Mr President said “These ideas won’t won’t make everybody rich, or relieve every hardship. That’s not the job of government”.

In times past (and in many place today) where there were rulers but no government there tended to be a handful of people that were very rich and a majority with not much at all.

Curtailing the wealth of the rich by government decree is exactly the same thing as relieving hardship for others, since these are both relative concepts.

That is, a primary role of modern government is to strive towards reducing wealth disparity and thereby relieving hardship for many. Well so I thought.

But then I suppose without some people suffering from hardship how will the rich Americans know they are rich?

At least the Americans know where they stand – there’s no sugar coating in the state of the union of the states of north america.

Here’s an interesting one; on United Air there are three categories of audio books – fiction, non fiction and business.

Does this imply that business occupies some sort of weird hybrid universe between proposed truth and utter fabrication?

That would match my working experiences.

I am just about to take off for San Francisco in economy class.

I have a baby in front me and one next to me. Both with mothers and fathers in tow.

Why do people do it to themselves?

In addition the mother next to me has a bad attitude, over mothering syndrome, a complete lack of pride and encroachment issues.

This will test my equanimity.

So I have decided to channel Siddhartha and block everything out of my consciousness.

I think I can do it so long as I don’t get spewed on.

Productivity is usually measured as the outputs per unit of input.

Most commonly it is used to report how efficient we are at converting and then presumably consuming resources.

The internet confounds  productivity in one respect; in some cases outputs are created with very few inputs and virtually no resulting consumption of resources.

This, the Matrix, is both infinitely productive and not all productive.

What we need is a new measure of non-productivity … the efficiency of using the internet to keep people occupied so they don’t unnecessarily consume our limited resources.

I often wonder what goes on in the mind of my daughter. She looks so thoughtful at times.

Yesterday we had a day at the beach. When we got back ‘home’ she did a run and dive for her laptop

Curious to see what mystery of the day she wanted wiki-solved I peeked a look at her screen.

Japanese puppy clothes. Outfits for little dogs.

Slightly confused I asked her why.

There is a faint possibility that she might go to Japan in July with her mum and her friend that lives in Japan has told her all about Japanese puppy clothes.

I pointed out that she doesn’t have a puppy.

“I bet they do kitties as well, dad”

I am not normally a fan of chalkboard quotes or calendars decorated with waterfalls superimposed with little poems, but this piece of randomly encountered wisdom bears recording.

Ahead of the Queensland state elections the operator of the Gold Coast Superduck franchise has accused the government of an underinvestment in glitzy tourism infrastructure, and as a result he argues that the Gold Coast is becoming a ‘bogan villa’.

[Scene] The pool at the Gold Coast Marriott … Bogan central.

Overheard behind me, a bunch of overweight forty something mothers discussing a new TV show called the Shark Tank. It sounds like Australian Idol meets the Mad Inventors.

The mums spent a good two hours discussing ‘inventions’. Mostly they were in fact just problem statements with no means of reducing them to practice.

An example was a mosquito killer which sounded eerily similar to Nathan Myrvhold’s laser based version.

This one would use high pressure water ‘drops’ (i.e. bullets) to kills mosquitos.

The question was posed as to how automatically find the mosquitos.  ‘Sonar’ was deemed a satisfactory answer.

I turned around at one stage to look for my daughter and I swear the mums went quiet on me in the interests of industrial secrecy.

According to some creative semi-genius there are two types of creative individuals; the conceptuals and the experimental innovators.

Conceptuals usually have an early ‘big bang’ period of creativity. Think Albert Einstein. After this initial bang they either reconcile to eating a lot of dinners off their early efforts or spend the rest of their lives futilely trying to recapture the incapturable.

Experimental innovators continue to create throughout their lives, often improving with experience. Think Henri Matisse. Missing an early hit, my guess is that they often feel unappreciated early on which provides continuing motivation.

I have written before that start-ups require both incredible skill and serious luck. In other words, start-ups are actually an art form as well as a business activity.

In this context the successful CEOs need to be creative geniuses. And in this you have your conceptuals such as Mark Zuckerberg, and your experimental innovators such as Steve Jobs.

My assertion would be that the experimental innovators are far more successful at transitioning across from start-up success to listed corporate success. Apart from continuing to be creative, they also continue to learn and adapt.

In the context of business leadership, creativity is that special extra thing, the achievable vision that is above and beyond a solid workmanship style of general management skills. This has to come from the CEO’s head – it can’t be grafted onto that person because it won’t be owned in the same way nor will it come with a proper appreciation of the environment requiring such a vision.

In the case of Steve Jobs, after a successful period at the early version of Apple and then in his own company, he came back into Apple with a clear vision. Based on product leadership in consumable personal computing and content, he would use the design, hardware and software development skills of Apple to build a recurring revenue business built on proprietary device sales and incredible marketing.

Because Apple only had a handful of products, Jobs could be the head of product development as well as the CEO. Which means there was one man with a single creative vision that defined all the product specs and approved their release. This is unique for a company of this nature. Most companies have so many products that the product development responsibilities are devolved to the business units; as a result there is no unifying ground-breaking vision and often products appear me-too-ish.

Knowing all this, I would say that the ideal start-up founding team is partnership of a conceptual and an experimental innovator. If you can find two of these that get on well and are well-grounded in the same area of technology and business, and have a burning desire to succeed, then you really have something worth investing in.

Just before bed last night I was checking through my emails.

One of the last that I skimmed and deleted was my daily Crunchbase list of venture capital deals.

Subsequently, in one of my dreams I met a bay area startup that had raised $70m to develop and propagate a new technology for cleaning used soy sauce bottles.

