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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One bounced and the other didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that was my morning’s entertainment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I wonder if shrubs can be removed without permission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s a mystery for now.

From the madhouse that is the USA…

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

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

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

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

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

But some Australians just love pushing those boundaries past two.

Justice = fairness – trust

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

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

Note: assumes unlimited resources

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

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

Especially when some others seem quite under utilised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think this is odd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuh. No way. Nicht.

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

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

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

Life must be hell for the intellectually rigid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it makes their life complex.

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

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

Sometimes the problem just goes away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I bet they have.

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

Hypocrisy annoys me more than it should.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hoo roo mate”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which has the better marketing department I wonder?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the exact email I got on the subject:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the driving force behind evolution.

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

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

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

Just thinking out loud, O ether.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the magistrate let me off with a section 10.

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

I have just been solicited on LinkedIn!

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

Proxy madness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophical thought of the day, O grasshopper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finsult

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

Insults fall into three categories…

Those that are entirely unintended.

Those that are intended.

And those that are imagined.

In all cases they should be blithely  ignored because…

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

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

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

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

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

This was in the context of technology startups.

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

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

Why?

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

I don’t think any one can.

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

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

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

Full disclosure.

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

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

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

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

Check out the Linkedin screenshot below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless this blog entry is all lies.

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

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

That’s the Zen spiritual approach to life.

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

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

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

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

Others prefer not to reveal all their secrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go figure!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any cartel or monopoly relies on two things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The simple ideas are:

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

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

The average punter v. the major parties.

Libs/Nats

Labor

Greens

One. I would never have dared opposed my dad.

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

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

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

There’s plenty of paths to every place.

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

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

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

My guess at our ruling coalition party below.

And in opposition we have Labor.

And the Greens hanging around the fringes.

No wonder I have troubles voting!

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

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

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

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

On the flip side I virtually never blame or deny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The outcome? I just don’t care.

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

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

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

Today I have accidental eggs.

Or is that existential angst?

I feel a rapidly approaching gear shift coming up.

Imagine a group of people calling themselves a think tank.

The may as well call themselves a Mensa armadillo.

Or a group wank.

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

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

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

and a mourning of false profits.