Wow, it’s hot. Yesterday 41deg, the day before 39deg, today 37deg. Thanks to air con in house, car and shops it’s not a problem but it’s not good for the lawn and garden. I pity the birds and wildlife. I’m not hearing any birds lately. I hope they’re just away on holiday and sending tweets 🙂

___________________________________________________

Holy smoke – trust Sony to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Who thought Sony was a car builder? They make hi-fi and PlayStations, yes? Well, look at the video above. What a thing of beauty. I want one!

Unfortunately, it seems it’s just a concept model, a demonstration of what they can do, not meant for production. Well, I haven’t been much interested in electric cars up to now. Teslas are not bad but I wouldn’t pay their price to get one. Most of the other makers’ electric vehicles are just weird looking re-hashes of their existing models.

But this Sony car excites me. If it was available and I had the money, I wouldn’t hesitate.

_______________________________________________________

This is a reminder of how pathetically weak Australia is at encouraging our take-up of electric vehicles. It’s absolutely vital to combat climate change, yet there are no government incentives to change over. Three state governments have even discussed imposing a tax on EVs! Why? Because the governments don’t get any excise tax from petrol sales as they do with normal cars.

I despair at this country. We have so much talent in science, engineering and manufacturing, yet we stuff up every big project we undertake due to political interference and ineptitude. The NBN is the prime example. As originally proposed by the Rudd Labor government, we would have had fibre to every house and building in the country, allowing speeds up to 1,000Mb/s. But when the Turnbull Liberal government came to power, they put politics first and had to have a point of difference, even though it made no sense. As a result we’ve got a dog’s breakfast hodge-podge of a scheme which, now that it’s complete, has to be rebuilt at massive cost to somewhere near the original idea. Malcolm Turnbull, the man who single handedly crippled the NBN. What an achievement.

Similarly, there are many companies busting to build solar and wind energy projects, yet the federal government puts obstacles in their way. The funding for the alternative energy council is always being reduced and gas is promoted as the way of the future, even though LNG (gas) is a major polluter. Why is gas promoted? Because the Liberal government is mates with the big gas companies and executives.

Oh, I could go on and on but it’s too depressing. If there’s a right way to do things, expect Liberal politicians to take the opposite path.

______________________________________________________

It was the same when I was working – I was appalled and frustrated at the way management behaved, and because I was interested, I used to read books and articles about the best managed companies in the world, mainly US companies of course. And I used to think, it was as if the management of the company I worked for had read these books and said, “Right, you managers, this is what we will not do.” It was so glaringly obvious that our management were determined to manage badly (and hadn’t read or understood these books).

In particular, their rule seemed to be, “Keep it secret, don’t communicate, don’t tell your staff what’s going on.” Oh, I’ll write a book about this one day. I kept a diary at one stage over about a two year period because things got so bad that I felt I would need to have a record. I’ll publish it one day.

________________________________________________

I think I said I’ve been using a free substitute for Microsoft Office due to problems I was having with it. I found WPS Office and I’m finding it’s marvellous! It’s so good that I’ve paid the $40 annual fee for the Premium version.

Well knock me down with a feather but in the list of Chinese companies that the US (Trump) has banned from the New York Stock Exchange was a company called WPS Office. It even showed their logo, which is the same as the one for this software.

This is annoying – it’s a Chinese company. I’m very disinclined to buy or use anything Chinese now, in view of their authoritarian government’s jackboot-on-the-neck approach to international relations.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve looked in the Help-About for any indication of their base but didn’t find anything. I’ll have to do some web searching.

______________________________________________

I’m listening to Amazon Prime Music, as I said and although it’s good, there is one very annoying thing and I wonder if it’s deliberate. At the end of each track it suddenly cuts off, either early or just drops out for about two seconds, before resuming and going on the the next track. I wonder whether it might be deliberate to stop us recording tracks, ie to make it annoying to build up our own collections. I don’t know.