-do/how-it-works/

So, to summarise, if we believe the current government story, with a one-off investment by government or car-users of $855 per car, i.e. half of the annual costs of road accidents in Australia, we could completely eliminate road accidents and deaths.

In fact, with 17.2m units being sold the costs would probably come down to around $200 per car.

My guess is that this approach would only cut out about one third of accidents and up to a half of the fatalities. But it’s still worth doing.

But revenues from traffic offences would drop to virtually zero and the legal industry would decimated.

Go figure!

Society wealth creation. People are either interested in making society more wealthy (through extraction of resource, the export of goods and products and the development of new technology) or they are interested in getting a greater share of the existing wealth pie (rent-seeking behaviour). Rarely is an individual actively interested in both activities; it’s a mind-set thing.

Society wealth distribution. People either want more than their fair share and can’t see why wealth should be shared equally (rent-seekers again) or they believe in equal distribution normally via government taxes and expenditure, quite independently of their own wealth position.

Society opportunity distribution. The rent-seekers typically want more opportunities for kith and kin whereas the fair-minded old-school socialists think that where possible opportunities should be equal for all people, even if outcomes are not.

Civil & Political rights. Some people think that legal rights are critical for a good life and a good and just society. Basically, the right of law is greater than politicians, who are governors not rulers. However others don’t care, some take it all for granted and yet others are aware than an over-reliance on legal rights has negative consequences, e.g. political correctness and an curtailing of personal freedoms.

Human & Social rights. These are very closely related to civil and political rights but extend to all people on the planet and not just citizens of the society that an individual lives in. For some these are the guiding principles that should drive all governments and legal systems. Others simply couldn’t give a rat’s arse.

Personal freedom. For some this is the most important role of government; to maintain personal freedom just like a rabbit in the headlights of Bentham’s fast-approaching lorry. Many, many people do not consider this issue important since they don’t know any better.

Pro-change anti-conservatism. At one end of the spectrum people embrace change (e.g. the internet and smart phones and the changes they are wreaking on society). People at the other end of the spectrum hate change and actively oppose it. Some conservatives even want to wind back the clock to say the 1950s, to a mirage of happier times.

Environment. Some people are very concerned that we are destroying our own habitat. Others don’t care or choose not believe because the changes that have to be made to address these concerns don’t suit them, on a daily basis.

The taxi industry in NSW is an old school rent-seeking cartel in action.

What should be an untaxed form of public transport is in fact an expensive service stuck in the 20th century. This is because vested interests have the ear and pockets of state politicians who have enacted many laws and rules to protect the cartel from competition. To wit, there is a controlled number of cabs on the road and their ‘plates’ have high asset value. Users pay government-mandated exorbitant fees, most of which go to the government as a form ‘user-pays’ tax, the cab plate owners, and the taxi payment system owners, with a pittance left over for the drivers.

Enter Uber and a host of other apps. These are using the availability of the internet, mobile phones and back-end services to disintermediate the taxi cartel.

Today Uber offered me a ‘low cost’ option which uses private drivers and cars at about half the cost of taxis. I expect the ‘taxi council’ (really!) to attempt to use their influence to make such a service illegal, probably on the basis of public safety or some-such. In fact they will pull out all stops because Uber’s low cost service effectively makes taxis obsolete.

Any cartel or monopoly relies on two things:

1.Information asymmetry – in the case of taxis in the old days the users had no idea where taxis were at any time. Drivers couldn’t easily connect with users. Taxis had to be colourfully labelled. There was no technology available to cut out the middlemen; this has changed.

2.Control of government – excessive profits are partially reinvested into the political process to maintain a control over any threats that arise, or to increase profits by enacting further customer-gouging rules.

Haven’t mobile phones and the internet changed things? Every single product and service industry in this world has, is or will go through total restructure.

I don’t expect our politicians to properly understand this and they will continually attempt to stand in the way of change despite all the evidence that this is a waste of time.

But looking forward a few decades, when it’s all done and dusted, the Ubers of this world are simply trying to establish themselves as the next cartel members. The basic idea is to replace a bunch of middlemen with one middleman (themselves) or One Big Arsehole in the Middle, as James Clark described them.

And since these new middlemen will be global we can expect their power, greed and arrogance to be substantially greater than today’s mob.Today’s disintermediating heroes will, in our lifetime, be the most hated ‘big brothers’.

