Like many others who clearly need to get out more, I've found myself spending a little time lately trawling through the moderately amusing at YouTube.
Most of it... well... it's marginally better than many of the offerings on Foxtel (Rupert's cable company here in Oz), but like any mining, hitting paydirt is rare.
Then I found this...
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Bloody Bureaucrats
Those of you who read this blog who know me in real life know how much loathing I have for bureaucrats.
"Mindless." "Stupid." "Totally Fucked." These are just a few of the things I call them.
Now before we all get into a pissing competition about which country/state/city has the dumbest, most mindless bureaucrats, I will say that wherever you find bureaucrate, they are the dumbest and most mindless.
I think it was one of Newton's Laws... the one that says that for every action, there must be an equal and opposit reaction. Or to translate... wherever there's someone trying to get something done, there's a bureaucrat standing in his or her way with a list of extremely stupid rules.
Right here in Oz, we have bureaucrats who can hold their own with the best of them... like my friends over at the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (the government body that looks after drugs, vitamins and things medicinal). They tried explaining why it's illegal in Australia to make a health claim about food by saying, and this is a direct quote, "food is for nutrition, and nutrition has nothing to do with your health". Sadly, I couldn't convince them to put that in writing on government letterhead.
Today, another shipment of Whey Protein arrived from the Excited States. This time, we were reasonably sure we'd crossed all the "t's" and dotted all the "i's" because we definitely didn't want a repeat of what happened with the last shipment.
And the Quarantine Inspector looks over the paperwork and says "where's the Jembrana Certificate?"
"The what?", says I, frantically running my finger down the conditions in our import permit, trying to see whatever it was I'd missed.
"Jembrana. You're supposed to have a certificate".
Oh. Um. Ok. That it wasn't in the conditions of the import permit is covered by the clause that says stuff like "AQIS (that's what they're called... the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service) can alter the conditions of the permit at any time. Great. Well done AQIS. It might have helped in you'd actually told me.
So I headed back to the office to look it up and before I tell you what I found, let me give you a bit of background. We get our Whey Protein Shakes mix from a little factory in Pittsburg Pennsylvania. It's truly yummy. They get the raw whey isolate from whoever it is that extracts the whey from the milk after the cheesmakers have thrown it away. The cheesemakers get the milk from... um... milk factories I suppose, who get it from farms anyplace they can.
Last time, the Quarantine inspectors wanted a certificate, signed by the USDA Chief Veterenarian, certifying that the farm the milk came from was BSE free. Stupidly, I wrote back telling them that the cow's name was Daisy, and she grazed on the south west pasture of a farm on Skunk Creek Road, Beaver Falls Minnesota. I shouldn't have done that. One of the prerequisites for getting a job in the bureaucracy is that you must have no sense of humour. Eventually, we reached the conclusion that if it was a bloody certificate they wanted, then we'd better get them one.
They also wanted a certificate from the USDA stating that no milk from sick cows is used for human consumption in the United States, to which the USDA vet I was speaking to replied "don't be insulting". AQIS explained that they can't have one rule for countries that know what they're doing, and another rule for the countries that suck. I said "yes you can, you have dozens of rules like that", but no-one was listening so eventually, they got that certificate too..
The other thing they wanted, and this was where we REALLY came unstuck last time, was a certificate showing that the meat and eggs used to make the whey came from cows that are BSE free. (That cows don't lay eggs seemed to have escaped the sharp minds at AQIS.)
It took four weeks to get past that condition, because I just couldn't provide that certificate. Why? No... it wasn't because of the cow/egg thing, though come to think of it, that might have been a big hurdle. I couldn't get that certificate because there is NO meat or eggs in whey protein... it's made from milk. Therefore, no-one could give me a certificate saying it was anything in relation to eggs or meat. It wasn't good enough that I provided a manufacturer's declaration to that effect... the certificate was on the list, so the certificate I had to get!
Oh... I digress... sorry... back to Jembrana. I looked it up...
It's a disease found in ONE very specific breed of cattle that's ONLY found in East Java, Indonesia, not to far from Bali.
"But we've already provided documentation that this product is manufactured in the USA, from American milk. Um... Bali's nowhere near Pennsylvania."
The shipment's still in quarantine pending the arrival of new paperwork.
