I have just finished reading a whiny article in the SMH entitled “Knowledge economy at what cost?”

Basic premise – ‘academic life was once great because we could do what the hell we wanted; now it’s rubbish because we have to do all this stuff and it’s mostly nonsense anyway. And there’s no funding for research. Why can’t we just go back to the 1950’s?’

In my opinion the Australian academic working life would be quite unbearable in this day and age. Maybe not as bad as working on a production line in a Chinese factory, but these intelligent people, the academics, have to suck up the hypocrisy of their masters, and their own. And this must hurt.

It seems as though the politicians and the public servants have gone out of their way to torture the academics over the last 35 years.

Slowly screwing down the bolts of torture. The victim, like a frog in water that is being slowly heated, has not reacted except for the odd muted whine.

In fact, self interest by senior academics has seen them effectively work as ‘collaborators’ with the torturers.

Eventually our university sector will be one large TAFE system solely serving the needs of our services-dominated domestic economy. The foreign student income may become a victim of the strangling of this sector by the government, who is just about the only investor in universities.

There will be a façade of residual research and our most likely young candidates will simply drift off overseas never to return. They already are.

With the availability of Google and Wiki I am pretty sure that the concept of a ‘knowledge’ economy makes no sense anyway. Knowledge is cheap; what we need is an ‘innovation’ economy – which we certainly do not have right now. Nor do we have a Knowledge economy despite 35 years of pretension that we are building one.

Knowledge is a necessary but far from sufficient ingredient for innovation. And our universities currently do not have, and have never had, a single clue about how to teach students to be a functioning part of an innovation economy.

I do wonder whether universities should follow society or get ahead of the curve.

Becoming large TAFEs make sense if they ‘follow’ because in our services-dominated economy this is what we need.

But if we want to use our universities to prime the pump of an innovation economy then there needs to be a lot of change. Possibly too much for the academics to bear me-thinks.

Personally I don’t think our universities are equipped with the fortitude, leadership or vision to ‘lead’ anything, not even a chook raffle. So it’s possibly best to just leave them alone for a few years until we see where our economy goes.

If resources take off again then we will need the large TAFEs and there will not be any rationale for another vision.

If resources flounder for long enough there may be a collective push for a Plan B (ooo .. they hate that phrase in Canberra) for our economy. Maybe an innovation led economy.

In summary, the past incarnation of universities is now redundant. There is no going back.

The present incarnation is an abortion resulting from genuine ill will in Canberra. It serves us not.

The future? Short of a miracle I can’t see a useful new model emerging from the current cesspool of self-interest, fear, enmity, mistrust, hypocrisy and plain old ignorance.

I have noticed that extroverts have more troubles using social media software than introverts because these tools are designed and built by introverts for use by introverts.

There is a correlation between price and exclusivity, but it is not linear and has a poor correlation coefficient.

Some labels, say Rolex Oyster watches, are quite pricey but worn on just about every business arm in China. Not exclusive.

Even an item that is rarely seen except in marketing communications can be considered to be not exclusive.

For example, a Cartier Rotonde de Cartier Astrotourbillon costs $116,195. Super pricey, yes, and rarely spotted. But they appear in many ads for Cartier and this erodes any genuine exclusivity.

Rarity, the chief sign of genuine exclusivity, is made possible by both limited supply and limited marketing visibility. Price is then just an indicator of quality, the greed of the supply chain, or the stupidity of the consumer, and sometimes all of these.

Brathwait design and ‘get made’ these nice watches.

They employ so-called naked marketing where they list their components, their cost base and margins on their website.

It’s a race to cut out the middlemen and reduce margins to something reasonable, like cost-plus.

If I were Swiss I would be worried around now.

Sure, try and extract as much margin from the old-school label conscious types before they die but in the long run they will have to either fall back to selling components or they will have to re-price the things.

I have a desire to design and sell my own watches. I know not why. Call it an obsession if you will. It’s being brewing for decades and I now have some well considered ideas that address an inexplicable hole in the market. Well, it’s inexplicable to me; probably no one else. Hence my (well learned) caution. I recently reached out to a Chinese watch maker and their reply is below. Caution anyone?

My cabbie this morning was complaining that the state government wants to sell all the power poles to the Chinese.

I suggested that we all just buy a couple each instead.

And then it occurs to me that  artificial intelligence has two components; the brain and the body.

Most of what I have read on the subject discusses the neural complexity required to be intelligent and then, at another level, self aware.

But I am thinking that the body is one big sensor, equivalent to billions of discrete sensors.

The whole global internet of things probably has substantially less sensors attached to it than my little finger.

What I am saying is that self awareness might be a natural outcome of processing and parsing all that sensory input.

“Three West Tigers players to be tested for Hep A after berry scare”.

I wonder how ASADA will spin this one?

Chinese betting ring?

I was talking to a colleague today about the habit of Australian venture capitalists in taking participating preferred stock as opposed to non-participating preferred stock or capped preferred stock.

I pointed out that 99.9% of all deals ever invested in by Australian VCs have been out of the money, so very few founders have been affected by the difference.

I also noted that because of the low success rate of VC in Australia that this tough ‘pricing’ mechanism seems justified.

But thinking further, any deal that is unexpectedly successful is likely to attract later stage funding from foreign investors and the very same participating liquidation prefs, carried through to later and bigger rounds, might actually work against the local investors.

Especially since their share of later rounds is usually somewhat limited by percentage, not necessarily due to their investment capacity, but also due to the perception by US VCs that they are ‘passengers’.

Without doing a spreadsheet calculation my gut says a capped liquidation preference might be a better bet, and at least it is a plan that foreshadows success.

So I say to Australian VCs, the handful that are left, stick to capped liquidation prefs and adjust the pre-money valuations down accordingly.

Now I am laughing; imagine trying to convince the cargo cult rump of the merits of this logic?

You can’t imagine how hard it is to get a splinter out without reading glasses at hand.

It’s probably why cavemen only lived to 50. Septiceamia.

Today is Shrove Tuesday.

My Catholic friend tells me that this is a day of self-examination, of considering what wrongs need repenting, and what areas of spiritual growth require attention.

And you have to stuff your face with pancakes ahead of Lent.

Talk about mixed messages.

Fine China may the one product where the ‘Made in China’ label cannot be considered to be detrimental.

Someone has a delicious sense or irony down there at The Tabletop Professionals.

Sometimes I want to write about a subject, such as the out-of-body experience, and I do a little Google research only to find that the subject is not worth writing about.

But in this particular case I will let you be the judge by reading the journal abstract below – this is the latest well-cited effort in the field. Based on my experience as a scientist my assertion is that these guys are:

1. Only using the most subjective of experimental data, i.e. surveys of subjects.

2. Hiding their total absence of a mechanistic proposal in a Krebs Cycle of acronyms.

3. They haven’t done their homework – they are trying to understand the out-of-body experience before the groundwork is done. That is, they are not standing on the shoulders of giants. In which case they are not scientists, so why do they bother with academic journals? They would be better placed to have websites decorated with flowers and sunsets.

“It has been argued that hallucinations which appear to involve shifts in egocentric perspective (e.g., the out-of-body experience, OBE) reflect specific biases in exocentric perspective-taking processes. Via a newly devised perspective-taking task, we examined whether such biases in perspective-taking were present in relation to specific dissociative anomalous body experiences (ABE) – namely the OBE. Participants also completed the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS) which provided measures of additional embodied ABE (unreality of self) and measures of derealization (unreality of surroundings). There were no reliable differences in the level of ABE, emotional numbing, and anomalies in sensory recall reported between the OBE and control group as measured by the corresponding CDS subscales. In contrast, the OBE group did provide significantly elevated measures of derealization (“alienation from surroundings” CDS subscale) relative to the control group. At the same time we also found that the OBE group was significantly more efficient at completing all aspects of the perspective-taking task relative to controls. Collectively, the current findings support fractionating the typically unitary notion of dissociation by proposing a distinction between embodied dissociative experiences and disembodied dissociative experiences – with only the latter being associated with exocentric perspective-taking mechanisms. Our findings – obtained with an ecologically valid task and a homogeneous OBE group – also call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between OBEs and perspective-taking in terms of facilitated disembodied experiences.”

I do not watch sport any more. At some age I just lost interest in ground hog day sports events.

But I still read the sports section in the newspaper and I find myself far more interested in the Rugby Union than any other sport.

This is because the Rugby writers are generally far better writers than those writing for other sports, with the notable exceptions of Craig Foster, Patrick Smith, Roy Masters and the now departed Peter Roebuck.

And when I say ‘better’ I mean in respect to both content and prose.

Firstly an article must be easy to read – this is a real art in sports reporting. An article that is easy to read must ‘sound’ pleasant to the mind, it must have a point, it must avoid repetition, it must have humour, it must lack dull and mechanical reporting of the events that occurred on the field, and it must be devoid of obvious errors.

Secondly, the very best article not only reports the sports event, past or future, but must also have a thesis that is proposed, returned to, and finally adjudged. And this thesis often has nothing to do with sports. For some this is just a juicy medium from whence to sprout life philosophy.

Without a profit motive, what’s the biggest organisation one can run in an effective manner?

Well, any country is generally a ‘not for profit’ and these are big. The UN. The Catholic Church. FIFA. The IOC. Yada, all the way down to your local sports club.

However at some point, say above 100 people, the managers of these ‘not for profits’ generally figure out a way to extract profits even though dividends and share sales aren’t an option.

Generally this is called rorting or corruption, this can include favours for people with brown paper bags, high salaries, job perks, generous contracts to personally owned service companies, the cheap sale of assets, and the like.

Since this behavior is anti correlated to good corporate leadership (because I assert so) there is a problem that needs fixing.

My pet proposal, designed to annoy quasi-socialists with two cars and kids in private schools, is that all of these ‘not for profit’ entities are semi-privatised.

