FORD-er love of God!

For a very long time, maybe 15 years or so, I’ve been of the opinion that Citroen are [one of] the worlds best at making components in their cars ridiculously difficult to access, and certainly the worst that I’ve worked on. I came to this conclusion through abnormally high rates of skin loss, scuffing, and cussing whilst removing yet another irrelevant part out of an engine bay, just to get access to some other part that should have been easy.

However, this weekend I’ve been working on a car that is so badly designed that it beggars belief. The amazing thing about this car is that it’s a very very common car in Australia, and it’s a Ford.

The first time I discussed the ignition problem that this car has with Andrew (it’s Andrew’s), I asked him if he’d checked the distributor. He said he didn’t think it had one. I thought that unlikely, even ones with electronic ignition seem to have a distributor. But on first examination, it appeared he was right. Then I recognised it from a head gasket job that I’d done on an earlier model of this car for Auntie Sandra, and sure enough when I looked under the inlet manifold, there it was!

So answer me this: Why would you consider putting a part like a distributor underneath an inlet manifold, especially an inlet manifold that is peppered with injectors, pipes and cables, so that it is barely possible to even touch the thing, let alone get the top off to have a look at it. The coil… well you can’t even see that! It’s behind the distributor under the manifold at the very back of the engine!

And you have to take the top off the manifold, before you can access the bolts that hold it on to the head…and even then it’s a question on one bolt of using an open ended spanner with an offset head, and alternating the way round you hold it so that you have to take the spanner off and put it back on again 12 times to get one revolution of the bolt.

So the award for gits of the decade in terms of car maintenance has been taken by Ford – congratulations to the designers. I wonder if any of them ever do their own car maintenance?

Option B1, subsection C

Just a little update on the housing stuff. Daile found another builder who make lovely wooden houses. Have a look at this plan and drawing, and look at some of the other stuff. It's pretty competitive actually...if we go to lock up rather than a full build especially:

http://www.oztechmanufacturing.com.au/Plan%2033.htm

Good aren't they? I particularly like the bridge across the middle of this one from where you can look down on the living room, and the fact that the kids area is separate from ours. We'd have to modify the layout a bit, but they've said that's all do-able, and they'd welcome our thoughts. We're considering nipping up to their showroom this weekend if Daile has time.

Ode to my boy

One of the things that has always intrigued me about portraiture is that when its done right, something of the essence of a person is in it. With caricature, its more so, coarse perhaps, and less subtle. The picture below I nabbed off Josh's facebook page. I felt that somehow, and with humour, this says a lot more than a mere photo can about the man.

Josh, I'm so proud of you, did you know that?

A break in the nick of time....

Hello from Oz – where the last couple of weeks have seen a bit of a break in our luck.

About a month ago, we finally swallowed hard and put our cherished bit of land on the market. We finally faced the fact we didn’t’ have enough money to build, and we were just wasting money keeping the loan from our rental house escapade to build a house we would never be able to realise.

It was a really tough call to make. But we’d been waiting for our luck to give for such a long time, and eventually you just have to face these things. We kissed our dream goodbye and set our chins to the future.

On shaky advice from the real estate agents we put it on at $350k, which is $115k more than we paid for it 3 years ago. Ambitious, but worth a shot we thought.
However, since the real estate agents want nearly $11k just to sell it, we decided to list it via a lo-cost agency that simply lists it on the two largest real estate sales web sites, We haven’t had even a sniff.

About three weeks ago Daile landed work with a large non profit organisation, and her role is to be a counsellor to young kids who have been abused and have dropped out of the normal catch points such as foster carers and normal schools. It’s not quite the kind of work that she wants, but its going in the right direction.

During that week, she came across a job, on a site that we don’t normally look on, that she thought might be worth me having a stab at. I phoned them up to find out more, they said I should send in my CV. I said, I’m not really interested in sending you my CV until I know more about the job, as I’d like to tailor it to fit. They told me more about the job. I tailored my CV…and then they invited me to interview. I had two and a half interviews and was offered the job! It’s a project manager role at this company: http://www.roaminteractive.com/ and it’s six minutes drive from where we live! Not brilliant money, but interesting and challenging work, plus there’s a lot of room for making myself hard to live without….