Food is the new black!

The CEO pitched me, showing graphs of billions of used bottles, a large percentage of which are disposed of.

Using a new micro-robot cleaning technology developed at a garage within a bus ride from Stanford and an app which will be co-marketed with the leading soy sauce vendors, the company is targeting 29% market penetration within 2 years giving them $1b in revenues.

But it’s not just soy sauce! First soy sauce bottles and then the world.

And then, thankfully, I awoke from this banal madness.

Overheard in the hotel cafe:

“Can I have a cow’s milk flat white thanks”.

My nephew’s partner is having a baby tomorrow. We know not what sex.

Which make pre-purchasing those presents an issue. Blue and pink seem to have invaded just about every category of baby goods.

The solution? A desert camouflage range of baby goods. Good for hiding all those excretions and it’s unisex to boot!

I rarely quote others in this blog but this pearler from Gerard Minack on Australian federal politics is worth repeating:

“One of the few areas of bipartisanship we’ve had over the past dozen years is both parties have agreed to be short term and second rate!”

And yet the progressives (Labor) attempted to introduce major new policies in their last minority government. Odd.

And the current Coalition government seemed intent on removing all these Labor policies or at least re-branding them. They haven’t been too successful in introducing any of their own.

Without control of both houses and in the era of total opposition how can any party be anything other than short term and second rate?

It is often said that you learn the most from your mistakes.

Indeed in the startup world I have dished out this wisdom to CEOs over and over, primarily to prevent them from being too cautious and therefore doomed.

In startups, each mistake is usually fatal. So a good CEO, not having enough time to learn all the lessons by failure (that would take 500 years), must learn to discern those that should be listened to. And then listen to them.

Any reading on the subject has little value other than alerting the student to the subjects that should be discussed with mentors.

The successful CEOs, through their mentors, absorb the lessons of generations of CEOs and their collective mistakes, usually by situation analysis (“what do I do now?”).

Even so, success also requires luck. The removal of controllable mistakes is a necessary but not sufficient condition for startup success.

I suspect that there are other business activities where the excision of avoidable mistakes actually guarantees success.

My guess is that these lower return activities can be taught as trades in a class room. They are so structured as professions that they only allow for mistakes by negligence.

First order reality in the 21st century; if you can’t photograph it then it doesn’t exist.

“Thank Christ for selfie mode and mirrors then, eh Lola?”

I deferred a discussion of subjective idealism, substance theory and bundle theory, on the basis that none of them can be snapped.

It is a matter of recorded fact that humans are rapidly gaining in average intelligence as measured by IQ tests.

This is ascribed to improving education and less damaging emotional development.

A lesser known fact is that good looking people have better opportunities in life, all other things being equal.

Especially for men, good looks improve things such as average salaries and the rate of promotions in the workplace.

The hypothesis is that other people collectively (& erroneously) associate good looks with other characteristics such as leadership potential and intelligence.

For women, the benefits of being good looking aren’t as great when it comes to career prospects because these benefits are offset somewhat by the ‘dumb blonde’ myth.

It also postulated that in times past other characteristics such as strength and durability were equally important but as we have engineered risk out of our daily environment these factors have dropped in perceived value.

It all makes me wonder if, similarly to IQ, whether our race is slowly becoming better looking because better looking people have more resources and hence more likely to reproduce?

Or are the less fortunate, including the not so good looking, breeding at a greater rate in revolt, and sending us backwards?

It would be unlikely that we are static in this regards.

And it is said that beauty is subjective. The data suggests otherwise. Who would have guessed?

When I was a youngster there were no scatter cushions.

Slowly over the last couple of decades, some women have adopted the habit of decorating their couches with scatter cushions and throws

Due to the competitive nature of the advertising driven madness it is now not uncommon, upon being proffered a seat in a den of femininity, to first remove a dozen cushions and three throws in order to avoid having ones head touch the ceiling and ones rear wobbling like a tinnie at sea.

For the male visitor the first task is to identify the couch, camouflaged as it is.

This is a plea; you can’t teach a pig to sing nor a male to burrow. At best they will suffer in silence.

Today I heard an interview with a Booker prize winning novelist, Richard Flanagan.

An inspiring interview and a man with something very important to say.

And yet I wonder if the high-art novel form does his message justice.

Why?

Firstly it’s only accessible to the very literate. It’s written in that Booker prize winning fashion with every sentence carefully crafted and a marvel of persistence. Which, in my opinion, gets in the way of the story and the message.

Think of this like eating at a three hat Restaurant. Molecularly assembled food for the cognoscenti but so rich that you need two livers to complete the meal.

And in this, the book is preaching only to the worldly inconvertible.

And secondly, the author intermittently drops into ‘god the narrator’ mode. As in:

“The men were like other young men, unknown to themselves”.

This infuriates me. There is no God that proffers opinions and absolute truths like this are by their very nature deniable.

Some young men know more of themselves than some old men. Some are callow and some come from places that allow them to just ‘be’ from the moment they are born.

I believe that any such generalisations should be derived from the narrative by the reader.

Let the story guide the reader. And let the reader derive their own meaning from the novel.

Authors are simply foster parents and efforts to control their children after they have left the nest simply spoil the result.

The optimal stopping theory in economics is a restatement of the Pareto Rule, with a $ sign thrown in.

As in, how many houses do you look at before saying “near enough is good enough”. Which is to say ” if I wait for perfection I may never buy a house because they just keep rising in price”.

The internet has helped people make better choices in this context by allowing more options to be perused in a period of time. Whether it’s houses, cars or dating.

Of course everyone else has the same benefit so the competitive benefit is somewhat diminished in this regard.