They wouldn’t have shares as such but non-transferable shadow stock gifted to all stakeholders on an equitable basis; and these would yield dividends.

This way the leaders of these entities can get their dreams fulfilled with salary bonuses related to dividend yields but their efforts in this regard would be constrained by other stakeholder needs, and communicated to management through the compulsory voting process for board directors, certain compulsory shareholder voting matters (no vote, no dividend) including the appointment and otherwise of CEOs.

I’m telling you, if all Australians received an annual cheque from the non-retained annual profits of the Federal Treasury, we’d be taking the whole Canberra thing a lot more seriously.

In fact there wouldn’t even be a Canberra. It’d either be sold to the Chinese or written off as a fully depreciated but cashflow hungry asset. Government would sensibly move to Sydney – probably in some cheap arse mid-sized block in the Paramatta CBD.

Politics would move to the business pages and be a lot saner. This would open up space at the front of the papers for a little foreign reporting. Yada.

I wonder of the NRL integrity unit is seeking the absence of, or the presence of integrity.

Chatting to Greggie the other night I learned that Australian universities are all heavily investing in medical and bio research, primarily by importing successful and relevant academic researchers in the area, and also poaching the same off each other.

The motivation is to halt their collective slide down the global university rankings as Asian countries invest in their universities

Since medical research has a higher ‘impact’ factor, a dollar investment in research in this area offers a better impact on the university rankings than a dollar invested in something useful and boring like water treatment technology.

The constraining factor of course is that there is still the same limited NH&MRC research budget available for this medical research and an increasing demand for it as the universities all heavy up in these research areas.

Our universities need their high rankings because it impacts the fees that they can charge off foreign students, which they rely upon to stay solvent.

This scenario begs a few questions:

1. How did we get into this situation? Its a very unholy downward spiral with no likelihood of unspiralling.

2. Having said that, it’s going to have to break for anything to change. And it will eventually. Everyone in the system seems to have Stockholm Syndrome and they don’t see the problem, or at the very least they have a fear of ‘calling’ the situation.

3. How much medical research can a Koala Bear? We in Australia hardly use any of our research results in the area as it is and we import most of the practical medical technologies that are widely used.

4. Why O’ why does medical research have such a high impact factor? Because a lot of people are doing it, which leads to more citations, and hence a higher impact factor. Ever seen such a circular justification? ‘Ship of Fools’ territory.

5. You have to think we would be better placed in our small economy skating away from the pack and specialising in something less mainstream than medical research where we at least have a chance of being first rate. This is sort of like being able to win the world cup in Rugby League whereas we have no chance in Soccer. Or playing a game such as AFL that nobody else has even heard of.

6. Our economy is mostly services and then resources and agriculture. Maybe our research efforts could focus here? What an odd thought.

7. I wonder if anyone seriously believes our universities have improved since they started focusing on the foreign student dollar?

8. If they are going to run our universities into the ground then at least turn them into for profit organisations and completely privatise them. They would have at least a fighting chance of being successful at this unholy pilgrimage. The first thing they would do is hire proper management.

Enough said.

There is a lot of research in the area of artificial intelligence but apparently very little in artificial stupidity.

Me thinks intelligence is best spotted by it’s lapses into stupidity.

In fact, intelligence as we know it is defined by such lapses.

An example is cognitive dissonance which can lead to despondency or, where there is less hope or control, depression.

You’d think you’d have to be bloody stupid to purposely make a machine that suffered from cognitive dissonance.

But maybe that’s what it’s going to take to get true learning capability and, therefore, artificial intelligence.

Now this funny.

Within 24 hours, after having twice having unrelated and random discussions about the two times in my life that I have been electrocuted, tonight I go and electrocute myself again.

This time it was just 100% pure stupidity – just like the last two times. I have been fixing this old lamp and was playing around with it after the job was done just to see why the thing seems to flicker from time to time. Then ZAP when I put my finger across the electrodes for the bulb.

I have an RCD  (residual current device) in the electricity box which was sold as a nanosecond cut-off device that will save one’s kids from electrocution. It didn’t seem to do much. Maybe it determined I was only copping a small current instead of a life-threatening current. Just like an ABS that doesn’t go off at low speeds.

In any case 50 Hz is now indelibly etched in my brain. And my fingers. I can still feel it as I am typing.

Now this is a segue; one of the conversations I was having about electrocution was related to body energy. What is it and where does it come from?

I made the point that we evolved without electricity and our body’s reaction to electrocution couldn’t be pre-recorded as, for example, it is postulated that our reactions to snakes and spiders are.

Supposedly we carry in our DNA a memory of spiders and snakes so that, even if we have never seen one of these, we know to hate them.

But then I thought, maybe we have such a genetic memory for lightening strikes. And that is the one that is used to create a microsecond response to electrocution.

What seems to happens is that every muscle, bone and tendon in the body immediately works in concert, and on a microsecond timescale, to remove you from the source of the current.

The first two times this happened to me I was thrown through the air – a feat that I could never conjure up with my conscious brain.

The question is whether this is a release of stored energy or a mobilization of an actuating engine that converts inputs to energy. Given the speed of response I think there is a form of stored energy on our bodies at all times, to be used in an emergency.

Now segueing again; it occurs to me that an orgasm is an electrocution in reverse. My thinking?

Well, first, why do we even have orgasms?

My suspicion that at one level we are being rewarded with something we like, so we do it again. The process also switches off the brain which prevents us doing unwanted things, like stopping; this switching off the brain is also a reward for most people. And then there is the releasing or controlling of energy in the body.

Therefore an orgasm is like an electric shock in reverse, compelling us to the source of the future shock.

One more of these bloody shocks and this blog will be officially nuts.

Actually this had led to more thoughts on sex. To have sex most people have to tune out all conscious thoughts, especially men. Erections are hard to maintain when external thoughts are going on.

Maybe this is why women have harder time having orgasms on average – they don’t have quite the physical feedback loop.

In any case my guess is that there are two types of tuning out of conscious thoughts during sex. The first is self centered subconscious, also known as ‘porn’. The second is a descent into the collective subconscious, known as love.

Deep, man.

My mother just asked me, with quite some annoyance in her voice, if I know what ‘flat’ means. This in the context of a failing to follow some exact instructions with respect to placing a zip bag full of bolognaise sauce into the freezer.

I responded:

“An object with a high aspect ratio which is substantially parallel to a surface which itself is substantially perpendicular to the local force of gravity”

With a sigh she gave up and I was saved from further unnecessary torture.

The billboard below is a lie. Drinking Coopers beer is one of biggest compromises I can think of.

Coopers is a pre-technology beer. For some reason the Coopers brewery, tucked away in Adelaide, missed the mid-twentieth century introduction of beer filtration, biotechnology and chemical engineering. They kept plugging away with their cloudy dinosaur of a beer and eventually it became the first of the local ‘craft’ beers.

Craft my arse; I call it lazy, tight-arsed, backwards and self-deluded.

When I enter a pub, any pub, I will ask for a Tooheys New. It’s easily the best beer made in Australia.

The closer one gets to the epicenter of the first hipster the less likely it is that a pub will have New.

They will have twenty taps all labeled with names such as pigs trotter, camel back, little fuckers, iron bark, here & now and maybe Coopers (although this is now considered by the hipsters to be old-new-school, or new-old-school, anyway one of these, and therefore mainstream).

These beers are universally over-expressed in flavour, expensive, pretentious, and full of unfiltered colloidal rubbish that will give you a clanger of a hangover.

Even the default backup for Tooheys New, Carlton Draft, comes in an unpasteurized craft version. It’s rubbish. Who knew that pasteurisation improved the flavour of beer so much? Who even knew that they pasteurised beer?

When I was a kid I lived in my parent’s pub. We had two beers on tap. New for the masses and Old for the shop stewards, and 50/50 (a mix of the two) for the odd eccentric and the resident homosexual.

Low alcohol beer was affected with dilution by lemonade. Craft beer involved the addition of Scotch or a Bex Powder, sometimes both. Pretension was satiated with Crown Lager, which was just over-priced and bottled Reschs Draft. Cloudy and bitter beer was simply an off keg

Ah, the easy days.

It’s very likely that we will never see the like of Tony Abbott again.

I suspect he is the secret love child of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Dame Edna.

I pretty much knew his prime ministership would play out like this because of the incident a couple of years ago when he outed himself for having a love child in early twenties, only to find out later that the now adult kid wasn’t his.

Faarkking hilarious. And this could only be the actions of a complete fruit loop.

We have Julia and Kevin to thank that he’s still around to entertain us on a daily basis.

I truly hope he’s still there in a year’s time.

The mystery remains though; what’s going on our political parties that these clowns can get elected to leadership despite their clearly demonstrated personality flaws?

The Telstra CEO has called for an end to the leadership ructions in Canberra saying the business community needs certainty to plan for the next decade.

Ask yourself, why?

It’s because our large oligarchies are so inbred that they can’t grow market opportunities in genuinely competitive foreign markets. They do not have the skills or the guts.

Hence they are stuck with their share of the Australian market and their profitability is largely dependent upon government policies with respect to corporate tax rates and continued barriers to foreign incursions into our protected markets.

In addition it is argued that inconsistent politics impacts consumer confidence which reduces the local market size as people stop spending.

The real problem is that so many of our large corporations are fully dependent on the local service sector, which represents a frighteningly high 68% of our GDP.

If our corporations had high value exports and/or significant foreign revenues, for example, they would be far less sensitive to local consumer sentiment and political shenanigans.

The sooner we act on this the less the ultimate  shock is going to be.

But I am afraid it’s already way gone; the correction when it comes is going to be much larger than that which followed Hawke and Keating’s efforts to open our old-school protected economy of the time.