"Mindless." "Stupid." "Totally Fucked." These are just a few of the things I call them.
Now before we all get into a pissing competition about which country/state/city has the dumbest, most mindless bureaucrats, I will say that wherever you find bureaucrate, they are the dumbest and most mindless.
I think it was one of Newton's Laws... the one that says that for every action, there must be an equal and opposit reaction. Or to translate... wherever there's someone trying to get something done, there's a bureaucrat standing in his or her way with a list of extremely stupid rules.
Right here in Oz, we have bureaucrats who can hold their own with the best of them... like my friends over at the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (the government body that looks after drugs, vitamins and things medicinal). They tried explaining why it's illegal in Australia to make a health claim about food by saying, and this is a direct quote, "food is for nutrition, and nutrition has nothing to do with your health". Sadly, I couldn't convince them to put that in writing on government letterhead.
Today, another shipment of Whey Protein arrived from the Excited States. This time, we were reasonably sure we'd crossed all the "t's" and dotted all the "i's" because we definitely didn't want a repeat of what happened with the last shipment.
And the Quarantine Inspector looks over the paperwork and says "where's the Jembrana Certificate?"
"The what?", says I, frantically running my finger down the conditions in our import permit, trying to see whatever it was I'd missed.
"Jembrana. You're supposed to have a certificate".
Oh. Um. Ok. That it wasn't in the conditions of the import permit is covered by the clause that says stuff like "AQIS (that's what they're called... the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service) can alter the conditions of the permit at any time. Great. Well done AQIS. It might have helped in you'd actually told me.
So I headed back to the office to look it up and before I tell you what I found, let me give you a bit of background. We get our Whey Protein Shakes mix from a little factory in Pittsburg Pennsylvania. It's truly yummy. They get the raw whey isolate from whoever it is that extracts the whey from the milk after the cheesmakers have thrown it away. The cheesemakers get the milk from... um... milk factories I suppose, who get it from farms anyplace they can.
Last time, the Quarantine inspectors wanted a certificate, signed by the USDA Chief Veterenarian, certifying that the farm the milk came from was BSE free. Stupidly, I wrote back telling them that the cow's name was Daisy, and she grazed on the south west pasture of a farm on Skunk Creek Road, Beaver Falls Minnesota. I shouldn't have done that. One of the prerequisites for getting a job in the bureaucracy is that you must have no sense of humour. Eventually, we reached the conclusion that if it was a bloody certificate they wanted, then we'd better get them one.
They also wanted a certificate from the USDA stating that no milk from sick cows is used for human consumption in the United States, to which the USDA vet I was speaking to replied "don't be insulting". AQIS explained that they can't have one rule for countries that know what they're doing, and another rule for the countries that suck. I said "yes you can, you have dozens of rules like that", but no-one was listening so eventually, they got that certificate too..
The other thing they wanted, and this was where we REALLY came unstuck last time, was a certificate showing that the meat and eggs used to make the whey came from cows that are BSE free. (That cows don't lay eggs seemed to have escaped the sharp minds at AQIS.)
It took four weeks to get past that condition, because I just couldn't provide that certificate. Why? No... it wasn't because of the cow/egg thing, though come to think of it, that might have been a big hurdle. I couldn't get that certificate because there is NO meat or eggs in whey protein... it's made from milk. Therefore, no-one could give me a certificate saying it was anything in relation to eggs or meat. It wasn't good enough that I provided a manufacturer's declaration to that effect... the certificate was on the list, so the certificate I had to get!
Oh... I digress... sorry... back to Jembrana. I looked it up...
It's a disease found in ONE very specific breed of cattle that's ONLY found in East Java, Indonesia, not to far from Bali.
"But we've already provided documentation that this product is manufactured in the USA, from American milk. Um... Bali's nowhere near Pennsylvania."
The shipment's still in quarantine pending the arrival of new paperwork.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Common Language
My friends used to laugh at me during my "way too much traveling" days. I'd come back from a trip to the Excited States with a very slight American accent.
I'd tell tham that I actually speak fluent American and they'd roll their eyes and say something like "Chester, you're a wanker, there is no such thing as fluent American".
"Just because they speak with an accent", they'd say, "doesn't make it a different language."
"It's still English", they'd contend.
How bloody wrong they are.
