Just for a change, I’ll bag someone other than the mainstream media.
Google News.
Its Valentines Day, Feb 14. 11:15am in the morning at I’m typing this.
And what is Google News showing in its latest Victoria news section? (hint, look at the dates of the stories)
What a pathetically lazy piece of journalism this is.
They’re obviously quoting from a press release, because they continue to mix figures from one site with the entire market.
Example
Australian employers are also turning to the virtual job market to find cheap employees: 1484 Australia-based accounts have hired an elancer in the past six months.
Elancer is a specific term to Elance, one of many, many sites facilitating online work, and even then, that’s excluding the broader market, including direct deals, so WTF with the next paragraph:
Australian bosses paid $US898,000 to online employees in 2008, up 44 per cent from $US624,000 in 2007.
HOLY SHIT! Alone I account for something like 5-6% of the money flowing to online employees from Australia.
But that’s just a small taste.
Cause and effect?
There are currently approximately 1300 active service providers on Elance based in Australia, making it the fifth biggest country on Elance regarding visitors per month, behind the US, India, the UK and Canada, according to independent reporting from Quantcast.
Um, number of providers from Australia has NOTHING to do with the traffic the site gets; if it’s popular in Australia, that would be due to Australians looking to hire primarily people overseas; there’s no correlation between providers and traffic, only customers and traffic.
Then there’s the clueless union official
Sharan Burrow, President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), said she was concerned some employers would use the economic downturn to cut pay and conditions.
?¢‚Ǩ?ìAustralian workers should carefully check whether jobs advertised on these websites pay the legal minimum rates if the job is based in Australia,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù Ms Burrow said.
For starters, most of the jobs run by a bidding system, and aren’t fixed rate. But that’s besides the point, because legally there’s no “legal minimum rate” because there’s no employment relationship; the tie up is exclusively a contractural one where a minimum rate doesn’t apply. THE ONLY WAY a min rate would apply would be in the event that a service applier ended up doing 80% of more of their work for the one person, and that’s presuming both parties are in Australia (that rule came in under Howard, and a lot of contractors hated it, because it meant they had to be treated as employees). The chances of an 80% load rule applying on Elance or a similar site: 0/100. But hey, why let common knowledge facts get in the way of a web beatup.
Update: I nearly forgot
Blogging critics have dubbed the sites ?¢‚Ǩ?ìdigital sweatshops?¢‚Ǩ¬ù that take advantage of stressed-out workers who resort to menial jobs at terrible rates.
The link in that paragraph goes to a forum, so the journalist seemingly can’t tell the difference between a blog and a forum. But here’s the better part: there’s nothing about digital sweatshops on the page linked to. Indeed, the link is to an online business forum and an entry made by a new member, and the responses to him. Nothing even remotely related to the story.
Lazy stuff.
Jeremy Schoemaker makes a lot of sense
Money quote:
I am always amazed at how scared people are to fail. I fail all the time?¢‚Ǩ¬¶. or at least what other people would consider to be failures. I would rather call them experiences.
Learning from your failures and trying until you find success is an amazing experience.
People always ask me if I can show them how I learned to make money, program, market, build websites, etc. Here is the secret. I FAILED! And failed a lot.
Paidcontent reports on a PCW report that suggests at least until the end of the last year, online ad spend in Australia continued to head north.
Notably off a crappy base, and they only polled the “top 1000 sites” what ever that means. Still, wins a win.
Received an odd email yesterday from someone I hadn’t heard from in years. Someone who out of the blue cut me off despite a once close working relationship.
Turns out that she got a serious dose of karma, and is rather bitter about it. Wrote to me to say as much as well. Very strange person, maybe a cultural difference given she’s originally foreign.
My crime apparently was expressing surprise on another site about her bitterness.
The thing I’m most sad about is how this person happily picked her own personal profit over others, and yet now claims she was dedicated to those very same people.
I guess, and it’s one of my flaws, is that I’ve never been able to balance both. I tend to side in supporting those around me, and it’s often cost me dearly.
I know at least one serious dick with a grudge against me had claimed I have an issue here, but let me say that I sleep well every night, and I didn’t send myself two emails now on the issue; be it I might add, 2 years too late.
None the less, for me it’s an interesting lesson in morals; sometimes you take hard knocks, but karma always balances things out if you always try to do the right things in life.
A lesson well earned.
As the sun sets over Victoria
let us remember those who have fallen.
Those who lived an Australian dream
The retired, first home owners and those in between.
Let us forever remember that even in the digital age
we were unable to save them.
and lets us respect them by learning from the disaster.
We cannot raise the dead
but we can learn from their deaths.
let us learn in years to come
better ways of saving the living.
At this dark time we remember the fallen
like those who fell before them
and know that together we can make this country better.
May generations hence remember this time
and those that have died
if only as a beacon as to why we should always strive to advance civilization
and the safety it should, and always must provide.
I’m still just….fuck.
Victoria is like a morgue today. People are quiet, the look of horror on their faces, even if they weren’t directly affected.
This isn’t to say that they are some how worse off than those who were directly affected; they simply aren’t. But this State is in a state of shock, that is made worse every time we turn on a radio or view tweets or online video footage.
There is nothing more depressing than hearing reports of a rising death toll, or seeing the Prime Minister on television look like he’s seen a ghost, and on the verge of breaking down.
This is the worst disaster in Australian peace time history, and for those who were born in the 70s or later, their lifetime.
And yet from the depths of despair rises the true Australian spirit.
I saw a man on TV last night who had lost everything not complaining of his loss, but praising that unlike his neighbor, he had survived.
The fire fighters, most volunteers working non stop for days to save more lifes.
The outpouring of support, through donations from individuals and business. I didn’t get to make my donation to the Red Cross until this afternoon because they had so much traffic the site was nearly constantly offline.
Even in its darkest hour, Australians rally together. That is the true Australian spirit.
Up to 60 people dead, hundreds, possibly thousands of homes lost, and Senator Bob Brown (leader of the Australian Greens) uses the opportunity to warn people about global warming
More fires to come as climate change continues: Bob Brown
Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25 per cent, 50 per cent more,” he told Sky News.
“It’s a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change.”
What, arsonists are gong be more prevalent with global warming…because that’s who the CFA is blaming for at least some of the fires. And wow, like we’ve never had deadly fires before either.
Bob Brown, you’re an insensitive little turd who seeks to gain political capital off the deaths of your fellow Australians. Shut the fuck up.
The Age confirms what I observed the other day:
THE leaves may be turning brown and falling, but it’s not an early autumn….
Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens have been undertaking a program to save plants and director Richard Barley said they were in reasonable condition, but he is concerned about the long-term prospects for Melbourne’s established street trees such as planes and elms. “Dropping their leaves is a normal reaction for trees in these circumstances. They have been hit by the two factors of the extended dry and the extraordinary hot air temperatures of last week.
“If we had cooler, wetter conditions to the end of April it is possible they could grow back some of their foliage, but if these conditions continue over the next two or three years, it will put them under enormous stress and it is likely a lot of them will die.”
Duncan Riley on SiliconANGLE Chiang Mai One
