Last.fm has decided to introduce a monthly fee for users in countries that are not the UK, USA and Germany. What you get for 3 euros is the radio. Which I don't use anyway, but somehow I feel violated. I realise the site runs on advertising and still needs to pay subscriptions/licensing to the music coy. But why not make everyone one pay, not just people in certain countries get it free. Is it because they are part of the new 'fuckuptheworldwedontcare' regime? And they need Germany for their gold?
Alas, the proxys are going to get raped if this type of shit continues... Which means we are going to have to pay for our own proxys/vpn/servers. Damn you cruel world. Again, this is solved by me paying $3.00 for a decent service. I mean last.fm still has scrobeling, which I need for my ocd. I think the advertising model could work in Australia, iTunes is going good which means we like digital music. Maybe they need to try harder to get advertising. The costs are most likely scaleable to an extent, which means it can work anywhere in the world. Not just the UK, USA or Germany.
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
The Man
The bottom of the market, minimum wage, is regulated, but the top of the market, executives, is not. The system is flawed, in these hard economic times it highlights the problem vividly. People are getting sacked but executive pay keeps going up. In the good times its easy to cover up. But what if some sort of regulation did exist. The companies that hire these executives would have saved millions in actual salary, shares, bonuses, perks, super and tax. That money could come in handy right about now, to ride out the bad economic times, keeping your capacity and human resource. All that shit companies were handing out about the workers being a valuable resource and CSR is non-sense, because when the time came these, supposedly valuable resources, are being thrown away. Executives are given many layers of pay, the base pay is so they are aligned with the shareholders goal of CSR. That means not polluting the earth and fucking everything up. Eg, sacking everyone. The other part is the bonuses and share options for meeting/exceeding performance targets. This is to align them with the shareholders goal of improved efficiency. Eg, dividends/capital growth.
Sol Trojilo, former CEO (Capacious Excremental Oligarch) of Telstra recently walked away with 40 million for 4 years work, he has not paid or will he ever pay tax in this country, in fact the company, Telstra, has to pay his taxes. And the only reason he is going back to where ever the fuck he came from, because of a moratorium on any income earned from his overseas investments expires, which would require him to pay tax. Actually this is not true, he has paid tax. GST, but it probably came out his expense account in any case. To add insult to injury, he is sacking him self, he is not resigning. This means he gets 12 months worth of pay in advance. Which is 3 million, but wait there’s more, because he is serving out a full financial year he gets a bonus of 5.1 million. The Telstra workers that got sacked recently did not receive 12 months pay. They did not get to decide what day they sack them selves on and they didn’t get any share options or bonuses. I’m sure if they had these things written in their contracts they would have worked as hard, if not harder than Sol the Troll.
Corporate welfare is another scam, which shows how unjust the system is. If you are on the dole you are required to perform a certain number of tasks before they will pay you. You need to apply for 10 jobs a fortnight fill in the appropriate book and take it to centrelink on the exact day. If you finish early, you cant take it in early. You must wait for your designated day. Additionally you must undertake full time jobseeker training. This requires you to go to a pre selected job agency everyday to learn about how to get a job. The corporations that receive these handouts, whilst well intentioned in trying to keep unemployment down, do not seem to have any performance targets, like employing an additional x number of people or investment in widgets. The transparency of these handouts is weak, we do not know what is going on. At least with the dole we can go to the centrelink website and read what is required to apply and how much money we can get if we have a part time job or no job. We only hear about these things through the media outlets and even then there is no detail, but the amount of money handed out and the supposed target of the funds.
Sitting around for extended periods of time, unemployed, will not be good once we get out of this slump. Because the capacity will be gone and we will have to import skilled workers to fill these jobs. As an immigrant I see this as a great opportunity for many foreigners. As an Australian citizen I see this as a loss of opportunity to improve the overall skills of the country at all levels... Granted I am still happily employed and study for my CPA so by the time this is all over I am going to buy my self a giant rake. Yes it’s going to be very specialised skills set and I wont have the diversity, but there is nothing stopping me from also getting that diversity in other ways.
Sol Trojilo, former CEO (Capacious Excremental Oligarch) of Telstra recently walked away with 40 million for 4 years work, he has not paid or will he ever pay tax in this country, in fact the company, Telstra, has to pay his taxes. And the only reason he is going back to where ever the fuck he came from, because of a moratorium on any income earned from his overseas investments expires, which would require him to pay tax. Actually this is not true, he has paid tax. GST, but it probably came out his expense account in any case. To add insult to injury, he is sacking him self, he is not resigning. This means he gets 12 months worth of pay in advance. Which is 3 million, but wait there’s more, because he is serving out a full financial year he gets a bonus of 5.1 million. The Telstra workers that got sacked recently did not receive 12 months pay. They did not get to decide what day they sack them selves on and they didn’t get any share options or bonuses. I’m sure if they had these things written in their contracts they would have worked as hard, if not harder than Sol the Troll.