Forget the accent. Americans speak a different language. Yes, we... what is it they call us... ah, yes... "Aliens"... we aliens can understand the words, so we can make sense of about 80% of what they say, but the devil's in the detail of that last 20%, and people ignore it at their peril.
"What's different?" I hear my reader ask.
It's idiom. It's sentence structure. It's thought process. It's a need to fill the silence.
No, I can't give you a specific example right now... it's 12.45am and more than a few of my brain cells have gone nigh nigh.
But I'll tell you a short story...
A few years ago, I was at a business meeting in LA. We were negotiating to go into jv with a US company. Picture the meeting... Americans on one side of the table, Aussies on the other, and much agreement, shaking of hands and slapping of backs. We were all agreed. The deal was done, or so my colleagues thought.
I speak fluent American. I knew what had been agreed, but when I spoke with the boss from down under, he had a totally different take on the outcome of the meeting.
We managed to stitch the deal back together again so all was well, but what brought this to the front of my brain tonight was an embarrasing miscommunication I had with one of my present American partners. And it's been an extremely costly miscommunication.
Same language? Bah!
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the Australians and the Americans are two peoples separated by a common language.
I'd tell tham that I actually speak fluent American and they'd roll their eyes and say something like "Chester, you're a wanker, there is no such thing as fluent American".
"Just because they speak with an accent", they'd say, "doesn't make it a different language."
"It's still English", they'd contend.
How bloody wrong they are.
Forget the accent. Americans speak a different language. Yes, we... what is it they call us... ah, yes... "Aliens"... we aliens can understand the words, so we can make sense of about 80% of what they say, but the devil's in the detail of that last 20%, and people ignore it at their peril.
"What's different?" I hear my reader ask.
It's idiom. It's sentence structure. It's thought process. It's a need to fill the silence.
No, I can't give you a specific example right now... it's 12.45am and more than a few of my brain cells have gone nigh nigh.
But I'll tell you a short story...
A few years ago, I was at a business meeting in LA. We were negotiating to go into jv with a US company. Picture the meeting... Americans on one side of the table, Aussies on the other, and much agreement, shaking of hands and slapping of backs. We were all agreed. The deal was done, or so my colleagues thought.
I speak fluent American. I knew what had been agreed, but when I spoke with the boss from down under, he had a totally different take on the outcome of the meeting.
We managed to stitch the deal back together again so all was well, but what brought this to the front of my brain tonight was an embarrasing miscommunication I had with one of my present American partners. And it's been an extremely costly miscommunication.
Same language? Bah!
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the Australians and the Americans are two peoples separated by a common language.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Nano Power
While we're on the environment, and on a slightly cheerier note, I was at the barber's shop today and read an article in the New Scientist that was pretty bloody fascinating.
If the amazing scientists at The Oak Ridge National Laboratory are on the right track, the fuel of the future won't be hydrogen or some biofuel, but a tank full of metal. Basically, you'll fill your tank with iron filings (nano sized iron filings) and whoosh... a fuel more powerful than gasoline.
If you're remotely interested, I rummaged around the net and found a copy of the article HERE...
If the amazing scientists at The Oak Ridge National Laboratory are on the right track, the fuel of the future won't be hydrogen or some biofuel, but a tank full of metal. Basically, you'll fill your tank with iron filings (nano sized iron filings) and whoosh... a fuel more powerful than gasoline.
If you're remotely interested, I rummaged around the net and found a copy of the article HERE...
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The Icecap Melteth
I heard an interview on the radio on the way to my office this morning, about global warming and the impending total loss of the Arctic Ice Cap.
Apparently, the climate expert claimed, we're to blame. Yes. All of us, and especially we Australians because per head of population, Aussies are allegedly the most polluting people on the face of the planet. This guy was blaming everything from the hole in the ozone layer to the loss of the Titanic on us, and it got me thinking... could he be right?
I mean, I know I'm guilty of leaving the occasional light switched on, but I do drive a car that does 5 litres per 100km (or around 45 miles per gallon), so I think I can be cut a little slack there. Then again, I do sometimes forget to separate my recyclables and I am known for spending too long in the shower.
He went on to say the last 10 years have been the hottest 10 years in human history, that the polar ice caps are melting and that any minute now, the entire Greenland Ice Shelf is going to slide off into the North Atlantic, raising the sea level by some 15 metres. And it's all our fault...