The internet has also unleashed unparalleled use of ‘artificial scarcity’. As in ‘act now or lose the deal’.

Marketing gone mad but we are much better off. Right?

Byron Bay whispers to me a tale of three peoples.

One mob that isn’t here.

One that could be anywhere.

And one that is attempting to catch the fragments of someone else’s dream.

Change.

Some people hate it. Some just want to hang onto what they have always had.

My view is that you have to respect the past. Cherish it. But that enshrining it is a personality trap.

When the time is right, engage a forward gear before the gear box rusts up.

For women… the easiest and safest way to chat up a bloke is to say “that’s a nice watch”.

If he turns out to be uninteresting you can fall back into your watch appreciation mode, and exit stage left when that is done.

Assuming they are wearing one that is. If they aren’t, then run – I will explain later.

“What do you think of the idea of a cruise ship in the Pacific Islands?”

Left field. Deep fine leg. Unexpected. Unwanted.

“Oooo … it’d be like an RSL club in an earthquake”.

My local gym has a book drop swap area. It seems that the latest new years resolution is to get rid of one’s books. There is a bonfire’s worth of them there now.

Bob Ellis says we have got it all wrong. He says humans are tactile animals and that we need to touch and feel books to have a rewarding experience.

I have to reluctantly agree with Bob. But unless someone comes up with an actual paper book where the ink morphs I think the future is LCD, OLED or electrophoretic.

In the 1980’s no matter what your tactics the half life of your bicycle ownership was about 6 months.

Then it was stolen.

Today you can’t get your bike stolen in Sydney even if you try.

Even the easily removable bits, like lights and front wheels, remain intact in even the most trying of situations

I can leave my bike tied up overnight outside of the ‘projects’ in Waterloo, and with my flimsy lock. And it’s still there in its entirety in the morning.

My suspicion is that thievery is a victim of the rise of cheap Chinese manufacturing and the internet, cutting out all the middle men.

As goods have got relatively cheaper the risk/return merits of theft have become much lower. The same risks with much lower financial returns.

Also the honest and increasingly affluent recipients of stolen goods down the pub have less to gain from the dodgy cheap purchases. Why bother when you have eBay or Kmart?

I am almost tempted to ride sans lock. Not really. But just look at the thing, a child could bust it.

My uncle Gary chews every mouthful of food 100 times and he likes talking.

Consequently he is the slowest eater I have ever met.

When quizzed on this peculiarity over his dinner (the rest of us had long finished and he was winding up my brother by suggesting Australia should pump all it’s coastal river water into the inland for irrigation – I had to change the subject) he admitted that he had never been asked before and was himself quite unsure where the habit came from.

After a few more painfully slow mouthfuls he admitted he may have over-absorbed advice from his elders as a child, and that, yes, he doesn’t mind winding people up.

LG has announced a new washing machine at CES with two washing units – a smaller one for small loads and the bigger one for usual loads. This is supposedly a result of listening to customer’s needs and also a desire to save energy on the smaller loads.

It got me thinking about other aspects of washing machines which could be improved.

Firstly, soap. We still put it in manually. I would be nice to just stick the whole box into the machine somewhere and have say a screw drive automatically load the soap each time according to the needs of the load. No spilled soap. No over or under dosing.

Secondly, settings. We still have to choose gentle loads, long wash etc. A little bit of sensing technology could identify straps on bras for example and automatically choose gentle mode. Or colours and whites would lead to an auto choice of cold wash. Etc.

Finally, for front loaders, a back wall that pushes to the front thus automatically adjusting the volume of the washer to the load size and minimizing water use.

No need for controls. Just stick it in and you get the best out of the machine.

Glassdoor is a startup that provides online information on companies’ work environments, salary details, reviews, interviews and job listings.

This of another example of how the internet is impacting the corporate environment.

Given that human capital is so important the availability of this type of information to current and potential employees will impact the performance of a corporation by impacting the moving average of the quality of people in a corporation. Hence it will also affect a corporation’s behavior with respect to it’s people.

This  measurement plays to two of the new ‘capitals’ which are used to evaluate the worth of a company – human capital and social & relationship capital.

As startups emerge that measure even further details of each and every corporation I expect even more ‘capital’ types to emerge.

Readily available information and not corporate desire is driving these changes.

One of my pet subjects is hypothesizing alternatives to our Westminster democratic parliamentary system of government.

Why? Well I have this suspicion that technology is allowing the system to be gamed by the major parties in a dance of death with hyper-partisonship. And that this gaming is leading to an absence of differentiation in policy and a diminution in the rate of development of useful new policy. I am not the first to think this.

Just possibly we could learn something from the corporate sector where shareholders elect boards and boards appoint the senior management. It seems to work most of the time with notable exceptions when shareholder oversight is weak.

Imagine electing a board of governors here in Australia who are then tasked with appointing ministers based not on party lines but on actual capability.

The board would get re-elected every four years. Non performing ministers would be replaced whenever by the board but election results would be based on incoming governors identifying changes they would like to see, and hence a carrying a mandate to change certain ministerial appointments.

The chairman of the board could be our president, elected amongst themselves, and holding reserve powers.

I have recently learnt that of the top 100 entities on the planet (by value) that about half are countries and half are corporations. The corporations are gaining ground in this measure so maybe their governance processes are just that much more effective. And corporations are now increasingly considering other forms of capital other than cash and capital – they are basically heading towards full management consideration of all the the matters that affect our daily lives.

It’s not the worst idea I have ever had.

