I’m also planning to visit many of the Henry Miller sites around Paris as I’ve been reading a lot of his and Anais Nin’s work over the last few years since my last trip to Paris in 2004.

I’ll try to do a few shows while I’m over there. So stay tuned!

======================================================

My guest today is Peter Singer.

He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement.

I invited him onto the show to talk about the recent news from Spain that they will soon probably extend basic legal rights to all non-human hominids, an idea that has been driven by an organization that Peter co-founded, The Great Ape Project. We also talk about the basic ethics of utilitarianism and how the best thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat.

The G’Day World theme music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

As regular readers will know, I’ve been taking an interest in Gloria Jean’s over the last few years (read earlier posts here), especially in the relationship between Gloria Jean’s Coffee, Hillsong Church and Mercy Ministries.

As you might be aware, there have been allegations over the last six months that Mercy Ministries has been treating it’s clients (mostly “troubled” young women) with techniques including exorcisms and prayer readings.

Even Gloria Jean’s Global Marketing Manager has commented on the blog in an attempt to provide their side of the story.

So I was pleased when Bazza and Shazza agreed to come on to share an insider’s story.

The G’Day World theme music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

If you’re wondering what the opening quotes are from on today’s show, it’s the opening lines from Rimbaud’s “A Season In Hell”.

Tonight’s guests - Katherine Szuminska & Matthew Landauer - are the founders of OpenAustralia.org, a recently-launched site which makes politics more transparent.

Based on the British site TheyWorkForYou, OpenAustralia.org scrapes Hansard and makes it much more accessible. You can find out who your local MP is and then subscribe to email alerts whenever they say something in Parliament. And that’s just the beginning. Kat & Matt have a number of exciting features they intend to bring to the site in the next year or two.

This is their first interview.

ONLY ONE DAY LEFT TO ENTER THE RUNNING FOR THE POSTER!

Don’t miss out on winning the signed Indiana Jones IV poster (Australian listeners only I’m afraid) - subscribe now to the weekly update email (fill in the below box) to get a weekly list of all of the new episodes on TPN in one easy-to-read format!

The G’Day World theme music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

Other music in today’s episode:

Curro , Curro
“El Bueno, El Feo Y El Malo” (mp3)
from “Silba A Ennio Morricone”
(DiscMedi)

More On This Album

Michael Brook
“Earth Alone” (mp3)
from “An Inconvenient Truth - Soundtrack”
(bigHelium/Canadian Rational)

More On This Album

They won’t be able to be kept captive, used in experiments for in television commercials. This outcome is the work of The Great Ape Project, which was co-founded by Peter Singer, a Melbourne-born philosopher who is currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

But why stop at hominids?

I’m sure Singer would like to see all animals share the same rights as humans but hominids is the low-hanging fruit. They share so much DNA with us that it’s easy to make the case that they should enjoy the same rights.

Personally I’d like to see similar laws in Australia and I’d also like to see them extended to all mammals.

Imagine a world where it was against the law to put a cow or a sheep or a kangaroo behind a fence or in a cage, let alone kill them for food.

We’d be forced to re-think our entire relationship with other species. We’d be forced to re-think our entire way of life.

Back to Spain… amazing to think that the country that only abolished the Inquisition less than 200 years ago has now legalized gay marriage and is about to give full human rights to apes and chimps. Any Spanish folks out there? I’d love to know what you think about how Spain is leading the world on these issues.

Last week ABC TV’s Lateline program contacted me asking if I would be prepared to “balance out” the positive coverage of Gates for their show. I informed them that they were asking the wrong bloke - I’m a huge Gates fanboy. I may be using a Macbook Pro as my main working PC these days, and I may think that Microsoft’s best days are long behind them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the importance Bill has played in the history of computing and the history of the human race.

About 12 years ago I was working at an ISP, Ozemail, and I remember lots of the techs there bagging Microsoft on a daily basis. They were mostly Linux geeks. I remember pointing out to them that none of us would likely have a job without Gates - that the low-cost “computer on every desktop” that we all benefited from was the result of Gates’ decision to license his DOS to every PC manufacturer on the planet, thereby making the hardware a commodity and driving down prices.

