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Cory and CATO sitting in a tree, m-i-s-leading ye?

Tristan — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:55:54 +0000

I just read an article about Cory Bernardi’s role in faux grass roots websites that are against putting a price on carbon – “Bernardi busy behind ‘grassroots’ anti-carbon tax movement“. It made me wonder if perhaps Cory is also behind CATO, that dubious ‘grass routes’ association of “taxpayers and consumers” who are throwing an online and real-world hissy fit over the current government’s carbon pricing policy. I posted about them over a month ago.

Update: Daniel Piotrowski of The Punch alerted me to an article he wrote back in August that delves a little deeper into CATA’s origins.

An aside

Tristan — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 06:50:25 +0000

I wanted to know how I can use asides in WordPress. It’s an option after you’ve published a post and I think it’s good for posting updates, as an alternative to using comments. Let’s see. Why is there no … Continue reading →

The Consumers and Taxpayers Association (CATA) should really be called the No Carbon Tax Association.

Tristan — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:03:40 +0000

I just read an article about a protest at the offices of the Minister for Infrastructure, Anthony Albanese. The rally was in response to Anthony Albanese’s recent comments that the ‘convoy of no-confidence’ was actually a ‘convoy of no-consequence’. I personally think it was a nice play on words but it seems some people took it a little personally. It seems that what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander.

What I’m really interested in here though is just who is organising all these anti carbon price rallies. And no, the proposed policy is not a ‘carbon tax’, it’s trading scheme with beginning with a fixed price.

The National Road Freighters Association was behind the recent Canberra truck rally. An organisition called “The Consumers and Taxpayers Association (CATA)” is behind the more recent rally outside Minister Albanese’s office. I thought I’d take a look at CATA’s website. Their website says:

Cata examines government policy, legislation and program delivery to ensure that taxpayers receive value for money for their representation.

Despite this lofty and noble statement, their website contains little ‘examination’ of any policy. Two other statements on their website also caught my attention:

CATA strives to inform consumers and taxpayers of their rights to reject policies that erode their cost of living.

CATA strives to inform the Australian public when Government policy fails and is costly.

I found these statements particularly curious since, despite having very broad and basic policy positions on Education, Health, Community, Security, Small Business, Climate Change, Infrastructure and Mining Tax, their website address is www.nocarbontaxrally.com. I was particularly intrigued by their interest and staunch opposition to a price on carbon, given the modelled impacts of the price on carbon are minimal. This was discussed recently in a recent blog post by my colleague, Rod.
I’m interested to know more about CATA but unfortunately the website doesn’t say much about management and just states:

CATA is not aligned to any political party nor is CATA operated by any other organisation or media. CATA is a group of everyday working Australians who believe in democracy and good government for consumers and taxpayers.

CATA has a distinctly Tea Party feel about it and it always concerns me when ‘everyday working Australian’ rally against sensible policies that they will barely notice. It’s a distinctly Republican (US) tactic to use ‘freedom’ and the ‘common citizen’ to rally against policies that will actually be felt most by big business. Maybe lobbying strategists are learning from the Americans.

P.S. If anybody from CATA reads this, you have a typo on the about page on your website.

Your welcome to contact us.

Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (aka. watch out for weasel words)

Tristan — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 05:31:14 +0000

A friend recent suggested that I read a book entitled “Death Sentence – The Decay of Public Language”. It’s an excellent book written by Don Watson, a former speech writer for former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating. As I said, it’s an excellent book and one I recommend wholeheartedly to anybody who uses language in daily life. That’s right.

I decided while reading this that I should do a short blog post when I come across the type of language Don Watson discusses in his book. I just found an example on the website of the Australian federal department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. The department’s name in itself probably qualifies as an example of the poor use of English. Today though, I wanted to highlight the following paragraph on the homepage of the department:

Australia has actively engaged in the preparatory process for Rio+20 to date. The Rio+20 Conference is an important step in ongoing international efforts to accelerate progress towards achieving sustainable development globally.

How do I think this sentence should be written? As follows:

Australia has participated in the preparatory process for Rio+20. The Rio+20 Conference is an important meeting to facilitate international communication about sustainable development.

I don’t know if Don Watson would take aim at the original wording but the reasons I didn’t like it include:

The phrase “actively engaged”.
The superfluous use of “to date”.
‘An important step’, ‘ongoing’ and ‘efforts’, all of which have close to no meaning but sound good.
To ‘accelerate progress towards achieving’ just riles me.
The notion of “achieving sustainable development globally” riles me too. It’s a lofty but empty vision.