It’s ironic that the oligarchies (minus the manufacturers who went the way of the Tassie Tiger) have managed to reinvent their domestic market positions despite this former market deregulation. But it makes sense; it’s the only skill-set that they had.

And the correction will come – technology is making sure of that.

At a business forum the other day I heard a successful businessman of Lebanese extraction argue that Australia has a high level of low level racism but a low level of high level racism.

This, in context, was used to create the impression that our problem with racism isn’t really that bad.

Now this guy is well and truly part of the establishment and wears his Islamic religious beliefs as a sort of emblem of token inclusionism within the business community. That is, he gets to eat a lot of lunches off these conciliatory views.

He didn’t address the kinetic link between low level and high level racism – do they have a correlation? can the proliferation of the former pave the way for the latter?

Our parliament is now getting itself all worked up over the racial discrimination act all over again.

The key issue is whether it should be unlawful to offend or insult a person based on their race or religion. Unlawful meaning that the offended or insulted party, if they have the means and motivation, can take the suspected racist to court for reparations.

Most agree that the racial discrimination act needs to ensure that high level racism is unlawful or even illegal.

I believe that low level racism should be discouraged in other ways, through education and marketing, simply because an over-reach into this space will create very real incursions into personal freedoms.

And to be honest, making racial discrimination unlawful unfairly favours those with the means to prosecute offenders – that is, it ironically discriminates against the lower socio-economic victims.

It’s a very grey area, the bit in the middle between high level and low level discrimination, and I for one would err on the side of caution before using the law as a solution to a problem that is not properly understood.

In Australia we have universities and in each university you will find a commercialisation office tasked with spinning out innovative technologies.

Four things are certain about these commercialisation offices:

1. The academics will hate them because “they don’t serve our needs”. I wouldn’t count this one against the commercialisation offices.

2. The people that run any one of them will have previously been in a similar job at another university in Australia or the UK.

3. They will be eternally cash flow negative.

4. At any moment by some weird consensus they will all promote commercialisation by either startups or, alternatively, licensing.

Right now the buggers are swinging back to licensing just as the global licensing model is collapsing as a result of the changes to the US patent and patent enforcement regimes.

It’s like they are totally unaware or it just doesn’t matter.

I suspect both.

Another privacy opportunity –

An app on your phone or in the cloud that generates false data alongside the true data about you that they are capturing and using against you.

For example – false location data, false browsing data, false purchasing data, false phone calls, etc.

This way, since they won’t know which is true data and which is not, it can never be used against you in a legal process.

Also, since you have a record of the false data you can detect misuse quite easily.

In fact, you could lay bear traps for the data pirates by creating patterns of false data that they can’t resist using. And catch them at it.

With voters increasingly swinging between our two political parties it’s a wonder that all the backbenchers, both Labor and the Coalition, don’t quit and form their own party.

They could call it the Backbenchers Party.

They would have an immediate majority in the lower house and they could form a government outside of an election.

Of course, they would then have to change their name to the Frontbenchers Party.

Then the former frontbenchers, both government and shadow, could join forces as the new Backbenchers Party.

I had an old friend, a very good research chemist, that spent the back end of his working life promoting an alternative molecular structure for DNA.

That is, he thought the double helix was either a hoax, or a conspiracy theory, or the result of cargo cult effect amongst scientists.

His evidence was that all the then available experimental data could be explained with more than one molecular structure.

This was partially true at the time, although it is not any more.

But he ignored the fact that the double helix has the sort of easy elegance that nature prefers.

Think of this as an minimum on an aesthetic ‘energy’ surface. What we perceive as aesthetic is in fact efficient; we ourselves are just a product of nature.

My friend was also a passionate believer in God.

So his unrelenting intellectual questioning of orthodoxy was left on the coat hook outside the lab on a Friday afternoon.

Which brings me to Ziggy. Not Stardust but Switkowski, an inexplicable former CEO of Telstra – the grounded kangaroo.

Ziggy, a former physicist, pops up here and there, promoting the most expensive form of electricity generation, nuclear energy. He is paid to do so by some lobby group.

Nuclear energy usually involves profits that are private, and end-of-life plant costs that are socialised at public expense. That is, yet another neoliberal wealth transfer mechanism.

Clean renewable energy is upon us; it has crossed the threshold to reality.

Ziggy, like my friend the chemist, just refuses to recognise when the quixotic crusade is lost.

Last night I saw a movie set in and around the character of Stephen Hawking. One of the more painful experiences of recent years.

The very idea of one human fantasy (god) and another (maths and physics) pitched together in a beauty competition is quite bizarre.

Just for the record, a reverence of mathematics automatically disqualifies an individual from any dissertations with respect to wisdom.

And wisdom has nothing to do with time, space, imaginary friends, or synchronised diving (degree of difficulty 9.99999, oh wow).

I think I literally sighed for a whole minute when I got out of that cinema.

A couple of nights back I watched Tony Abbott get grilled by Leigh Sales on some ABC program.

Because he had just retained the prime minister-ship after a party spill, the focus of the interview was pure party politics.

It was a somewhat boring cat-and-mouse affair with the increasingly frustrated and quite disrespectful interviewer working hard to get a gotcha moment out of Tony, who to his credit avoided one altogether.

However in the process he revealed (to me at least) that he has absolutely no philosophy as to where he wants Australia to go. All the policies discussed are aimed at getting re-elected – sugar for a sufficient number of the masses.

The interviewer was out for blood but missed the opportunity to focus on the lack of an overriding philosophy, which could have been very easily and calmly exposed.

Reflecting back, Bob Hawke did have an over-riding philosophy – a healing of the traditional rifts between labour and capital.

Keating wanted to restructure the economy so we could compete internationally after years of  protectionism.

Howard wanted to reinvent the calm contentment of the 1950s.

And then came Rudd, who like Abbott just wanted to be prime minister.

Gillard, I suspect, did have a philosophy especially in improving the equality in, and performance of the education sector. But it was somewhat limited in scope, poorly communicated and rather tactical as opposed to strategic.

When a politician has an over-riding philosophy it is much easier to listen to him her her.

Conversations become more natural and structured because policy can always be communicated in the context of the larger picture.

I wonder if we well ever have such again?

The national (net) wealth is the total sum value of monetary assets minus liabilities of a given nation.

Wealth includes (1) natural assets such as land, forests, fossil fuels and minerals, (2) human capital – the population’s education and skills, and (3) physical capital includes such things as machinery, buildings, and infrastructure.

According to a 2013 Credit Suisse report Australia was second in the OECD behind Switzerland in national wealth per adult

Most of the Swiss wealth is in banks, watches, engineering and chocolate. They have probably dropped a little since then due to losses in their now less attractive banking sector and aggressive currency depreciation.

The net worth per Australian adult in 2013 was US$402,578, of which US$503,070 was in assets and US$100,492 was debt.

Just yesterday I noted that the value of all residential dwellings in Australia is $5.4 trillion – info usefully provided by the TV in the gym.

I checked and the market cap of all ASX companies is $1.6 trillion.

Assuming that non-residential dwellings and land are worth another $5.4 trillion, and that private companies are worth at least as much as the listed companies, that gets us to $14 trillion.

Superannuation totals around $1.5 trillion.

To this has to be added human and other physical resources, including all those mineral resources – I get a total of at least $20 trillion.

Even subtracting for the impact of Tony Abbott, that leaves us with assets of around 800,000 mostly illiquid dollars per person. Much more than calculated by the Swiss.

And there is a little debt here and there – I am not sure how much of this debt is offshore and I am not sure how much this matters. But it does manage to suck up most of the liquidity that we do have.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could renounce our citizenship and get a $800k payout cheque when we leave the partnership of the criminally insane? Criminally insane because, despite this high inherent wealth, a large fraction of the buggers think they are hard off and would do just about anything to change that.

Or, on the flipside anyone seeking asylum here would have to buy into the partnership – $800k thanks, or at least a debt to that tune.

The Chinese have until recently been able to buy a ‘Golden’ visa to Australia for $5m – it seems this was well priced for Australia.

So it seems Australia’s problem is not assets, it’s cashflow. Which is why we have a habit of selling assets to generate cashflow.

Maybe we would be better off putting ALL the crown assets into a huge publicly listed vehicle (say $10 trillion market cap) and slowly sell all the stock in this company to overseas buyers.

As the money flows in we could all get an annual cheque for being part of the tribe, just like various indigenous communities I have visited around the world.

And then when the stock is all sold we could re-nationalise the business and maybe compensate the shareholders – actually, probably not. The trick would be to wait until some huge natural or human disaster (say a big war) when everyone’s eye is off the ball.

Then 18 months later, the apparent period for total global financial amnesia, do it all again.

Hang on, that’s sort of what we are doing….

Sometimes I feel like I am being chased by marauding hipsters.

Not on a daily basis but on a calendar basis.

Wherever we move our work office they follow.

Hordes of them in their three or four shades of hipster-look, some with stars and some without, carefully honed at the facsimile centers otherwise known as music festivals.

The plumages of these bowerbirds are an interesting amalgam of all the movements that have come before them, all the way back to the beat folk of the 50’s.

There must be individuals out there that introduce new elements, gleaned from old movies, one item at a time and on a regular basis.

Some of these catch on and the buggers slowly morph, staying a very short step ahead of the fashion industry where half of them work. The rest work in ‘marketing’ or IT startups, sometimes both.

As they arrive into our urban environment the pubs get converted (sideways) and sprout a Mexican beer garden, and the cafes go upmarket. As do the prices. And the conversations with your local barista become much more predictable.

Pretty soon we are going to run out of unhipstered Sydney. Lantana by another name.

Can someone please produce a contour map of hipster influence? And maybe start a movement for heritage zones, free of hipsters by decree.

Data – we are all generating skads of it all over the internet and other networks.