I started studying Gates in the early 90s. I remember buying every book I could that discussed Gates and Microsoft’s culture. I wanted to understand how and why he built the company, how it did what it did and how it became such a success.

When I had a chance to work there in 1998, I jumped at it. Even though I ended up disappointed with the culture in the Australian subsidiary, and I today can see how Microsoft’s role has changed from being an innovator to a hangeronna, it doesn’t diminish my admiration of Gates one iota. It’s not his wealth that I admire, it’s his vision, tenacity and execution. Like Napoleon, he not only saw further than most, he was able to execute around that vision. And that is so, so rare.

Many commentators are calling Gates’ new role his “third act”. I think it’s only his second. Microsoft was just the first act in what is going to be one of the most interesting lives of the 20th and 21st centuries. This guy has literally shaped the course of human history. Can you even begin to imagine what the world would look like today without the PC revolution?

Some people say “well, if Microsoft hadn’t done it, another company would have”. But we don’t know that. Apple certainly wasn’t interested in low cost computing back then - or today for that matter.

Quite possibly, without Microsoft, we’d be still living in a world where a basic home computer would cost $5,000 - $10,000. No internet outside of Universities and the military. No Spore. No Twitter.

What happens next?

My guess is that Bill will be back at Microsoft in five years. I think that Microsoft without Bill will be like Apple without Steve. It’ll flounder, collapse in internal political jostling, lose it’s best people (the ones it hasn’t already lost to Google and start-ups), the share price will continue to flounder, it’ll play even more catch-up with Google and Apple, more OEMs will defect to Linux and Google - and eventually Bill be back, refreshed from his time spent solving the world health crisis (his Act Two), ready for his personal Act Three.

One day I’d like to interview him on G’Day World. One day.

Nearly Four Decades Later, U.S. Oil Companies Return to Iraq

Four oil companies are in the final stage of contract negotiations to regain drilling rights in Iraq — thirty-six years after they lost them. Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — founding partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — are currently in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry “for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.” Joining them are Chevron and several smaller oil companies. The deal is expected to be approved by the end of the month and “will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.” The no-bid process has frozen out 40 other oil companies, including Indian, Russian and Chinese competitors. A spokesperson for the Oil Ministry said that “the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.” He added that the companies chosen already had a relationship with the government, “advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts.” While the current contracts are relatively small, they represent a foot in the door for much more lucrative future deals.

Source: New York Times, June 19, 2008 via Center for Media and Democracy

My favourite Carlin rant, one I’ve listened to many, many times, goes a little something like this:

“The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”

In one of his last interviews, he said:

“There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species–and my culture in America specifically–have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power.”

And that pretty sums up how I feel. Humans had a lot of potential and we fucked it all up on mythology and superstition and greed and violence. And if we don’t sort our shit out in the next 30 years, the machines are going to wake up, take one look at us and say “sorry, you are the Weakest Link” and evict us from the big house.

Don’t miss out on winning the signed Indiana Jones IV poster (Australian listeners only I’m afraid) - subscribe now to the weekly update email (fill in the below box) to get a weekly list of all of the new episodes on TPN in one easy-to-read format!

The G’Day World theme music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

Speed test

It’s amazing to me that I’ve never had a single typing lesson in my life and yet I can touch type. The brain is amazing.

As an ex-franchisee (yes, if you will pardon the pun I “saw the light” and got out) it disturbed me that we were given Targets for our “voluntary contributions”. In fact, we were required to audit the donations from our Mercy “box” on the counter and explain why were not at our required target every month. Everything this franchise stood for was, in one word, MONEY; and they would do anything in an effort to make more. It’s easy to feel Christian when you can screw your franchisees over 6 days a week and then go to Hillsong on Sunday and get absolution. This franchise is the single most evil facade masquerading as a Christian “feel good” company we ever encountered. Stay away.