This is human nature and we have no way of stopping it.

I have just started using Uber, a taxi booking app.
This app is just that much better than all the others and this differentiation is based on some simple idea, great execution and capital.

The simple ideas are:

1.There are four classes of cars (low cost private, taxi, black and lux) with progressively increasing costs
2.You can see where the local available cars are on a map which also allows you to set up your pick-up position and gives you the shortest pick up time
3.Once you select a type of car and book it, you then get to watch it turn up on the map
4.The driver doesn’t know where you are going so there is no sense that unfavourable fares are avoided. Indeed they seem to be rewarded on the number of jobs they do and their star rating (See below). That is the reward system for drives is in the customer’s interest
5.When you arrive at a destination you just get out of the cab. The invoice is emailed to you. And the driver doesn’t have cash so isn’t a target for thieves
6.When you look at your receipt you also get to rate the car and driver
7.There is a social media like system in place that rewards users if they sign up new users

To execute a service like this you need:
1.An insider knowledge of the industry and an open-minded user-based experiential understanding of what is wrong with the status quo
2.This drives the founding team members to define and refine a new service, using new technology
3.An ability to execute the software and also the business relationships needed to get the business moving
4.An access to lots of capital to buy market share and momentum
5.Luck and great marketing
6.First-mover advantage

The average punter v. the major parties.

Libs/Nats

Labor

Greens

One. I would never have dared opposed my dad.

Second. As such he never had to use violence on me. Ironic that.

Third. This was all made quite easy because he was quite sane in his beliefs anyway, and never ever attended church, for example. So I never did either.

Nevertheless I have been fuelled by a rage against hypocrisy of all sorts.

There’s plenty of paths to every place.

And yet, do I forgive my parents? Yes I do, but I don’t why I have to.

I just mapped myself onto what I think are the defining political issues in the 21st century.

Some of these axes conflict each others and others don’t. But I haven’t built in any constraints based on these conflicts since people aren’t logical about these things anyway.

My guess at our ruling coalition party below.

And in opposition we have Labor.

And the Greens hanging around the fringes.

No wonder I have troubles voting!

Wiki says that Quadrant magazine “holds a conservative stance on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of ‘unthinking leftism, or political correctness, and its ‘smelly little orthodoxies'”‘.

Otherwise this means the mag is a pseudo-intelligent and mostly unread mouthpiece for the rent-seeking wealthy classes opposed to any threat to their rent-seeking wealthy ways.

Why do they bother? Because it used to matter and there is a bunch of rent-seeking parasites attached to it. And in any case why get rid of something of unknowable value?

My over-weighting of the impact of the evils of hypocrisy in society is the root cause excuse for my tendency to defend and justify.

On the flip side I virtually never blame or deny.

Apparently the source of the term “flat chat” is an Australian mystery.

There are some dodgy explanations based on a proposed phonetic derivation from “flat strap”, which is what a strap was when you whipped a horse as hard as possible.

Personally I think they should look through the records for horse’s names in the 1800’s. A good fraction of our phrases are derived from ironical use of horses names.

In this case, Flat Chat probably never placed in a race despite some decent pedigree.

I once read a book called “The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery”

The guy, the novice who wrote the book, is frustrated because he isn’t told anything by the Zen monks. He has to figure it out from his own experience
And all he gets is inscrutable advice to that effect.

And I can’t put it any better than this book summary that I found on the web:

“As a straightforward, modest account of a young Dutchman’s year-and-a-half stay in a Japanese Zen monastery, van de Wetering’s book will deflate chic, romanticized Western notions about Oriental religions. Engaged in the proverbial soteriological quest, van de Wetering rejects philosophy and turns to Zen as a more immediate sort of profundity. He soon discovers that Zen offers no dramatic revelations, no “”gales or collisions”” of the spirit. In the monastery, his metaphysical speculations are discouraged, even punished. His stay is, in many respects, traumatic. He is permitted only four hours of sleep a day; for one week he must endure the excruciating torment of the lotus position for fifteen hours a day; he learns to graciously accept a daily beating; he undergoes countless humiliations due to problems of language and custom. And he discovers that this quest for meaning is doomed precisely because it is a quest. After being directed to look into a mirror to find his real face, he can succeed in doing so only when he sees that the mirror is empty, like the Zen master whose story he recounts, he learns to “”perform the most astounding feats. If he slept, he slept, and if he ate, he ate.”” The year-and-a-half is recalled with ambivalence – affection, resentment, and confusion. But the book effectively documents one man’s authentic confrontation with his own myths.”