Where we have been, who we have been with, what we looked at, what we bought, who we talked to, who we messaged, what we listened to, … and the list goes on.

In the broadest sense there are three groups interested in this data:

1. Law enforcement and security agencies, either solving crimes or getting ahead of the curve and pre-solving crimes (minority report style).

2. Planning bodies of many sorts that need this information to make their plans more effective. This is a diverse bunch such as political parties, urban planning groups, and music festival promoters.

3. Any number of companies that want as much of your money as they can get. This groups consists of a whole supply chain of data gatherers, analysers, aggregators, wholesalers and retailers that on-sell their work efforts to vendors of products and services. However, increasingly data itself is the being consumed – we are disappearing up our own data orifices.

In the interests of personal freedom many are arguing that governments should clamp down on data collection. Unfortunately the cat is out of the bag and the data is already being collected. Indeed the various nets and the devices connected to their edges are beyond the control of any national government – at most there are a handful of governments that could bring down the networks. But that is different to control – in fact its a sort of admission of no real control.

The best we can do is place clear limits on the misuse of data by the three interest groups at the end of the supply chain, on a national level.

In fact I would make the misuse of such information a criminal offence. And put the onus of proof on clear data ownership and integrity, inclusive of any original data collection, upon the end (mis)user of data – the defendant. By making it a criminal offence the risks of using data illegally cannot be transferred by warranties in a contract. Indeed it would be an unlawful and criminal act so that any aggrieved party could take court action, not just the public prosecutors.

An example would be Coles or Woolies buying user data off some middle company that has aggregated and parsed data from a variety of sources including Google and Facebook. The directors of Coles or Woolies would be on the hook for criminal charges if they use illegally obtained data, or misuse data in contradiction to a clear code of conduct.

Generally speaking the risk of criminal charges keeps people honest, especially senior managers and board directors. At the end of the day we still live in a world where it is people, not machines, that make decisions to do silly things. So we need to make people responsible in a criminal sense otherwise the cost of getting caught is just a cost of doing business.

As a postscript I would add that data collected under a EULA (for example in an app or a browser) would only stand-up to court scrutiny if the EULA had first been approved by a national body set up for this purpose. If not it would be deemed to not exist for the purposes of being used by an end-user of data as defence material in a criminal court case.

The  newly crowned Miss Universe from Colombia has been asked to make good on her aspirations for world peace by none other than the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (Farc).

The report said it is unclear what role she would play in the current peace talks. If Bob Marley could do it, I don’t see why she can’t.

What the farc?

This is Bear, one of the oddest dogs I have ever met. He belongs to my elderly parents.

10 years of age and still a pup, Bear is half Kelpie and half Border Collie.

Not being able to chase stock around a paddock he puts all his energy into protecting the pack.

One raised voice or one touch out of place and Bear launches himself between the adversaries with fearless enthusiasm.

And he’s not joking. No fighting.

In yesterday’s news I read:

“Prime Minister Tony Abbott promises South Australia chance to tender for Future Submarines project to win leadership votes.”

I for one do not take too kindly to a PM that promises $20-40 billion dollars of tax payer’s money just so he can prevent a leadership spill in his own party.

Seriously, seriously fucked up and with a moral compass pointing straight to hell.

This sort of behaviour is exactly why he is in trouble and he will never get it.

Now that was an interesting discussion I overheard;

“How long can the internet last?”

Based on history, the general agreement was a hundred years at best.

It never occurred to me, to be honest.

Why would it end? An apocalypse, a machine takeover, new and better technology, IoT-net, or what?

Geez.

The local Italian version of the milk crate cafe seat.

My advice to Malcolm Turnbull is not to wait until there is a spill to declare his nomination for party leadership, but to resign from Parliament immediately.

His point has been well made and the the pigs have been taught to sing.

They will never ever thank him though.

One of my favourite books is ‘The Empty Mirror’.

It’s the story of a Dutch guy who in the 1950s went into a Japanese Zen monastery.

He was very frustrated that they didn’t just tell him all their ‘secrets’ and that he had to learn them all through contemplation, meditation and basic routine.

Eventually he realised that they were showing him to learn through the body and subconscious mind, and that engagement of the everyday mental faculties just gets in the way.

In the West we are time poor and many that try and learn the calm and centralised ‘other’ ways are taught with methods that engage the highly developed brain with gobbledygook such as energy paths, chakras and any number of conceptual structures pilfered from old Eastern practices.

The assumption is that we are unable to let go of beliefs and therefore need to adopt a suitably untestable set of beliefs in order to start the journey and eventually let go of them.

I suspect that many get part of the way along the journey but get stuck in the belief structures, never to escape.

And then they become teachers because they have to eat and pay rent, thereby promulgating the problem.

And this (below) rocks in from a new research paper based on the MySchool results.

I now see what Julia was up to.

It basically shows that despite having twice as much money per student that private schools do not get better academic results than government or Catholic schools.

This can mean one of two things:

1. The private schools are crap at what they do, or

2. All that extra money is being spent on non academic things, which is the argument the private schools are (sensibly) running with.

If education results asymptote as they appear to do, then my guess is that Labor will argue for a ceiling figure, above which no government funding is afforded.

Many private schools would not get any funding. The budget would be relieved.

But it does beg the question, how far could funding be dropped in public schools without affecting academic results?

I am pretty sure that in my time results were at least as good as today but that relative funding levels were much lower.

Mike says “Arguably the country is getting much better value for money under both catholic and private school systems”. That is, the same results with less public money.

Mike is surprised that the government hasn’t forced people into private schooling like they have with private health care insurance. This is probably the coalition’s long term agenda.

The issue of course is that there are those that simply can’t afford even the basic schooling costs, whatever they are.

And also, the two sides of politics see the two sides of schooling as their breeding grounds for members and voters, to be preserved at all costs.

A view that is increasingly out of date as voters take to swinging between our two dysfunctional centrist political blocs.

Attributed to many and claimed by few, it’s probably at least 500 years old.

‘Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK then it’s not the end yet.’

The photo below is me in Europe somewhere in my early twenties. Short of cash and not able to afford a shaver or a haircut. What other excuse could there be??

PS I did not take that photo Trev. My girlfriend did. The selfie and stick only emerged as an unexpected side effect of the smartphone and its dodgy optics.

Last night I gave the opening talk at an entrepreneurs’ weekend forum.

In question time I was asked ‘what motivates me?’

Very unlike me, I struggled to give a comprehensive answer.

But I did say that my motivation is certainly not money.

Later on, I decided that I am on a journey of understanding and the the medium in question (not my only one), early stage tech and investment, is simply a very useful place to explore some of life’s mysteries.

In contrast, a job in a corporation or a government funded body would teach me very little. I know, I have been there. These are static and controlled environments.

In my space, chaos and confusion are rampant. People’s core characters are exposed through stress. The weirdest types are attracted. The game is global and takes me all over.

Where better to collect data and run experiments?

The answer ain’t 42 mate.

Actually there is no answer as such. There is just a model that works for me.

I have built much of the scaffolding of the model already and am now focused on the brick work and maybe a couple of extra wings.

I don’t seriously expect anyone else to be that interested in my efforts. I lose interest myself pretty much the moment something is completed

It’s a race between me and the bats to get the mangoes off the tree.

I just spent two hours up the tree with the home-made mango picking pole

And then I get my second ever back spasm. Not nice.

Fortunately there’s a lot of useful advice to be has around here. And a hot bag and Voltarin.

Too much advice, in truth.

Advice should be dished out like a massage, with careful feeling for the other person’s responses and adjustments thereto.

A rare art.

Xenobitic additives, fats, carbs, salt and sugar, all delivered. Hopefully before it chills. Those fries are awful when cold.

When I was at my first real job, a start-up that when on to list on the NYSE, we were hit with a hostile take-over offer, which the CEO rejected out of hand.

The shareholders, on the other hand, weren’t so unimpressed and within days the arbitrage boys owned enough stock to seal the deal.

At the emergency shareholders meeting I remember chatting to a senior ‘hedge fund’ guy (hard to say what he was – maybe best to describe him as an American pirate with money and a suit) and he told me that ‘Once a company is in play, it’s over. The only question is where the money goes’.

This sort of reminds me of Tony Abbott’s situation – the deal is in play and the result is now inevitable. I wonder if he recognises this?

My guess is that the sort of bizarrely ego-driven mania that is required for a person to become PM must also blind-side the individual to the recognition of this sort of inevitability, despite the fact that it has happened many times over and always with the same result.

In business most smart leaders, when faced with such a situation, immediately start negotiating while they have some chips left on the table. Usually it is money they seek.

Abbott could angle for some plum role, say the ambassador to the UK. His spiritual home, so to speak.

Beef, who knows? I bet they don’t.

Sausage, Nuh.

Roll, yep.

Hand, only if they can’t afford a machine.

Crafted, dreaming.

Oven. Bain-Marie plus microwave.

Fresh, more dreaming.

100% Aussie beef seasoned with fresh garlic, tomato, carrot and onion. Really?

1830 kJ. Ludicrous.

$3.95. The only sure truth.

New word O’ bard.

Helianthusate, verb

hee-lee-an-thuh-s-ate

To vacillate in a predictable fashion.

Have you ever travelled to a different time zone and then used your Android phone to put meetings into your calendar for when you get back?

If so, and your phone is on the default setting of reverting to whatever the local time is, you will undoubtedly find your meeting times all messed up when you get back home.

Surely this is a problem that can be fixed?

I suspect that the problem is that the calendar app doesn’t know if the meeting is OS or at home. So it should ask, when you are out of your local time zone, whether this meeting is back home or somewhere out on the road. Or just assume that the time you put in for a meeting was the home time if it occurs after you lob back home.

It doesn’t seem that hard.

