Mimentum Blog

Posted By Mimenta on May 21, 2012

The retailers are lying when they tell you that no GST gives online sellers an advantage over retailers in bricks and mortar shops. The truth is actually the opposite:

1. When I buy something online, I have to pay postage and handling, something my local store doesn’t usually charge me for. If I bought something as large as a refrigerator, on line, the postage and handling is at least 20% more than if I bought it from a department store who charges me for the local carrier to deliver it (and I know what time or day he will drop it off too). Postage and handling for online sales is always more than GST. If the retailers really want the “level playing field” like they claim, they should increase the GST to 15% to equal the online postage and handling charges.
2. If I’m not happy with the goods, I can take them back to the store for an exchange or refund. Australian Consumer Laws protect me if the goods are defective or fail to perform as the seller advertised. Online, there is no such protection. The seller is likely to reside overseas where our consumer laws don’t apply (even when it says he’s in Australia). Refunds or exchanges are purely at the discretion of the seller who is not legally bound to offer them.
3. Retailers ignore the fact that already many of their current sales are the result of buyers researching the product online and going to the store to touch and feel the actual product (the “hands on” experience). In the USA a study was performed on shoppers and it was found that over 22% of department store shoppers used the Internet to research their purchase first but bought from the store for their final purchase because they wanted that final “hands on” experience that they could not get on the Internet.

The real truth is that retailers will lose business to online sellers and they deserve to because:

• Retailers charge too much. The Jewelery trade marks their product up often by over 600%. Retailers have grown used to huge profits for little work and need to get leaner. I don’t have to buy off you. There’s other stores, so make it worth my while.
• Retailers give such poor service, that people might as well go online. You can’t look at anything in a store without being pounced on by someone.
• Retailers don’t research their products. I can find out more on the Internet than I can in any store, from an attendant. In a Harvey Norman Store, I was given wrong information twice about a laptop computer by an attendant who tried to sell me a laptop that was not suited to what I wanted. At his sales desk was a computer where he could have looked up the information on the Internet but his employer would probably consider that a waste of paid time. One of the worst offenders would be the Dick Smith and Tandy stores, when it comes to selling electronics components – their attendants are so ignorant of their products, it’s lucky they haven’t electrocuted someone.
• Retailers treat customers like sheep. Why should I queue at a Harvey Norman store to pay a cashier for my purchase? I spent 5 minutes in a queue in a Telstra Shop to wait for an attendant and I hadn’t even been served yet! I walked out and signed up with Southern Phone over the phone and got them to cancel my Telstra Account, all while I sat in my car in the carpark!
• If I have to talk to an Indian or Philipino customer service officer about my Melbourne purchase, why don’t I just go online and buy direct from India or Philipines for at least 20% less, online?
• Stop feeding me that Buy Australian patriotic crap – your products came from overseas, your customer service is overseas and you are probably saving up for another holiday overseas. When I see Gerry Harvey saying “We are losing Australian jobs” I want to puke. It’s a case of “Pot calling the kettle black”. How many Aussie jobs were lost when a huge chain like his Harvey Norman Stores sources their goods from places like China?

It’s time retailers showed some integrity, and faced the truth. Even with the advantages of “hands on” experience, consumer law protection, lower delivery costs and face to face personal human contact to cater for my needs personally, you just aren’t good enough to earn my business!

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Posted By Mimenta on May 12, 2012

While we tend to focus on the event, we need to look ahead rather than behind. We need to use this new information for future planning.

Although there is still some debate about global warning, whether you accept the theory of not, we need to be aware that extreme natural disasters are happening and are likely to reoccur. Existing civil planning and construction needs to exceed known past disaster levels, to allow for these extreme conditions, no matter how improbable they may seem today. With new technology, comes new dangers and we need to revise our minimum safety standards and reaction procedures accordingly.

Given these natural risks, we need to change our disaster planning. The Japanese government treated the people like children and played the information down. The people now, do not trust the government and assume the information they receive is understated. As a result today, a warning issued to the population is likely to create an over reaction. With today’s technology, we will have advanced warning of most disasters. If the people receive this information promptly and have a practised plan of action, panic will not result. Panic is the result of ignorance.

We need to beef up our civil defence response. After WWII we created a disaster response organisation in every country and town. Over the subsequent years, without many significant disasters, we have become complacent. We remember those who fell in the wars but forget those living. The preparations we, the civil populace, made for invasion are the same ones we make for most disasters. Commemorative days should be days we practise our disaster plans out of respect for our ancestors. The best way to honour them is to demonstrate they did not give their lives in vain; they made us more vigilant as a whole country.

