Corporate Blogging at Telstra Exchange
One of the great things about writing your own blog is the freedom. You get to choose the style, the format and the frequency of posting. You get to set the rules of the blog, and so long as your employer is supportive of private blogging, there’s scope for discussing pretty much any topic – even those that may be work related.
But as a writer, there’s a different challenge in writing for a specific audience or in a particular format. This is part of the reason I’ve become an official blogger at Telstra Exchange (TEX). Writing for TEX means pushing ones self to write to someone else’s requirements.
For example, whilst conciseness is something I strive for , my more analytical posts tend to be around a thousand words, or even longer. By contrast, the recommended word count for TEX is about half that. Sticking to the suggested limits requires careful selection of both the blog topic and the key points to be covered. It’s a challenge, but being able to work within the guidelines and still produce a post I’m happy with is quite rewarding.
The other reason for blogging at TEX is exposure. My first post at TEX was a review of Kindle for Android, and in one afternoon it’s generated more comments, likes and shares than anything posted on MinimalState. TEX looks like being a good platform for building a personal blogging brand, which can hopefully be leveraged to boost the profile of MinimalState.
So whilst there will still be new and original posts appearing here at MinimalSate, I’ll also be directing readers to posts on TEX. And if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see covered here or at TEX, please let me know.
The State of the Population
Thanks Julie Gillard. Really.
Some time ago, I was going to post on the ‘Population Crisis’ as it had been reported at the time (months ago) and why I though, generally speaking, it was rubbish. I held off, as accurate statistics were tricky to get hold of, and I’m generally pretty easy to distract. I blame Twitter.
Julie has gone and put our population, and the illegal immigrant portion thereof, back in the spotlight. (A great speech, I recommend you read in its entirety. It is somewhat lengthy, feel free to finish this before you do.)
The real population crisis, is much, much worse.
Here’s the thing about population. There’s a lot of it. Not just here, but globally. We breed like rabbits. No – scratch that – like humans, and it seems the fruits of ‘keeping warm’ during the long, cold winter months have led to a somewhat unbalanced ecosystem. The best digestible write up on this I’ve seen to date comes from Greenpeace co-founder and Captain of the Sea Shepard, Paul Watson. (Who, being an ecological activist since 1968, is somewhat ahead of the game as far as I’m concerned)
Here’s the other thing. Check out a population density map.
See how nice and low density Australia’s population is? Now look up, and to the left a little – and you find yourself espying the Globe’s most densely populated areas.
Of course, we know that that 80% of our population is huddled against the shoreline, afraid of the hot, arid, spidery death that awaits us all inland, but it’s not brain surgery people – the world is running out of room.
And conveniently for the folks that currently have the least room – there’s a big, open (looking) space not so far away – surely, being the kind, generous, diplomatic and friendly nation they promote themselves as being, that place could take in some of the overflow. Even if they do eat such strange and universally despised ‘foods’ like Vegemite.
I’m not suggesting we’ll be overwhelmed by the ‘Mongolian Menace‘ so feared by our predecessors and the Federal Council of Australasia anytime soon – but at some point in the future, assuming we don’t all suddenly realize that China might be on to something with the whole One Child thing, the population waters will rise, and they’ll all need to go somewhere. In 40, 60, even 100 years time, we will need to learn how to accept each other’s culture, language, behaviours and skin colour – and learn how to truly share this planet. All of us.
So yes, detractors – there is a population problem, but realistically, immigration policy doesn’t have a lot to do with it. Pragmatically, it’s good to see that JG has this at the (near) top of her agenda as PM, and now she’s opened the can, let’s see how quickly, and in how many ways our underlying national racism can worm its way out.
We are one, but who are we?
Much has been made of racism and racist attitudes in Australia recently. MinimalState’s own HeathG made the case in the wake of the racially charged bumper sticker debacle that underlying racially prejudiced sentiment in this country should be exposed, rather than banned.
It’s not the outspokenly prejudiced that I’m concerned about though – it’s the rest of us. You know, the one’s who “aren’t” racist.
I’ll wait a minute while your defensiveness dies back down as you detect the sarcasm. Good. Moving on then.
I’ve always thought that the way we use words and how a question is posed can give a valuable insight into it’s answer, and this one has always been a favourite of mine.
We seem to be asking a lot the question “Are we racist?”. To that I respond with another question. Who, exactly, is ‘we’?
