Dear Dell,

You are several kinds of idiot.

You also appear to think I am an idiot too, which I suppose makes sense given your idiotic disposition.

When I recently asked to buy a caddy for a hard-drive I wished to add to my Dell T410 server, you refused, cowardly hiding behind a  non-technically based “policy” preventing sale of a caddy-only (an item costing around $40), stating they could only be bought with a hard-drive.  So you quoted me one of the more expensive possible SAS hard-drives to accompany my caddy, $590, even though YOU KNEW I didn’t need a HDD and you could have quoted on the cheapest possible SATA HDD.

When I questioned this idiotic requirement, you hide behind “it’s Dell policy”, but are totally unable to explain or justify the policy.  I requested a phone call to discuss this situation, but all I received was another email from a difference faceless name repeating the Dell policy propaganda.  Hiding behind inexplicable policy is the last recourse of a dishonest business model, in this case one based on coercion & exploit of potentially ignorant customers.

I have since sourced a suitable caddy from an eBay seller (brand new, sealed in a box, which suggests Dell caddies CAN be bought without extortion from somewhere), and installed the extra hard-drive (which was originally from another Dell server).

Your idiocy and greed means you now get NOTHING, instead of something, and you should all be ashamed of yourselves for supporting this policy.

Yours sincerely,
Anthony May.
On behalf of [REDACTED].

ok so i’m a bit late to the Lets-All-Realise-Everett-Bogue-Is-Suffering-From-Naivety-And-Megalomania Party. that’s fashionable, right?

i’ve been reading some minimalist stuff lately & it’s been impossible to avoid seeing Everett Bogue popping up everywhere.  so i read some of him too.  before too long, i couldn’t shake the impression that Everett Bogue is just another insufficiently read/educated GenYer who thinks he’s the first person to discover something, but had the nous to capitalise on it and get a bunch of Fellow Seekers to pay him to live The Good Life – for the time being at least.

congratulations Mr Bogue, you’re a the top of a tiny pyramid scheme.  you’ve successfully discovered the ‘secret’ of countless shonks before you.

my best friend spent a year traveling the world – minimalist style – in 1996, and maintain that low-possession-count lifestyle in two of Australia’s busiest & most capitalist/consumerist cities, until his untimely death a few years ago.  minimalism wasn’t anything new then, and it sure as frak isn’t anything new now, although for sure the lessons can be carried into the digital realm.

but inherent in that low-possession-count ethos was an underlying reliance on other people’s possessions typically via living in a room with other housemates WHO PROVIDED MOST OF THE FURNITURE. and fridge. and ice cube trays.  when we took a holiday in Byron Bay, who do you think brought the beach towels?!!

Everett brags about how little he owns on his site.  i couldn’t help but notice there’s no refrigerator.  or beanbag.  who supplies those?  i’m guessing someone else.  that’s not minimalism, that’s an externality of the likes that any economic rationalist would be very proud.

fuckminimalism.com ? no, fuck you, Mr Bogue.  i understood the core of (and resonated with) minimalism from one brief conversation with my best friend 15 years ago.  i didn’t need to (and thankfully now can’t) spend $17 on your ebook to tell me what can be gleaned – for free – from hundreds of honest, well-meaning people.

and us$47 for your Minimalist Business ebook? yer kidding right?  i haven’t bought an ebook for more than $15 from highly talented writers who had something NEW to say.  no surprise you ignored my tweet politely asking why Minimalist Business cost so much.  so much for Twitter being the best way to communicate with you.

as for this $25/month letter.ly cybernetic yogi shit, omg, that’s where you really lost me. as above, just another GenY kid so far up his own fundamental orifice he can’t see that he’s stumbled on what’s already been discovered long ago.  the abundance of nonsense cyber-infused new-age terminology won’t work on those who’ve seen it all before.  Facebook out – Twitter in?  fuck me, you sound like a vacuous fashion queen of the most objectionable kind.

Everett Bogue IS what i consider convergence; or history repeating itself, depending on how generous you feel today.

p.s. contrary to you bragging about your google rank for ‘cybernetic yogi’ etc, this (leanmeanminimalist.com) site and 4 others ripping you a new one, were the first 5 hits when i googled “cybernetic yogi”. i pray that when i click on Image search i’ll see a cartoon Yogibear who’s been altered by the Borg.

mwah!

The failure of REDgroup is ‘A Perfect Storm’ writ large.  They were saddled with major debt right form the start, have been financially squeezed from every corner, but more than anything else they’ve compounded their problems with a sequence of bad decisions made by “bovver-boy” managers installed at the expense of losing their inherited experienced staff, thinking that the book publishing and retailing industry would yield to corporate thug tactics, or that consumers would be the slightest bit interested in buying barbecues from Borders.  One could argue that PEP made a mistake even buying the beleaguered (Borders) chain in the first place.  Alas, 20-20 hindsight comes easily.

Books are a sacred miracle of human evolution, representing that quantum leap from storing information only in our heads to be re-told to our descendants in stories, song and teachings, to miraculous devices that are easily and cheaply copied with fidelity, allowing an author, perhaps dead millennia ago on another continent, to speak directly into our head.

But where we buy books (and many other things) from is anything but sacred – most of us don’t give a toss, we just want to pay a fair price, and if Amazon et.al. can sell & ship it to me for up to 50% less than Borders or A&R can, where do you think I’m going to go?  And if I can have a book without a single tree being felled… hello?!?

It was this ‘revolution’ in book publishing that was partly responsible for lifting of the veil of the Dark Ages, a fundamental shift in humanity’s course.  Why should a significant refinement in how books are made, delivered and read also not have a significant impact on society again now? It’s not like I have a vendetta against bricks-n-mortar book retailers, but we simply don’t need as many of them as we used to, and will continue to need less of them as more people buy online and switch to eBooks.  Blacksmiths and shoe repairers died out because we didn’t need them any more.  So too will many categories of brick-n-mortar retailers, and hopefully coal miners.  That’s unavoidable progress.

REDgroup isn’t the first retailer to face the 21st Century and fail.  It won’t be the last.  But relative to its book retailing peers, it fell *now* because it made a bunch of bad decisions by people who didn’t understand the subtle, respectable, low-profit-margin art of bookselling.

And I’ve learned a lesson in being dependant, albeit indirectly, on an Old Media business failing to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.  But I’ll talk more about that in a forthcoming post, whose working title is “The Future Of Calendar Club”.

Angus & Robertson have been around way over a century (albeit with a litany of former owners in its more recent decades), with a long and respected reputation for selling quality books in a demure manner by demure middle-aged ladies wearing sensible shoes in demurely designed book stores.  From cities to countless regional towns, they brought quality books to every corner of Australia, the Everyman’s bookseller.  They’re classic Old Media, and they sold just one product category, and – until the last several years – did it fairly well.

Borders, the hip young USA brand that Gen-X & younger oozed over in the 90s and early 00s for its multimedia retailing tour de force – not just a massive range of books, but music (pressing a few buttons to sample any CD on headphones was a revelation!), DVDs, glossy magazines & more, in large, plush, comfortable stores with its very own cafe, seemed to take the book retailing world by storm.  Clearly Borders was commoditised American economic imperialism propagating across the world like a virus, but unless you were wedded to your local indie bookstore and studying a double arts degree, visiting Borders was like a guilty pleasure, but without the guilt.