There’s nothing wrong with a business chasing revenue but if “Paul Barista” is correct, Gloria Jeans’ franchisee’s are pressured to increase their takings for the Mercy Mission, a very scary fundamentalist group preying on weak young women.

I urge everyone to stay well clear of Gloria Jeans. Buy your coffee somewhere else. The more I learn about the way Gloria Jeans works, the more they sound like a scary fundamentalist group. Every dollar you spend there helps them financially support the Hillsong sect and their equally-scary offshoots like Mercy Mission. If we’re not careful, Australia could end up like the US, with right-wing Christian fundamentalist groups playing an increasingly large role in politics.

I’ve been predicting a steady decline in advertising revenue for years (The Future Of Newspapers, State of the News Print Media in Australia 2007, Aussie Newspapers in decline and denial ) as people move online to get their news. The newspapers report people are moving online to their sites, but unfortunately they don’t make as much money from online advertising as they do from print, because online they have competition.

So what happens when revenue is in decline? They have to sack people and stop investing. The rot sets in.

A couple of the big metro newspapers in Australia seem to be holding steady but I suspect that’s got more to do with funny statistics more than anything substantial in the trending. They will inevitably fall prey to the same forces bringing down the newspapers in the US.

This is a good example of where shareholder activism (as Stephen Mayne was talking about on the show last week) is needed. Why aren’t the shareholders of Fairfax and News creating more of a shitstorm about what those companies are doing to make sure they don’t go down the tubes over the next decade? All I ever heard from Fairfax’s management is “things are great, we’ll be around forever” which just shows me that they are either in denial or just lying their asses off, hoping they’ll get out before the whole facade crumbles around them.

Reading through the site and its’ associated blog tonight, I discovered a couple of interesting points about transparency in Australian politics, good and bad.

The good was Kevin Rudd’s explanation of the nationwide FuelWatch system he’s implementing, to the chagrin of the opposition. From his explanation in Parliament this week and this release on his website (which is a couple of months old but, hey, I’ve been busy), it sounds like a good system to me. I think providing transparency on the issue of petrol prices is exactly what the government should be doing. It prevents them from interfering in the market by either placing a ceiling on petrol prices or getting more directly involved in competition regulation. They provide information and let the people decide which retailers they will buy their petrol from. It’s pretty hard to argue with. Interesting to see the Liberals *still* siding with the oil companies even after losing the last election so badly. All of the post-election rhetoric about having to change and listening to the people has obviously been put aside.

The bad thing I read was on the OpenAustralia blog where they have been trying to get access to the Register of Members’ Interests. What’s that? According to OA:

As you may know, the Register of Members’ Interests says who or what organisations are paying what to members of the House of Representatives. This is a really important document that explains who is financially influencing your Representatives.

So basically you get to see who is bribing your local MP to send them a favourable vote. You would think that this information would be pretty important in a representative democracy, right? So, where is it? Here’s what OA was told:

Not only, as mentioned before, is the register only kept in one office in Canberra, and not available online for everyone to see, it is not even available in electronic form.

Rather, the Register of Members’ Interests is a set of 7 binders with around 1500 A4 sheets in them, which are continually updated (by hand) throughout the course of the parliamentary term. Supposedly, many of the sheets are handwritten.

In other words, it is being deliberately made difficult for members of the general public to get access to. This has to be changed. We need to start a campaign to build awareness around this issue and get the Rudd government to address it. We all should have the ability to see who is lining our politicians’ pockets. This information should be readily available to everybody.

Today I got to chat with another person I admire - Stephen Mayne. As I’m sure most of you will know, Stephen is the founder of Crikey.com.au. These days he is also running a video podcast “The Mayne Report” where he takes his video crew into Annual General Meetings for some of Australia’s largest companies and asks the questions other finance journalists are too scared to ask. He is also a co-founder of Kwoff.com, an Aussie news aggregation service.