Corporate welfare is another scam, which shows how unjust the system is. If you are on the dole you are required to perform a certain number of tasks before they will pay you. You need to apply for 10 jobs a fortnight fill in the appropriate book and take it to centrelink on the exact day. If you finish early, you cant take it in early. You must wait for your designated day. Additionally you must undertake full time jobseeker training. This requires you to go to a pre selected job agency everyday to learn about how to get a job. The corporations that receive these handouts, whilst well intentioned in trying to keep unemployment down, do not seem to have any performance targets, like employing an additional x number of people or investment in widgets. The transparency of these handouts is weak, we do not know what is going on. At least with the dole we can go to the centrelink website and read what is required to apply and how much money we can get if we have a part time job or no job. We only hear about these things through the media outlets and even then there is no detail, but the amount of money handed out and the supposed target of the funds.
Sitting around for extended periods of time, unemployed, will not be good once we get out of this slump. Because the capacity will be gone and we will have to import skilled workers to fill these jobs. As an immigrant I see this as a great opportunity for many foreigners. As an Australian citizen I see this as a loss of opportunity to improve the overall skills of the country at all levels... Granted I am still happily employed and study for my CPA so by the time this is all over I am going to buy my self a giant rake. Yes it’s going to be very specialised skills set and I wont have the diversity, but there is nothing stopping me from also getting that diversity in other ways.
Floods of Information
In my life information doesn’t come in a nice orderly stream. It floods, overall/on average the amount of information is not overly massive, but it’s the drought periods which are left unproductive and make me lazy. When the flood of information comes in, systems come back. But, wouldn’t it be more productive/better to always have these systems in place so that there is no lost time. We can always be more productive, especially when its not so busy, or when we procrastinate on jobs we don’t want to do, then all of a sudden everything is due all at once. Not a nice situation to be in.
I have tried getting back to GTD, but since I never read the book the whole way through, I’m probably missing some vital information. But I understand the major concepts and I am currently trying to implement a system, mainly for work, but would also like to have something in place for home and personal projects as they are also important and need to be cared for in a professional way. My spreadsheet is basically a list, which doesn’t help to prioritise unless I use extra numerical fields and sort that way, but that’s extra work is too complex. Not that I don’t want to or couldn’t, just that I also need to be mindful I am also required to update and maintain about another 6 systems, the common denominator here are the clients they stay the same. But it’s the information that I want or need to track at a particular time that is a pain in the ass.
One area which has been seriously neglected is my weekly review. The weekly review gives my a good overview of what needs doing and keeps my workspace clear of shit that not necessary the current project/task I am currently working on. For whatever reason I need a tidy workspace and as I am learning I also need a tidy filing space, as all I have been doing is literally dumping anything I don’t want to do in great big piles on the floor. This has many problems,
The storm is here, but the bulk of it hasn’t quite hit so I still have time to board up the house, put the sprinklers on and start building a boat.
I have tried getting back to GTD, but since I never read the book the whole way through, I’m probably missing some vital information. But I understand the major concepts and I am currently trying to implement a system, mainly for work, but would also like to have something in place for home and personal projects as they are also important and need to be cared for in a professional way. My spreadsheet is basically a list, which doesn’t help to prioritise unless I use extra numerical fields and sort that way, but that’s extra work is too complex. Not that I don’t want to or couldn’t, just that I also need to be mindful I am also required to update and maintain about another 6 systems, the common denominator here are the clients they stay the same. But it’s the information that I want or need to track at a particular time that is a pain in the ass.
One area which has been seriously neglected is my weekly review. The weekly review gives my a good overview of what needs doing and keeps my workspace clear of shit that not necessary the current project/task I am currently working on. For whatever reason I need a tidy workspace and as I am learning I also need a tidy filing space, as all I have been doing is literally dumping anything I don’t want to do in great big piles on the floor. This has many problems,
- Cant Find anything
- Silverfish
- Duplication of materials
- Inability to find information when you need it, leading you to not do the task
- Lack of floor space
- General ill feeling of untidiness (OCD?)
The storm is here, but the bulk of it hasn’t quite hit so I still have time to board up the house, put the sprinklers on and start building a boat.
All Breakfast All the Time
Karl has commented in a previous post, an appropriate response to this topic warrants a full blog post.
