by cameron | Feb 4, 2008 | Podcast, Uncategorized
Over dinner last night, I heard about a scam being run by an Australian bank, where they tell business customers to pay $20 to speed up the processing of cheques they bank. An honest teller finally told this friend of mine, who had being paying the $20 once a week for years, that it was rubbish. The cheques don’t get processed any quicker than they normally do.
This made me recall the number of times I’ve had arguments with tellers when they tell me that it takes 20 days to process a cheque drawn on an international bank. I’ve even banked cheques from GOOGLE and they tell me it takes 20 business days to “clear the funds”. What bullshit. I always ask them if they’ve heard of the internet.
So, I’m researching a podcast on bank scams. Not the Nigerian kind – the Australian kind. If you’ve got a story about unfair, excessive or unlawful penalty fees charged by Australian banks and other financial institutions, or just scams like the international cheque clearing, then shoot me an email. And check out the campaign being run by Choice and the Consumer Action Law Centre on the same subject.
by cameron | Feb 4, 2008 | Video
I finally did my first Seesmic video today. I’ve had an account for a couple of months but haven’t figured out what to do with it. Not sure how useful it is to me yet but if you don’t experiment with these things, you’ll never know. It took me months to work out Second Life and Twitter as well. Hell, I’ve been podcasting for 3 years and I am still trying to figure THAT out. Anyway, here it is. It’s called “On Fidel”.
http://seesmic.com/Standalone.swf?video=FZhZBn6Qid
by cameron | Feb 4, 2008 | capitalism, Iraq, Uncategorized
The world’s largest arms dealer, the USA, which is also the country with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons (it maintains a current arsenal of around 9,960 intact warheads… how many DO you need to destroy the world?), will spend more that $1 trillion on “defence” for the first time in history in 2008, according to this article in Le Monde. I put inverted commas around “defence” because their current strategy of non-UNSC sanctioned pre-emptive attacks can hardly be called “defence”. It’s a typical PR sleight-of-hand. Let’s call it what it is. It’s an “ATTACK” budget.
As part of this $1 trillion, the US will spend $23.4bn towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads.
The older I get, the more I read, and the more unconvinced I am becoming that democracy and capitalism contain the model for the future for the human race. If the USA is the beacon of modern democracy, then I believe we need a new system, a better system.
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It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defence budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defence-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defence spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defence budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.
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by cameron | Feb 3, 2008 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Two great events on in Melbourne this week.
MODM 9 is on Thursday night and
The Hive, a new event for entrepreneurs run by Ross Hill, is having their first event on Tuesday night! I’m looking forward to both. I’m working on a plan to take MODM national this year and I’m very excited about it. It’ll be great to travel around the country every month talking to digital media folks about how we use our skillz to change the world.
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James Masini will be talking about how he started Hippo, raised significant investment and plans to take over the casual job market… be there!
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The Hive is networking for entrepreneurs. We get together to share advice, talk and hang out. Membership is free and easy, and everyone’s invited. If you have an idea and want to launch a venture or already have a venture already then make sure you come along.
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by cameron | Feb 3, 2008 | Melbourne, Podcast
A few weeks ago I went on a tour of some of Melbourne’s top cocktail bars with my mate and TPN host “Cocktail” Kevin Clark. Kev, who tends bar at the Tiki Bar & Lounge in Richmond, hosts TPN’s Soused podcast (a podcast about cocktails) and is also co-host of TPN’s Geeks Of Hazzard. He told me that it is said that the face you make when you’re shaking a cocktail is the same face you make when you are making love. So we grabbed my video camera and asked some of Melbourne’s top cocktail mixologists to show us their cocktail faces. I had a great night, learned a lot about cocktails and tasted some fantastic drinks. This is the result. The video is 30 minutes long and about a 140mb download.