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Tags: Current Affairs, Nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, nuclear reactor, radiation, radioactive contamination

Posted By Mimenta on May 5, 2012

The design for the Daiichi reactors was 25 years old. There are improved designs since then that would have survived much better in the same situation.

We need to review the design of whole nuclear plants and not just reactors, with a view to natural disasters. These reactors sat under a pool of water which was needed to keep spent fuel cooled. A reactor core explosion would damage the pool and expose additional fuel to the reaction. Logic says you don’t store the firewood above the fire so why would you store spent fuel above a reactor?

The public require administrators who make policy decisions and set standards based on safety, when it comes to nuclear energy, not economics alone. Uranium, the fuel used to power these reactors,  has a half life of 250,000 years – tha’ts 250,000 years to become only half as toxic. Doesn’t that tell you we need to make these decisions on more than an annual profit?
[FYI - I'm being conservative here - the other fuel ingredient was plutonium - it has a half life of 3,000,000 years!]

The sea wall to protect the Daiichi reactors was not built for a 100 year event. In this respect, TEPCO is not at fault. The blame lays squarely with the Japanese government who endorsed the plans for the power stations and the subsequent governments who failed to review them. They took a gamble that the past Tsunamis would never happen again. They gambled against the odds with the lives of their people and as such betrayed the trust of their people. The towns all along the coast have tsunami markers, put there by ancestors. Most of them were above the existing sea wall levels and were ignored when the sea walls were built.

Because the whole Daiichi power plant was driven by economics rather than safety, risks were taken. We need to realise that Nuclear Power is only a cheap source of energy as long as it is running perfectly. However it is also an unforgiving source of energy where a $25 replacement part can cost billions of dollars if it breaks down. The costs of decontaminating Fukushima would be enough to build 20 modern power plants. We need to keep this in mind when we look at the viability of older nuclear power stations. In hindsight, it would have been far cheaper to decommission the Daiichi reactors and build them to a new safer design that would not have put the spent fuel at so much less risk, as well as build a higher sea wall.

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Tags: Current Affairs, Effects of Japanese nuclear disaster, Nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, nuclear reactor, radiation, radioactive contamination

Posted By Mimenta on April 11, 2012

If I asked you where the greatest source of radiation in a nuclear power plant was, you would probably say, “The reactor”. Fukushima taught us otherwise. The reactor vessel itself was the primer for the explosion. More deadly, was the spent fuel stored in the cooling pond above it. From the disaster management point of view, “spent fuel” is really far from “spent”. It is highly radioactive and combustible; not super combustible enough for a reactor but combustible enough to create as much risk as the reactor core itself if it’s not cooled. This far exceeded the amount of fuel inside the reactor vessel but in human terms was just as toxic.

We failed to accurately track the potential of the power stations for disaster. We knew how much fuel material was in each reactor core and completely ignored the amount of spent fuel that was stored on the site. All fuel, whether spent of in use, is equally dangerous and we had over 175 times more fuel in storage, than in the reactor cores.

Hazard response planning was wholly inadequate for the amount of material on the site. Operators need to keep authorities accurately informed of the amount of hazardous material they have on site at any time.

Operators should improve their housekeeping. TEPCO failed to remove their rubbish – the spent fuel rods. As a result this posed the greatest danger to public health. In the core meltdown it added to the amount of material and fueled the explosion as well as making more radioatice material available for vapourisation. In reactors that did not have a core meltdown, as the cooling pond water levels dropped and the spent fuel, still thermally hot, superheated the remaining water into a radioactive vapour.

One reactor building was completely shut down – no reactor core at all. It posed the same risk as the reactors that were active because this building had a cooling pond that evaportated and held more spent fuel than any other reactor.

Maybe we need to change the name “spent fuel”. The image that it is unreactive is wrong. It radiates lots of heat as well as all other forms of radiation, just not fast enough to produce the heat required to create super heated steam to run the tubines. Put enough of these spent fuel rods close together and the collective radiation and heat will quickly rise enough to melt vapourise water. When that water is gone, the heat continued to rise until the fuel reached melting point. At that moment it can combine into one highly reactive mass, no longer separated with spaces, it turns critical and vapourises.

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Tags: Current Affairs, Effects of Japanese nuclear disaster, Nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, nuclear reactor, radiation, radioactive contamination

Posted By Mimenta on April 4, 2012

We see someone with qualifications and accept what they say as the truth. Unfortunately we forget to question their motives – now we will pay for at least the next 200 years!

We trusted the experts and overlooked the fact that they were all from one side of the nuclear power debate.