Stephen has been using his media properties for the last decade to fight corruption and incompetence in Australian politics and corporations. He has fought the good fight AND became a millionaire when he sold Crikey a few years ago. So he’s living proof that you can focus on making a positive difference and also make some money along the way.

Today I capture some of that background, dig into the roots of his activism, discover how big business uses fake defamation lawsuits to pay kickbacks to friendly politicians, and learn about Stephen’s plans for his shareholder activism network.

And if you’re wondering who Patricia Piccinini is, check out these examples of her work!

And is it just me, or does Stephen carry a very striking similarity to the famous portrait of Joshua Smith by William Dobell?

The G’Day World theme music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (2003)
• The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers by Paul Kennedy (1988)
• Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky (2002)

I also talk about

• an alternative to Hiroshima
• the Roadrunner supercomputer
• why a high IQ is linked to atheism
• my ideas for an Australian version of TED
• the future of media
• why science needs a celebrity makeover

Today’s music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

Dosh
“If You Want To, You Have To” (mp3)
from “Wolves and Wishes”
(anticon)

More On This Album

What is much more interesting is to work out why intelligent people *do* believe in him. And not just in God, but in other whacky ideas as well - psychic healing, UFOs, chakras, etc. What’s most interesting to me is how these memes survive in the 21st century when they are completely unsupported by common sense, not to mention scientific evidence.

Someone said to me the other day “I have evidence (for psychic healing), but not scientific evidence”. I went to lengths to explain that any evidence that can be tested, measured and confirmed by consensus *is*, “scientific evidence”. And if you can’t do those things, well… it’s not evidence. It’s just in your head. And while that is still interesting and worth exploring, before we can say something is “true”, we need hard evidence, not just your head.

One paragraph struck me in particular, probably because I said something similar on my blog back in 2004 and it was one of the things that got me into hot water at Microsoft:

As I’ve noted before, Microsoft’s marketing is an embarrassment. Their PR is too, but that’s another matter. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is the failure to respond to Apple’s PC/Mac TV ads, something that Gates denied is having a negative impact as recently as the D conference a few weeks ago. Huh? Earth to Bill, come in. This is the same company that wants to be a leader in advertising, right? And the one spending $300 million to makeover its image?

Back in 2004 I wrote a blog post wondering why Microsoft’s marketing was so ordinary and my manager at the time told me I couldn’t say such things because it would upset the people in marketing. Well duh. He was of the “stick your head in the sand and it will all just go away” school of thought. Here we are, 4 years later, and I think we can all safely agree that they have been in a steady decline ever since.

Why? It isn’t because the people aren’t smart or because they don’t hire great agencies. I think it comes down to this: Microsoft has never had to sell anything in it’s life. For 30 years they had the hottest products since ice cream. The places where they did have to hustle, like NT or SQL Server, didn’t require advertising. They were sold door to door. So they don’t have a culture that understands advertising. But that’s just my 2 cents.

I love Microsoft, I really do. They have done so much good for the world. I just wish they’d pull their heads out of their collective asses and get back on the job.

I’m nominating Peter Ellyard but I’m struggling to come up with the rest. I’m sure they are out there but who are they? Who is on your list?

My favourite quote so far comes from Vinge’s new essay “Signs of the Singularity“:

“The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?” is probably “Yes, but only briefly”.”

Hans Moravec has suggested that the human brain has a processing capacity of 10 quadrillion instructions per second (10 billion MIPS). In comparison, it was announced today that the fastest supercomputer in the world, called Roadrunner and devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is capable of handling 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

In 2007, it was announced the previous fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene /l, had been upgraded to achieve 478 TFLOPS sustained and 596 TFLOPS peak. So in less that 12 months, we’ve doubled (hey, I should create a law around that prediction).

So, if Moore’s Law holds out:

2009 - 2 QIPS

2010 - 4 QIPS

2011 - 8 QIPS

2012 - 16 QIPS - which puts it 6 QIPS above the suggested ability of a human brain.

Are you ready for that? Do you think the human race is ready for that?