The only way these two could be less different would be to compare them to Woolworths or KMart, or an indie one-store bookshop up the proverbial street, whose rickety floor-to-ceiling shelves feel like they’re about to collapse in a plume of dusty old-school dignity.  But despite their obvious differences, two pillars – the oldest and the newest – of the Australian book retail world have suffered the same fate at the same time.  What on Earth went wrong?

When Borders entered Australia in the late-90s, the two were genuine competitors with unrelated owners, and quite different business models.  But for individual reasons, both came under the ownership of Pacific Equity Partners (PEP), who formed REDgroup Retail to hold them, alongside Whitcoulls in New Zealand (and other sundry non-book entities).  By this stage, the wheels were already wobbling.

My guess is these two very different businesses were originally seen as complementary; A&R serves the Everyman, and Borders served lattes to the hipsters.  Unfortunately the devil is in the detail.  Borders AU/NZ/Sing were already in serious debt when snapped up by PEP, and A&R were headed down the same path.  Not surprisingly, two negative cash flows do not make for a positive cash flow, and under this growing mountain of debt (now totalling some $130M !!!) some truly horrible things have been done to both brands in a desperate futile attempt to stem the flow of borrowed money.

There’s been a bookshelf of words written this past week about REDgroup entering voluntary administration & who’s to blame.  Some of them hold water, some of them are utter nonsense, and some I’m really not remotely qualified to comment on.  Fell free to tell me which ones I got wrong!

• Much hoohar has erupted over the claim by REDgroup’s CEO that the parallel import restrictions were a significant contributor in REDgroup’s demise.  However, given that (a) many of their books were marked ABOVE the Australian RRP (ie. they can’t have been too concerned about discounted books from offshore retailers), and (b) REDgroup’s own submission to the Productivity Commission in 2009 recommended KEEPING the PIRS, this is all clearly bumkum smokescreening.  According to Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe Publishing, the US and UK don’t allow parallel imports either, and if Australia were to do so it would have severe implications for local publishers, authors and printers, to the benefit of their overseas counterparts.

• That GST should be applied to offshore imports, or be exempted from certain domestic retail categories, to “level the playing field”. This one’s gotta be the ultimate scapegoat, and Gerry Harvey had his hat handed to him in the court of public opinion in January this year trying on this furphy.  Suggesting that some select few endangered species of the Australian retailer genus should be GST-exempt is mind-boggling.  AS IF the Australian Government is about to do away with a major component of its GST income – the GST targets the retail level!  Online retail – from both national and offshore retailers – has steadily grown in the last decade from obscurity to significance.  In 5-10 years when I can try on a digital pair of jeans on my digital avatar and check for proper fit & see what they’ll look like from a virtual mirror on my high-resolution monitor, or point my smartphone at the corner of the room to project an image of a new sofa to see if it’ll fit in my room, and click a button to have it delivered, clearly the scope of what can practically be bought online is only going to grow, so why on earth would the Government set a precedent for slitting its wrists & slowly bleeding to death?

• That too much of Borders stock was inappropriate for Australian readers’ tastes.  Maybe.  As Patrick Carr says on Newmatilda.com, Borders “sacrificed profitability for market share. They poured huge money into extensive stockholdings. Their hope was that if they stocked everything, shoppers wouldn’t look elsewhere.”  Unfortunately that didn’t work out so well, and I’m guessing that’s behind a lot of the $130M about to be written off by banks, publishers, and other creditors (everyone except their owners, PEP).  Whilst it was a correctable problem, paying off the debt from that catastrophic error when it’s already a tough market obviously wasn’t possible.  But it doesn’t explain Angus & Robertson’s equal lock-step demise…

• That the honourable centenarian Angus & Robertson have been disrespectfully relegated to bargain-bin & best-seller-pulp status, undermining the value of their time-honoured brand.  If you narrow your range to pulp, don’t be surprised when customers buy pulp for a fraction of the price from Woolworths or Amazon/et.al.  But how did that happen?  Perhaps extorting smaller local publishers for an additional $2.5k to $20k to stock their books might’ve had something to do with them deserting the once respected chain, leaving A&R without unique compelling product?

• There’s just so much more entertainment available now, and so much more competition for our disposable dollar & attention.  Even a mere two decades ago we consumed media distributed by news papers and magazines, TV, movies, music (vinyl/CD), and that was about it.  Computer/video games were niche, and there was no (recognisable) Internet/WWW.  Nowadays we have a smorgasbord of tech to keep us entertained & distracted on a whim anywhere, and all of them are seriously challenging the old-school old-media business models of physically-distributed media with territorial copyright licensed to 3rd-party distributors, or highly regulated & gate-keepered traditional electronic media.  Whilst the pie has grown much larger along with our prosperity, the number of ways that entertainment pie is now sliced has exploded.  We are reading less books.

• No one’s talking about this one, but it can’t have helped matters that REDgroup made the tragic mistake several years ago of being convinced that SAP would be a good thing for their business IT infrastructure.  Surely a swish new world-class enterprise management system would make things better, right?  Did no one at REDgroup do their homework and read about the litany of over-budget & over-time SAP implementations scattered across the world in the previous decade??  Books have been written and websites dedicated to documenting their spectacular failures.  As other smaller entities in REDgroup came to make major IT infrastructure decisions in recent years, SAP was given a wide berth, for fear of crippling their own business with a grossly expensive and agonisingly slow development cycle.  Aside from that, any IT department that has a two week waiting list to delegate an internet domain name for their own online ecommerce store (something that can be actioned in 5 minutes) has way bigger problems than being duped by blowhard SAP salesmen.

• eBooks & eReaders are taking a share. Yes, but I suspect this one’s a trivial component dwarfed by the other factors, but no doubt it’ll grow into a major additional bite in the coming years.

• Let me drop two dirty words in the book industry: self-publishing and eBooks.  Thy time approaches.

Despite all the posturing to the contrary (by retailers & luddite consumers alike), there’s a heap of stuff you can confidently buy from reputable online retailers, Australian & overseas, many of whom DO offer genuinely good service, without needing to actually see, touch, try on, or spend any time whatsoever in mind-numbingly sterile malls offering the same narrow set of brands everywhere.

Until the early 2000s, Australian Customs *did* levy import duties on some stuff I bought overseas.  I don’t know what the dollar amount threshold was, but when combined with the cost of shipping from overseas, and the exchange rate below $0.60 to the US1$, it usually made it a more expensive proposition than shopping locally, and thus relegated offshore retail to stuff you just couldn’t get locally.

But that world is gone.  For unrelated reasons the US & AU dollar are virtually parity, international shipping can often be quite reasonable, and there’s now no import duty or GST applied to imported goods totalling less than au$1000.  Now I can go on a clothes or sneaker shopping spree – online – and have several hundred dollars worth of stuff (which would cost anything up to double from Australian bricks-n-mortar retailers) and have it all shipped to me for $20-50, still making it a clear financial win.