Current theory has it that the value of an enterprise can be measured by accounting systems using the six ‘capitals:

1. Financial capital – basically the double entry cash accounting system developed by the Venetians

2. Manufactured capital – the addition of the value of plant and equipment

3. Intellectual capital – patents, brands, copyright – all government mandated monopolies

4. Human capital – the value to a business of it’s highly trained employees

5. Social and relationship capital – a more recent concept that values customer perceptions of a business

6. Natural capital – another recent addition that values the impact of a business on the environment and our limited resources

All of these factors contribute to the ‘value’ of a business. The last three are recent additions, initially added because they represent assets to a business and in some scenarios, a risk to a business. Anything that requires both  investment and risk clearly impacts the value of a business and can therefore be accounted for.

Goodwill is another capital – but it is really just used in accounting systems to round out the errors and explain why the value of a business, in say a sale, is often different to the carrying value.

There is one ‘capital’ missing from this list and that is ‘Oligarchical Capital’. It is where a business invests in creating an unfair advantage by lobbying government to create barriers to competition. This also carries risks to a business since overdoing it makes a business lazy and at risk to obliteration when there is substantial changes in the external environment.

Netflix is opening in Australia with limited content compared to the US. Ahead of this they are cracking down on foreign users accessing their US service via VPN.

Staying in the home of others over Christmas I learn that Foxtel has quite limited content in Australia, charges subscriptions and still puts adverts into the middle of shows.

The government is trying to crack down on unlawful downloads by making them illegal. A new code of practice “will include a process to notify consumers when a copyright breach has occurred and provide information on how they can gain access to legitimate content”.

Yeah how about adding “at a price no greater than what US viewers are being charged for the same content, and with no adverts inserted into the content. And if they can’t provide the show for any reason the consumer is free to download it from anywhere.”

CAUTION
Make product development decisions only when someone competent is in charge. Engaging lawyers while developing products can lead to serious fuck up’s. Some contracts are functionally useless. Use common sense and obey the KISS principle. See your user forums for complete operating instructions.

AGREE

(And the buggers would have to press ‘agree’ every day they go to work just like I have to ‘agree’ every time I start the car)

“A hearing-impaired girl becomes separated from her boyfriend on a bush trail in the Blue Mountains”.

What is it with Australian film makers?

Besides it’s a ‘track’ here.

Overheard on Swanston St:

“You dignit”

The noun for dignity? However it did sound somewhat derogatory and not at all dignified.

I think it’s a vocative in apposition. The appositive explains why it requires a noun. The vocative explains why it cannot be third person.

It’s a keeper.

At a recent conference in China on the business of patents there was a talk on the subject of patent trolls. This is pretty obscure stuff unless you are in the business.

In question time an American got up and somehow, I don’t know how, he managed to include in his dissertation (posing as a question) the concept of America’s bill of rights. I think patent trolls either restricted his rights, or the legislation of laws to restrict the patent trolls restricted their rights. It doesn’t matter which.

It seems to me that every bill of rights should also come with a bill of responsibilities. If they don’t you get this sort of behavior where an individual spuriously claims that their rights are being impinged.

If there was a Bill of Responsibilities then an individual that forgoes his’ or her’s responsibilities would also have their rights attenuated until penance has been served and they can demonstrate that they fully and properly understand their responsibilities.

It is sort of this way under law anyway but it would be useful to put rights and responsibilities on the same level.

Or to keep it simple, avoid Bill of Rights and Responsibilities altogether. After all they are just words and we do all seem to be able to read into the words whatever suits us.

In December a letter went around Australia via Facebook regarding bank foreclosures on farms. A precis would read ‘drought. farms not worth as much. banks behaving badly and foreclosing on farmers. possible conspiracy to sell farms to Chinese and miners’.

I am not much of a fan of emotionally simplistic communiques so I just spent a bit of time Googling the subject.

It seems the Australian Wheat Board at one time held the mortgages for hundreds of farms but during the GFC sold these to the big four banks, probably at a loss and maybe due to an issue with liquidity.

Due to the current drought in some parts of Australia the value of some farms is now below book value and the banks are probably using a clause in the contract to demand more mortgage guarantees from the farmers, and if these are not met then exercising an option to foreclose. Even if a farmer is meeting all repayments!

This is so just so messed up and belies the old-school partnerships between businesses and banks, the latter which are ironically permanently illiquid themselves, in principle.

The only reason the banks could pick up the loans during the GFC was because our savings in them were underpinned by the Australian Government – otherwise they wouldn’t have had this flexibility. So in a way we the Australian taxpayers underwrote their ability to buy these loans at cents in the dollar and now to exploit them for capital gain.

The Wheat Board should only have on-sold these mortgages with the revaluation demand clauses excised, or the government should have demanded so. And to the farmers I would say, you should demand a first option to buy out or re-finance your mortgages, rather then allow a Wheat Board to sell them to whoever.

The value of farm properties in an extended drought is very low due to the low demand for properties which in turn is impacted by cashflow in the sector. Because farmers are struggling there are no buyers; however this probably doesn’t reflect the true value of properties – it’s a sort of second order effect that exaggerates the drop in value of farms. Given that droughts are a way of life I believe that farmers should not be exposed to the extremes of property value fluctuations (by government decree) otherwise we won’t have anyone willing to go into farming,

I suppose a conspiracy theorist would argue that the whole farm mortgage scheme is designed to recapitalize farms (downwards in value) to reflect the true value in a post-climate change world (where droughts will be more common and the land will dry out) and put the assets into corporate hands where economies of scale will allow lower costs and continued operations. But only after the land has been stripped of any useful mining resources for a one-off bonus.

In the end this will probably just happen and the only thing that may halt it is market intervention by parliament; this will come down to the effectiveness of the power of representation of the farmers in parliament versus the power of lobbying of the finance and corporate sectors to those who are not supposed to represent these interests in parliament.