The Zen approach is the opposite to the Western mental approach. It’s purely experiential and based not on thinking, but being the truth. Behind all this, and quite counter to spirit of the approach, it is quite nihilistic, to use a Western philosophical term. But even in making that statement I have drifted into a complete paradox because I am believing/thinking the nihilism through the super-ego rather than feeling/being it via the id.

I think the Zen guys are saying you either have to be 100% Zen or there is no point even trying. If you can’t or won’t be Zen then they will do it for you and they will hang around the edges of society in case you ever change your mind.

Another way of looking at it is that the book ‘spoiler’ above doesn’t change anything; you still need to read the book to absorb the ‘feeling’ of the message. Similarly there are no ‘spoilers’ in life; it has to be experienced to be Zenned.

I am going to go away and attempt to experience certain Zen-like activities and see if a part-time absorption of the same can impact or influence my life. It’s worth looking into even if the Zen monks would say I am doomed before I start because of the bitsy nature of my efforts. They would say that the mirror is invisible to me.

Humour, especially dry humour, just does not work when transmitted by electrons or photons.

About the only progress since the days of Morse code has been the invention of emoticons.

And they sort of work. But really, they are just a shit insurance policy against the inevitable.

To wit, I have invented the dry humour spider diagram to accompany each message, including this one!

For the last few years I have been getting my hair cut by Piet at Wildfire. Fancy, expensive and a tad pretentious.

I quit today and got my haircut at the local barber. One tenth of the time, one fifth of the cost and one hundredth of the bullshit.

The outcome? I just don’t care.

With a great sense of relief I have just handed my daughter back to her mother. And immediately I feel the loss. There’s no free lunches in this world.

One statistic that the road and traffic authorities never measure for correlation to road incidents is ‘driver distractions’.

Probably because the same authorities set up a good fraction of the distractions.

Today I have accidental eggs.

Or is that existential angst?

I feel a rapidly approaching gear shift coming up.

Imagine a group of people calling themselves a think tank.

The may as well call themselves a Mensa armadillo.

Or a group wank.

Another premier lost to corruption. How in the world are we supposed to take our state legislation seriously?

I put my finger right over the camera lens and got this. That’s fantastic low light sensitivity for a phone camera.

Padua, Pamela, panda, Pambula, pandemic, anaemic, allergic, allotype, ‘allo there.

and a mourning of false profits.

No aerosols, liquids or gels. And you may get sniffed by a beagle.

I am staying in a bogan villa eh.

And large white pointers that eat people.

Bitsas make the best people.

Just showing off.

A verse is a single metrical line in a poetic composition.

A multiverse is a poem for literary litotes.

The very best lies are told at wakes.

There are three types of fisherman. Those that fish and those that catch fish. And me.

Personally I’d like to see a fishing licence include a scratchie. Three fish gets a free fish from the local fish shop.

The rarest selfie includes polaroid sunnies taken in landscape mode.

In a Western cartel-democracy, when in government a party must:

1. Extract money off taxpayers while pretending not to
2. Spend in excess of those tax receipts on all sorts of things like defence, social welfare, health and random shit
3. Pretend no. 1 is in excess of no. 2 and blame the other guys or the global economy when it’s obvious that it’s not
4. Use most of that expenditure to keep the right fraction of voters happy so they can get re-elected
5. Also some of the expenditure is for mates and monied types that support and control them directly through donations and brown paper bags
6. Pretend no. 5 is no. 4
7. Where possible appeal to voters in ways that do not cost much money, e.g. xenophobia, sports, lies and more lies
8. Be prepared to bail when the irrationality of all this catches up with them and let the other lot have their chance at madness
9. Work hard to make sure the other lot’s chance at madness is as short as possible by lying – specifically by saying the opposite of no. 1-7 above

And that is it. 101.

Which is why it still amazes me that some of these fuckwits have personal agendas that they care about. Like monarchies, abortion, human rights, free speech, industry development, fish, guns, trees, global warming etc. The good politician would simply ignore these issues entirely and never, ever mention the words.