Is it wrong that overseas retailers don’t have GST applied to their sales?  Absolutely.  I mean c’mon!  In this globalised age where anyone can buy stuff from anywhere else on the planet so easily, why shouldn’t the Government apply GST?  A better question is why don’t they.  My theory is in the ideology of the GST itself.  The GST forced nearly every Australian business to become a tax collector for the Government.  It spread the administrative burden far wider (though about the same thickness for all), whereas the previous Wholesale Sales Tax regime involved at least an order of magnitude fewer Australian businesses and virtually no individuals.  Clearly corralling retailers across the planet into becoming GST collectors for the Australian government would be Mission Impossible (even if legal), so having it levied by Australian Customs at the import waypoint is the only practical option, basically slapping an invoice on every box before local delivery.  With such a cavalier attitude to turning every Tom, Dick and Harriet businessperson into a GST collector for the Government, it’s no surprise that the (Howard) Government wanted to divest itself of the administrative burden of applying and chasing import duties from a strongly growing citizen import tendency.  A decade ago Amazon was just a distant blip on the radar.  Now, with zero import duty/GST and a steadily strengthening AU$, it’s a serious bite out of not just local retailers’ income, but Government’s too.

But lets not make the mistake of thinking the lack of GST applied to consumer importation accounts for the attraction of buying from offshore eretailers.  It doesn’t.  As I said above, the price of much of the stuff I buy offshore can be nearly half that of local retailers.  Even the addition of 10% GST, or more, wouldn’t level that ‘playing field’.

In any nationally competitive industry, prices stabilise at a value that lets all the links in the retail chain make at least a workable profit.  Australia is a small population, spread out over a massive continent.  Out retail prices reflect primarily the ‘economy of scale’ of our comparatively tiny population, and often the cost of shipping product over our vast distances to tiny towns.  So when Europeans and Americans come here and bitch about the price of everything, well, that’s in large part because they come from a country/region with a much higher population, and population density, among other factors.  Get over it.

Maybe you’re more a Readings type of bookworm, one of the few who likes to go to a bookshop who actually reads through several pages of a book, shake hands with the author, AND then buys it from the shop at whatever price they decide to charge.I’m not.  I buy books based on recommendations from my social network, reviews, and occasionally author reputation, in which case I don’t need a physical shop to visit.  Seems I’m in good – or at least voluminous – company.

The reality is that so much of what we buy has become so commoditised, we don’t care where we buy it, “value adding” is often irrelevant, we just want it for a fair price, and we’d especially prefer not to pay the inflated price of faux-discount retailers who use expensive TV advertising.  How can all the existing bricks-n-mortar retailers with expensive mall rents, extensive multi-site IT & POS infrastructures, and a vast staff with structured management spanning a state or country ever compete with a website operated from an ‘invisible’ office-with-warehouse out in a cheap suburb with no public shareholders to please?  Ruslan Kogan is laughing all the way to the bank on this business model!

“Dear Myer, thanks for prompting me to find that expensive moisturiser online for 40% less than you, with free delivery to my door.”

While numerous Australians were worrying if their $15M worth of Angus & Robertson, or Borders gift certificates would be honoured by the chains’ new undertakers, that’s what I tweeted this afternoon, inbetween worrying whether my No.1 client will be (a) able to pay me money owed & (b) be allowed by the new administrators of REDgroup Retail (owners of Borders AU & NZ & Singapore, Angus & Robertson, Whitcoulls (NZ), & my client Calendar Club AU & NZ who are the only profitable business in REDgroup) to continue using my services.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – we’ll come back to REDgroup…

I’m referring to the mindless smoke-screen kicked up last January by Gerry Harvey & his whiny band of helpless billionaire retailers bemoaning that the world is changing and GST-avoiding online offshore retailers are slowly killing them and somehow it’s up to us, or the government, or someone, ANYONE ELSE BUT THEMSELVES, to save them.

I dunno why it’s taken me seven years, but when I noticed my Biotherm Homme moisturiser running low recently it occurred to me that maybe I could find this stuff online for a helluvalot less than Myer charge for it. Sure enough, I let my google do the walking and spent ten minutes getting a rough idea of who’s who in the online cosmetics retail scene, and placed an order for the same thing for 40+% less than Myer.  A week later it was delivered to my door – free (i.e. no additional charge).

No longer must I wade through that excruciating cacophony of smells, and fight off the obsequiously friendly staff who insist on offering me “package deals” of shit I don’t want or asking to sign me up to some loyalty program every freakin time I walk in there that’ll invariably add more crap to my letterbox/inbox, and have to pay above-RRP for this so-called ‘premium shopping experience’.  Now I’m paying at least 15% less than I was for the same product seven years ago.  I’m still loyal to the brand and product – but not the retailer.

And before you get angry at me for buying expensive moisturiser when supposedly “the cheap stuff is just as good”, I beg to differ. ’nuff said.

I routinely buy lots of stuff online: gadgets / tech / software, sneakers / clothes, books / music / tv / movies (almost all digital now, not physical), and sporadic other stuff for myself or gifts.  But it’d never occurred to me to buy such an obvious fit for online retailing – cosmetics – until now (dumb), thanks to Gerry Harvey’s bleating (dumber).

coincidentally, an entrepreneurial friend in Sydney has described one of his new endeavours, which tweaks my energy-efficiency & sustainability buttons, in this case in business IT, with a view to me being involved at my local implementation level.  it has legs, and in principle at least, it excites me to be able to blend my IT skills with something that “matters” in these global-warming times.

that catch is, the kind of clients they’re going for would likely require me to wear a suit, or at least collar-n-tie etc, and work amongst “corporate IT” types, and in much more complex IT environments, over which i’d have little control.  i flinch severely at that idea.  i’ve always considered standard business attire to be utterly absurd samian reductionism & never wanted anything to do with it.  i worked in & dressed for exactly this situation (thankfully only in those times while on-site with a client) for 4 years in Sydney before moving down here.

i’ve been a 1-man-band in small-business IT consulting for the last 10 years in Melbourne, serving the IT needs of a rarely-changing set of clients.  jeans, tshirt & sneakers are my uniform.  for the most part, so do my clients  (apparently last week a new employee at one of my clients who didn’t know my name referred to me as “that skaterboy”!)  i don’t have a string of MSCE creds to my name – i’ve rarely needed such to meet my client’s needs.  my “office” is a 2nd bedroom, so i don’t have the raft of bricks-n-mortar expenses that bigger fish have.  as such, i don’t charge anything like $180/hour that suit-wearers in this genre typically do.  it works well for us both.

there is a undetermined (& as yet undiscussed) chance i could continue meeting their needs via various remote access technologies from afar, using the services of a low-level hardware jockey for the relatively fewer times when hands-on-site is needed.  or maybe not.

and i’m investigating or considering other options, non-IT-consulting options.  all transportable, work-from-home up-north options.

but there’s also this debt to pay off, which will take at least a few years at status quo, or sooner if i engage other income sources – like this opportunity.  it’d be nice, but not essential, to move up north debt-free.

but the time & headspace to fit this in would likely leave little time to foster the transportable-income alternatives that i need to facilitate life up north!

is this something i should seriously consider, & put aside my disdain for The Suit (and everything that comes along with it), for an option that would further tie me to Melbourne & probably delay a northerly move, but be ‘expedient’?  or is this a diversion from who i am, and where i want to be in 1-3 years time?