• There was TEPCO , the owners of the power plant and reactors,who supplied the data to the government.
• The Japanese government who had assured the public that the reactors were safe.
• The International Atomic Eneregy Agency (IAEC) who promote the use of Atomic energy.

Where were the Greenies, to give us the other side of the arguements?
It was too dangerous, too dirty for them to check the data on site (and very convenient for everyone else to lock them out). They all gave us armchair reports from comfy University offices, using the sanitised data provided by TEPCO, The Japanese Government and the IAEC. If these so called “Environmental Experts” were so intelligent, why didn’t they think to scrutinise the data for bias?

The radiation contamination measurements taken were either done so by people from TEPCO and the International Atomic Energy Agency or their data was disseminated by them. Much of the data was “filtered” to reduce the seriousness of the incident, either by delaying it until further readings eliminated all other possibilities or by losing the readings altogether. Where ranges of contamination data were recorded, the lowest values were publicized.

The Japanese Government didn’t know there had been a core meltdown until 3 days afterwards, when the immediate radiation contamination readings would have indicated a core meltdown, as it was happening. Even then the “experts” from the Atomic Agency cooked the “safe exposure” figures, multiplying them 20 times higher to make the danger less scary. We expected them to be unbiased and they weren’t.

If the radiation readings were high, the TEPCO officials stopped the data because it didn’t suit what they wanted to think. While they waited for confirmation radiation readings, people were exposed to levels of radiation considered 100 times above the  safe level.

Even today, researchers at Japanese Universities, staff are convinced that if they recovered radiation contamination data showing high readings, their departments would filter their findings. Radiation readings taken from surrounding areas by independent sources are repeatedly contradicting government readings, which are usually much lower.

The Atomic Commission has a vested interest in playing down the risks of using Nuclear Energy but we give them sole access to all monitoring. We let the fox guard the hen house and believe the chicken count!

Today the IAEA has given Fukushima the same disaster rating as Chernobyl (hate to say it but I told you so back in April 2011). The so called experts made the same mistake as the Russian government – trying to play it down and leaving innocent people exposed to massive levels of radioactive contamination. These disasters can be so deadly, we need to react to the worst case scenario, not the safest, until the data is confirmed – it’s better to be safe than sorry, isn’t it?

It’s time  to appoint a fully independent Atomic auditor with representatives from BOTH sides of the nuclear debate and not rely on those with a vested interest, to give us the full story.

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Tags: Current Affairs, Effects of Japanese nuclear disaster, Nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, nuclear reactor, radiation, radioactive contamination

Posted By Mimenta on March 29, 2012

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you some breaking news!”

(I’ve always wanted to say that . . .  but it’s true. There’s some new findings at Fukushima that should be ringing alarm bells worldwide:

Radiation in Fukushima Reactor No. 2 is far higher than anticipated and the water level of coolant is much lower than authorities expected but there could be even worse news from the other crippled reactors, when authorities finally get a robotic inspection vehicle inside the other tsunami damaged reactors.

According to Al Jazeera on 28th March 2012 (click on the heading to see the article)

——————————————————

Radiation ‘fatally high’ at Japan reactor

“One of Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors still has fatally high radiation levels and much less water to cool it than officials had estimated, according to an internal examination that renews doubts about the plant’s stability. A tool equipped with a tiny video camera, a thermometer, a dosimeter and a water gauge was used to assess damage inside the containment chamber of Fukushima Daiichi plant’s number 2 reactor for the second time since the tsunami swept into the complex more than a year ago. The data collected on Tuesday showed the damage from the disaster is so severe that the plant operator will have to develop special equipment and technology to tolerate the harsh environment and decommission the plant. The process is expected to last decades. The other two reactors that had meltdowns could be in even worse shape. The number 2 reactor is the only one officials have been able to closely examine so far.”

————————————————————————-

At last we are getting some facts and quite disturbing ones:

1. That “the coolant levels are lower than expected “ raises two issues -

• Where is the highly radioactive missing coolant? Is it leaking out somewhere (and still doing so) or has it evaporated, in which case, why was it hotter than we predicted to evaporate so much?
• If this reactor core has lower levels of coolant, what are the levels in the other reactors that have not been inspected. If they are lower, we could face yet another Chernobyl type explosion, due to the combined mass of reactor fuel and spent fuel rods that were stored above the core in the cooling pond, before the explosion.

2. The other reactors are too damaged to even get a robot in there and we have no idea what to expect.

3. The estimates of the radioactivity were beyond the so called “experts” predictions, which casts serious doubt on just how expert are these ‘experts’?
After all they are the same experts advising the rest of the world on their nuclear power plants.