Then we got a call from a mate on a street opposite our land, to tell us that a house was going for sale that was right for us. There have been almost no moves off that street for 10 years. We went straight over and agreed. We decided to make an offer the next day, but we were beaten to it. Then, funny thing, the owners of the house opposite them heard that we’d been interested and said they’d be interested in selling. Their house was even better, being the only one on the street that had a pool, tree top views to beautiful sunrises from the decks, and a bit of room for building a decent shed. We put in an offer, which they refused. We said no we can’t go higher, then overnight last Saturday, I thought we should just go for it so we raised the offer to what they’d said was a minimum, and they accepted.

Then after several days of yes/no/yes/no… the bank finally decided that they couldn’t lend us the money until we’d sold the land. So we had to let it go.

This week Daile heard that another, better job that she’d been trying to get for ages, and which she’d ‘fluffed’ at interview by her own admission, obviously didn’t agree, and they’ve offered her that job! She's well chuffed! So am I! (I'm not mentioning either of these orgs in case anyone from the first one happens to see this blog).

After we’d got to no with the bank, we were talking with the ‘personal banker’ that we have about some of the figures that had been bandied about during the process of trying to raise a mortgage on the house. We discovered that contrary to our belief, they ARE prepared to lend us enough money to build a house on our land. Not quite the palace that I’d envisaged from the UK or early in the piece here, but a house non the less.

Daile found a company on the net that build low cost pole homes. They’re cheaper than building from scratch yourself because they make use of prefabricated modular designs. We’ve been looking at these – some are surprisingly good! :

http://w.auwebcentres.com.au/trubuilt/splits_elanora_split.html

and

http://w.auwebcentres.com.au/trubuilt/splits_sunrise_split.html have a look at the pics by clicking on the smaller ones…. They change into the big one.

The fella that does the sales for this company is having a look to see what they would look like on our land in terms of fit… by using the contour map that I modified. We’re beginning to think that this is the way to go, and then add more later as we need it. If we go this way, not only can we afford to build the house after all, but we should be able to build the pool that we promised the kids too!

Here’s hoping.

P.S. Daile decided to go in for a competition to win $350k… just in case it’s a run of luck we’re having!
P.P.S. The bank valued the land at $330! So we were right on the money!

Happy Birthday Matilda!

It's Matilda's birthday today! Nine years old...yeeeha!

Profit-DIS-able?

In 2005, I bought a book, a tome really, called Positive Psychology in Practice, which is a compendium of papers by leading psychologists in their fields, one of whom was a woman called Jane Henry who happens to head up the creativity and innovation course that I ended up doing the following year. At the time, my conception of psychology was that it dealt with ill people, rather than whole people, so the book was revelationary to me, and I happily went without the box of wine that I could have had, to get it.

Last week, I met up with a couple of mates in central Brisbane who have been trying to build up the Brisbane chapter of the RSA. We were discussing the historical profile of the organisation (which is old) and interestingly, the view that we all hold that championing ethical positions that were commonplace 100 years ago, wouldn’t be inappropriate for it. Given that globally, the RSA has something like twenty seven thousand fellows, it was heartening to hear that the CEO and other directors think the same.

As part of the general drive to make people more aware of the organisation and it’s purpose, I agreed to pen some outline thoughts for a talk to be given to a ‘Leadership Lounge’ (whatever that is) of senior business people in May. We agreed in principle that I could work with a title something like:

‘PROFIT ‘ used to be a dirty word – now ‘ETHICS’ is. What happened and is it important?

So I set about marshalling my thoughts on the subject, perusing the psychology book, amongst others, when I came upon a section entitled ‘Money and Happiness’. I’d like to quote a large section of it. I’m going to keep all the academic cross references in because it’s the right thing to do. Apologies if that makes this less readable.