as i suspected, Copenhagen was largely a failure, as all those going into it knew before they even arrived.  Naomi Klein had it right when interviewed at the start of Copenhagen – all this “Hopenhagen” bullshit is (almost) useless, childish, and naive.  why “hope” for something that isn’t even up for discussion?  the Copenhagen talks have been little more than a stepping stone to where we needed to to be YEARS AGO, with years more yet to go.  i guess the problem will need to get a lot worse before our elected leaders cut the crap and do what’s necessary.  particularly Australia – thanks Liberal/National Coalition Opposition fuckheads, whose new leader is more concerned that school children learn about the bible… fuck me.  how many more things need to go wrong, how many more dead species, how many more collapsed dying ecosystems, how many more felled forrests, how much more desert, how much higher sea levels, how many more major destructive weather events, how many more people displaced, how much more devastation will be needed before we pull our heads out of our arses?

oh, and on the topic of Australian politics, Rudd’s henchman Conroy is still trying to protect the children, by implementing futile compulsory ISP-level filtering.  fuck me… (again).  we concerned citizens will need to get smart in our collaboration to turn the tide on this shit.

work is mad busy, exacerbated in part by my appalling time management, particularly in the mornings – just can’t seem to get into it.  Dell have fucked me/client over bigtime, 6+ weeks late delivering a new server that should’ve taken about 2 weeks, which has created a crunch over xmas/new-year, and they’ve been belligerent in their non-communication at every step.  i’ll probably blog that one separately once the dust settles.  & i’ve dropped the ball with a (small, minor) client who’s decided/realised that for this specific job at least, someone else will have to fill the gap of my lax attention to their needs. *sigh*  perhaps, in yanking back on the joystick controlling my life that was in freefall only a few months ago, i’ve scraped the undercarriage a bit…  hopefully the landing gear is still intact.

psychologically speaking, i’ve been fairly consistently boyant, overall.  no one-day plummets like i mentioned a few weeks ago, thank $deity!  a couple of my psych sessions have been very thought-provoking.  i’ll probably go into more detail – with my psych, and here – in the new year when our sessions resume, but i’m beginning to think that a significant part of the last 5 years dysthymia has been about my unresolved issues/questions that brought me to Melbourne in the first place: my life’s purpose.  10 years ago i felt itchy, unhappy, unsettled, and made a decision to leave Sydney and move to either Melbourne and start a new life vaguely of the kind i’ve been leading; or to Byron Bay / Northern Rivers and lead probably an entirely different lifestyle.  i was convinced to do the former, and ultimately fell into a new situation, and particularly a new self-employed career, without barely lifting a finger, let alone making any conscious choices about exactly what i wanted to do.  and i think that kinda worked for several years, but essentially only as a distraction; a distraction that became undermined and peeling around the edges as i became unable to ignore broader issues going on in the world, and realise that i wasn’t – and still aren’t – doing much of anything about them.  perhaps it’s time to face up to the fact that i’m coasting, not doing something that i’m passionate about anymore, and find a way to move into something else that is/does.  the two burning questions are: 1) what? and 2) what, that can also support my financial needs to pay off this small mountain of debt i’ve created for myself?  not saying i’m about to retire to Byron Bay & become a hippy, but i think something needs to change.

and perhaps it’s just circumstances & back-drop, but we’ve also been looking back to my childhood, teens & early 20s, realising how a combination of a ‘mildly inhibited family culture’ (at least so far as self-expression is concerned), self-inhibition due to my confused/unresolved sexuality until i ‘woke up’ at 23yo, and $deity knows what else, lead to me being such a late bloomer.  maybe it still has significance, maybe not, time will tell.

speaking of my parents, i’ve decided, with some trepidation, to bring them up to speed to some extent with my depression of the last few years.  i’ve held back from bringing them into that drama, because from 750km away, there’s not much they can really do about it anyway, other than worry, and they find enough to worry about without me adding to it.  at least now i can honestly put a positive forward-looking spin on it.

things are still going well with J.  we’ve spent some good times together over the last few weeks. i continue to feel comfortable with him, always learning more about him, seemingly connecting on several different levels.  but i’ve been plagued with one major concern.  why the fuck is he doing this couples-counseling with his “ex” boyfriend?  i finally forced the issue last week, and he agreed i deserved to have some idea of what was going on, without needing/wanting to know details.  i can’t say the answer made me feel any, or at least much better, other than knowing a bit more of the history between he & his ex.  i still feel just as vulnerable.  my rational head hopes it will help him sort out his issues, which can only be a good thing in the long run, and my ego hopes he’ll come to his senses and realise that i’m prepared to – *gulp* – commit to him and give him the love and attention he deserves.  (i can’t believe i just said that, but there it is – raw expression of thought and feeling; damn scary).  but ultimately things are still pretty touch-n-go, i can see it in his language (verbal & non-verbal) that he’s holding back (as am i) until he comes to some resolution with his ex, and he knows it, and he knows i know it.  it’s torture.  i just hope my philosophy/observations of “windows of opportunity” is wrong this time…

and as if that admission wasn’t enough, how ’bout this parting thought:

i have NO IDEA why, but i’ve been preoccupied with internet/new-media/social-media MARKETING for a while now (moreso than usual), including reading a few of the overwhelmingly-many blogging/tweeting marketers out there.  this is a subset of human i’d previously looked down upon as cockroaches out to get me (or at least my money). WTF???

are you fed up with Optus (Mobile) & want out, but locked into a 24month contract with massive early cancellation penalty? well here’s your free chance out!

Optus have added clause 5.2A(personal)/5.3(business) to their SFOA – Standard Form Of Agreement – covering most pre- & post-paid mobile customers.  if, like many, you object to it, they have the obligation to allow you to end the contract without “early termination fees”.

you only pay for outstanding calls, and however many months worth of handset repayments you have left (if any – some people choose to pay up-front, or higher monthly without handset fees). for me that’s 12 or 13 months x ~$7 = $84, which is 10% of the early termination fee that would ALSO apply if YOU (or I) were in breach of contract. but in this case, it’s Optus who are.

the change they made (effective 12 August 09) is to block you from calling certain Optus mobile numbers – numbers that happen to be used by cheap international calling services, which is just plain anticompetitive. but the SFOA change is so vaguely worded it could be applied to ANY ph# they choose in future. even if you’ve never used such a service before, they are negatively materially impacting the terms of their contract with you for the remainder period of your contract, and you are at liberty to cancel it without early-cancellation-penalty.

their obligations under the SFOA give you until Friday 4th September to object and cancel (without penalty) before they consider you to have agreed with the new terms.

if you cancel in this way, you’ll probably have the choice to revert to a month-to-month arrangement (as would happen automatically when a contract runs out) and consider your options, or cancel immediately & go elsewhere (probably needs a 1 month notice anyway?).

if you call and eventually convince them to cancel your contract without penalty, i urge you to call again a few days later, or at least a few days before your next billing period begins, and confirm that your account has in fact been marked for contract cancellation without penalty.  Optus use one of the oldest tricks – they say “yes, sir” on the phone, but do nothing at their keyboard.  when your next bill arrives you realise nothing’s been done, you’re still in contract, but now the deadline for objecting to the new terms has passed.  when i called a 2nd time, the CS rep knew nothing of what i was talking about, i was still in-contract with no indication i was cancelling – i had to explain again, be put on hold, then received a confirmation/reference number.