On current form the farmers are well behind and fighting a rearguard action – they need to start getting seriously aggressive if they want to fight entropy and greed and preserve the past in a rapidly changing world.

To be honest, I am not even sure it makes sense for them to do so unless they come up with an entirely new structure for their sector. One which they control.

I sometimes wish those ancient Greeks had trademarked ‘laureate’. Next we will have Marrickville Council Garbo Laureate and the Clovelly Primary Spelling Laureate.

Yesterday my nephews, yet again, displayed tremendous and otherwise hidden concentration skills when plotting how to maximize the altitude of their home grown missiles.

Temporarily discarded was the idea of a airborne launch off a quad-copter drone – that is being trialed tonight in fact.

What was proposed and after much discussion executed was a soda gas bomb. The ingredients were; a soda gas carbon dioxide cylinder about 7 cm long and 2 cm in diameter (the ones used in those handheld old-school soda water bottles), surrounded by the grey stuff scraped off a dozen sparklers, wrapped in aluminium foil and then ignited in a steel bucket using a sparkler for a wick.

The result was an almighty bang and the exploded soda gas cylinder landed onto the roof of the garage.

After much brow furrowing, next up was a variation on the former effort, where the bomb, instead of being placed in a metal bucket was placed into a long metal tube (sounds familiar) – the tube was in fact the handle of a large car jack. Essentially we created a mortar and the results were spectacular. The missile (upgraded in category from a bomb now) was blown up and out of sight, never to be found.

Excited by this early success tonight’s efforts may incorporate the aforementioned drone launch and the use of a much larger Soda Stream bottle (at least 10x the size, probably much bigger). This should have enough explosive force to reach low flying aircraft.

This may be a good moment to excuse myself from further incriminating involvement in the project!

Found in Flinders St – an immigration museum (sic). The mind boggles.

For a start modern Australia is one great big immigration museum. And secondly, do you reckon there is a special exhibition on asylum seekers in there?

One thing for sure it would make a great backpackers. Extra income for the museum and real live exhibitions for the patrons.

When in doubt repeat after me.

An old friend posted this on FB:

“some time back i was standing in a line at a bank and i was amused by the glossy propaganda on the wall…it read WE ARE HERE TO TEACH YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT MONEY…..i found it highly amusing cos if they did that then the kids would be after them with pitch forks…corporate propaganda in synergy with STATE sponsored Bankism (yes it is not capitalism) will take us to a place that we dont want to be as a people….let’s hope that the penny will drop for a few more folk in 2015 and that there will be a greater awakening to the extent of mind control playing out in every aspect of our lives.”

I made a great effort to look past the obvious objections to this effort (grammar, logical consistency, caps lock, futility, lack of humor, etc) to see if it made any sense, in any context.

‘Mind Control’ seems to be the ultimate crime and yet, when I think about it, just about all humans in history have been cognitively captive to their local culture; looked at through the right lens, any individual who happens to object to the culture they are in may lean towards conspiracy theories and claims of mind control.

What I am confused by is the proposed solution. It seems to me that an individual who isn’t with the societal program has two choices; to remove him- or herself from the culture, or attempt to change the culture. Generally speaking the latter is a super low odds activity but, unfortunately, a couple of individuals in history have managed to do it so this gives all the crazies hope.

Also it is worth noting that where an individual has managed to change a whole culture that a majority of people were in significant pain. It is moot whether this is the case for our mob today.

The only pain we seem to be in is the stress related to getting even more of our share of the world’s resources before they run out.

Lemmings, yes. But Lemmings in a state of strained psychotic ecstasy. Awakening them will just make them unhappier.

New product idea for blokes … in order to ease the three pocket tap.

A key ring and wallet each with a wireless chip, battery and an alarm. The wallet, keyring and smartphone are all connected and if one goes out of range the others alert the owner.

Mysteriously marked but unmarked grave of Australian masked cliché.

Such is death by media and metal headed thunking of the osteoporosis risk management department.

At least the kids can play Where’s Ned?

Another one of these useless fuckers bites  the dust …

One more and I swear I am going to build my own and put them out of business.

Pertaining to the last two posts; below is my first effort from the alpha prototype of the slow selfie movement app and also my first effort a starting a ‘Dickhead Button for FB’ petition.

Sometimes I wish FB had a ‘dickhead’ button as well as a ‘like’ button. Just so people get both positive and negative feedback, the latter of which is badly missing in our society.

It just occurred to me that Frida Kahlo was the inventor of the selfie.

Sure there were self portraits beforehand but it’s just about all she did.

With oil paints and canvas, she did the slow selfie and you have to admit she did a better job than our fast selfies.

A new app opportunity – the slow selfie that takes at least a week to edit to the final result.

Yet again, yesterday I bought a coffee for the CEO of a startup.

Amongst other stories I heard this sad one for the umpteenth time.

He had pitched his company to xxxx Capital in Sydney.

They had considered the deal, done a bit of due diligence, but eventually decided the deal wasn’t in their ‘sweet spot’.

However they did offer the CEO their ‘other’ service – the one where he pays them to help him raise funds.

I had to tell him that, sadly, there probably was no investment fund and the whole investment charade is standard fare in this fair city of ours.

I truly think that Peter’s of Kensington at Christmas time is a little taster/entree for hell.

Imagine spending an eternity in the place? Even if it isn’t hell, I would slit my wrist soon enough and get there anyway.

I watched my first game of T20 cricket last night.

It made me think they didn’t go far enough – I propose a new version.