How economics can help us pick a job or an industry

Tristan — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:04:47 +0000

Generally speaking, it pays to be in industries where prices and demand are going up.

Economics 101 tells us that prices generally increase due to low supply and high demand, more suppliers enter the market attracted by high returns. Eventually competitively reduces returns and prices will stabilise, acting as a disincentive to new suppliers. Alternatively, or synchronously, demand may also drop away as people find substitute goods and services.

So rising prices and rising demand is the ideal scenario. But what about an industry where you have either prices or demand going down? Well, typically, the decrease in one needs to be less than the increase in the other. I’ll give some examples.

Prices declining, demand increasing

Information Technology is a good example of extreme price decline, but massively increasing demand. Computers have also been able to innovate and increase demand over many years.

Prices declining, demand flatting

Retail is an example of an industry where demand is flattening out and prices are going down. For a long time demand was enough to compensate for the declining prices. Also, by contrast to information technology, retail is – arguably – less able to truly innovate. Fashion trends are innovation in retail clothing but the real ‘innovation’ in retail has so far been to replace bricks and mortar with online shopping, which has just exacerbated the downward pressure on prices.

Prices and demand declining

And when you have prices and demand going down, get out. I’ll try to think of some industries that fit this and edit this post when I do.

The stable option (accounting and law)

Exceptions to the above are accounting and law, professions that are largely sector agnostic. They will always exist so long as we trade with one another (accounting) and murder and assault are illegal (law). So they’re pretty safe industries to work in but may exhibit ups and downs along with the broader business cycle.

Conclusions

I don’t claim to have the answers but I do like farming and food production. Increasing demand and increasing prices over potentially a long time, with declining supply of the factors of production (namely land, fertiliser and water) make this an attractive area to me. And if you don’t want to read the tea leaves and divine the future, just become an accountant or lawyer.

The future of Nokia should be microfinance

Tristan — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:01:47 +0000

Having been the dominant mobile phone handset maker for a long time, Nokia is now on a slippery slide down from the top. In developing markets, Nokia is still doing well, but is increasingly challenged by low cost Chinese manufacturers.

I took the screenshot from the Nokia website showing the history of the company. They have changed businesses in the past and I think it’s time for them to change businesses again. The battle for high end mobile phones is over for now, with Apple and Google squarly in the lead and not looking like slipping any time soon.

So, if I were in charge at Nokia, I’d focus on the intersection of microfinance and mobile phones. Leave Apple and Google to battle it out for the smartphone market for now, wait for the dust to settle. Meanwhile, aggressively expand business and expertise in low and lower-middle income countries where microfinance and mobile payments and banking has huge potential

2012-beyond: Mobile microfinance

Anybody can be an entrepreneur, it just takes practice.

Tristan — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 05:30:34 +0000

POST SUMMARY

“Life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

School teaches us to understand and deal with knowns.

Much of life requires us to respond to the unknown.

Anything written with hindsight will tell a cleaner narrative of events.

A diary is a better medium for insight into the story of events as they occur.

Dealing with unknowns only improves with practice and repetition.

The real lessons for business or life success are in daily diaries, not autobiographies.

I got into a discussion on Twitter that subsequently led to some interesting comments about the benefits of hindsight and how strategy and success can look so deliberate once we’re on the successful end of things.

It got me thinking about the benefits of hindsight in telling a story, our education system and reporting of business success in the media.

ON HINDSIGHT

Hindsight is a great thing for story writing because the beginning and the end are known. To repeat something that I tweeted in the discussion, “Most of school you’re taught to assess facts and write an answer to the known. Life and business requires adaptation to the unknown.“. That is the whole point. Writing about something after it has happened means the story is necessarily biased towards the known outcome. In short, it makes it look like things were more known or more planned than they actually were.

ON SCHOOL AND EDUCATION

This got me thinking about school, and how school can better prepare people for uncertainty they’ll face in the real world. You see, for most fields, knowledge of the knowns is all that is required. I certainly wouldn’t want my doctor to try a new and unproven approach to surgery in place of a proven one. However, particularly in business, or the attainment of most goals, what is more important is the ability to respond to external stimuli and react accordingly. Not necessarily with one correct answer but with the best answer at the time, or perhaps many different answers.