A while ago while when out on the town with my friends Karl and Jonathan, I brought up the topic of breakfast and specifically the various methods one has to cook scrambled eggs. In searching for recipes I stumbled across Mr Breakfast, dedicated to all things breakfast. But what if you don’t want to actually make the breakfast yourself? Cafe 21 (at the casino) you can order all day breakfast, because its open 24/7 you actually can order at anytime. Like at 2am and slightly drunk . It’s about 24 times better than a kebab. Most cafe’s have some kind of all day breakfast, all day breakfast is great (I think Rics has all day breakfast... can’t fully remember...). But what about other breakfast foods. Imagine being able to get a bowl of cereal at 6pm after work? Or peanut butter on toast for lunch, or pancakes at 11pm (Pancake Manor). What about a dosa as a midnight snack?
You Eat Now!
Is the slogan. The name was going to be Mr Breakfast, but since Mr Breakfast seems to already be taken (at least in Americaland). Need to call it something else.
MisterBreakfast. - All Day International Breakfast Restaurant: You Eat Now!
If there is ever a time you are feeling hungry. Think of Breakfast.
A while ago while when out on the town with my friends Karl and Jonathan, I brought up the topic of breakfast and specifically the various methods one has to cook scrambled eggs. In searching for recipes I stumbled across Mr Breakfast, dedicated to all things breakfast. But what if you don’t want to actually make the breakfast yourself? Cafe 21 (at the casino) you can order all day breakfast, because its open 24/7 you actually can order at anytime. Like at 2am and slightly drunk . It’s about 24 times better than a kebab. Most cafe’s have some kind of all day breakfast, all day breakfast is great (I think Rics has all day breakfast... can’t fully remember...). But what about other breakfast foods. Imagine being able to get a bowl of cereal at 6pm after work? Or peanut butter on toast for lunch, or pancakes at 11pm (Pancake Manor). What about a dosa as a midnight snack?
You Eat Now!
Is the slogan. The name was going to be Mr Breakfast, but since Mr Breakfast seems to already be taken (at least in Americaland). Need to call it something else.
MisterBreakfast. - All Day International Breakfast Restaurant: You Eat Now!
If there is ever a time you are feeling hungry. Think of Breakfast.
USA+IFRS=Win
Washington, D.C., Aug. 27, 2008 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted to publish for public comment a proposed Roadmap that could lead to the use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by U.S. issuers beginning in 2014. Currently, U.S. issuers use U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (U.S. GAAP). The Commission would make a decision in 2011 on whether adoption of IFRS is in the public interest and would benefit investors. The proposed multi-year plan sets out several milestones that, if achieved, could lead to the use of IFRS by U.S. issuers in their filings with the Commission.
I feel dirty
because I tried out the self service checkout at Woolworths. It feels weird having to do the work your self, like the scanning thing. Its just wrong. Is it quicker? Yes and No. Its not quicker doing the scanning, weighing and packing your self. I am slow at that. Just knowing the system etc will take time and the receipt takes an eternity to print. I thought I did it wrong. But it was just slow. The quick part is that on one uses it, so you can just hop straight on. Its very similar to checking books out at the uni library using the self check out checkouts. I think if you had just one item and paying with cash it would be extremely quick. Kinda like a giant vending machine that you have to enter the machine to retrieve the goods your self.
Would I use it again, only if there was a large line at the express checkout and I had only a few items. I do not think its worth doing it if you had a trolley load of goods as using the scanner is tricky for people who have never worked retail.
Would I use it again, only if there was a large line at the express checkout and I had only a few items. I do not think its worth doing it if you had a trolley load of goods as using the scanner is tricky for people who have never worked retail.
Baconpops
Bacon on a stick. That should be McDonalds next menu item. Yes, its unhealthy and wrong. But they need to compete against KFC who have ingeniously created hotrods chicken nuggets on a stick. Its basically a sishkebab, but without vegetables.
McD, need to hit back with something equally awesome and since they are pushing bacon at 80 cents a pop, they should just put some on a stick, fry it and sell it for $2.95.
McD, need to hit back with something equally awesome and since they are pushing bacon at 80 cents a pop, they should just put some on a stick, fry it and sell it for $2.95.
Clients: Part 2
And its annoying because you just cant tell how much work would be involved, and if you over estimate then they may decide to go somewhere else and if you underestimate and when the project is finished and you send them the bill they get upset and "you told be $XXX", "but I did spend the last 2 weeks working on it putting aside other work". Oh and the other thing that gets me about clients are the ones that ask you to get something done quicker and then dont bother to even collect that day and wait a week, when you could have comforatbly done it over the the week.
How to run a successfull small business. Start off with a Medium sized business and watch it go down the drain.
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