i was told each time that the early-cancellation penalty will still appear on my bill, but i have to call up to have it credited before paying it.  naturally i expect that CS rep to say “sorry sir, you’ve asked to cancel your contract, the early termination penalty applies” and have to explain it all again.  but hopefully that’ll be the final moment of victory.

after swearing i’d never go back to Telstra for anything (other than this barely-used land-line for ADSL), and i may yet go elsewhere, i never thought a Telstra competitor – Optus – could become so unpalateable that they made Telstra look appealing.  things must be getting tight on the Optus books…

after watching the first episode of Office Tigers with very mixed feelings, i couldn’t help but laugh and cry at SBS’s sense of irony by following it immediately with Dead Tired.  having wrestled with my own “sleep hygiene” issues over the last several years, it’s obvious to me that the importation of western business (and social) culture into India – including less sleep – is likely to result in the same dramatic impact to health – but on an Indian population scale.

several years ago i read a book called ‘The Promise Of Sleep” (2000, William Demment & Christopher Vaughan).  Demment is a pioneering sleep researcher, investigating not only sleep, but the usually hidden consequences of not getting enough of it, over a period of almost 50 years, especially back when almost no one else was giving it a second thought.  Dead Tired is an insightful TV documentary covering similar ground, based on a broader body of more modern research, and which echos Demment’s concerning findings and warnings about our sleep-deprived culture.

in the offices of Office Tigers in Channai, the American co-CEO inculcates his Indian employees with what I view as the WORST aspects of modern western business culture.  he roams the office chastising employees for not wearing their ties; has his supervisors warn their employees that if they take a day off, it’d better be only for something serious like septisemia rather than the flu; and encourages working absurdly long hours (the office is open 24/7 running shifts – there’s no locks on the doors, just a few security guards).  this is all justified by claiming to be a meritocracy rewarding hard work.  yeah, right…

India’s burgeoning middle classes (which it never really had much of until relatively recent times) are understandably clamouring for the salary and lifestyle that comes from working in these new western companies.  but what are the consequences?  not only are a billion Indians (and more than a billion Chinese) rapidly developing societies with the same energy demands of the west, with all the global warming & finite resource consumption concerns that have been mulled over by east & west alike for many years now, but they’re following our footsteps into sleep-deprived western lifestyles!

what will it be like for such a huge populace to suffer (and fail to tackle) the hidden health problems that come from typical western sleep-deprived lifestyles?  just look around you:  lower productivity, horrible car accidents, sleep apnoea, high blood pressure, obesity, depression, and more.  yay…

and once again, SBS rocks with two fascinating documentary series, whose combination is deliciously ironic.

IceTV has won its three year battle against Channel Nine’s specious copyright suit against IceTV.

http://www.icetv.com.au/news/?p=614

Nine’s competition reviewed IceTVs processes from a copyright perspective years ago & decided there was nothing for them to answer for.

so i’m not sure what, at this late stage, Channel Nine’s end-game was supposed to be in persevering with the case, but now that i’ve switched entirely to using Elgato eyeTV + IceTV (in other words, the tv tuner in my TV is rarely used now), not-infrequently seeing “not available” in the program guide for Channel Nine (due to IceTV’s observance of the original judgement’s ruling) made them (Nine) look – once again – like frakking idiots.

if it’s not in IceTV, I CAN’T (read: won’t) WATCH IT !  admittedly there’s rarely anything on Channel Nine worth watching… more Two & A Half Men, anyone??? <yawn>

lets hope Channel Nine give up on this bullshit for good, and, um, perhaps focus on being a TV station in dire need of pulling thier finger out, programming-wise.

i hope the people at IceTV are drinking the champaigne tonight, they sure deserve it after being dragged through 3 years go specious copyright claim bullshit in Nine’s futile attempt to dodge the future.

http://www.adsl2exchanges.com.au/viewexchange.php?Exchange=NCOE

Internode, like all ISPs, must first decide if they have a ‘business case’ for installing their own ADSL infrastructure into an exchange.  Only then can they begin what is clearly an arduous process.  Internode decided on 5 September 2007 that they DID have a business case, and from that point on, have every incentive to do so promptly.

TWO DAYS LATER they changed status to ‘Removed’, and based on what I’ve read for years on this issue, were presumably denied ‘space’ in the exchange by Telstra.

15th April 2008, more than 7 MONTH later, they had another crack at it – based on what change in circumstances I don’t know, but I’m guessing at some stage Telstra said “OK, try again, sucker”.

Then, not until 12th January 2009, ANOTHER NINE MONTHS LATER, did it move from In Build-Waiting (for other competitors to gain glacial sequential access to the exchange), to In Build.  Hoo-fucking-ray.

If you’re wondering why, have a read of Simon Hacket’s (Internode’s MD) answers to many common questions about this shambolic state of affairs caused largely by Telstra (but only for competitors, Bigpond seem to get clear fast access to exchanges when they need):

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=631758

Who knows how much longer I’ll have to wait for it to become active, before having to run the gauntlet of the DSLAM running out of ports due to the sudden exodus of Internode customers from the Telstra DSLAM to the Internode DSLAM.  Or perhaps it’ll transpire like it did when I lived in Windsor/Prahran until late 2005, only to see the Agile DSLAM there come online within a few month after I’d moved elsewhere.

I’m simply astonished that this crap has been allowed to happen for so many years.  Where’s the ACCC in all this?  Still asleep?  They’re clearly not looking after my interests on this issue.

Telstra obtained the vast majority of its copper network, and the exchange buildings they all connect to, on MY DIME, and those of my parents & grand-parents (and you & yours) BEFORE they were progressively privatised.  It is PUBLIC property (that should have access granted by an independent body) – or at least should have been deemed so, and that is where this whole farce had its genesis.  ‘Cuz a privatised Telstra with its network owned intact was supposed to be good for competition, right?  Wrong again…  Fucked over by powerful vested interests, again…

Aside from the lack of an actual iPhone *application* for Gaydar, where this latest adaptation to the GaydarMobile website may be an acceptable compromise (I have no intention of finding out), my point is that I still think you’re NUTS for wanting to charge me US$48 for Gaydar + GaydarMobile, vs $28 for just Gaydar (3 months).

So, lemme get this right.  Regardless of which mobile device I use, you want to charge me a 70% subscription premium to access the same service, simply for the ‘privilege’ of doing so from a mobile device?

I can’t comment on what others may or may not be doing specifically in the online gay dating site genre as regards mobile device access, but I *can* comment on the broader explosion of mobile accessibility options, and the business models behind them, and yours is heading, in my humble opinion, in 180 degrees the exact wrong direction, by charging *any* premium, let alone such a steep one, and is thus doomed to failure.

It’s my contention that free – or very low premium – access to said same service via mobile would attract a larger subscription (from the many guys who baulk at sitting down in front of a computer for any length of time – you see this sentiment expressed in profiles all the time), and thus pay your development costs, and *then* reap the reward.  If you need any evidence of this rapidly growing phenomenon, I would draw your attention to iPhone apps such as WhosHere (for a ‘general’ audience but clearly embraced by gay men) & Grindr (specifically for gay men) to name just two.