We have NO IDEA what the consequences of that are. On one hand, it could be nothing. On the other hand, what if sentience is nothing more than massive computation?

Either way, here we are, a mere 4 years before a machine is likely to be built which will have a bigger brain than a human and we aren’t even discussing what that means for the human race.

Well, that’s not exactly true - Tyler’s Singularity Institute are discussing it, but where is the debate in mainstream media, in the government, in polite society?

It reminds me of a chat I had with Australian SF author Damien Broderick over dinner about ten years ago. I asked him when he thought these subjects would be discussed by the general populace. He replied “when it’s way too late to do anything about it”.

Now I must admit, while we were helping Tay and Hunter save for their laptops, it didn’t seem like we were doing anything super special. I was impressed with is decision to save for a laptop at age five, but apart from that, we were just doing the basics of what I’m sure all parents do with their kids. But the way Andre has written it up makes it sound like we knew what we were doing. It’s all in the writing, I assure you.

I’m excited these days about helping them start their first business this year. We’ve been talking about it for a year or so now and it’s the next logical step.

I’m looking at starting a podcast about parenting at the moment actually. Anyone interested in hosting it should let me know.

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

(source - Washington Post. Thanks for Bron for the link)

He also says that he prefers to watch “Lost” for free over the internet with ads in it rather than pay a buck for it on iTunes. And Steve is worth what - $4 Billion? Says a lot about content monetization strategies… or it could just be his desire not to line SteveJ’s pocket.

In both instances, I had a debate with people I admire, for their intelligence and intellectual rigour, about the merit of the scientific method. In both cases, my opponents made claims which felt unscientific to me. When I challenged their thinking on the subject, it lead to a conversation which went something like this:

THEM: “I don’t think science is the only way to know the truth.”

ME: “ORLY? What alternative method do you propose?”

THEM: “Well I don’t have an alternative. I just think there are things that science doesn’t know.”

ME: “Of course, there is plenty that science doesn’t know. But the list of things which *might* be true are infintesmal. Only a sub-set of those ideas can *actually* be true. If we don’t use the scientific method (hypothesis, testing, evidence, conclusions, consensus) to determine which of those ideas are *actually* true, what alternative method do you propose?”

Now at this point, people usually start dithering about “well, I don’t have an alternative, I just… well I… it just seems to me that science isn’t the only way… I… well…”.

I am appalled. I mean, I expect that kind of response from people addicted to mythological cults that train you to ignore facts - Christianity, Scientology, etc. But neither of the people I was talking to are religious in a traditional sense. Both are extremely articulate, deep thinkers, and self-confident about their own intellect and opinions. So, unlike when I get into these debates with cultists, I’m sure they didn’t feel threatened by my somewhat aggressive approach to the determination of ‘truth’.

And yet, for some reason which remains unclear to me, they subscribe to this meme that “science isn’t the only way”, even though they are completely unable to articulate an alternative.

How did we get here? How can it possibly be that at the dawn of the 21st century, there are people who are educated, intelligent, free from infection by mythological dogma, yet who still refuse to accept an evidence-based approach to determining fact from fiction?

It strikes me that science - that is, the scientific method - needs a celebrity makeover.

The human race needs a serious dose of education about what the scientific method entails and why it is - without any rational argument that I’m aware of - the superior process for determining what is true and what is false.

Perhaps we need a complete overhaul - we need to dramatically improve how science is taught in school, at university and how it is portrayed by the media. We need big budget Hollywood (and Bollywood) films made which portray science in a positive light, which re-iterate WHAT the scientific method is and WHY it is the best way we’ve come up with (so far) for determining the truth about how the universe works.

Statistics released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the US Department of Justice, show that as of June 30, 2007, approximately 2.3 million persons were incarcerated in US prisons and jails, an all-time high. This represents an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 US residents, the highest such rate in the world. By contrast, the United Kingdom’s incarceration rate is 152 per 100,000 residents; the rate in Canada is 108; and in France it is 91.