So how to teach this in school? I realised that we need to understand where similar principles already exist. In my opinion, two of those areas are sport and music – particularly jazz or just jamming. And what lessons can we learn from these two skills. It’s just that, they are skills that are practiced. If a mistake is made, you are penalised (a fat rejection in basketball or stuffing up your solo in music). However, you know next time what to avoid and how to be better.

ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND THE MEDIA

Before I go on, let’s get one thing straight. I don’t particularly like the word ‘entrepreneur’, and I like ‘entrepreneurship’ even less. I always preferred ‘businessman’ because to me, a businessman sounds like he finishes what he starts, an entrepreneur just starts something up and feels that is an achievement. Anyway, that’s beside the point. Entrepreneur is usually a pretty hot keyword so I’ve used it – I don’t have an alternative to suggest either.

Where were we. Yes. Entrepreneurship, startups, business men, business women, business teenagers. We often read their stories with interest on Techcrunch, Mashable, TED, Business Week, Fast Company and gang. However, as we discussed in the aforementioned Twitter converstation, their stories often make them seem like super-people when it comes to achievement. But that is only because of the benefit of hindsight. You see, anybody can be an entrepreneur, it just takes an idea, constant practice and some luck.

P.S. If you’re already a successful entrepreneur, or you’re planning to be one, do me a favour and write a daily diary of you work towards your goal. It will make for more interesting reading when you’re finally featured on Mashable.

How to go from startup idea to startup product.

Tristan — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:59:42 +0000

I decided to develop a visual chart of the decision tree or options available to startup entrepreneurs when they have an idea and want to develop that idea. I was inspired by all the amazing responses over at Silicon Beach in response to the thread “Finding Technical Co-Founders: How do we help people do this better?“.

So here’s my first attempt at distilling all the wisdom discussed within. Credits are due to pretty much everybody who contributed, but with a special emphasis on those who suggested practical steps to take. For a more nuanced discussion, read the original thread.

More info and resources can be found on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Finding-Co-Founders/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founders

P.S. If anybody reads this who is a graphic designer, let’s chat. I’m sure we can make this look a lot nicer and comprehensive.
P.P.S. If anybody knows about any interfactive chart building startups, let me know. This would be much cooler as something like that. Rather than a flat file. Something like a Workflowy.com list would be part of the solution, but a bit dull.

UPDATES:
1 – Updated to reflect Humphrey’s comment about wireframes and the comment about operating the business manually.

Dear NAB, if I were a customer…

Tristan — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 12:17:41 +0000

…I would definitely break up with you.

The National Bank of Australia’s (NAB) current advertising campaign has to be one of the worst i’ve ever seen. Perhaps I’m the only one who doesn’t get it. But essentially, NAB is saying “we’ve broken up with the other banks”. This must refer to the closeness with which the “big four” (NAB, CBA, ANZ and Westpac) have historically operated in Australia.

So, in NAB telling us that they’re ‘breaking up’ with the others. I take two key messages from this campaign.

1. NAB is admitting that they have been colluding with the other banks. Thanks for telling us.
2. NAB shows no loyalty. Like the prisoner who chooses to talk and face less time. They’re confessing to their ‘crimes’ and by association, the ‘crimes’ of the other banks. This is an effort to save their own skin and get more customers.

NAB, I’m a very long way from being a customer. Perhaps I’m being overly cynical – and I did read that this is based on a similar campaign run somewhere in North America. Whatever the intention, I think a more simple campaign message such as “not all banks are created equal” would have had the same message without the negative connotations.

Keeping your online identify safe with a simple password system

Tristan — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 11:32:50 +0000

With the proliferation online accounts and email, I’d like to outline a simple password system that I think should work for most people. I’m writing this because I know a lot of people that use one password for their entire online life. While that makes it easier to remember all your online credentials, it also means that if any site you are registered at gets hacked, every site you visit is compromised. So, a simple solution.

Have three passwords for use online (that’s not that hard, right?).

1. Low level password: This could be used for membership sites such as the Whirlpool Forums or other community and information based sites that you frequent. For this password, it’s probably okay to use your cats name or the name of your favourite sports team.

2. Medium level password: This password could be used for more sensitive online identities such as email, facebook and anything that carries a lot of information that is personal. This password should be a bit harder to guess and should probably incorporate some number replacement and other symbols.

3. High level password: This password should be reserved for financial or very sensitive information online. This password should be super strong, not just a simple w0rd r3plac3 password. I’m talking full stops, misspelling, words that are made up. A tough one.

Now, all you have to do is remember those three passwords. If more people did this with their online identities, their information would be a lot safer.