4. We have developed the technology to create nuclear disasters but are woefully behind on the technology required to handle them, monitor them and clean up after them. The only safe way to eliminate highly radioactive waste permanently, is to send it into the sun. We already have that technology but are too miserly to put it to proper humane use.

5. It tells us that not only is the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power plant still not secure, it is still spewing radiation into the environment at higher levels that the experts anticipated. In a second whammy, what they are not admitting, is that if the extra low coolant does reach critically low levels, the reactor could explode all over again, or at least superheat and release even more radioactive cesium and iodine levels than before. The worst scenario is that it vapourises and spews plutonium into the atmosphere. This has a half life of 3 million years, or to put it another way, it takes 3,000,000 years to lose half of it’s lethal toxicity.

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Posted By Mimenta on March 29, 2012

Fukushima was a new scenario. We were trying to plan for a disaster that had never been before but we never realised it at the time.
The data used to determine safe levels of exposure was derived from the WWII atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki, Hiroshima, test bombs like Bikini Atoll, Maralinga here in Australia and from the Chernobyl reactor explosion – all were high levels of exposure. The recording equipment used after the WWII bombs wasn’t accurate like today’s equipment. They were direct line of site blasts. The Russian authorities covered up the Chernobyl disaster, refusing to take readings from the surrounding area for over three months. When they did release the data, much of it was lost, conflicting and suspected of being “sanitized” politically. We had no knowledge of the spread of radiation from a reactor meltdown immediately after the incident. We never knew how the radioactive material ejected into the air, would spread within those first few months.

As a direct result, villages near the area were evacuated to areas that measured much higher than their village had been. No-one factored in that the climatic reaction to airborne particles would concentrate the radioactive contamination in pockets, miles away from the reactors themselves. The airborne particles from the explosions, rich in contaminants from the core itself, condensed with the rain to create radioctive showers in the surrounding areas.

The village of Kawauchi, for instance, within 30km of the Daiichi plant, was evacuated and residents taken to Koriyama, outside the evacuation zone. What authorities failed to note was the the radiation level in Koriyama was higher than that of Kawauchi.

In the village of Iitate, 10 days after the rest of the world had displayed film of the explosions at the Daiichi reactors, government officials dispatched doctors to the village to tell residents everything was fine.”Not only did he not say that there wasn’t a problem, he also told us we could eat local produce,” said the former Iitate resident. It wasn’t until 11^th of April^h that they started to hint there would be an evacuation.

All data needs to be released now, so we can model how this could happen if a similar incident occurs somewhere else.

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Tags: consumer advice, Current Affairs, Effects of Japanese nuclear disaster, Nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, nuclear reactor, radiation, radioactive contamination

Posted By Mimenta on March 26, 2012

The only thing more sad than a death, is a death in vain.

While we remember that day the world watched, glued to their televisions, as the tsunami’s black wave of devastation swept a wall of boats, cars, burning homes and other debris miles inland into Japan, we tend to forget the people who perished.

We saw images of the damaged reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi power plants and later heard that the steam and smoke we saw, was highly radioactive, not just hydrogen. Somewhere in there was a tiny mention that a number of workers had perished in the plant.

As the scene developed we saw ships where houses stood and town after town totally wiped off the map. We also heard statistics, the number of millserverts, lost, missing and displaced. It was all so overwhelming that we often forgot those numbers weren’t just statistics. They were mothers, fathers and children. We never got to count the lost pets. It was easier to think of it as rubble and the news was forbidden to show us the real cost – the more than 19.000 dead but it was a battlefield like many others except nature, not another race of men, was the enemy.

It’s a year on and it’s still too soon to erect memorials but while the scientists talk of statistics, let’s take time to remember the fallen. Spare a thought for the empty seats at so many tables, the empty bed and barely started school books, that are all families have as a token of the passing of their loved ones. There are many families who will never have a body to bury – never have that absolute closure.

It’s important to remember their passing but even more important, is to make sure they died not in vain. The only thing more sad than death, is a death in vain. Forget the recriminations, it will not bring them back. Instead we should look at events and extract the lessons from them so that we honour them and their passing will be of value to all people around the world.

We listened to so-called experts but today we realise how little information we had to form those opinions and how useless was much of the advice, given to the people of Fukushima, Japan and the rest of the world. We realise now that that advice was not neutral and came from all the “experts” who were in favour of nuclear energy. There was no-one speaking for the other side, checking their data.