I don’t suppose it’s our immigrant population. Obviously ‘they’ can’t be racist about themselves. You know, the ones who populate ‘our’ call centres and taxi ranks, causing no end of strife because they can’t speak ‘our’ language. I mean, ‘they’ only account for what, a mere 24% of our total population? (ABS, 2006) And you know, the very Federation of our Great Nation was established on the fear of this mob taking over.
‘We’ is probably not our indigenous population either. (Pause for seeming gross misuse of grammatical structure. In context, it makes sense, but it is painful to write I assure you.)
After all, ‘We’ apologised to ‘Them’ in 2008 about the whole ‘Stolen Generation‘ thing. And you know, they probably migrated here over land bridges from Southern Asia anyway.
And definitely not visiting foreigners. We all know Sol Trujillo was just a Mexican after ‘our’ money, and his opinion didn’t really mean much anyway, so it was OK for him to go home. To Wyoming. In the USA. And don’t even get me started on Harry Connick Jr. He’s an American southerner of all things – what could he possibly know about racial prejudice?
So next time you ask yourself, or hear the question asked “Are we racist?”, try and make sure you answer with the understanding that when we say “we”, apparently, we’re asking about the attitude of those true-blue, first fleet, 7th generation Aussie whitefolk.
In which case, if you ask me – the original question kind of answers itself.
Tags: Australia, hate, nationalism, racism
Kodjo: Moving on
MinimalSate wishes to advise that due to a change in employment commitments, kodjo will no longer be contributing to this blog as an active blogger.
DSL Downtime
A brief apology for the lack of recent posting. My DSL connection has been unusable since Thursday 23rd and is continuing to experience slow/no data flow issues. Blogging will probably be quite light on until the issue is resolved.
Welcome to CollinsVU
MinimalState would like to welcome its newest contributor, CollinsVU.
A father of 3, husband (of 1, just to clarify), IT Lead at a Telstra call centre and serial facebook application blocker, CollinsVU is a communication, technology and science buff with an evangelistic appreciation of social media.
More information about CollinsVU can be found on the authors page or on his blog, Prometheous Ink.
CollinsVU’s disclosures and disclaimer information can be found on the disclaimer page.
Racist speech – Don’t ban it, expose it
This week the West Australian government announced plans to introduce laws that could see people prosecuted for racist bumper stickers. The move was welcomed by West Australia’s Equal Opportunity Commissioner, who claimed the legislation was “overdue”. But is using the threat of legal penalties really the best approach to dealing with this kind of racist speech?
Tags: free speech, hate speech, law, racism, West Australia
Party of No: pouring Republican sand in the gears
Can seeking to prevent the elected government from governing be an electoral winner?
The US Republican party is taking that bet, having decided to not merely vote no on almost everything, but to slow or prevent executive appointments, and most recently, to reduce Federal agencies capacity to undertake hearings:
Read the rest of this entry »
Prescription insurance: Moral hazard vs transaction costs
A person with insurance for drug prescriptions is more likely to use drugs and less likely to worry about getting the cheapest or most cost effective prescription. This leads to the expectation that the demand from the insured for drugs would result in higher prices than if individuals bore most the cost of drug prescriptions, but that is not correct:
Our paper provides evidence for what we consider a surprising outcome: in the case of the new prescription drug program for Medicare enrollees, moving consumers from cash-paying status to membership in an insured group lowers optimal prices for branded prescription drugs below what they otherwise would be. This is surprising because the standard effect of insurance is to create inelastic demand and therefore elicit higher prices from a seller with market power (Duggan and Scott Morton 2006). However, the insurers that we study bundle insurance with a formulary and other mechanisms to create elastic demand. An individual consumer typically does not know which drugs are acceptable therapeutic substitutes; the consumer’s physician typically has poor knowledge of prices, especially negotiated prices; and any one consumer is too small a share of demand to negotiate with a pharmaceutical company. A prescription drug plan can potentially surmount all three hurdles.
Our evidence leads us to conclude that the formulary and other mechanisms perform the special role of allowing buyers to move market share among drugs with patent protection, thereby raising cross-price elasticities and lowering purchase prices (or reducing price increases) for branded drugs. This result contrasts with the common intuition that an uninsured consumer, paying at the margin for her own purchases, is the best tool with which to create competition in the market and impose pricing discipline on sellers. Certainly, this reasoning is at least part of the rationale behind many current policies in health care such as tax-free health care savings accounts (R. Glenn Hubbard, John F. Cogan, and Daniel P. Kessler 2005). Our evidence suggests that this picture is incomplete; for maximum effect, the consumer also needs to be part of a group that can substitute one provider for another.