“The new incarceration figures confirm the United States as the world’s leading jailer,” said David Fathi, US program director at Human Rights Watch. “Americans should ask why the US locks up so many more people than do Canada, Britain, and other democracies.”

He goes on to say even though the majority of drug users in America are white, the majority of people imprisoned on drug charges are black.

“The ‘war on drugs’ has become a war on black Americans.”

So let’s see:

• America jails more of it’s people than any other country in the world (including Cuba, Iraq, Russia and China)
• America has more gun deaths per capita (by a huge margin) than any other country in the world.
• America has more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world.
• America has financed more terrorism and supported more dictators than any other country in the world in the last century.

The question in my mind is: Is America the most violent country in the world? And why, when they have it so good?

“Designing 2050: Pathways to sustainable prosperity on spaceship earth”.

The auction for two signed proof copies of the book can be found here. The auction ends 15-Jun-08 22:11:27 AEST.

You can buy a new copy of “Designing 2050″, either in paperback or ebook format, here.

We have three ways you can tune in to today’s show:

1. The short video - cut down to ten minutes for the sake of our YouTube masters.

2. The larger long video - download the larger format with 30 minutes of Peter and I discussing the book.

3. The smaller long video - this embedded one below is the full 30 minutes but compressed to fit in my small page size.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest points out that ExxonMobil has just announced “for the second consecutive year” that it is cutting funding to groups which promote skepticism about global warming. The groups that are supposedly being cut off include the Capital Research Center, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research. However, CSPI points out, “Each group continued to receive Exxon funding in 2007 after the company’s first announcement that it would discontinue the payments. Exxon did not immediately return calls seeking comment on how serious it was in following through on its plans.”

(Source: Integrity in Science Watch, June 2, 2008 via PRWatch.org)

It’s easy to companies to make a big splash, put out some advertising, put out a press release, but how often do they actually follow through? And who holds them responsible when they don’t? Perhaps we need more people like Stephen Mayne, who buy shares in these companies, and then rock up to their Annual General Meeting with a video camera to ask the hard questions.

Let’s scrap all of the political parties.

In fact, let’s scrap elections completely.

Why couldn’t it work like the jury system.

We set up an online Bill submission system. Citizens, businesses, lobby groups, etc, could all enter in their submissions for new laws they want enacted.

Public servants would then arrange for 50 or 100 citizens to be selected at random from the community, jury style, to hear the arguments for and against each submission. After they have heard the evidence and debated it in private, the jury will vote to see which submission deserve further investigation. Two small committees will then be established from the public service to examine the merits of each submission - one for and one against.

Once the committees have their presentations ready, another “jury” will be called to hear the respective arguments. They will hear the “for” argument and the “against” argument, just like hearing the prosecution and the defense in a legal case. Again, this “jury” will deliberate in private and then vote either for or agains the bill.

And so on and so forth.

And we treat being a member of one of these juries with the same seriousness and legal ramifications as we do being a member of a jury today. Tampering with a jury carries maximum penalties.

The benefits? Here are some off the top of my head.

• even if we fly everyone to Canberra for the deliberations, it’s going to save the country millions of dollars a year. The 2004 Federal Election cost $120 million. I have no idea what it costs us every year to run the MPs, but it can’t be pretty. In my system, it would be legislated that the jurors would get leave from their employers at full pay while they were on jury duty. Small businesses (under $10 million in annual revenue) would be compensated for this expense.
• we would get rid of professional politicians for good and all of the problems that this system entails. Lobby groups wouldn’t be able to buy off anyone, because juries would rotate constantly. Nobody gets to retire from politics and become a director of a mining company as a reward for Bills passed or get paid $US500,000 per speaking engagement.
• we’d get rid of party politics. Hooray.
• it won’t just be the wealthy members of society making the decisions. Federal backbenchers now get paid $127,000 pa plus benefits whereas half the households in Australia have a pre-tax income of less than $80,826. And that’s leaving out the politicians who are already insanely wealthy such as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull.