Lola doesn’t want to grow up because she knows how good she has it as a millennial kid. All sugar and no responsibilities.

I cannot ever remember wishing I wouldn’t grow up. For most of my childhood I was sort of looking forward to a less banal existence.

My dad tells me this was his first motorized transport – he owned one in the early fifties. Looking carefully I see no real suspension. Must have been fun.

I imagine there wasn’t an Australian motorbike company called ‘Aborigine’.

With Lola, I just watched the Life of Brian.

I haven’t seen it since it was first release in 1979. My dad took me to see it as a kid.

I recall that he was in stitches during the movie whereas I, who had been denied a religious upbringing, was mildly amused at best.

It has stood up well to the test of time. I found it quite funny this time. Especially the Latin lesson for Brian as the graffiti artist; having personally suffered through years of latin grammar.

It occurs to me that this movie really marked the point where mainstream Western society threw off the hegemony of the church(es).

It had been developing for decades but in 1979 a large chunk of society collectively laughed at the church(es). There is nothing more demoralising to power mongers than being laughed at by the masses.

Revolutionaries should remember this.

Selfies to infinity. Actually down to one pixel. Zeno’s paradox in the twenty first century. How to confuse a hipster. Huh?

The top five oldest torrents on The Pirate Bay are, Top Secret Recipes E-books (uploaded on 2004-03-29), Italian Teens Home Video (uploaded on 2004-03-30), Revolution OS (uploaded on 2004-03-31), LoTR – War of the Ring (uploaded on 2004-03-31), Complete Idiots Guide to Amazing Sex (uploaded on 2004-04-03).

I wonder if our wonderfully confident millennial kids will want for motivating forces?

Often one needs insecurities to drive achievements. Maybe they will figure out another way.

As a result of an unexplained fainting session last weekend Lola has to do a stool sample.

She says she is not. Never. Ever.

I offered to dig a nugget out with a spoon while she sleeps. This has not improved the mood around here.

To end the subject, just let me say that affluence is pernicious.

The antidote is awareness.

These guys have been at it for half an hour now.

Imagine not being able to blog such inspirational info!

A day of blogging left.

The key question is whether to keep going or to stop as planned on the first anniversary of incipience.

I have derived a number of benefits from blogging:

1. It gets those thoughts out of my head
2. It has helped me structure my thoughts
3. It has helped me structure my wisdom
4. It has entertained me, but few others. On average I have had only 4-5 viewers per blog but that has been in purpose. It’s really a private journal.
5. It has entertained me
6. It has helped me linearise my thoughts – that is, make them more easily understood by others
7. It has forced me to practice my writing, daily
8. It has enabled me to post daily photos, which gives these an outlet without being the focus. They are totally abstract and derived from an abstract part of my brain. I can’t tell you anything about them.
9. It might be good for my daughter one day, when she is ready.
10. It’s been great for practicing not splitting my infinitives.

On the negative it is time consuming and sometimes repetitive. And worse still, sometimes whiny and banal.

Whadaya?

There’s an old expression that ‘you can’t bullshit a bullshitter’.

I always agree.

I remember a time as a young person when one of my daydreams was recognition by the elites of the mainstream.

Business, technology, science. It didn’t matter what.

Now I know it’s much better being outside of the mainstream. In order to seek admission into their clubs you have to be like them.

But all they have is their memberships. The rest is hot air and fluff.

The best bit is that they are all panicking. The Internet is making them redundant because there are so many divergent paths to ‘success’.

Also, elitism fundamentally relies on, amongst other things, asymmetrical access to information and the Internet has killed that.

It’s hard to feel elite when the younger generations don’t even know you exist. No one is clamoring to get in, at least not anyone that they fear might be genuine talent.

Lola is decoding Taylor Swift.

In the CD cover slip certain random letters are capitalized.

When you put these together you get secret messages.

Such as “whenstppedcrntouhougt”

I suspect that once you have sold your integrity there’s no buying it back at any price. You can’t license it or borrow it either.

Query whether integrity is one big unit or whether it can be sliced and diced and traded in parcels.

For some reason anthropomorphism in the sea eschews soft and cuddly.

The prime suspect is the elephant of the oceans, the whale. And number two is the shark. Next we have dugongs and groupers. None is pretty and one is downright dangerous.

No wonder the Japanese, who love the koala bears, are confused.

Most people worry about money when they have none.