Yours sincerely,

On 18/03/2009, at 3:02 AM, Simon Johnson wrote:

Hello iPhone Fan,

You recently got in touch with us as you’d like to use GaydarMobile on your Apple iPhone. Great news! We’ve updated GaydarMobile to now work on iPhone.  You’ll find GaydarMobile is easier to use on your iPhone than logging into the online version of Gaydar that uses frames and might be difficult for your phone to understand.

GaydarMobile lets you plan your perfect night in, even when you’re out. Using your mobile phone you can send and receive messages, view profiles and chat to your friends and favourites. Here’s how…

§  Text GAYDAR to 69080 (UK only) or tap in www.gaydarmobile.co.uk through your mobile phone internet browser.
§  Log in with your existing Gaydar username and password. If you don’t have a Gaydar account, you can join free through GaydarMobile or online at Gaydar.net
§  Once you’re logged into GaydarMobile follow the on screen instructions to validate your number.

Once you’ve followed the above steps you’re ready to use GaydarMobile. Congratulations! GaydarMobile is very easy to use, and you’ll find that you have the same features available on your mobile as you do online. So it shouldn’t take too long for you to find your way around.

GaydarMobile isn’t a text service, however it does use data and you should check with your service provider if you have a data package. Most call packages now include data as standard.

Start cruising from the comfort and privacy of your mobile phone handset, no matter where you are. On the train, at your desk, on the beach, in your favourite bar or queuing in the supermarket. Who knows, a hot guy might be behind you!

I hope you find this information useful, if there are any other features of Gaydar you’re unsure about or need help with, hit reply and ask questions. We’re here 7 days a week, from 8am to 11pm (GMT).

At Gaydar we are committed to providing our customers with the best possible service. If you haven’t received the support you’d expect, please let me or any of the Gaydar Support Team know.

Play your way, enjoy Gaydar.

Simon Johnson
Marketing & PR Manager
QSoft Consulting Ltd

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise what they were aiming for – ordinary computer users (especially Windows users) don’t usually pay much attention to the details of such prompts, they’ve been dumbed down (by necessity) to just click yes to software update offers.  Next thing you know, you’re using Safari instead of whatever browser was the default before.  Nice one Apple.  As a sysadmin for several client’s networks, this is a friggen PITA at best – very few ordinary Windows users *ACTUALLY* invited you in.

In response to the justified outcry, they added a facility to exclude any offered item from current & future update offers.  Seems fair, right?  But to use said feature, you first have to UNtick the ones you DO want, TICK the ones you DON’T want, then drill into a menu to say “don’t offer me these updates again”, then then REtick the updates you need.  Are you fucken kidding me, Apple?!?

But wait, it gets worse – there’s yet another major disingenuous aspect to this new ‘feature’:

Apple Software Updater remembers your selections only on a per-user basis, not – as it should be – a system-wide basis.  So if a different user is in control when the scheduled check for updates next runs, all the unwanted software is offered again, ticked on for installation, by default.  Great… :(

I also suspect that when any product moves up a full 1.0 version increment, it’s again offered, despite previous instruction not to.  We’ll see very soon when Safari 4 comes out of beta…

You don’t fool me, Apple.  FUCK OFF with your insidious worming your way into my client’s systems.  It’s hard enough to administer flocks of “dumb users” without their default browser being switched out from under them (which can have major consequences for some sites – particularly intranet sites in business that require specific browser brands/versions), or MobileMe Control Panel or Bonjour being needlessly installed.

The deliberate cunning behind how Apple Software Updater for Windows works in its fine detail is a clear display of Apple’s uglier side.  Shame on you Apple, it’s just plain deceptive & dishonest, and very Microsoftish.  Mozilla worked their butt off to get Firefox to where it is in market share, and they earned every % of it honestly.

i’ve sat on my hands long enough before weighing in on this topic, waiting to see if it was all just a bad dream and i’d wake up and the world would be a sensible place again.

yeah, ok, i’m awake now.

seems Senator Conroy has either lost his mind, or thinks we never had one.

i’m fed up with do-gooder Catholics who think they can save the world/us by hiding it from us, and parade it as “protecting the children” so they can hurl their intelligence-insulting “what?  are you against children being protected from bad stuff?” bullshit.

i vehemently reject his proposal for compulsory ‘net censorship in Australia.

you can read all about the bone-headedness of his plan here at nocleanfeed.com.

PLEASE contact your local MP, and Sen. Conroy himself.

i’ll try to be as polite as i can be in the face of such a stupid stupid man…

“Hi, received your letter.for coverage issues on iphone plz contact iphone tech support on 133713.have credited $59 as g/will.-Optus, Chintu”

Well, short but sweet.  Thankyou Optus, the credit is appreciated.  I’ll call that number next week and see what news I can get on my speed & coverage issues.

techydude

———-

” I wish to register my complaint about the 3G data performance I am experiencing on my iPhone 3G since I commenced using it on the Optus 3G network a few months ago.

At best I achieve an average 470kbps down / 270kbps up, often with latencies in the several THOUSAND ms – that’s several SECONDS, which is utter ridiculousness.  Often, like right now, i get ~120kbps/80kbps.

And too often I have no 3G connection at all.

My data speeds did not change at all with two firmware updates, whereas 3G phone call reliability did improve markedly, and other networks are achieving ‘somewhat’ better results, which suggests this is not an iPhone issue, but a carrier capacity issue.

This is not “3G”, it is not the product’s implied performance (yes, I noticed your sales documentation furiously avoided mentioning anything remotely resembling an assurance of any particular bandwidth performance), it’s barely better than GPRS.

Clearly your 3G network is at a similar level of maturity as your GSM network was until the late 1990s, but little do your customers or prospective customers know they’ll be stepping a decade into the past when they “upgrade” to Optus 3G until they’re locked in for a year or two – something you neglect to mention in your sales material.

Because of this my iPhone 3G is rendered much less useful than it needs to be, and I’m also paying for a lot more bandwidth than I could ever hope to use in a month at these appalling speeds.

When I read in the IT press that Optus had achieved the global distinction of having the poorest 3G performance, I knew my patience for the normal early adopter teething issues had gone on long enough.  Even then it took me at least another month to draft this complaint and still no improvement or communication.

You’ve been naively optimistic either that your 3G network would cope with the iPhone 3G (and its emerging ilk) era, or that there won’t be a major customer backlash.  When did Optus become a classic Corporate Psychopath?

I’d estimate you’re verging on being in breach of the Trade Practices Act as regards “fitness for purpose” and all the ‘class action’ fun that suggests; and as an Optus customer of over 13 years whose been pushed too far this time, that’s a bandwaggon I’d be only too happy to jump upon.

However I’d rather hear some good news, that you’re on top of the problem, a bucket load of new capacity is on the way and we should be through this within the next few months, oh, and sorry for the disappointment, here’s some of your wasted money back.

But so far you’ve been silent.  Were you hoping I just wouldn’t notice?  Time to ‘fess up, Optus, or that $40M you’ve supposedly lost because of the iPhone 3G will only be the start. “

techydude

Their own product’s labeled nutritional advice didn’t stand up to the rigours of two New Zealand high school students’ science class experiment performed in 2004 to confirm the veracity of the product’s labeled nutritional advice, and thus drew their attention to other aspects of the product’s label – a long-standing claim of “4 times the vitamin C of oranges”.