‘Does money buy happiness? Many people presume there is some connection between wealth and well-being. From 1970 to 2002, the number of entering American collegians who consider it ‘very important or essential’ that they become ‘very well off financially’ rose from 39% to 73% (Sax, Astin, Korn & Mahoney, 2002). Are people in rich nations, indeed, happier? National wealth does predict national well-being up to a certain point, with diminishing returns thereafter (Myers 2000b). During the 1980’s, the comparatively affluent West Germans expressed more happiness than the very poor Bulgarians, but not more than the moderately affluent Irish. But national wealth rides along with confounding factors such as civil rights, literacy, and years of stable democracy.
Within any nation, are the rich people happier? Yes, again, especially in poor countries where the low income threatens basic human needs (Argyle, 1999). In affluent nations, the income-happiness correlation persists. But some analysts find it ‘surprisingly weak’ (Inglehart, 1990, p. 242). Moreover, the human capacity for adaptation has been made nearly equally available to the richest Americans, to lottery winners, to middle income people, and to those who have adapted to disabilities (Myers, 2000b)

Does economic growth boost happiness? The happiness boost that comes with increased money has a short half life. Over the past four decades, Americans’ per person income, expressed in constant dollars, has doubled (thanks to increased real wages into the 1970s, the doubling of women’s employment, and increasing non-wage income). Although income disparity has also increased, the rising economic tide has enabled today’s Americans to own twice as many cars per person, to eat out more than twice as often, and to mostly enjoy (unlike their 1960s counterparts) dish-washers, clothes dryers, and air conditioning. So, believing that it is ‘very important’ to be well off financially and having seen their affluence ratchet upward, are Americans now happier? Their self-reports suggest not. Moreover, before a late 1990s rebound, the third of a century after 1960 was marked not only by spiralling affluence but also by plummeting social well-being. The divorce rate doubled. Teen suicide tripled. Reported violent crime nearly quadrupled. The prison population quintupled. And the proportion of babies born to unmarried parents sextupled. The National Commission on Civic Renewal (1998) combined 22 such social trends to create its ‘Index of National Commission on Civic Health’, which plunged southward from 1960 to the early 1990s, even as affluence rose. I have called this conjunction of upward material prosperity and downward social recession The American Paradox (Myers 2000a).

The same conclusion – that economic growth has not produced increased personal or social well-being – is true of European countries and Japan, according to Richard Easterlin (1995). In Britain, for example, sharp increases in the percentages of households with cars, central heating, and telephones have not been accompanied by increased happiness.

Not only does wealth not boost well-being, those individuals who strive the hardest for wealth tend to have lower-than-average well-being – a finding that ‘comes through very strongly in every culture I’ve looked at’, reported Richard Ryan (quoted in Kohn, 1999; see Kasser and Ryan, 1996). His collaborator Tim Kasser, concludes from their studies that hose who instead strive for ‘intimacy, personal growth, and contribution to the community’ experience a higher quality of life (Kasser, 2000). Ryan and Kasser’s research echoes an earlier finding by H.W. Perkins: Among 800 college alumni surveyed, those with ‘Yuppie values’ – who preferred a high income and occupational success and prestige to having very close friends and close marriage – were twice as likely as their former classmates to describe themselves as ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ unhappy (Perkins, 1991)’ Myers, (2004) ‘Human Connections and the Good Life: Balancing Individuality and Community in Public Policy’ in Positive Psychology in Practice (2004).'



So you have to wonder – if the evidence is so reliable (and it does seem convincing – not least from ones’ own experience) why do we let the marketers steer society into a frenzy of consumption, non of which is going to make anyone happier in any meaningful way beyond the point of having enough of the basics to avoid REAL stress. My view is that we are so comatose to the facts that I presented above, and so over exposed to ‘misinformation’ from advertisers, that we are essentially a duped and ignorant (of these ethical issues) society.

Last week I had a couple of interviews…(I’ll tell you about them next week…don’t want to jinx it) and the on the second one, the employer was an hour late. I took myself off to the local library that I’d noticed was right next to the office. I walked in, and walked up to the first shelf in the reference section…where I saw a book called ‘Encyclopedia of Ethics’. I took one of the three volumes out and it opened on this page:

‘Consent may be questioned when a party is ignorant or mistaken about material facts. While requirement of disclosure are often low in what lawyers call ‘arms-length’ relationships, they are often higher where lay people must entrust important matters to hired specialists. In medicine and law for example, professionals typically have a fiduciary obligation, beyond the mere prohibition of fraud, to disclose risks associated with their services. Like small children in a strange world, the patient and the defendant may need instruction – reasoned discussion on the client’s interests as a collective good – if they are to choose wisely. (This assumes the lay consumers capacity for rational choice).