In its current form Australia’s proposed Crowdfunding Legislation, with its limits of $10,000 per non sophisticated investor per year and maximum of $2500 per company per investor, looks pretty bloody useless.

My guess is the feds are working hard to protect small investors from losing their money on an investment that they can’t do a proper risk assessment on.

The fear? That the same small investors, after they lose their money, will cry foul and blame the government for not protecting them from their own ignorance.

I have a solution!

Put all the relevant companies into a pool (say a specific exchange) and when an investor puts their money in they are assigned a randomly picked stock.

Given that the pool will without doubt lose money and that there will only be a small fraction of companies that make money, this then creates a ‘lottery’ situation. Most importantly the mean return for all the money going into the exchange will be negative, just like any good tote scheme.

Since this is without doubt just a pure gamble, investors gains would not be taxable as income.

And their losses? Well, bad luck – it would be like losing your money on a horse or a lottery ticket.

I would also create a PIPE scheme, where these same companies could sell stock directly to private investors (at the same price and terms) which would be treated under capital gains tax rules.

One hypothesis floating around is that our kids get so protected from the environment that they don’t develop sufficient immunity and end up with issues ranging from asthma to allergies. Another is that the over-use of antibiotics, extended breast feeding and crap diets is destroying certain key bugs in kid’s gut which are necessary for good immunity.

This hypothesis has been recently supported by a research effort that gave about 30 allergic children a daily dose of peanut protein together with a probiotic in an increasing amount over an 18-month period. The probiotic used in the study was Lactobacillus rhamnosus and the dose was equivalent to eating about 20kg of yoghurt each day. At the end of the trial 80% of the children could eat peanuts without any reaction from either their bodies or their mad mothers, compared to a 4% result from a placebo group.

Now to be be honest with you, I don’t give a flying fuck about peanut allergies. But this story reminds me of Australia’s economy. Let me explain…

We are 25 million people here in Club Australia living off a continent which would otherwise be good for 250 million people (yes it is – just think there’s 8m people in Israel; that is, a desert which is 370x smaller than Australia).

Resources and land – we have these in abundance and, well, why work hard on things like technology when there is an easy life to be had? So we end up living on an economic diet of carbs. And we have all the allergies in the world.

And our mother (the gub’ment) keeps us out of the dirt on a daily basis – for example, protecting us from the risks of losing our money in crowd equity funding or financial spread betting. And the result, we don’t lose our money and in the process we don’t learn how not to lose it.

In my sector, early stage tech, what I see when I look out the metaphorical window is a bunch of teletubbies playing in a kid’s bouncy castle, eternally protected by the mother from hell in Canberra that imagines potential peanut allergies in every white-shoe brigade proposal.

REPORT CARD: not ready for international competition just yet!

The unions in the construction industry remain stronger than they do in many other sectors, especially on larger projects.

In the sphere of occupational, health and safety their manic approach has substantially reduced accidents and deaths. No doubt about it. And this has positive effort has also helped keep them viable in this industry.

But they also actively work to stop the introduction of any imported labour-saving technologies. Their other fucntion is of course to keep up the number of jobs required in their industry.

There will come a day where in some foreign construction site there is one worker in a control room pushing buttons, but the equivalent Australian site will still have mid-twentieth century vision of hundreds of workers running around.

Back to OH&S – if there are no people on site then there can’t be any accidents. So logically, removing workers from a site by using new approaches to construction will reduce the number of OH&S incidents.

In the end it will come down to cost – do we prefer to pay 16x the lowest possible cost for new building? And just so a few people can dodge technological unemployment for a little longer.

The trouble in deferring technological unemployment is that the people affected will eventually meet their destiny but by then it is too late – they are too far behind to re-train.

I am not sure the construction unions are really doing their members a long-term favour.

Given a choice between hot air and paper towels, I take the towels every time.

You have to laugh … all the incubators and small investors really thought the bureaucracy was going to implement a useful new startup ESOP scheme.

After spending skads of useless time with the bureaucrats they are now bitterly disappointed with what they are going to get.

And they seem surprised too!

It doesn’t surprise me. There’s two negative forces at work here;

Treasury and the ATO, desperate not to make any loophole bloopers.

And the rest, a combination of disinterest, envy and incompetence.

Oh well, I will stick to my zero-value reverse-vesting common stock offerings. I don’t in fact have an issue that needs fixing.

What they mean is that the toilets have been out of action for a month. Green in every sense of the word.

UTS has just finished the unfortunately named “UTS Dr Chau Chak Wing Building”.

Is it a wing or a building or both?

Designed by the Frank Gehry company, it’s a little building with quite an intriguing exterior. Some will say ‘different’ is always good because if you wait long enough it will be considered a classic.

Personally I don’t think it’s that marvellous. It looks OK, but it’s not breathtaking. Different, yes. For me it doesn’t speak to the location nor does it have any hint of “Australia” about it. It looks like it belongs in Chicago.

Actually it looks like a climbing wall with windows sticking out of it. I reckon it would have looked better with the windows recessed. And then the UTS could have earned some extra money by renting it out as a climbing wall.

Given where it is, tucked away behind a few other buildings I wonder whether the money might have been better spent on making another ‘statement’ building on Broadway.

They spent $180m on the building. At 16,030sqm the building cost $11,228 per square meter.

In China commercial high rise costs $1,400 per square meter, and some new construction techniques they have are down to $1,000 per square meter.

If our universities can justify all this extra expense on high class buildings because they supposedly boost a university’s standings then god help our universities if the Chinese ever get on top of their architectural design issues.

The Australian government is modifying the tax laws on startup options, after much pressure from interest groups

The issue that they, the ATO and Treasury, have is that every time they create a favourable option tax scheme for startups, the big 4 consulting firms figure or how to game the scheme for their larger clients, closely followed by all the small consultants and their clients.

It looks like they have over cooked this new scheme to avoid this issue but by doing so made it less useful than it could have been.

My personal opinion is that the scheme could be very simple, as follows:

1. A company is eligible if

(a) more than 25% of the fully diluted stock, including options, are at least 1x liquidation preferred stock with a threshold of board and shareholder control rights, including drag-along rights for exit.

Note, they don’t need to grant options until someone invests, and with the proposed zero valuation (below) the timing of option grants becomes less critical. For example a company can accrue promises (by letter) to grant options and grant them later on when they hit the 25% threshold.

(b) the holders of at least 80% of liquidated preferred stock do not own any common stock or options.

Together these features would exclude the unworthy small businesses, corporations, listed leeches and SME’s, so long as beneficial interests were carefully excluded. And also the companies would need an annual external audit of their capital structure.

2. All options are deemed to have zero value at the time of grant with no income declarable, no matter what the price per share of the preferred stock. Keep it simple. This also avoids all the silly valuation methodologies, the dumb timing issues, etc. Note that the zero valuation for options does not imply any valuation of the common stock for tax purposes.

3. Options are only over common stock, must vest over at least two years, and the board must have power of attorney rights over them.

4. Options must be between 10% and 25% of the fully diluted stock after each option grant.

5. Profits from options are taxed at the same rate as capital gains as if the stock was held from the time of grant, independent of the mechanism used by an acquirer to buy out the options, or the time the stock is held between conversion and sale.

It is useful to remember that the mean return on genuine startups in Australia is quite negative over the last 40 years, so such a tax scheme isn’t giving anything away as such. Just so long as it can’t be gamed by the unworthy.

This scheme is also structured to force all this incubators and angels into sensible investment structures. It’s a two-fer that addresses the question as to “what is a startup?” from a capital structure point of view.

Back to school education … I made a friend quite cross with regards to something negative I wrote with respect to private schooling.

She said, and I absolutely believe her, that all she wanted for her kids was that they have ‘the best start in life’, aka private schooling.

However, many people that send their kids to private schools with this mantra in mind seem take on an expense of say $40k per annum, per child, without first doing substantial research on the subject. The fact that other people they know are doing it is deemed enough evidence.

Being me, I have done a little research into two aspects of this mystery:

1. Why parents choose to send their kids to private schools, and also

2. The data showing the effectiveness of private schools in giving kids a ‘better start in life’

Summarizing the surprisingly little published data on the second of these:

Taking into account all relevant factors, between school types in Australia there is virtually no difference in outcomes for kids, when measuring factors such as likelihood of employment, earning levels and employment prestige, and normalising for other variables. For more details see:

http://theconversation.com/buyer-beware-are-you-really-purchasing-a-better-education-14509

http://theconversation.com/private-schooling-has-little-long-term-pay-off-30303

If you don’t have much maths in your background, this data shows that university entrance scores and post uni salaries primarily correlate with socio-economic factors. To put it another way, a kid from a well-off background will do well not matter what sort of school they go to; it’s the parents and their attitudes & beliefs that drive ‘good’ results. The fact that a lot of well-off kids happen to go to private schools simply creates a correlation between these schools and good results that is not at all causal. So when you look at the great results from some expensive school you aren’t looking at a reflection of great teaching; all you are doing is looking at a socio-economic catchment phenomenon. I have explained this to a few well educated people now and they rarely get it so I am beginning to wonder what all that education is for.

So the rush to private schools is not supported by empirical data. This is a marketer’s dream – a product that sells itself despite the fact that it has no obvious quantitative efficacy. No wonder there is very little data available.

I then decided to tool around the internet looking for qualitative studies that explored why parents send their kids to private schools. This is the complete list of factors found by researchers, cobbled together from a number of studies, in no particular order:

1. Higher university entrance marks (debunked)

2. Higher salaries for kids when they emerge from university (debunked)

3. More prestigious jobs for kids when they emerge from university (debunked)

So then we get to the ‘soft’ selling features of private schooling – the ones that are hard to measure and in reality must sell the deal to parents:

4. Keep the kids away from the riff-raff in public schools. I personally think that in public schools one is more likely to find a broader cross-section of peoples, and this must serve kids well in life as opposed to the sort of (Anglo-Chinese blended) mono-culture in some private schools. As to out-and-out riff-raff, in my experience the worst of the worst people that I have met in life were spoiled private school progeny.