These two high-school girls in fact found, using standard high school science lab equipment, that these Ribena Ready-To-Drink products had very little vitamin C, with the competitor products they expected to fare poorly actually containing 4 times that of Ribena (which doesn’t sound too hot either).

The girls approached Ribena directly by mail, but were ignored, then after a follow-up phone call were brushed aside with the glib response that the ’4 times’ claim referred to blackcurrants vs oranges, not Ribena vs other juice products. So they look it to the media, and NZ’s TV ONE consumer affairs show “Fair Go” put it to air in late-2004, thus bringing it to the attention of NZ’s Commerce Commission (not to mention GSK themselves for the second time). Despite this, in 2005 Ribena proceeded with high profile advertising, including television, perpetuating its “4 times”claim.

Over two years later, the NZ regulator announced its findings a few months ago. GSK pleaded guilty to 15 representative charges (80 actual) of misleading consumers in both the nutritional information, as well as the claims of “4 times the vitamin C content of oranges”, ordered to pay $217 500, amend its nutritional advice to reflect reality & stop claiming the “4 times” bullshit.

GSK’s TV ad, and the accompanying www.ribenathefacts.com.au, has Mr Sayers claiming that “(our) testing method used to determine the level of vitamin C was unreliable” (how can one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world be less reliable than a high school science lab?), “and we were unaware of this at the time” (except for the 2005 ad campaign following the bad rap you got from ‘Fair Go’?), and that ‘vitamin C levels had deteriorated over time and didn’t meet that claimed on the label’. Who knows for how long Ribena’s Ready-To-Drink product quality has been “deteriorating”. Apparently they’ve now removed all references to vitamin C & amended their nutritional advice, and made amends in the NZ popular press.

Does anyone really buy the “we didn’t notice there was almost no vitamin C in the product we heavily advertise as having so much vitamin C” bullshit? GlaxoSmithKline’s Ribena fraud is a textbook example of Stupid Greedy White Men hard at work with their heads up their arses trying to make that extra buck. When any company (or individual) seeks to defraud its own customers, they create a climate of mistrust amongst consumers in general – one in which 14-year-olds, inculcated with such scepticism, seek to verify the labeled nutritional advice of innocuous fruit juice drinks, but find the truth lies elsewhere, thus reinforcing the climate of mistrust.

The end result? A company essentially drags itself through the mud & damages its own genuine good potential as a supplier of nutritional products, and takes us all a step closer to life as a consumer being such a risk/rip-off that we must test products ourselves – what a fracking drag! :-(

p.s. when i first saw the TV ad, hearing Sayer’s statements escalate, i was actually waiting for a punch-line like “but no!  our products in fact have FIVE times as much vitamin C!”.  but no such punch-line was to be heard.  see!  i can be an optimist, it’s just that i’m perpetually prepared to be disappointed by large corporations.  i wonder how that came to be…

modern society considers many acts of metaphorical bell-ringing to be taboo, the proponent tarred with the brush of the boy who cried wolf too many times – particularly if the prescribed actions threaten to detract from someone’s profit margin. it’s as though the merest possibility of overstatement or marginal error were a sin a hundred times worse than that being warned.

i’ll postpone pondering the roots of such a passive status-quo-maintaining culture, but suffice to say, when it comes to this topic, i have no intention of censoring myself any further.

there are 3 film/tv documentaries that have genuinely literally changed my life, each personally epiphanal, for which i hold the opinion (regardless how unlikely) that every single person on the planet should see. the first was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos 8/13-part tv series (1980). when i saw it in ’88, it gifted me a sense of perspective about the natural world and my (our) place within it that formed a lasting foundation for my worldview.

it was a long time between drinks to the second, The Corporation (2004). unfortunately it was instrumental in triggering 2+ years of dysthymic depression, but ultimately painted for me a very clear picture of what’s wrong with our modern world, and what needs to be done to achieve a capitalist society that’s also genuinely fair, sustainable & democratic, rather than one run mostly by stupid greedy white men.

the third, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) helped bring me back to life, & contextualise what i think is the most pressing challenge our civilisation has ever faced.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore pulls together a wide range of examples of climate change, history, political distortion, & human nature that doesn’t just explain what global warming is in simple & eloquent terms, but also why global warming concerns have been ignored, discounted or marginalised for so long, as well as the need for prompt & substantial action.

if you think there is anything remotely resembling a raging equally-sided dispute amongst scientists that global warming is real & caused by our fossil-fuelled emissions, or might instead be some climatic natural phenomenon whose cause we’re still unaware; if you think global warming probably won’t affect you personally all that much; if you think an extra 2 billion Chinese & Indians rapidly adopting the same consumerist lifestyle as ours using the same greenhouse gas-producing power sources & transport won’t make much difference; if you think you can’t make a positive difference, directly & indirectly; then this DVD is for you. it’s for everyone.

some have suggested that Al Gore is using An Inconvenient Truth as a political tool for the 2008 US presidential elections. no surprise i say ‘bring him on!’ – if it hadn’t been for 11+ years of Little Johnny’s politically expedient amorality, i’d still be wondering why American’s kept the Evil Chimp in power for 8 years too. others accuse Gore of scare-mongering. well, quiet little debates in science labs & school rooms, & government scientists being silenced or censored by their own government just isn’t getting the job done.

the dots have been connected.

the nay-sayer climate change ‘skeptics’ (a shameful miscarriage of the term) have been revealed as the self-interested greedy few, or their pandering politicians, posessing little or no scientific merit to justify further inaction (to say nothing of amoral cynical pseudo-skeptic-fanboys like Tim Blair who sprout vitriole & peddle inane examples of cold climates as supposed counter-proof, a policeman for the anti-bell-ringer mindset it would seem).

for many years Earth has been showing major signs that it is reaching saturation point in its ability to process our fossil-fuel emissions, and beyond which corrective action may take hundreds of years to reverse due to a run-away domino effect. almost every biological system on earth is in decline. how bad must it get before we wake up?

how can we possibly convince the rapidly developing world to adopt low greenhouse gas emitting technologies & techniques if we hypocritically don’t follow our own advice?

i’ll cover this more in a separate post, but addressing climate change in a sensible, global, prompt but staged manner holds enormous potential for commercial success, without horrific economic consequences. but to cut to the chase, it ultimately comes down to ordinary consumers becoming aware of the issues & the solutions, taking what steps they can as individuals, AND pressuring their elected representatives to do something. nothing will happen or change until we do. John Howard is living proof that Political Will is a renewable resource that springs from the Eternal Well Of Opinion Polls – all we need to do is point him in the correct direction.

someone once told me that a reasonable definition of stupidity is always doing the same thing, but expecting a different outcome. someone else once told me “for things to change, first i must change”. and another “think globally, act locally”. they all seem to have currency on this issue. we are all part of the problem, and we all can and need to be part of the solution.

it’s time to walk our talk that we care about the world we live in.

buy, borrow, beg, or download a copy if you must, but please watch this movie. watch it with a friend or two & talk about it afterward. watch the end credits seeded with ideas on how to do something.