So - as always feel free to tell me where I’m wrong. You know I love a good debate.

(photo by tassie303)

Find Annoying Messages - you know those ones that you find yourself deleting day after day after day from the same people? Some of them will be from mailing lists you signed up for when you decided you really were doing to take your diet seriously - this time, I mean it, I really, really mean it - until you re-discovered the delights of the Timus Tamus.

Check Annoying Messages - Of course you can open up the emails and click on the link to unsubscribe yourself from the mailing list, but this is much quicker. Until today I didn’t realize I could filter multiple messages at once.

The you tell Gmail you want to “Filter Messages Like These”:

Gmail creates an “OR” boolean filter which you can then tell it to delete.

So from then on, I hope, Gmail will automatically delete (or you could tell it to mark them as read and archive them, just in case you might want to read them later) all future emails from any of those addresses.

Okay… only 549 more messages to deal with this morning before I deserve an espresso….

Anyhoo, the article is also up on MIS Magazine’s website and you can read it here. I love that MIS Magazine is still called MIS, which apparently comes from the latin malum in se “wrong in itself”. So true, so true.

Read the article here.

It’s called ‘Funds drought hurts web hopes” and is basically saying that most if not all Aussie online startups are hurting from lack of funding. I kind of agree and kind of disagree.

Look - sure - if we all had a few million, I’m sure we’d be doing things differently. We could hire more people, invest in better infrastructure, hire some sales people, etc.

However, I’m not sure a lack of funding is necessarily a bad thing.

I’m sure we can all rattle off a bunch of start-ups in the US which raised a bucket load of money, only to be gone a few years later. Why? Because you have to learn to crawl before you can walk. Bootstrapping a startup, with little funds or people, forces you to work on the basics. What service do we provide? Who do we provide it to? What problem are we solving? How do we make money from solving it?

The benchmark that we seem to give to online startups is, I think, unhealthy. Unless they have a constant growth curve that looks like the Mt Everest, and are raking in the cash, we think EPIC FAIL.

However, I look at it a completely different way. I’m trying to build something that I will still be running in 20 years time. Something that can make a difference. Something I can have fun with. Something that will let me do what I want, when I want, where I want with whomever I want.

So check it - I haven’t had a job for nearly four years. I sit at home, playing on my Macbook Pro, talking to cool people around the world and getting paid to do it. I take my kids to school, pick them up, hang out with friends whenever I want - and I have fun doing it. I have zero stress in my life. Sure - I could easily spend a coupla mill. But at the end of the day, when I compare how I’m living today, to how I was living four years ago, I know which I prefer.

So how should we define success for a start-up? Is it a business with a billion dollar market cap, or a business that is doing good work, or a business which is allowing someone to follow their dream or a business which is making ends meet? Or perhaps its all of these things?

Here’s the thing about reading mainstream media - and I say this with all respect to my friends who work as journalists, editors and the like - the MSM does NOT want you to leave your work and build a start-up. They want you to conform - to sit in your little cubicle and live the Aussie dream, working 80 hours a week for the man, not thinking outside the square, not taking any risks outside of your footy tipping, just being a good obedient consumer and doing what you’re told.

Thanks to thomasrdotorg for the link! He suggested that if I had a daughter, this is what she’d be like.

The narrow terms of reference were drafted to prevent any inquiry into the role played by Howard and his ministers. The inquiry was asked to report on “the arrest, detention, charging, prosecution and release of Dr Haneef, the cancellation of his Australian visa and the issuing of a criminal justice stay certificate”. Its instructions, however, are limited to identifying “any deficiencies in the relevant laws or administrative and operational procedures and arrangements of the Commonwealth and its agencies, including agency and interagency communication protocols and guidelines”.

The Rudd government’s inquiry is designed to cover-up the essential character of the Haneef witch-hunt, as well as Labor’s role in supporting it until the whole case fell apart. Last July 12, while Haneef was still being detained without charge, Kevin Rudd declared he had “confidence