5. Ensure that the kids are more well-rounded as individuals. As per the last point, a sense of entitlement and elitism that is hard to avoid at private schools might erode any efforts to make kids more well-rounded. But I would challenge that public school kids aren’t well rounded anyway – they are pretty amazing and often their well-roundedness seems less ‘coached’ than the private school kids.

6. Ensure that the kids have more ‘life’ experiences. I personally believe that over-stimulating kids with experiences may lead to boredom later in life. Too much, too early can suck out the motivation from a soul. It’s not a biggy anyway.

7. Better remedial services. There is a view out there that private schools deal better with kids that go off the rails or just can’t keep up. However there is no published data to suggest this is true.

8. Allow for more parental involvement in the schooling process. Yeah well this makes no sense. In the old days the wealthiest people paid schools a lot of money for them to take their kids right off their hands, for good. Now people want to hang around schools like helicopters. If this turns you on so much, then home-school your kids. I say leave school education to the professionals and also leave the professionals alone – you can only annoy them as a parent.

9. Ensure that the kids get networked into a higher social status environment. This is a value judgement which becomes self fulfilling prophecy of no value.

10. Allow the parents to increase or maintain their own social status. This is the true selling point as we all know, but few admit. For example, I know parents, mums in particular, who have essentially dropped all their old friends and completely disappeared into mother’s groups at a private school. It isn’t real; kids grow up and these coalitions of the similarly afflicted will have no purpose in six years time. Someone ought to do a psychological study of this very odd phenomenon. It reminds me of the Sneetches in action.

11. Ensure that the kids get more exposed to ‘traditional’ values. There is a fear by the conservative types that the unionised Labor leaning state school teachers may bugger around with their kid’s heads. This is why Johnny Howard was so keen to promote private schooling with policy tweaks and changes; to increase the number of future right leaning voters. Apart from politics, conservative types are also scared of the laissez faire social leanings their kids may pick up in a state school. Indeed this may be an unholy and subconscious attempt to ensure that children do not fall too far from the tree.

And there you have it. A pretty poor set of reasons to spend $40k per year per child, in my opinion. Where else would anyone sign up for a quarter of a million dollar obligation (per child) without substantial research results that compare the pro’s and con’s?

And the oddest thing is that many of these people can hardly afford this money; it can be a real stretch. Because of this they are even less open to discussions on the matter. It is such a leap of faith and it affects their lives substantially; therefore it hurts when their blind choice is questioned.

And what of the kids that are sent to private schools? Do they feel any obligation to succeed? I think so; in many cases their parents go way out of their way to afford the fees and they want value for money. No matter how hard they try not to put pressure on their kids, their very involvement in the process, the helicoptering, alerts the kids to their desires. At worst this will cause some kids to buckle. Even at best it may drive them in directions they wouldn’t have taken in their lives without the same pressure.

We have a wonderful state schooling system that is essentially paid for through your taxes. Use it. Make your life easier.

And, hey parent, leave your kids alone. Let them be themselves, in their own time, and without unnecessary pressure to perform to some dearly-held vision that you might hold for ‘success’ in this society of ours.

We do not own the ‘narrative’ of our children. That belongs to them and the world.

Business leaders are shocked by the Queensland election result …

Apparently it’s disappointing because because governments may now shy shy away from tackling major reforms.

Such as selling off public assets to private owners to finance short term budget imbalances (rather than slowly trading to a lower debt by pruning costs and increasing tax revenues).

People aren’t that stupid; they have learned that such sell-offs simply result in higher prices for basic services as well as increased complexity in billing systems and marketing efforts.

Any increases in efficiency gained by private ownership seem to be lost in the even greater requirement for growing private sector profits.

The result; greater wealth disparities between those that can buy into the private sector ownership of basic services and those than cannot.

It’s a good thing that businesses can’t vote.

Only recently did I discover that, hitherto, I have been mispronouncing tinnitus.

Probably because I never heard it pronounced properly in the first place, due to my tinnitus.

Oddly enough I usually don’t hear my tinnitus; my brain filters it out somehow.

So when I occasionally do hear it it’s not such a big deal. In fact it’s sort of comforting – I grew up with deafening cicadas and I like the fact that I carry around a permanent reminder of endless summer holidays.

However my tinnitus does increase the background noise at all times. Which makes the signal to noise levels of my hearing lower than the unafflicted.

This turns out to be more of a drama for others than it is for me.

My daughter was, on the second day of her last year at primary school, placed into (shock-horror) a composite year 5-6 class.

I got an early whiff of the issue when I received a fairly defensive email from the principal early on in the day. I thought ‘that’s odd’ but was too busy to think about it properly at the time.

And then I got a phone call from my daughter’s mother – my daughter had been placed in a composite class and all the similarly ‘affected’ parents were already organizing themselves in protest to fix the problem. We had to attend a parent’s meeting – the People’s Front of Clovelly (or was it the Clovelly’s People Front?).

My only awareness of composite classes was that they are endemic in country schools. I had no awareness that your average suburban primary school also has them. It makes sense though; in the case of my daughter’s school, enough kids had been sucked out to a final primary year in prep schools for private high schools to give them a numbers headache only solvable by creating a composite class.

Now I am an experienced business investor and entrepreneur and we all know never to trust our intuition on a subject that we know nothing about.

So I called my sister-in-law, a primary school principal, for the facts.

The take home message was that (a) the school probably had no choice, (b) academic outcomes are usually not affected by composite classes so long as an appropriately skilled teacher is picked, and (c) there can be some social skills benefits not usually afforded to kids in a non-composite classes.

In addition, the alternative choice, taking my daughter out of the school, which her mother had suggested, was certain to have negative outcomes. As was forcing her way into the monolithic year 6 class simply because Lola does not gel with the teacher, who is a blunter.

On balance this was a non-issue for me after five minutes of learning and thinking.

I accidentally ran into one of the other fathers and found myself unwillingly convincing him; this took half an hour.

Then I spent five very unfortunate minutes not convincing my daughter’s maternal grandmother who has a social standing to consider, and saw yet another opportunity to get my daughter into the private school system

The mother? I told her what I thought and why. I got her to ring my sister-in-law. Who knows. My guess she will swing this way and that and eventually do nothing.

The whole saga does highlight a few issues that have been bugging me for a while now:

1. The overwhelming sense of entitlement of parents – in their minds the school system is there to serve their demands. In essence, they are paying (hardly in the case of the public system) for something that matters a lot to them and they demand outcomes. This sense of entitlement extends to their kids – they see them as chattel that they can force into the sausage machine, not individual humans that they need to nurture until they, the children, find their own paths.

2. The outcomes that the parents desire is the best possible schooling opportunities for their children. Why? Well I think it’s because they want their kids to have as much status and earn as much money as possible in this competitive system of ours. But behind this, of course, is the parent’s own need for confirmation of their own status in our society. What better than a well-performing child to validate one’s own sense of worth?

3. All of this must end in tears for a lot of kids, but much later in life. Groomed for wealth production and entry into circles of like-minded networks of the deluded, there can be little room for them to follow their own paths, nor to grow into holistic and mindful human beings.

4. My, how people take themselves so seriously!

I have a friend that has a passion.

Previously that passion was a hatred of the ‘power structures’ in societies, plus any dealings with his hostile local council.

Now that anger had crystallized into the need for a movement to tear down our political and economic structures.

He is out recruiting like-minded souls for this quest. I am unfortunately not one of the willing but will offer advice from the side lines.

There are a few pertinent observations to make here:

Firstly, his passion would have never got this far without YouTube, complete with loads of easily digestible videos detailing all the conspiracies that were invented to control us in our inevitable journey to the matrix.

The internet speeds up the conversion of people to ‘disenfranchised’ status and also gives us more people that get over the line, into the ‘we must act’ stage.

Secondly, my guess is that my friend’s current recruiting stage via personal conversations with mostly sane-ish old friends will bear little fruit. We are not impressed with the thesis. And that will automatically lead to communion with strangers via social media.

Social media allows groups of similarly disenfranchised people to associate in private. Until they go public with some unfortunate action plan.

Thirdly, we would be well placed to create an official forum for these groups to air their grievances and be heard. Some of what they are reacting to has some merit, maybe (e.g. in the case of my friend it is over governance of the individual by law makers mixed with the evil control of certain global financial sector groups). In any case letting the air out of the balloon before it pops makes sense to me.

Finally, we should force these groups to get some formal training and maybe even licenses to operate as anarchist groups.

The history of social change in organised structures is littered with passionate manifestos that not only called for change, but also outlined replacement social systems.

Take communism for example; Marx and Engels went to the effort of outlining a whole new way to structure society so that when the disenfranchised workers took over Russia they had a blueprint to work with. It’s a shame that Marx and Engels had no understanding of human psychology and that their political structure was easy prey for maniacal dictators.

This might not have happened if they had done the requisite training and had obtained a Bachelor of Anarchy Management (BAM) degree, probably from UWS.

Well what do you know, Pirate Bay is back on line.

The Luddites will slowly discover that it’s very hard to  simultaneously shoot ghosts and piss into the wind.

And as I recall the Luddites were strung up anyway.

One more don’t and I will.

For men the barber shop may be the one and only place where we are forced to consider ourselves for half an hour without interruption.

In the womb we are just sentient animals. No self reflection, no head chatter and no memories.

As we grow into children the ‘mind’ kicks in and we learn all the higher-order thinking and self awareness functions.

These must have evolved to give us a competitive edge over the other species and each other.

But grafted on as they are to the animal sentience we are a walking paradox, a unicameral civil war.