Here are the rules:

1. Get rid of the stumps so the only way to get out is caught or runout, or no. 6 below.
2. Runouts are then effected by a fielder tagging (with ball in hand) the runner before he/she crosses the crease line
3. Each batting team gets 9 innings
4. Each innings is over when the batting team has lost three wickets
5. If you hit the ball you have to run
6. Missing three good deliveries (non-wides) in a row results in an out.

The rest can stay the same.

And they could call it Cricketball. Or as Trev says, Creaseball.

[Scene] Sydney Taxi.

The driver has ABC news radio on. Which is a nice change from Alan Jones and his like.

I hear that there is some animated debate about our current state of terrorist alert.

A quick web search later and I find this:

“National Terrorism Public Alert System

• low—terrorist attack is not expected
• medium—terrorist attack could occur
• high—terrorist attack is likely
• extreme—terrorist attack is imminent or has occurred.”

This reminds me of our sales pipeline excel spreadsheet.

I used to let the sales guys give a % likelihood of converting suspects to prospects and then to customers.

Now if they find a new suspect this automatically gets a 5% probability, so it doesn’t over-weight the sales forecast. If it hasn’t moved up the probability chart within 3 months it is automatically excised.

If we start talking specs and terms with a suspect they move into ‘prospect’ mode and get a 33% probability of conversion.

If we are negotiating contracts they move to 66% probability and pre-customer status.

Once a contract is signed they become a customer at 100%.

After one year, the moving average of the forecast (i.e. the comparison to what we predicted versus what happened) is used to adjust these fixed percentage values for the next year.

The benefit of this scheme is that it can be measured and calibrated and also it can’t be sneakily played with by the salesmen to snow the CEO, or sneakily played with by this CEO to snow his board.

Now back to the terrorist alert system … here’s my criticisms:

1. They need to assign a time period to the alert. Even a bushfire alert is only good for 24 hours.

2. They need to assign a probability to an alert and within a time period

3. This way, for example, if they say there is a 10% chance of an attack in one week, and after ten weeks of this and there being no attacks, then they know they were over-doing it and could drop it to 5%, etc.

4. The issue with the qualitative alerts that they have is that the words mean different things to different people. Especially considering a good whack of Australians have English as a second language.

5. And ‘extreme’ is extremely silly – how can the same level of alert be applied to an attack that might be imminent and to one that has occurred?

There are two types of people in this world; those that walk on travelators and those that stand.

I feel like taking another shot at the Australian technology incubators this morning … but then maybe I need to balance my commentary because someone might actually be listening.

Despite the fact that the incubators are effectively a pilot light in a system where the mains aren’t connected, one can’t fault the passion of the founders of the incubators.

They truly believe they are doing a noble deed.

Indeed the prevailing mood is one of ‘first encounter’. Essentially they are providing opportunities for emerging natives, the start-up founders, to become somewhat civilized in the arts of the start-up world.

And the incubator model is as good as any because the natives seem to love it. What they, the gen-Y start-up founders, don’t seem to be able to do is discern good advice from the other sort, experience from trite, or good intentions from rape. I don’t know why this slice of wisdom skipped a generation. Too many Christmas presents maybe, but it prevails.

So, accepting that just about all of these gen-Y startup founders will fail miserably or worse still, succeed in a miserly fashion, the incubator at least provides them an advisory model that they can buy into because all their kith already have. It’s better than nowt and it keeps that pilot light burning.

Here’s hoping someone turns on the mains some day.

From the Silicon Valley irony-free zone

“The Bright Spot Theory; the basic idea is that when the clouds roll in, you look past the disappointments and identify at least one ray of sunshine, however small it might be. You then double down on that and ignore everything else.”

This, in the flat plains of freeways, urban sprawl, dollars and technology, equates to wisdom.

In English you might say; “Our first idea didn’t work but because we still had some of our investors cash to spend, rather than just quitting we took the bit that showed some promise and put all our efforts into that”.

My hypothesis is that the dudes in the Valley feel somewhat emasculated, them being geeks, nerds and pudding men in chinos, and hence the tendency to co-opt tough talk from the sports world.

And they also like to show their mates that they are smart, so they mix it up with the sort of philosophical insights one might find on the back of your grandmother’s toilet door.

Ten minutes after its cesarean delivery, every VC in the Valley will be rushing to share the new theory in order to impress upon the listener how dialed in they are to the drum beat in the jungle.

The story that I have been told is that Christianity was the first religion built on the foundation of the greater good, as opposed to selective good and evil

Since then a number of competing religions have claimed the same mantra.

The paradox for the owners of these religions is that they had to make any following of the alternatives a mortal sin, hence denigrating their own mantra of common good.

Indeed, since they didn’t have copyright laws to fall back on they also had to make misuse of their brand a mortal sin.

I suppose it was all for the greater good in the context of personal greed.

The solution is secular common good systems which have built in protection against control by the greedy.

However this transition period where secular and religious common good causes are coexisting looks pretty traumatic. Since the latter are being replaced by the former; it’s no surprise there is a bit of push back.

My quick list.

1. Speech
2. Fire
3. Missionary position
4. Social care religions
5. Maths
6. Birth control
7.  Systematic questioning of orthodoxy ( enlightenment)
8. Electricity
9. Telecommunications inclusive of the net
10. Mechanical transport

Back to Australian start up incubators.

If they take liquidated pref shares and veto control rights in return for a few thousand dollars investment, and they don’t bother to take a board seat, then to me this looks like passive-aggressive behavior.

‘Learned’ is an adjective that is pronounced as two syllables.

Whereas we here in Australia have learnt to pronounce it in one.

The third one was out appeasing the Greens.