But I have watched many people go from subsistence (the Western version where they really want for little) to affluence.

I have observed two types; those that care less about money as they get more affluent and those that care more.

The people that go onto to be wealthy and unhappy tend to be in the latter category.

Who would be a judge?

It can’t be fun enforcing inconsistent laws made up by functionally corrupt politicians, randomly enforced by illiterate police and rabidly defended by amoral legal pirates.

A sense of justice would make the job intolerable.

And you would hate yourself on your bad days.

If you believed in god you would be dreading the pearly gates.

Unless of course you cross-referenced Somalia and emotionally divorced yourself from responsibility for the outcomes. Which would require psychological brain surgery.

You can’t change destiny so you may as well believe in it.

About five years ago I bought this great bike bag in San Francisco.

A bike courier that I used to drink with contemptuously told me that it would be lucky to last a couple of months.

I have used it every day since. It is still going strong and a not hint of wearing out.

Beware the opinions of the professional amateurs!

My neighbor is sending toxic corpses my way. Whyfor the chemical warfare?

Should I put up with this? Note, I didn’t say ‘should he be able to do this?’

We finally had a good lecturer at the traffic offenders intervention course. And of course, of course the horse was a lawyer.

Isn’t it odd that we Australians treat our chooks, or at least some of them, better than our asylum seekers.

And chooks can’t even drive cabs.

New business concept…

Sponsor an organic chook. Sorta like sponsoring a Nigerian child.

Input. Weekly cash withdrawals from your bank account.

Benefits. Weekly organic eggs from very your own chook delivered to your door.

It comes complete with a smart phone app with “chook-cam” (attached to the head of each chook) so you can log on and see what your chook is seeing.

And you can cross reference the veracity of the organic sea side nature of your chook’s environment.

[scene] About Life, Rozelle. Upmarket and expensive organic food supermarket.

Great organic free-range eggs from happy hens fed with organic hand-milled grains and living on the Fraser coast seaside. It’s a surprise they haven’t hand painted the hen’s names on the eggs.

There are also many unhappy women in leotards; hard not to notice. I had to dodge the negative radiation. The organic eggs aren’t helping.

What they need is an in-house tantric shaman. Bugger the chook eggs; we need to work on the homo sapien eggs.

They probably also need to lose the jobs, husbands, private school mother mates, BMW X5’s (or similar) and mortgages. But keep the kids, although they need reprogramming.

Craig Thomson gets a 12 month sentence for ‘stealing’ $24k off his union. Actually he abused his expenses. His crime? Firstly he held a seat for labor in the last minority government and he spent the money on prostitutes instead of food, hotels and travel for his wife.

I have seen CEO’s of public companies (that I have reported to) blow this amount on a first class air ticket to London. And then double that amount when they got there on hotels and entertainment. And then they would have one meeting of very dubious value.

Our politicians can simply pay the money back if they get caught abusing their expenses. As Tony Abbot was forced to do.

Craig is the victim of hypocritical and moral witch hunt … after listening to the magistrate rabbit on with moral BS when sentencing, if I were Craig I would have immediately hired a PI to ferret out the magistrate’s abuses of his own expenses for subsequent publication on the web.

A Facebook missive from a former friend that has retreated to the suburbs and motherhood, and who is now well over forty.

Is she wants to be like Quentin then she is twenty years too late hitting the government committees for a living.

Boys night out last night. Half straight and half gay, so admittedly probably not a representative cross section.

All totally bemused by knights and dames. It seemed to have lodged the weirdo hat on Tony Abbott just that much firmer.

It was pointed out that Dame Quentin managed to fuck up her legacy right at the last hurdle. Wonderment as to whether Bill was asked for his opinion.

Scratch a pensioner and you will find a monarchist.

There was a debate as to which would come first, Gay marriage or a republic. General consensus that Gay marriage will win.

Gen Y’s were discussed as a near permanent barrier to the republic since it appears they simply don’t care and would not vote for any changes they don’t understand. It was pointed out they wouldn’t vote at all if they had the choice.

Then we moved onto more important issues such as which was the best HBO series ever.

I read in the micro broadsheet that a statistician once mused, nay even proposed, that the quality of a marriage could be measured by the number of roots in a period of time minus the number of arguments in that same time period.

The trick to avoiding divorce is to keep the measurement greater than zero at all times.