Or is it?
I remembered something I'd read a few years back about the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, and as I don't actually have a life and have ADD (which means I get distracted by useless stuff like this when I should be working), I decided to dig a little.
Now when I say "dig", I really mean "use Google", because while I'm happy to let the web slog through records for me, actually going out and trawling through a library seems a little too much like hard work.
I discovered something a scary. Really. I'm not trying to be funny here... this is disturbing.
Stay with me for a mo while I bore you with statistics...
Between 1700 and 1799, there were around 34 cataclysmic explosive volcanic eruptions around the world. The geologists say it's very difficult to get an accurate statistic before 1700, and even the figure for that hundred years might be a little rubbery because so much of the world was unexplored by people who gave a shit.
Between 1800 and 1899, there were 41 of these eruptions, and that's more likely to be a close enough to reliable figure because those explorers covered a great deal of territory in a hundred years.
Here's where it gets interesting...
Between 1900 and 1999 there were 69 of these catastrophic explosive eruptions. That's around double the rate for the preceeding two centuries.
And between 2000 and 2006, we're running at one a year, or almost three times the rate for 1700-1899.
Let me get back to Pinatubo... where 15 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere in 15 seconds. Fifteen million... that's equivalent to the entire annual sulphur dioxide generation from all of the activities of man. The total amount of carbon dioxide generated in that eruption is estimated as greater than that generated by all of industry and technology for the preceeding hundred years. From one eruption.
Are you getting a picture here, or do I need to spell it out for you?
Global warming is real... so real that, if you believe the guy in the interview, it's going to kill most of us in the next 20-30 years.
But did we do it?
Mt Pinatubo taken from Clarke Air Force Base. Photo Courtesy of the USGS.
Apparently, the climate expert claimed, we're to blame. Yes. All of us, and especially we Australians because per head of population, Aussies are allegedly the most polluting people on the face of the planet. This guy was blaming everything from the hole in the ozone layer to the loss of the Titanic on us, and it got me thinking... could he be right?
I mean, I know I'm guilty of leaving the occasional light switched on, but I do drive a car that does 5 litres per 100km (or around 45 miles per gallon), so I think I can be cut a little slack there. Then again, I do sometimes forget to separate my recyclables and I am known for spending too long in the shower.
He went on to say the last 10 years have been the hottest 10 years in human history, that the polar ice caps are melting and that any minute now, the entire Greenland Ice Shelf is going to slide off into the North Atlantic, raising the sea level by some 15 metres. And it's all our fault...
Or is it?
I remembered something I'd read a few years back about the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, and as I don't actually have a life and have ADD (which means I get distracted by useless stuff like this when I should be working), I decided to dig a little.
Now when I say "dig", I really mean "use Google", because while I'm happy to let the web slog through records for me, actually going out and trawling through a library seems a little too much like hard work.
I discovered something a scary. Really. I'm not trying to be funny here... this is disturbing.
Stay with me for a mo while I bore you with statistics...
Between 1700 and 1799, there were around 34 cataclysmic explosive volcanic eruptions around the world. The geologists say it's very difficult to get an accurate statistic before 1700, and even the figure for that hundred years might be a little rubbery because so much of the world was unexplored by people who gave a shit.
Between 1800 and 1899, there were 41 of these eruptions, and that's more likely to be a close enough to reliable figure because those explorers covered a great deal of territory in a hundred years.
Here's where it gets interesting...
Between 1900 and 1999 there were 69 of these catastrophic explosive eruptions. That's around double the rate for the preceeding two centuries.
And between 2000 and 2006, we're running at one a year, or almost three times the rate for 1700-1899.
Let me get back to Pinatubo... where 15 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere in 15 seconds. Fifteen million... that's equivalent to the entire annual sulphur dioxide generation from all of the activities of man. The total amount of carbon dioxide generated in that eruption is estimated as greater than that generated by all of industry and technology for the preceeding hundred years. From one eruption.
Are you getting a picture here, or do I need to spell it out for you?
Global warming is real... so real that, if you believe the guy in the interview, it's going to kill most of us in the next 20-30 years.
But did we do it?
Mt Pinatubo taken from Clarke Air Force Base. Photo Courtesy of the USGS.
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