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Day: May 23, 2011

JBC, MCI Star Trader, CFS, GSI and Other Scam Trading Programmes

May 23, 2011 / / 1 Comment

A reader sent me a link to this video from the BBC programme Watchdog:

It is easy to feel that the people who bought this programme have themselves to blame. But that would not be fair.

JBC, CFS, MCI or whatever they are calling themselves since they last closed down and set up somewhere else under a new name, are very sophisticated. They have been doing this a long time. They provide professional looking literature, and refer people to ‘independent’ websites and magazines which have reviewed their product.

The problem is that the websites and magazines are fake, as is the software. This is a con.

I have written a number of previous posts about the JBC MCI CFS stock / share trading scam.

If you have been a victim of these conmen, please email me or comment.

I would very much like one of our Australian current affairs programmes to take a run at these swine.

Rapture, Global Warming, and Other Delusions

May 23, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Harold Camping was wrong. 200 million Christian believers were not ‘raptured’ up to heaven on Saturday.

If Christian fundamentalists keep this up, it will only be another 100 or so wrong predictions and they will have as much of a credibility problem as the global warming alarmists.

Seriously.

How is it that someone like Camping gets two predictions wrong, and the media treats him like a clown, and people like Paul Ehrlich, James Hansen, Tim Flannery and others, get hundreds of predictions wrong and are lauded by the media and given six figure salary jobs selling government climate policy?

This is a picture of a tolerant crowd outside Campings radio headquarters gloating over his mistake.

Gloaters

Maybe science won’t make a fool of you, but bad science will, and so far, it’s doing a better job than Harold Camping.

Building the Stuff-up Revolution

May 23, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I am against taxpayer funded subsidies as a matter of general principle. Subsidies mean the government thinks it knows how to use your money better than you do.

For example, I have a 100km return trip to work each day, and live in a remote area where petrol costs a third more than in Adelaide. But the state government still thinks I should be subsidising the travel costs of people who live in Adelaide, pay less for petrol, and travel 10 kms to work.

I’m sure that makes sense to someone. Well, any politicians whose voters live in Adelaide.

Now the federal government is using your money to pay for set top boxes at $350 each for people on government benefits. This enables them to receive digital TV broadcasts on their old analog set.

High definition set top boxes retail for about $100. You can buy a new digital TV for $300.

I’m sure this amazing plan makes sense to someone.

Probably the same people who decided it would be fair to take your tax money and give it to people who wanted solar panels on their roofs. And then use your tax money to pay those same people twice as much for the electricity they generated through the panels you paid for as the power companies could sell it for – leaving you to pay the difference in increased power bills.

Not only was this dumb to start with, the contractors who put these panels in appear to have performed with the same level of diligence as the blokes who contracted to put dodgy insulation in pensioners’ roofs at your expense. In other words, stuff all, except when it came to collecting the cheques.

Now National Electricity and Communications Association chief executive James Tinslay has called for a nationwide review of solar panel installations after revelations that 5 per cent of those in Port Macquarie in northern NSW contained potentially fatal flaws.

Mr Tinslay said botched solar installations put homeowners at risk of fire and electrocution, and a national audit would be likely to cost millions of dollars.

His comments follow reports that NSW Fair Trading inspectors who visited 55 solar installations in Port Macquarie in February found problems with 16 sites — three serious.

Thirty-five out of 40 installations audited were found not to comply with the Home Building Act.

Pretty much as expected, then, based on past performance.

Fortunately this particular rort is likely to come to an end fairly quickly, as governments realise they face an electoral backlash over increased power bills caused largely by the payment of exorbitant feed-in tariffs to owners of solar panels. State governments plan to cut feed-in back to levels which are still unrealistic, but which will cost taxpayers less.

But the graspers are not going to go down quietly. The solar panel industry is having a hissy fit, with claims thousands of jobs will be lost.

They are brilliant at grasping the subsidies. One thing they don’t seem to grasp is that the money to pay for those subsidies is taken from ordinary people and businesses who if they still had that money, would be able to employ people to do something useful, productive, worthwhile. Every government, or government subsidised job, costs nearly two jobs in the private sector.

The solar panel industry are as much a bunch of carpet-baggers as the insulation and set top box boys. Although with the government dishing out money for these loony schemes you can hardly blame people for stepping up to take their share.

But I am two minds about householders who signed up for solar panels.

They must have known, or should have known, that their cheap panels and high feed-in tariffs were being paid for by other taxpayers. However, if state governments have really entered into contracts with them for tariffs at a certain level, those contracts should be honoured – even though they should never have been put in place.

Governments must honour their contracts. There can be no confidence for anyone if they don’t. Even in this case, darn it!

Failure is Essential

May 23, 2011 / / 0 Comments

One of a few interesting posts over the last week from Dr Tim Ball:

Support and even reward of failure by the current US administration is the culmination of a pattern begun several years ago under the guise of progress. It generally began in the school system when students were not allowed to fail, and worse, were pushed unprepared to a higher level. By the time the student realized they were totally unprepared they were no longer in the education system. It is an ultimately destructive approach …

I watched more and more students come into university simply unprepared. A measure of the problems was the proliferation of remedial skills courses and probationary courses required before assigning regular student status in colleges and universities. Employers increasingly complained about poor skills among graduating students. Approximately 10 emails a month from students doing classroom projects provide me with a crude measure of poor language skills.

Not allowing failure became a prevailing philosophy in our schools several years ago. It’s assumed this will promote individual personality and freedom when the actual result is enslavement of the individual. It ignores the fact you learn self-discipline by initially being disciplined. As you demonstrate a personal responsibility you are given more self-discipline. It is naïve and dangerous to assume children will develop self-discipline on their own. It is dangerous for the child and for society. …

(Recently I had a) .. debate with a liberal education professor about the need for school leaving exams. It occurred in front of High School students and teachers. He opposed them with the usual arguments; teachers simply taught to the exams; they created stress for the students; they create a two-tiered society of successes and failures. In response I said; at least the teachers were teaching to some standard; yes, the tests were stressful but life is stressful and preparing students for life is fundamental; the results created a two-tiered society because the testing was usually geared to college entrance rather than a broad determination of abilities; the system usually ignored how the measures were helpful to students as a measure of their abilities with other students beyond their school.

I was jeered and booed most of the time until, to a mighty cheer, a student said he opposed testing of any kind. I suggested the student better hope the pilot of the next commercial flight he took had achieved some level of performance in his flying tests.

At many public schools in Australia, there is a ‘no child will fail’ philosophy. This does not mean that students are given whatever help they need to reach required objective standards. It means results are manipulated until it looks like students have succeeded. It also means that teachers who do want to teach and mark to standards are marginalised and even abused.

One school staff member related an incident where he had said he could not pass certain students because they had simply not done the required work, or not done it to the required standard. The response from another staff member was shouting and waving a finger in his face. It wasn’t fair, she shouted. His harsh attitude would adversly affect the students’ self-esteem.

This kind of ‘no one is allowed to fail’ mentality is one of the reasons industry IT qualifications are valued much more highly than school or college diplomas.

To get an industry qualification you have to prove you have the knowledge and skills. There are objective standards. You have to meet them. If you don’t, you don’t get the qualification. Consequently, if you have a COMPTIA or Citrix or Microsoft certification, people will have confidence you can do the work, and you will get a job.

The same is true, or I hope it is, for airline pilots and brain surgeons. But in almost every endeavour, some real knowledge and skills are necessary. That is reality. We are setting students up for real and lasting failure if we do not prepare them for it.

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