Make a Difference

Day: August 8, 2012

What Consensus?

In March a group of forty-nine NASA scientists wrote to Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator, expressing their concern that NASA’s climate alarm advocacy is not based in science and is undermining NASA’s credibility:

The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.  NASA Administrator  NASA Headquarters  Washington, D.C. 20546-0001  

Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.

For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.

Thank you for considering this request.

via WUWT.

A month ago the journal Nature Climate Change published a paper by a group of German scientists demonstrating that the world’s temperature has been declining for the last 2.000 years:

How did the Romans grow grapes in northern England? Perhaps because it was warmer than we thought.

A study suggests the Britain of 2,000 years ago experienced a lengthy period of hotter summers than today. German researchers used data from tree rings – a key indicator of past climate – to claim the world has been on a ‘long-term cooling trend’ for two millennia until the global warming of the twentieth century.

This cooling was punctuated by a couple of warm spells. These are the Medieval Warm Period, which is well known, but also a period during the toga-wearing Roman times when temperatures were apparently 1 deg C warmer than now. They say the very warm period during the years 21 to 50AD has been underestimated by climate scientists.

Lead author Professor Dr Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz said: ‘We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low.

2,000 Years of Gradual Cooling

Marc Morano and Lord Monckton explain why the whole notion of climate refugees is bunk:

And if you need more, try the NIPCC 2011 interim report which lists dozens of peer reviewed papers published in the last two years questioning the science of man made global warming.

Consensus? Pull the other one.

The Oddness of Apple

I have always liked Apple products. Although they are a little expensive compared to other products, they are stylish and reliable.

I would love to be able to sell them. I recently signed up with a new wholesaler who is an Apple distributor, and began to go through the process of becoming an Apple reseller.

Normally Apple require a commitment to sell a minimum of $30,000 worth of their products per quarter. Our total IT sales easily exceed that, but Kangaroo Island is an isolated community with a very small population; less than 5,000 people, so I did not feel able to make a commitment to that level of sales from day one.

I explained this to the Apple rep, a pleasant seeming young woman named Charmaine. It was not necessarily a problem, she said. She asked me to send her photos of the shop and of the space in the shop where Apple products would be displayed. After I had done that she sent me a Reseller Application and told me that once that was completed and returned, we would be ready to go.

A week later I heard from a third party that my application had been declined. I emailed Charmaine to check whether there was anything in the form I had missed, or if there was something else I needed to do. No reply. A week later I emailed her again. No reply. Another week later I tried again. Still no reply.

I was beginning to think that if Apple treated its customers the same way it treated potential resellers, I was probably better off not selling its products. That is a decision we have made before with companies which do not keep their promises. See this earlier story about OKI printers.

Co-incidentally, at about the same time, I read about an Apple Store in Sydney which had been copying personal files and photos from client computers for the amusement of staff:

The Sunday Telegraph revealed last week that the inner-city store – an accredited and official Apple reseller – copied private pictures of the household-name star and his wife in numerous sexual acts.

He had taken the computer to the shop to be repaired…

The Olympian is among a number of celebrities – as well as members of the general public – caught out.

This was not an isolated incident, or one or two staff members who were swiftly dismissed:

Shop staff scan machines for intimate material under the encouragement of the store’s owner and upload sensitive photos and videos to a shared drive…

The store owner denied targeting sexual images but said: “If people choose to put photos and personal information on their computers that’s their decision.”

I was gobsmacked. That is a shocking betrayal of trust. People’s computers are their private property. The only time we ever look at client files or emails is if we are asked to recover and check particular files. Otherwise, client privacy is sacred. Even if there are photos on the desktop, we simply ignore them. I don’t even tell my wife what I have seen on client computers.

What was Apple’s response to this?

Apple spokeswoman Fiona Martin …  called on any customers who feared their privacy had been compromised at an Apple store to contact the company immediately. However, she would not guarantee Apple would take steps to protect its customers, or that it would withdraw the store’s licence.

What does that mean? Let us know, but don’t expect us to do anything about it? As far as I know the store is still operating, is still an Apple reseller, and existing staff are still in place. Nor has Apple revealed publicly which store it was.