Hard PATERNALISM would impose controversial and often odious restrictions on bargained-for exchanges even where participants are competent, adequately informed, and have had ample opportunity to deliberate. Nonphysicians, for example, may not perform surgery even when patients choose the services voluntarily and in full understanding of the risks and benefits of available alternatives. Comparable bargains involving the sale of bodily organs, drugs, or sexual services, selling oneself into SLAVERY, and assistance in SUICIDE have been opposed on the heatedly contested grounds that the transactions are objectively bad for one or both parties.’
‘Encyclopedia of Ethics’



We know (more or less) that the pursuit of profit is objectively unjustifiable if we regard human happiness as a utilitarian aim. The question is, are we ever going to get this, or are we going to continue to let big business and it’s officers impoverish our societies, our lives and our sense of belonging?

Ok, that’s quite enough for now, I could go on, but I just needed to get that out.

Refs:

Argyle, M. (1999) Causes and correlations of happiness. In Kahenman, D, Deiner, E., & Scwartz, N. (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp.353-373). New York: Russell Sage Foundation

Becker, L.C. and Becker, C.B. (Editors) (2001) ‘Encyclopedia of ethics’ – , London, Routledge. Pp

Easterlin, R. (1995) Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all? Journal of economic behaviour and organisation, 27, 35 – 43.

Inglehart, R. (1990). Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 242

Kasser, T. & Ryan, R.M. (1996) Further examining the American dream: Differential correlates of intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 280 – 287.

(Kasser, T. (2000) Two versions of the American Dream: Which goals and values make for a high quality of life. In E. Diener& D.R. Rahtz (Eds) Advances in quality of life: Theory and research (Vol 1, pp. 3 – 12) Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Press.

Kohn, A. (1999, Feb 2nd) In pursuit of affluence, at a high price. New York Times. Available from www.nytimes.com

Myers D.G. (2000a) The American Paradox: Spiritual hunger in an age of plenty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Myers D.G. (2000b) The funds, friends, and faith of happy people. American psychologist, 55, 56, - 67

Myers, D.G. (2004) ‘Human Connections and the Good Life: Balancing Individuality and Community in Public Policy’ in Positive Psychology in Practice (2004).

Perkins, H.W. (1991) Religious commitment, Yuppie values, and well-being in postcollegiate life. Review of Religious Research, 32, 244 – 251.

Sax, Astin, Korn & Mahoney, (2002) The American Freshman: National norms for fall (2002) Los Angeles: UCLA, Higher Educational Research Institute.

What?

I did have this as a side image...then I because that's too small to see the print...I felt it had to be upgraded...

This is truly a work of genius! These advertising people really do deserve the money don't they!



What about this one...can you see the painful progression?



I like this one....is this the Clintons? Am I incredibly sharp or what?

Drum roll (er)

Joe and I were chatting just now about toothpaste...you know...how you do... and the subject of toilet roll came up. Well as you know, the same mentalliy that screws up toothpaste also uses acres of trees to wipe their delicate little butt. I had a conversation with Phoebe earlier where she was reminded about not over doing it with the paper...blockages, enviromment, cost, etc etc yada yada...and she said 'I don't care about toilet paper' to which I replied 'fine...use your hand then!' Ha ha. I'm so witty!

Anyway...Joe, the master of You Tube... sent me this little thing... VERY clever!

Joe sent me this.... (re toothpaste!)

This is class! The steam roller gets my vote Joe!

10,9,7, Sick

Been a bit lacklustre today… not wanting to do much, and then after mowing the back garden, which is to be honest, a mission, I just vegged out. Not really me, but I just couldn’t find enthusiasm today.

So this evening, I sat down to watch the telly with the girls. Daile’s got a bad neck today, so we all ended up there, all pretty wiped out, all said and done.

In theory, that would be the end of it. We’d seen the adverts for ‘House’ several times over the course of the early evening, and it looked fairly interesting. But when it started, as with all these over advertised programs, the ad breaks took over.

At some point in the past, some advertising research must have shown that if you show the same 10 adverts to an audience all night, they do actually have some brand retention, because that’s what the networks do. They all do it here, so you get to see the same ads about 6 to 7 times an hour. If you watch for four hours, which is not that difficult if you’re in veg out kind of mood, you are exposed to the same ‘gag’ or line perhaps 25 times! 250 adverts!