Taking advantage of the situation evolution has turned all this self awareness into a boon.

Thus sex and reproduction are the results of just about all of our mind-body dislocations.

For the more aware, life’s journey starts with the sentient animal, launches into the cognisant and then fights it’s way back to the sentient animal in time for the ashes

It’s a real shame that we don’t have 500 years to properly enjoy this journey. As it is most people’s journeys are fraught with fear and most never get anywhere near the endpoint.

Both LinkedIn and Twitter confuse me. Each has a useful social media monopoly but each also seems to have no idea as to what to do next.

In the case of LinkedIn it’s pretty obvious what they should do, so there must be some pretty retarded senior management down there at head office.

For Twitter though I can see that figuring out a viable future must be quite hard.

Overnight my Twitter account had been followed by hundreds of Arabic speaking people many of whom have 250k “followers”.

And the incoming followers aren’t stopping any time soon; probably this is driven by some third party bot.

Now my Twitter account has one purpose; as a beacon for my WordPress blog. I can tell how many of my Twitter followers are real based upon my WordPress stats. Say 1 in a 100 and heading south with the middle eastern influx.

The take home answer is that Twitter has a problem. There are hundreds of millions of people ignoring each other’s Tweets but staying in the system so they can attract more fake followers.

There will be a tipping point where the system will suddenly be subject to ridicule. And it will go the way of MySpace.

My advice to them is to track the reading of tweets and divide the followers up into “readers” and “collectors”.

People simply want some clarity as to the true interest in their ramblings. And without this the home publishers have a hard time monetising their efforts.

I wonder if Twitter, the corporation, has a vision statement?

I just checked and, yes, they do:

“Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.”

35 words, 62 syllables, 4 clauses and 2 grammatical errors. You’d have thought they’d at least keep it to less than140 characters!

I think they should adopt this pearler attributed to King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 6:10-11:

“The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” 

An absolute winner!

“5 hidden Bible verses about machine intelligence”

This beauty lobbed in via LinkedIn.

Basically it’s an intricately long attempt to reinterpret 5 tweets from King Solomon as insights into how the human brain works.

To that I say;

“The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” Ecclesiastes 6:10-11

Which headline do you reckon the online writer went with?

‘Boom time: three startups have launched grocery shopping websites in Australia’, or

‘Boom time: Everyone is launching grocery shopping websites in Australia’

I had better launch one then. Maybe specialising in gluten free water for late night perverted millennials with logic deficit disorder.

My prediction, Tony Abbott will resign as PM before the next election.

No night of long knives for the coalition.

They are capable of learning at least one thing from the mistakes of their predecessors, surely?

Shorten will then be forced to have at least one policy when the libs have a credible new leader and agenda.

But wouldn’t it be interesting to see Labor in power with not a single promise to break?

As our so-called progressive party this might just enable them to do something interesting.

Probably not, they would still figure out how to fuck it up.

Most start-ups do a pivot and when they do they usually define their new product and market opportunity in the context of what investors want to hear.

Is it a billion dollar market? Is it a game changer? etc

Well fuck that.

My advice to founders is to just do what you want and you will make it work if your hypothesis is right enough and you have the requisite skills and knowledge.

It’s more important to love your company and the journey than it is to have excess capital to build the next multi-billion dollar disintermediator.

My guess; the guys that just follow their own passion are far more likely to create the billion dollar baby anyway, despite the extra handicaps they may have in getting funded.

I went to a business function today with a room full of CEOs from mid sized Australian service sector companies.

The lunchtime entertainment was Vince Sorrenti who lampooned Tony Abbot mercilessly over the Sir Prince thingy.

There was deep laughter in the room.

Ridicule among the business types must surely spell disaster for a conservative leader.

Or any leader for that matter.

I think that if people see enough mad dot points around a far-away leader they not only join them up but they sketch in the middle bits in colour as well.

If you are going to put free WiFi transceivers in every one of your residual phone boxes then please allow for automatic logon.

Otherwise our devices automatically connect, WiFi is deemed the primary connection by the device, and we are left without internet connectivity unless we manually logon.

Geez.

The idea of a business over-exploiting their smaller customers is a pre-internet concept.

That is, anti-volume-discounts…

It’s over guys, whether you know it or not.

Just lately I have been repeatably exposed to the misuse of the word ‘vulnerability’ in the context of a critical practice in positive personal growth.

Wiki describes it nicely; vulnerability refers to the inability to withstand the effects of a hostile environment.

What the new age correspondents are trying to express is the ability to be emotionally open in a non-hostile environment.

And in addition, to expand the number of non-hostile environments by throwing off emotional attachment to preconceptions.

What the good preachers really mean is ‘invulnerable openness’.

Successful business leadership requires three attributes:

1. An ability to deny urges
2. An ability to desire the undesirable, and
3. A passion for the unachievable.

Simple eh?

An example…

1.Saying no to muffins at a business networking function.
2. Saying yes to attending the business function, at cost.
3. Believing that the business function will yield career boosting opportunities.

According to Douglas Adams the constant repetition of the anecdote describing the inspirational moment when he formulated the title of the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ had obliterated his memory of the actual event.

I agree; a story often re-told eventually becomes a memory of the telling and not the doing.

Similarly a story remembered through the lens of a single photo has only one snatched moment where the story has achance of matching any version of what really happened.

The Australian honours system consists of a number of orders, decorations, and medals through which the country’s sovereign, the Queen of England, awards its citizens and the odd non-citizen, for actions or deeds that benefit the nation (Australia that is).

So when the vaguely insane PM of Australia suggests to the partially senile Queen of England (and she agrees) that she awards her mostly disliked husband, the Greek-English Prince, a knighthood for largely undefinable services to Australia, and said award is announced on Australia Day to the confusion of just about all Australians (most of whom are partially inebriated anyway), some Australians think there is a problem.

I don’t think that the problem is the Australian-England thing, although that might represent a problem of its own.

No, the real problem is that we give awards to people that (a) want them, and (b) who also get them for just doing their jobs.

PS here’s me not doing my job but getting some rewards anyway 🙂

It’s odd that we don’t need to train and get a license to do the most difficult task of all, raising children.

Not that I am proposing this, mind. I am just guessing that it will come in this paternalistic society of ours.

The issue will be what to do with offenders that get pregnant without first doing the training and getting a license?

Any punishment would likely impact on the well-being of the upcoming child.

So this last bastion of free will may crash only when birth control can be remotely controlled by a government agency.

Oh geez!

My all-time favorite t-shirt was one bought as a student at a conference in Bendigo in the late 80’s.

Supplied by Benetton, it was mostly red.

In letters the colors of the rainbow, it read:

“Warm sunny colorful and no pollution”

I have no idea why I liked it so much nor what happened to it.

There was no internet or mobile phones then; as a result Google throws up no images of this lost relic.

It lives on only in my imagination.

When I was at school there were some concrete reasons to fear the end of the school holidays.

You would think that all of the modern schooling improvements would have changed this. Nicer teachers, no corporal punishment, no bullying, more interesting curriculum, etc.

And yet my daughter is panicking about tomorrow’s date with destiny. Go figure.

In our rigid two party political system there are three factors that ensure a party is elected; the economy, pork barreling and incumbency.

The party in power has very little influence on the economy but has to create the appearance of doing things that give them the credit for a good economy.

If the economy falters then they must die on this sword.

Pork barreling works to an extent but its effectiveness is largely depreciated by our media’s manic focus on deficits, and the fact that many recipients of pork barreling can’t vote (think corporations). But yet, it is one of the gifts of incumbency.

Incumbency can only be polluted by dumb decisions which unnecessarily piss off the electorate.

A most desperate type of man, one that will do inexplicable acts, is the one that desperately wants to belong to an exclusive club.

The explanation being that the exclusive club has only one purpose; to be inexplicably exclusive.

Spirituality; people, without people, there are no spirits.

I often ask myself why society (and the individuals in it) takes sex so seriously.

What should be an enjoyable team sport ends up defining many people’s lives, and indelibly impacting many others.

And sex is continually used to manipulate all of us as the primary tenant of just about all marketing, including that embedded in religions.

My guess is that it’s outcome, reproduction, is the central purpose of our lives, hardwired into our brains.

Which is why any hostile artificial intelligence will eat our lunch; we are predictably handicapped.

In the 2000’s China stole the solar manufacturing industry off the Europeans.

They could do this because solar was by then a generic commodity technology and they, the Chinese, had much cheaper finance, labour and just about everything else.

Plus they were unconstrained by any financial modelling of their return on investment (‘bugger it, let’s just steal the market and figure it out later’; and they still are trying to figure out how to make money).

The Europeans continue to whine at the unfairness of all this. But the battle is long lost. And yet they continue to spend billions on solar R&D from which the benefits flow to Chinese manufacturers and eventually back to the European solar generators.

Just yesterday a leading European solar academic proposed this:

“In the next battle, if we want to survive, why don’t we merge all the (solar) research centres in Europe? There are billions spent (on PV R&D) every year, but if there is no industry, what is the point? There is no point.”

You have to love academics. What battle? And there is no explanation as to why merging R&D efforts in Europe would change the inherent cost benefits of manufacturing in China, and probably no thought on this.

I have said it before, beware the genius with a single life experience (academia). They know a lot about one thing and therefore, without the benefit of new experiences where they are a novice all over again, believe they know everything about everything.

And indeed they rarely apply their supposed discipline of rational thinking outside of their own area of activity.

It’s a mystery and a fact at the same time.

Drones; love ’em.

I expect that eventually we will have special hats that act as docks for little drones that can intermittently fly up to perform some useful function, like flying out and taking selfies for us or following us on our bicycles to record any wrong doing by evil car drivers.

Given that there will be so many drones up there in the sky one day I suspect that we will need a technology and a standard for drone collision avoidance.