Gee I am glad we have the herald here in Sydney. This morning, one section in particular caught my eye.

New product idea; an irony detector for online newspapers which is used to place online articles automatically so as to avoid claims of utter stupidity.

In the gambling world there is a long odds phenomenon where a emotional bias to betting on long odds reduces the return on investment. See the plot below.

Government intervention into the business environment in a democracy suffers a similar fate. Long odds are guaranteed by a non-financial aversion to risk, driven by the fear of negative publicity, in turn driven by claims of favoritism or negligence.

The result? Government initiatives driven by process and not outcomes.

It’s a chronic problem in the west highlighted by the success of certain government interventions in some countries with less representative electorate systems.

Of course, there is a inflexion point where less public review just results in corruption and rubbish returns for the tax payers.

What I am trying to say is that there is a sort of sweet spot in democratic systems where a certain degree of public feedback is entertained and ensures the best returns on government investment.

We are way past this sweet spot here in Australia, which is ironic given that, almost to a man or woman, we look to government to fix every problem

You know, if I was running for government in opposition, I would preface all my promises to the electorate and the lobby groups with ‘Senate-willing’.

And if the Senate rejected my policies I would drop them until the Senate changed their collective minds. Bugger negotiating with the black-mailing independents or irrationally opposed opposition.

And then I would head off to the pub for the rest of my term in office.

My suspicion is that Australians wouldn’t really mind a government that did bugger all, just for a change. Most wouldn’t even notice.

And if this process was spun out for the whole first term the government would almost assuredly be reelected with Senate control.

It’s called the long game.

I can’t for the life of me understand why the incumbents, having watched the last mob strive to actually do things without control and subsequently fall miserably, attempt to do the same. Just plain silly.

If you want to float a pet hypothesis, just say it mate. Nothing worse than a gutless question for a heading.

PS the answer is ‘I doubt it. The government’s pressure on wages is probably just a second order affect, the primary affect being the softening demand for our exports and under-scale business investment in differentiated growth.’

Little things…

When I get too busy in life the first victim is my fingernails. They simply don’t get cut. It’s great having such an obvious indicator for stress. Thank god I don’t chew them.

With respect to emotional matters, a truth is just an opinion that dwells comfortably with kindred opinions. Sometimes even complacently so.

Last night a friend limited her alcohol intake due to concerns about her breast milk; she has two babies.

We concocted a new first world product – a mother’s milk alcohol level analyser.

It probably already exists but we couldn’t be arsed checking.

My wonderful nephews  unfortunately did not receive much of an education.

This renders then susceptible to influences of any which persuasion.

To wit; right now they are buried in YouTube, convinced that ISIL is out to kill each and every Australian.

The defining data to support this hypothesis is that ‘four of our women’ have gone ‘over there’ to marry terrorists.

You have to admit there’s not much to work on here.

I just had a quick peruse of the Sydney papers whilst a Microsoft update rendered my laptop functionless.

The respectful moratorium for the victims of the chocolate bomber seems to be over and all sorts of questions are being asked in the media.

The big question that I haven’t seen addressed is whether all those businesses with business continuity insurance have found an exclusion in their contracts for acts of terrorism.

Was this terrorism or a nutter? This will be painful

Misinformed commentary persists on the matters of patents….

Patents provide for less risk into investment into new technology.

Stronger patent rights lower the risk of investment in technology, resulting in more investment.

Data point; USA. The strongest patent rights in the world underpinned by jury-led high damages, product injunctions, and contingency lawyers for patent enforcement.

And it’s the most inventive nation in the world with the highest investment in R&D. This is not a coincidence.

In a pure game of chance, if played long enough, everyone reverts to the mean and gets their money back.

Unless the house takes a cut in which case, over time, everyone loses all their money betted.

The severity of the house cut just determines how long the punters get to play, on average, before they lose their money.

In a game where there is no house cut but there is a little predictability, those that know the correlations act as the house and everyone else gets to lose their money as of they were playing a game of chance.

If there is a house as well then that just compounds the problem for the punters.

And for what it’s worth, over time the longer the odds that these guileless punters play, the less average gambling time they get per dollar.

I was asked today what improvements I would make to my Breville espresso machine.

Where do I start?

A thermocouple in the steam wand with a gauge on the front panel

A low water warning LED light

A larger range on the grinder  quantity adjuster so my double espresso grind doesn’t always end in spilled grinds

Pertaining to the above a basket with sloped sides to avoid grinds spilling over

Instant cutoff on the steam wand so you don’t risk bubbling your foam when you withdraw the wand

A steam wand that doesn’t scream at you

A coffee counter

A basket which doesn’t hold water after rinsing, causing dribbles all over your kitchen

See, innovation isn’t that hard! All you have to do is use your own product.

I have just set up a new WiFi router.

This one was a tough one because I couldn’t get the setup software out of Chinese.

But it made me think, from a user interface point of view these things haven’t improved in a decade.

You still plug in an Ethernet cable into the router and a PC, and then go to a specific net address in a browser to access the router setup

Why not a phone app accessed via WiFi?

Taxi apps with maps were created to frustrate people like me.

My current booking had been circling my location for 15 minutes and he has been ‘4 minutes away’ the whole time.

They only reason I haven’t cancelled the booking is that I want to find out why he can’t use a GPS.

Terror sieges probably happen at least once a quarter somewhere on the planet, possibly more frequently.

We seem to care much more about them when they are close to home.

It’s probably the ‘it could have been me factor’.

Given the tweets, emails and blogs that I have been receiving it looks like a pretty step distance correlation function.

Internet marketers take note!

When I change laptops now it doesn’t take much effort thanks to Google.

