Facebook - so many wankers but so easy to block them

Social media opens up the world, we have so many new people to communicate with but we all know the downside, the internet is the domain of trolls and wankers.

What I really like about social media platforms such as Facebook is the ease that you are able to block these faceless trolls, bullies and imbeciles. When these people reply to your comments with these stupid flashing messages, angry faces or just dribble and/or a tirade you are able to put them out of your mind immediately never to bother you again.

What really makes me laugh is they never seen to post their own pic on their page, it is always a pic of a famous person, an absurd portrait of a deceased person, cartoon character or a sporting team logo. These gutless and faceless trolls might get under the skin of some people, once I am able to block their stupid comments, I am glad I never have to give then another thought.

Whom do we serve?

I constantly ask myself employed as an advanced skills lecturer at a major training organisation, whom do we actually serve?

I sincerly believe our focus must benefit our students and the organisations employing them as apprenticeships and traineeships are funded by business enterprises. A simple analysis, yet this is rarely the case with decisions mostly favouring individuals in the training organisations.

Then, secondly our actions predominately benefit the organisation with students, employers and the industry employing enterprises and individuals sadly lagging. Public organisations also employ apprentices and trainees, we must never forget where we receive our funding from and to whom our loyalties ultimately align.

During my business studies we explored strategic management and value adding activities. I really focused on core competence and the resource based view of the firm. As a state government employee, we receive funding at both a state and federal level and we as both an organisation and individuals must take our responsibilities seriously and make decisions based on the best interests of those we serve.

After all, we receive tax payer funds so our mission must be to realistically employ public funds in an efficient and responsible manner and to not purely serve ourselves. We have a duty to not only current taxpayers, but past and future taxpayers to increase productivity leading to advantageous outcomes for the state.

The cost of unproductive meetings

In many respects I still haven't made the jump from the private sector to the public sector despite my twelve years of employment in the government. The culture is just so different because there is no culture to perform at a productive level.

I am now surrounded by a bunch of people, many who have never worked in private enterprise believing they are businessmen and businesswomen, but maintain a public sector mentality of poor productivity and a failure to take responsibility.

We have a whole contingent of professional meeting attendees who fail to achieve any measurable outcomes from these meetings whatsoever. I call these government meetings; these are meetings with no agenda, no minutes, no implementation plan and no outcomes. We don't even know who attended these meetings, what was discussed and most of the time they can't even recall the date.

We have had discussions where I have been told we agreed on this, my question usually is, "was I there?" Needless to say, the minutes of the meeting are never distributed to any team members because there isn't any.

Ironically, registered training organisations offer a unit of competency in BSBADM502B Manage Meetings, this is a unit in the business administration curriculum designed to equip graduates with the skills to effectively manage meetings.

It goes without saying if I have to call a meeting, an agenda is published and minutes recorded but I do this on a personal level as per my private sector training. The implementation plan is recorded and during subsequent follow-up meetings, the implementation plan is reviewed and updated as required.

As part of our professional development requirements, all team members should undertake this unit of competency, there should be no recognition of prior learning with all candidates required to undertake the full learning and assessment package. Then the cost of unproductive meetings and the cost to the organisation might eventually be negated.

You would actually think that with all these meetings attended that they would become pretty good at this; but unfortunately this is the government - think again. Across the organisation, I would hate to actually calculate the cost of these unproductive meetings, as I believe that more than 80% of meeting time is wasted based on my observations.

Mounting a dive knife

Gone are the days where a scuba diver would strap the largest stainless steel knife to their lower leg before heading off into the water. It was a terrible location, if you got entangled then it was actually difficult to access and would frequently snag. I'm glad I relocated my dive knife early in my diving career.

These days dive knives have become smaller, sharper and manufactured from more exotic materials like titanium. So many options are now available to mount a knife to either your jacket, harness or low pressure inflator hose.

The adaptor for the low pressure inflator is my choice of mounting point but it is not without its problems yet I consider it the best option. I do change regulators often and prefer my knife mounted on my jacket.

Previously I had just used cable ties to secure the knife using the leg strap slots directly to the inflator hose attached to the BCD although these days I find it easier to just use the mount that accompanies the knife.

Fake certification cards

Diving in shops in South East Asia, it is now being reported to me that potential divers are walking in through the door with fake certification cards - I could hardly believe this story.

My first question is why? Why would you risk your life just to get out of taking an entry-level diver course? These days you pay your fee and then do the academic section online before heading into confined water to learn the skills required to become a safe diver and then reproducing those skills in an open water environment.

These days with online checks, all you do is give your name and date of birth and diver certification can be cross referenced. From what I am told, the fake certification cards are poor quality, the logo and are a give away and no diver number exists. That will no doubt change in the future as counterfeiting quality improves but unless they are able to hack dive certification agency records then an online cross reference will find them out.

So what is considered seriously wealthy?

I have been asked what is considered seriously wealthy by a number of people and the magical number bandied around is seven and a half million dollars. But where did this number actually come from?

A millionaire was once considered wealthy but with the effects of inflation, being a millionaire in Australia isn't such a big deal anymore - still a nice figure though. The term millionaire has a certain ring to it, that's for sure but is it really that affluent? The average homeowner in Australia is pretty much halfway there, add superannuation entitlements and if dual income households are involved then both incomes feed into the assets.

But this is working families, rarely do they get to handle such large transactions. The real money is small business owners, business executives and the CEOs that rake in unbelievable sums relative to their output. Research indicates many small business owners have all their capital invested in their business and hold insufficient funds in the personal superannuation funds for a comfortable retirement.

So where did the figure $7.5 million come from? I'm not sure, during some research I found a definition of sorts where men and women were surveyed with men nominating $5.3 million whilst women nominate $4.8 million. At time of research, the average Australian salary is $81,947 giving roughly 64 times average annual earnings to reach that figure; that's out of reach for most people.

Whilst not an Australian definition, the US based Fidelity Investments surveyed more than 1000 millionaires in the United States to determine their definition of wealthy. Their definition of a millionaire differs to the conventional definition as they only consider $1 million in investable assets that don't include the primary residence or retirement accounts.

I find this definition extraordinary as why wouldn't you include a retirement account? After all, it is your money. I believe their definition may come from seeking funds to invest but even then, a mortgage may be taken out against a primary residence to invest.

In Australia, the option of a self managed superannuation fund is an excellent vehicle (even with the recent government meddling) to build a decent retirement income. If you control the assets in the SMSF then you are the investment manager and if you are one paying in the contributions then the beneficiary is you.

I believe they want you to spend like a millionaire so they are able to generate earnings from your savings. They want you to go all Hollywood and spend like a movie star instead of acting like the conservative millionaire next door who is relatively anonymous.    

The Australian Financial Review

Fairfax Limited is bleeding cash, their masthead newspapers of The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's counterpart The Age are mere shells of what used to be journalistic integrity - not any more. Fortunately The Australian Financial Review has not suffered the same indignity as the SMH and Age newspapers as investigative reporting is still practiced the AFR.

Whilst The Australian Financial Review is not The Wall Street Journal, the AFR is an excellent round-up of the business news of not only Australia, but Asia-Pacific in general. Naturally global business news is covered but the emphasis is on Australian business news; whilst the major Australian newspapers cover business news - the AFR knows business. Whilst I wouldn't make any major financial decisions made on the advice on any articles, the AFR offers the reader an extensive but broad overview of the contemporary Australian business environment. It's a pretty decent financial newspaper and I'm happy to support this newspaper.