like visiting www.climatecrisis.net for heaps of ideas we all can do to reduce our impact on global warming. some are easy, some are cheap, some just require a different way of thinking & aren’t really all that inconvenient. some will even keep you fit. ALL of them will make for a better world, a better home, in our own lifetimes.

and stay tuned here for details of my own efforts to reduce my ‘carbon footprint’ :-)

few things twist my knickers more than Little Johnny (described by Dubya as “a man of principle” – high praise indeed) demonstrating he has no principles (other than a tendency to foist his Christian doctrine views on Australians), and in its place an amoral stance for the sake of political expediency.

while being interviewed by Tony Jones on ABC’s Lateline 5/2/07, these are a few of his latest words on global warming & what he thinks Australia’s ‘response’ should be, now that he’s suddenly donned on his new green coat:

“We have to play our part, but we have massive advantages because of our fossil fuels. We have uranium and, therefore, the potential of nuclear power, and we want to behave in a way that plays to Australia’s strengths and protects Australia’s employment. We don’t want to give all of that away in some kind of knee jerk reaction that damages the Australian economy.”

“…and the whole focus of our policy should be on reducing carbon emissions in a way that doesn’t damage the Australian economy unreasonably or unfairly”

when asked if he thought coal-fired power stations were a major, if not the major contributor to global warming:

“Stationary power is certainly, yes, all round the world, and that’s why getting cleaner coal, it’s why looking at nuclear, which is the cleanest option of all, to run power stations you can’t run power stations, on the Australian experience, on wind and solar. You either run them on the way they’re run now, it’s predominantly coal or gas or sometimes hydro, or you run them, in the future, with nuclear. Nuclear becomes more viable economically as the cost of running coal fired power stations increases with the adoption of cleaner technology.”

more on nuclear being the “cleanest option” in a later post, but which will it be, PM, “clean” coal (a political tool/term for a technology that doesn’t exist yet), or nuclear? if you think “clean” coal will be too expensive & therefore nuclear is the only way to go, then just shut up about “clean” coal, ok?

“We are lucky as a country because we have the vast reserves of coal, and we’re the largest coal exporter in the world and we employ a lot of people in that industry and I’m determined that any response we provide doesn’t unfairly disadvantage or hurt them. The issue is, how can we, maintaining our economic strength, reduce the amount of carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere? Now, that’s the challenge and that’s why we want to keep the nuclear option on the table, and that’s why we want to look at clean coal technology.”

“lucky”, if you ignore the flip-side that our coal exports are a substantial part of the biggest problem in human history.

how can you even start the decade-long process of replacing coal with nuclear & still not unfairly disadvantage or hurt the coal industry? even using carbon sequestration to delay the inevitable will take just as long to develop, commercialise & roll out as nuclear, & also involves huge infrastructure costs, all of which adds up to higher energy costs for consumers. or is all this hot air about carbon sequestration just to make sure the coal industry vote for you later this year?

when pressed further on the question of whether continuing to export coal for use in dirty power stations (as virtually all of them are) is in Australia’s best interest as regards our share of global warming’s impact, i believe he’s correct – if you keep your morals out of the equation – that doing so would kill most of our coal industry and still not achieve much impact on global warming, as our cheap coal export recipients (Japan takes the lion’s share of our exports, & China is likely to become a major component too) would simply buy it elsewhere &/or use their own…

…unless all coal exporters put their balls on the block & stop selling it at the same time they stop using it themselves; a lofty & unlikely-at-this-stage goal to say the least.

on the issue of carbon taxing or trading schemes, and whether – as an alternative – the government should simply legislate that Australia’s coal-fired power stations adopt the carbon sequestration technologies Howard himself disingenuously espouses:

“That doesn’t sound very much to me like a market mechanism, when you compel somebody to apply a particular technology. It is far better, if you want to keep faith with the market approach, to develop a carbon pricing or carbon trading system”

legislating the population toward self-preservation worked for the transition away from leaded petrol, and away from ozone layer depleting CFCs, to name just a couple off the top of my head for which we & our children are already reaping the benefit. oh, that’s right, it was the former government that lead those changes (in Australia) for the public interest, despite the financial pain.

“It’s a question of how you do it and it’s a question of ensuring that Australia doesn’t become the international mug and introduces a system that penalises us, to the disadvantage of this country internationally. That’s why I’ve been very keen to link what we might do here with what is done internationally.”

i’m suddenly reminded of the two dorks interviewed in The Corporation who paid for their college tuition fees by announcing to the mass media “hi, we’re proud to be sponsored by <major coporation name>!”.  It was a totally unsustainable technique for anyone stupid enough to follow their footsteps when the media ceases to give a shit after the first stunt.  One of them (not the blond one!) went on to say “I have alot of faith in the corporate world because it’s always going to be there so you may as well have faith in it, because if you don’t then it’s just not good”.  nice to see those corporate funds creating some insightful future Suits poised with undoubtely more unsustainable tactics with which to take the world by storm.

when not placing their faith in a system that allows a collection of people to behave typically amorally, and sometimes totally imorally (by legislation requiring the bottom line to be put ahead of all other interests, even the public good), economists sometimes talk about the need for “destruction” to make way for “creation” in economic markets. and they would be right. as a society & its needs mature, old industries die out and new ones replace them – it’s been a frequent reality throughout industrial history. you do what you can for the displaced employees, but ultimately their jobs have to go, whether they’re blacksmiths, whalers, photolab film developers, or coal miners, whether it’s because we don’t need, or don’t want, their industry. when baking the cake kills you AND your neighbours, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an Australian or a Chinaman doing the eating.

it seems to me that John Howard:

• doesn’t have much faith in the economic benefit of carbon sequestration for coal-fired plants & merely talks about it because he needs to be seen talking green instead of just Nuke Nuke Nuke.

• will lead us invariably to nuclear power despite its massive infrastructural costs which we the consumer will ultimately pay for, all the while the “not in our backyard” mentality towards locations for both generation &, critically, the storage of nuclear waste permeating every Australian electorate (from hypothetical local consumption, as well as from that we already export) – especially South Australia which already has vast areas cordoned off from WW2 nuclear testing and some of the most geologically stable areas of the continent, good safe water port access, & despite loads of money to be made from providing world-class much-needed storage facilities.

• has no intention of setting the stage for a prompt but graceful move from coal to any other technology (other than decade-hence nuclear, or hypothetical clean-coal) for fear of losing coal votes while he is in office, & obviously leaving that political suicide job to the next guy.

• as usual intends to play Follow-The-USALeader, having no intention of being a leader of Australia, or on the world stage, by seriously & promptly encouraging the commercialisation & roll-out of proven renewable technologies, in deliberate preference to insisting that an alternative to coal has to fit with the existing Big Power generation paradigm & infrastructure (refer to my previous post on the decentralisation & democratisation of renewable technologies).

in other words, John Howard is STILL putting short term Big Business interests way ahead of the long-term sustainability of Big Business & the habitability of the country in which they & we reside.

this issue is too important to be influenced by comparatively insignificant political concerns & partisanship. if we do not address the issue now, there will not be a pleasant blue-green planet on which to play the game of politics. yet political posturing is the best John Howard can come up with – yet again.

next PM please.