I can tell you that this week I will DEFINITELY avoid spending ANY money at Kmart, KFC, ANZ bank, (well actually I can’t HELP that since we bank there, but if I COULD avoid it I would) Toyota, Holden, Listerine, some tinned chicken arseholes, Bam, Virgin Blue, St George bank, KFC, did I mention KFC? Maybe, every time we see one of these damn things we should stay away for one day. That way we could really change the way that networks view their audiences. I mean it’s not difficult to see what they think of us is it?

Now the networks spend a whole lot of money telling you to stay tuned one way or another, but mainly with ads for what’s coming up today/tomorrow/next week. They try to portray themselves as giving you the best value… the best programs and all that bullshit. Then they advertise 10 ads at you all night.

What I hear when the ads cut into a program every 5 minutes for 5 or 6 minutes is the networks screaming ‘We don’t give a flying f**k about any of you… all we care about is selling advertising to big organisations that can afford to buy it, and we don’t care whether we’re pissing some of you off because most of you are too comatose to even notice that we’re doing this”.

OK time out.

Some of you may think…‘Well Chris, that’s just how the business world works…get used to it!’ TV works because of advertising. Well it doesn't work for me!

It doesn’t work because networks, like big businesses, adopt a position where they TELL you that they are acting in your best interests, when ACTUALLY that’s the absolute last thing that they are doing.

But don’t get the idea that I’m naïve enough that I thought that they were actually doing what they said they were doing. We all know this. I’m saying something here that you all know…I know you know… you know?

But the other thing I’m saying here is that we’ve lost something. Our society lost something, and I think that this attitude that is embedded in TV networks is symptomatic of that loss. It’s not JUST TV networks though its everywhere you look. Last mothers day, the Kimberley Park State School had a thing that they have every mother’s day run up which is a little mothers day market. This is an early morning market that the kids can go to buy something for their hardworking mums for the upcoming Mothers day. It IS a nice idea and most of the kids get something there. They each have about 5 bucks to get something…and this year Phoebe bought Daile a little cup that was wrapped in cellophane… and packed with sweets. She was chuffed with the thing, and I gave her some paper to wrap it in. When the day came, both she and Matilda were BURSTING to give their Mum the gifts that they had personally chosen and wrapped.

Daile opened them both with as much drama and appreciation as she could muster, and Phoebe offered to help her unwrap, as little kids are wont to do. When she ripped off the cellophane, and poured out the sweets…. There were only the sweets that were visible, and under that was scrunched up newspaper....!

Hmm

I don’t know what you think about that. What I think about that is that we have become SO used to the idea that it’s OK for things to be sham and show - that we don’t even have any qualms about preparing gifts that our kids are going to be giving to their Mums in the same way. Phoebe felt that SHE was ripping off Daile!

Am I the only one who thinks that we should be considering ‘other’ stuff when we lie like this? Our whole society is built upon saying one thing and doing another! For example, many employers want us to feel part of a ‘family’, not because they give a shit, but because they think they’ll get more out of us. But they don’t really get that you have to actually TREAT people like family to get them to BEHAVE with that kind of loyalty. Non of us expect them to treat us like family, we’re not STUPID, but they assume it! Then before you know it we’re behaving as if we WERE stupid.

COME ON everyone! Lets get some belief in our own worth here! I’m sick of being had every time I place a mobile call! I’m completely over being treated like a 12 year old by TV and radio networks, Newspapers, Websites, Spam, Shops and direct sales people. I’ve had enough of people NOT NOTICING that they are being systematically shafted by the social system, the same system that thinks of them as consumers and human resources, rather than citizens and employees. And I don’t mean citizens and employees like politicians use the words, I mean citizens as in people who share a moral conviction and sense of responsibility for the rightness and wrongness of pro-social and anti-social behaviour respectively. I mean employees as in humans being in a mutually beneficial and just contractual relationship that has both written AND unwritten contracts that must be kept with dignity and honour by both parties with implications that reach beyond the immediate concerns of the organisation to the include stakeholders that are external to it and not financially relevant at all. I’d like to see moderation, scaling down, lowering of financial goals, more worth assigned to non profitable non ‘outcome’ related or at least non measurable outcome related activities.

I want to see kids learning that words should be matched by deeds, that honourable behaviour is worth something, that making money at any cost is NOT OK. That caring about other people and the environment that we live in is actually a good thing, and putting that above their own immediate welfare now and then might actually be better that they can conceive of right now!

Then they can go and tell the TV networks all about that.