Between Chrome and Drive it all just sort of happens. In fact the only reason I store files locally is in case I am ever working offline, which is becoming more and more of a rarity.

So why do we use the Microsoft OS at all?

I think it comes down to the Microsoft Office suite and isn’t it fun watching Google slowly and surely add functionality to their online equivalent?

The other apps on the Microsoft OS aren’t critical for me – sure there are some good ones, but they are succumbing to online services at a rate of knots.

For Microsoft it must feel like having an alien in the belly; slowly growing and with complete surety it will eventually burst out thereby killing its host.

The chocolate terrorist is gone, along with two of his hostages. What a sad and pointless way to die.

I wonder what the reaction will be?

The paper says he was asylum seeker who came to Australia in 1996. They also say he is a lone wolf, possibly an angry man acting by himself.

It’s hard to eavesdrop on a lone wolf; there is little to monitor. If the security forces want to stop this sort of attack then they need to identify and target each and every individual who fits a profile.

And once identified they will have to be monitored for risk factors. I don’t think we can yet arrest people for crimes they might be thinking of committing? Maybe we can.

Of course they could always go the other way and push the suspects at risk into counseling and possibly also give them free holidays in Hawaii every 6 months. We could call this the Pacific (aka peace) solution.

This might work – it would be cheaper than shutting Sydney down every few months.

I have been texted by Melbournians to check that I am ‘OK’.

Initially perplexed, I eventually responded ‘all OK, but getting sick of chocolate’.

It just goes to show that you can’t just take what you want and expect no blow back. Especially in a system which encourages technological unemployment and a marketing driven sense of worthlessness.

I expect out governments will embrace the opportunity to show ‘leadership’ and plug the holes with increased security expenditure.

Maybe it’s the right response. Maybe there is no other response that makes sense.

One thing’s for sure, we are who we are and we aren’t who we were.

We thought hard about it and decided to ditch the Xmas shopping for the pool. Easy decision in the end

I just got a spam email addressed from an old friend that has been dead for almost a decade. Despicable.

In the last week two pairs of my glasses, reading and sunnies, both lost their screws while I was traveling. Both useless.

It’s the 21st century surely we can do better than screws?

Soluble fiber; the term has never made any sense to me.

If a fiber is truly soluble then it would break up into it’s constituent molecules and the fact that it started life as a fiber would mean nowt.

What they actually mean is ‘water dispersible’ fiber. In water such a fiber would be substantially extended and free of entanglement with it’s brethren.

And only a chemist would care about such definitions.

How about hiding a smartphone battery charger in a belt; as in the thing that holds up your pants.

You can get these flexible lithium polymer batteries and there would be no need for the belt to be any thicker than usual.

While watching Silk, the legal drama, it has occurred to me that our adversarial court system is odd.

It appears to me that the defendant is always on trial, whereas in fact it should be the evidence of the prosecution that is on trial.

Furthermore, the jury members are forced into making a binary decision on an individual level and then collectively they must argy-bargy until all, or a sufficient weight of them agree on a binary decision.

If the evidence of the prosecution is on trial, then maybe it’s best if the judge and the jury members each give a score from 0-10 on the weight of the evidence. If the average jury member’s score and the judge’s score are both over 50% (or any number between 50% and 100% as chosen) then a guilty charge is upheld, and the severity of the penalty is then impacted by the average of all scores.

A new report shows that over 80% of American ‘believe’ in climate change.

The only thing that I ‘believe’ in is that other people believe in things.

The problem with belief is that it requires all issues to be reduced to binary choices, and that a mental coin is tossed as to whether one is on that side of an issue, or this.

Why not just assign a probability based on the evidence, do a risk and return analysis and then decide on an action plan, which can be modified as new evidence comes to light?

Of course the answer is twofold:

1. At an individual level this requires a practised and rigourous mind – lazy is easier, and

2. Socially, it is actually easier to count up for the beliefs, the for’s and against’s, than it is to enter into a debate based on probabilities.

Maybe the outcome is the same. Maybe not. But why have we bothered to develop intelligence if we don’t use it?

A good fraction of the world’s patents are in the automotive industry – one of the most technology advanced and intense product sectors.

Therefore I have always been puzzled by the lack of patent enforcement in this industry, excepting the odd patent troll activity.

I have just had a chat to the senior legal counsel at Hyundai and it turns out that the major players in this industry have a gentleman’s agreement not to enforce their patents against each other.

They don’t cross license either; they just don’t enforce their patents.

So you might wonder why then they have patents at all? Well it’s a gentleman’s agreement so they need to patents just in case someone is silly enough to break it.

This then explains why Tesla can sell cars and infringe thousands of patents without fear. And why Elon Musk can make a bold statements about Tesla not enforcing any of it’s patents – no one would license them anyway. He is giving away nothing.

Google must have really pissed someone off in China.

Not only have they built latency into Google services here so that they are virtually unusable, there is more.

To get around the embargo I use a VPN. But on any Wi-Fi connection I don’t even get the login page unless I close Chrome, Drive and the VPN software.

And Google isn’t doing themselves any favours elsewhere either.

They have started up the LOT consortium – an attempt to get all companies with phone patents (hardware and software) to sign a non-aggression pact, so that Google doesn’t have to worry about patent rights on it’s loss-leader software and hardware design products. It will just cream the cash off the advertising revenue.

Basically it’s an attempt to keep the rest of the supply-chain barefoot and pregnant.

They are starting to look and feel like Microsoft in the worst days of their monopoly, and in such arrogance do empires falter.

New business idea …

Vacation accommodation website … for tradies. Free accommodation for trade work at the accommodation site.