And there was no specific mention of where the roots were attained.

Tiger Air and a hangover do not mix well.

Our federal government wants to sell off a bunch of assets.

One rationale is to plug a budget hole.

Another is more philosophical; the argument runs that governments shouldn’t regulate a market and also compete in that market because it would be unfair (when did that ever stop them?). This argument might work for Medibank Private which has competition but not so well for Australia Post, a virtual monopoly.

Lobbyists also push hard for selling assets since they tend to enrich the buyers. This is a primary motivator!

A counter argument is that public monopolies are by definition break even or cash flow positive. Why sell something that has no risk of not generating profits forever? When valuing these assets there is no need to discount the cash flow.

Also the benefit to the public can be simplicity. When Australia Post is sold our postage options are going to get as complex as our phone bills. As are our energy bills.

What value can we place on the simplicity that government monopolies provide?

At a recent event held for the wealthy family investors in our lovely country I found myself chatting to some weirdo from the Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy.

I suggested to him that I would fully agree with his and their position but only if we had an Australian monarch.

Apparently that is an abhorrent suggestion. No argument why though.

Ever heard of the eight hour movement?

A nineteenth century labor movement that promoted a daily work day routine of:

8 hours work
8 hours sleep, and
8 hours recreation

What happened to that win eh? Now it’s more like:

16 hours of LCD display
6 hours sleep
2 hours commuting

I reckon an argument goes like this…

happy
less happy
blame someone else
blame someone close
argue
maybe apologize
wait
repeat

The only way to break this cycle is if both parties agree to a resolution after each argument where they both concede or agree to do something new or some such.

If one party insists the other does the changing/resolving it doesn’t work, even if the insisting party is convinced he/she is in the right. 

That is, mutual resolution must be a pre-agreed principle and not discussed on a case by case basis.

Instinct mostly comes from the Id but also from the abstract part of the super-ego.

Which means when you are trusting your instinct you should not act immediately if you have a choice.

Wait at least a day to let the abstract part of the super-ego run its calculations.

I tried to explain to Dave that a yacht club that advertises itself as prestigious probably isn’t. Just unrealistically expensive.

I just gave a young nephew some advice at his request on the subject of women. Specifically how does one pick a partner?

I suggested that at his young age it’s best to trust your instinct. But before committing check the specific model using an elder that he trusts. Which will be me .

The paradox here is that by the time one has the skills to do this cogently one is possibly too old.

The opportunities to bond and grow together, while the personalities are still developing, would be lost.

What odds Johnny Howard gets a knighthood?

Postscript…. Johnny Howard reckons he doesn’t want one…. but if Quentin accepts then Johnny oughta be a pushover.

[Subject] traffic offenders intervention program… Pseudo compulsory remedial courses for serious driving offences…..

Given the costs to society of, eg drink driving, I don’t think the reactive TOIP courses are what is really needed.

Preventative courses are needed where all drivers are required to attend at license renewal time. Cars need annual rego checks but not drivers? WTF? Drivers are more dangerous than their cars these days. Cars have got pretty safe and reliable.

And PowerPoint doesn’t cut it. There needs to be drink driving and speeding simulators (otherwise known as PlayStation 4) and graphic 3-D movies etc.

I wonder how the legal Industry that has sprung up around all this lucrative activity would respond to that?

And while they are at it they could, on an annual basis, assess technical skills which we can all admit are getting appalling out there.

There’s a bridge coming up in the nanny state.

Possibly the best Chinese ad I have ever seen.

China just keeps giving.

Don’t fall in love with the barista
The barista loves the machine

The machine belongs to Ollie
But Ollie just loves money

Useful info from the herald which I am saving for a future pub debate. I can’t see any trend here.

Well fuck me, at 79 years of age my dad has finally uttered an opinion betraying deep thought.

He suggested that in the old days the reason why elders were revered for their wisdom is that they weren’t very old. He told me that 50 was old in the pre-industrial societies and at 50 you still have all your mental faculties (implying that this isn’t the case at 79).

I added the thought that in a society, sans change, age equated to increased accumulation of current knowledge. Whereas in our society of constant change getting old signals redundancy for old knowledge. And it also gets harder to adapt to change as one gets older. Double whammy.

Agreement all around. And then we retired for his half-full skim-milk extra-hot half-sugar latte and my double mac.