So clients going into an Apple store and having their private files searched and personal photos filched for the prurient entertainment of staff is OK, but when someone with a long-standing interest in Apple products, a high level of technical qualifications, a commitment to customer service, and a solid trading history wants to introduce Apple products into a new market, that’s not even worth replying to emails about.

It seems an odd set of priorities.

CFS Live, ESL Trader, OP Solutions, etc

I have written a few times about these scammers. See here and here, for example.

CFS-Live and ESL Trader are a simple but very slick share trading software scam. The pattern is that they cold call to test interest, send a polished looking brochure, make follow-up calls, give you a few websites (all fakes) to check to confirm their stories, tell you there only a couple of licences left for your state, that because of the demand they can only hold one for you for a day or two. If you still hesitate they will give you a directors’ guarantee that you will make back the cost of the programme within the first twelve months or they will refund your money.

But you won’t make any money, and they won’t refund your payment.

I rarely write negatively about any person or company. When I do I am careful to be fair and factual. I always allow people to respond and will make changes if they can show I was wrong. All the CFS ESL crowd needed to do was demonstrate that their products really do work, and that they treat people who are unhappy fairly and honestly, and I would have been delighted to have said so.

Instead, they responded with threatening phone calls, abusive emails, and numerous vicious and misleading comments to the posts about JBC, CFS and ESL.

More recently, they have set up a couple of websites or blogs making vile allegations about me and my family, or pretending to be people who have shopped with me and are dissatisfied. It is silly, childish and nasty. I am not bothered by them, because no-one who knows me or my business would believe them for a moment.

In the last few days someone has attempted to organise an attack on this website. Again, silly and shortsighted. Everything is backed up, and even if the attack was successful and the site went down, it would be up again the next day

By doing these things, Rhys, Phil and co have confirmed what I have heard from the hundreds of people who have contacted me or made comments on the various earlier posts – that they are not only dishonest, but vicious and vindictive. Not the kind of people you want to be doing business with.

The National Disability Insurance Scam

Who could not be in favour of helping the disabled? Who wants to pay for that help?

The delectable Philippa Martyr writes in Quadrant Magazine:

The Federal government has recently committed $1 billion to start up a National Disability Insurance Scheme for as many as 20,000 people with serious lifetime disabilities, and their carers and families.

This certainly makes a nice change from cuddling up to a union that has plundered the wages of the very workforce that helps to care for these people.

However, here are some of the ways in which the NDIS – a scheme which is supposed to help genuinely disadvantaged people who are doing it really, really tough – could have been funded from as far back as 2007, when this government was first elected.

  • Estimated cost of the unnecessary pink batts scheme, whose graft and waste is well-documented: $2.45 billion, followed by another $424 million to fix the dangerous installations
  • Estimated cost of the Building the Education Revolution scheme, ditto: $16.2 billion
  • Estimated cost (so far) of the National Broadband Network, as WiFi conquers the known universe: at least $36 billion
  • Resources available to the Climate Change ministerial portfolio in 2010-2011, to fix a ‘problem’ whose tractability and indeed existence is questionable: $1.57 billion
  • Labor’s ‘literacy and numeracy partnership’ (4 years) which has produced no measurable improvements in either: $540 million
  • The dramatically unsuccessful Productivity Places Program which was so badly administered that it is impossible to tell who benefited from it, if anyone: $2.1 billion

Sadly, this catalogue of over-administered political bankruptcy tends to point to one conclusion: the NDIS will become just another unauditable and potentially tragic botch-up. Only time will tell.

Only $1 billion on the latest feel good scheme. That’s only $50 from every every Australian resident. We should probably be grateful. The NBN looks like costing more than $50 billion. That’s at least $6000 from every household – for an internet connection.

I have written about the utter madness of the NBN before, but let me say that again. A minimum of $6000 per household for an internet connection, an amount you will pay through taxation whether you need an internet connection or not.

Perhaps we wouldn’t mind the incredible cost if we were getting an incredible product. But the NBN relies on technology that was outdated before it even began. Most households, even those that connect to the NBN’s overpriced services, would have been better off with newer, mostly wireless, technologies that would have been introduced had the market just been allowed to do its thing.

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