You rent a car at $50 a day and it ends up costing you $150 a day.

We perceive this as the cost of all the extras, namely insurance, fuel option, no excess, sat nav, sales tax, credit card fee, etc.

Douglas Adams wrote about bistromathics and car rental is another example of where this weird new branch of maths applies.

It is where numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants or in this case around car rental centers.

Car rental conforms to the third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of bistromathics; specifically the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, and the original quote.

Numbers written on a car rental final receipt presented to the rentee whilst returning the car and also while in a daft dash for a plane do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the universe (except restaurants).

No one has ever noticed because no one has ever properly dissected a car rental receipt. If they had tried they would have failed.

Interestingly, human intuition steps in here. To avoid the ensuing risk of madness our subconscious alerts us and we never get around to toting up these receipts.

How about this for an invention …

A car door lock that unlocks whether or not someone on the outside has lifted the door handle.

That might save a few marriages.

Ever noticed the price of hiring a taxi is unaffected by gas prices except when they go up?

Please develop at least one G-shock watch with these features;

1. Automatic time zone detection and time adjustment – actually, this is optional. It’s not that hard to manually adjust the time when you land somewhere. Only add this is it doesn’t add too much complexity, bulk and battery demand.

2. Slim profiled so the watch can be worn with work shirt sleeves. But keep the diameter nice and large.

3. Analog only function with a night light button

4. And no other functions, not even the day or date. We have our smartphones for these.

5. A simple black design without all the usual superfluous text or sub-dials all over the watch face.

6. Keep the rotating bezel in case anyone wants to do simple minute timing. Besides it looks good.

7. Solar powered battery quartz movement.

8. Make it out of carbon fibre filled black resin and titanium to keep the weight down and also to justify it’s high price.

9. It needs a second hand so we know it still has battery. I suppose the light fills this function too but the second hand is better. For some reason I don’t like the quartz movement second hand (click-click second to second) – it looks clunky. I wonder if a continuous second hand can be developed?

The market for this watch is business types that grew up on G’s and don’t want to go mechanical or wanky Swiss, but that need something more elegant than any G-shock on offer today.

I keep running into startups that are using crowd sourcing to cheaply aggregate data, with an aim to disintermediate incumbents and to figure out a business model once they have enough customers.

However there are some segments where data is not currently threatened by the crowd at all.

Generally this is where data needs high levels of curation to be useful and also where data holes or data mistakes add too much risk for the users.

Examples are data purchased by corporations upon which critical decisions are made, such as market share and competitor information and patent data.

There is however an analytics opportunity out there to compare crowd aggregated data with curated data, to put a fair market value on both sources of data subject to use cases and inherent risk profiles for the users of the data.

Rushing between meetings in the Bay Area I have been listening to American public radio today.

What strikes me, yet again, is how extreme the views are of minority interest groups here in the US.

From organic farming to black rights and Amish style simple-life proponents, the language and arguments are structured only to appeal to the converted. They are seriously disenfranchised.

My guess is that this is just a reflection of the extreme greed of those incumbents who have, over time, insulated their power base from the democratic process

In effect, the US is an oligarchy charading as a democracy.

A key sign is that information and decision making used for ensuring the security of US citizens is increasingly being isolated away from general access, contrary to the very reason why democracy was originally invented in ancient Greece.

It’s odd also that the debate about personal security focuses on exterior threats when the manifest threat to life and limb is very much domestic.

The one saving grace in Australia is our electoral system of compulsory voting which ensures that any oligarchy has to either snow over 50% of the voting age public or control both sides of politics; a challenge that naturally attenuates their avarice.

I have surfed all my life and, no matter how much I try to avoid it, the subject of ‘sharks’ pops up every now and again.

A few times the buggers have popped up, quite literally, next to me.

On all but one occasion I ignored them; my reasoning was that they were too small to worry about. More likely I was subconsciously relying on the fact that they were simply not interested in my preservative-laden non-organic carcass. And in each case there were also the fact that the other 20-odd guys out there didn’t react; who was going to be the wimp that cracked first eh?

The other solitary occasion was different. I was surfing late on a winter day by myself at a deserted beach about 4 hours south of Sydney. The biggest shark you can imagine emerged out of the water, chasing some fish, not more than 5 meters away from me.

I swear I literally levitated out of the water in my efforts to catch the next wave, which just happened to be a monster close-out that put me right through the wringer. Even so, I didn’t stop moving until I was on barely wet sand.

I did not go back into the water that day.

There are a few popular myths among surfers on the subject of sharks. Unfortunately, no one really knows which are true and which are not.

1. Urination attracts the buggers. So if you care, don’t, even if you are freezing to death.

2. Keep your dogs out of the water people. They also attract sharks.

3. You paddling on a board – from below a shark thinks you are a fish in distress. Someone once asked a shark this and it confirmed it.

4. Most sharks are not really interested in Homo sapiens sapiens – they only attack them by mistake, thinking they are some odd fish in distress.

5. Shark repellents don’t work – only a wally would try.

6. There is safety in numbers – someone else is likely to get eaten and not you.

7. Sharks are more likely to attack a solitary surfer. Or so it seems when your mind wanders onto the subject waiting for a set, with not another person in sight.

8. Sharks are more present at dusk and dawn, when you are more likely to want to surf.

9. If a shark attacks you the best thing you can do is use your board as a weapon – there’s no point trying to get away.

10. Dolphins and sharks don’t mix – so you are safe if there are dolphins around. Except when the shark decides it wants to eat a dolphin.

11. Stay away from schools of fish and their telltale seagulls in pursuit – the fish attract sharks.

12. Ignore shark alarms – these are set off by clubbies that have nothing better to do than see a shark in every lump of seaweed or dolphin.

13. Don’t ignore shark alarms that are the result of a fly-over – these guys can actually see sharks.

14. There are more sharks than there used to be because (a) over-fishing is driving the sharks closer to shore to find fish to eat, (b) the warming waters are driving the bigger sharks north (or is that south?); and (c) they are now under fishing sharks.

15. There are a bunch of morons that want to protect sharks. They tend to live in the inner city suburbs, buy their food at Macro, are members of GetUp, and they rarely enter the surf for anything other than a quick splash. They, the sharks (and maybe the people too), should be fished to extinction and bugger the food chain.

16. Shark nets don’t do anything but we should have more of them.

17. There are more shark attacks because there are more people in the water.

18. There are more shark attacks because there are more sharks in the surf.

19. There are more shark attacks because there are more GoPro’s in the water. Sharks hate them.

20. There are not more shark attacks than before, just more GoPro’s.

21. Recreational fishermen and surfers don’t mix. The former tend to do things to attract fish, like put out burley pots. This also happens to attract sharks. Don’t surf anywhere near burley of any sort.

22. Be nice to lids; sharks see them as an entree which gives you a chance to get out of the water before the mains are served.

23. Someone once invented an armoured wetsuit. Sort of like neoprene crossed with Bilbo’s mithril shirt. But you couldn’t bend your legs or arms in it.

24. Sharks don’t like white water so you are safe once you are in it, apparently. The evidence is that you can’t take a photo of sharks, or anything else, in white water. My advice would be to keep paddling.

25. Sharks are colour blind so you should have a blue board and a blue wetsuit to camouflage yourself in the water. If you believe this nonsense then you deserve to be shark bait.

26. Once told to me by a long haired Bali lifer; if you snag a shark while fishing always let it go otherwise shark karma will come and get you (‘man’). As a young teenager I once accidentally caught a large shovel nosed shark while fishing for whiting in a dinghy off our place in Jervis Bay. I kept the shark but had to get out of the boat before it injured me. My dad thought it was funny, watching from the shore. In any case the bad karma hasn’t got me yet.

27. I had a period where I intermittently used a waveski, a.k.a. a goat boat. These wonderfully difficult and exhilarating buggers have been chased out of the water due to the propensity of their riders to catch every wave based on their greater boat speed. Even so, they had certain shark-proof benefits; a faster get away, no limbs dangling in the water and a paddle to ward off sharks. I never got to use this weapon on a shark but I did smack one particularly obnoxious local with it once; and then scarpered almost as quickly as the time I saw the big shark.

28. Shark stories like all fishing stories get bigger in the telling. Always depreciate any local advice on the matter.

29. You really have to get sharks out of the brain. There is nothing worse than sitting on your board worrying about sharks. It ruins the experience.

30. Even so, you will have some friends or family members that insist on discussing the subject, driven by some GoPro’ed incident on the news. They might even start giving you useful advice culled from the above list and gleaned from some ‘Wakeup Australia’ TV nonsense . If so, tell ’em to fuck off and go and have a surf.

And just to prove a point see the headline below … shark attacks a bogan wearing a GoPro.

It’s the GoPro’s I’m telling ya.

Our native pests just hate ’em.

Next up some dickhead wearing a GoPro out in a bush laundry will get swarmed by a bunch of enraged funnel-webs.

See the headline below – so, what do we do?

Make kangaroos wear helmets and get a license, or

Ban cyclists from riding at more than 5 kmh and thus endangering native pests, or

(the simplest) Ban the wearing of GoPro’s by either cyclists or kangaroos. According to the Bogan Law no. 1, if it ain’t GoPro’ed it didn’t happen, mate.

A quick list of ten government monopolies in Australia

1. violence off the sports fields

2. totalizators

3. taxation (no receipt) and duties (you get a virtual stamp at least)

4. incarceration

5. must-follow rules other than those defined by mutually agreed contracts

6. human transport over the edges that are girt by sea

7. advertisements for government monopolies that no one watches

8. licenses and degrees for occupations that can be learned in a couple of weeks on the job

9. most of the profits on the sale of petrol, alcohol and cigarettes

10. the selling-off of profit making government monopolies for no good reason