Over the next few postings, we will look at a few of the lessons to be learned, not for the sake of blame and not to wave an anti nuclear flag either. Some countries just don’t have the resources to provide energy for all, without nuclear power. Though it can be deadly, it should be possible to improve the way we handle it to replace the coal fired power stations that contribute so heavily to global pollution.

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Tags: Current Affairs, Effects of Japanese nuclear disaster, Nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, radiation, radioactive contamination

Posted By Mimenta on March 18, 2012

The figures quoted in the Ernst and Young “study” of online sales are totally meaningless. You cannot accurately predict Internet sales, there are just too may variables effecting the Internet. Any major world event, like 9-11, Prince William’s Marriage and the Japanese Tsunami,  will alter the numbers of viewers looking at an online store or auction site. We have a period of solar flares that can interfere with communications satellites at the moment. The report of a virus or a team of scammers working Ebay or Amazon or any other high volume sales sites will have a huge effect on sales for quite a while. Recently an earthquake in Taiwan destroyed a producer of computer RAM and all sales of computer memory died on the Internet. Only shops with existing stocks kept selling RAM cards.

Lets take a good look at Internet projected statistics and go back to predictions made in 2005.

The amount of goods sold online were predicted to grow exponentially back in 2005. E bay and Amazon were the largest players in the online sales game. If this prediction had come true, online sales would be over 1800% more today.

It’s not possible to make these predictions because the Internet is always changing. No-one can predict the next influence to hit the Internet, let alone it’s effect on online sales.

In 2005 there was nothing on the horizon to slow the exponential growth of E Bay. It was an unstoppable juggernaut. Sellers moved goods through online auctions and online e shops. In the tax year ending 2005, according to ATO sources, there were 1,410 Australians who filed tax returns with “Internet Marketing” as their main occupation. According to E Bay, at that time, 75,000 people were signing up for E bay membership every day. If the predictions were accurate and a continuation of the previous year’s trend, the following year there should have been twice as many Australians claiming “Internet Marketing” as their income source, on their 2006 tax returns. In fact, in 2006 the ATO had only 1500 people claiming their income was derived from Internet Marketing.

All the statisticians said that the Internet was going to boom over the next 5 years and had yet to reach it’s peak. Within the next 5 years the Internet was going to become the business goods trading arena, replacing much of the trading of goods that were currently trading in bricks and mortar shops. Shops that failed to adopt an online presence risked becoming dinosaurs and facing extinction.

• In 2006 E bay raised the fees for sellers, especially for their online shops. All their market models said this would be a wise financial move. They increased listing fees for sellers too but only in the old country members. Eager to woo the new Chinese market opening up, they did not add fees to Chinese sellers. Many sellers here in Australia closed their E bay shops and several new online auction sites appeared. E bay was flooded with fake goods and goods of an inferior quality.
• Several viruses hit the Internet scene. Computers were found to be clones in a massive network.
• Phishing emails become rife to the point where Nigeria gains the reputation of being the World’s Internet Scam capital.
• Microsoft release their new operating system, VISTA and the public find out it’s all graphics with no drivers. Microsoft again abandon their principle of backwards compatibility and businesses agree to stick with the old operating system Windows XP.
• Current Affairs programs broadcast accounts of E Bay deals gone bad.

By the end of 2006 the Australian Tax Office recorded 1500 tax returns with “Internet Marketing” as the major source of income, instead of the predicted 3,500 new Internet Marketers. We only gained 90 more than the previous year. When extrapolated over the increase in taxpaying population, that year, the growth in online marketing actually went backwards. A series of unforeseen events had effected the Internet. The statistics could not have foreseen this coming.

You cannot make predictions about the Internet because the trading relies on technology, confidence, price, world economics, politics and a host of other variables.

• Imagine if someone invented software to crack the encryption on secured online banking. What would happen to online purchases?
• What if Microsoft decided to create a web browser that could not read PhP or ASP code? Users couldn’t display e Bay at all (don’t laugh – one version of MS Office was released without the ability to read old Office file types.)
• If Greece and Spain defaulted on their Sovereign Debts, the domino effect on world financial markets would crash currencies and exchange rates and dramatically effect the amount of spending world wide. It’s come close to happening twice already and we are not out of the woods yet.

It is not possible to make any accurate predictions on the Internet, more than 3 to 6 months ahead – there are too many influential factors. Ernst and Young might be statistically competent but they are not psychic, so their predictions are as about plausible as reading chicken entrails.

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Posted By Mimenta on March 16, 2012

Last year, in Australia, we saw the retail sector screaming foul because online sales were not paying the 10% GST Tax. Lead by Gerry Norman, from the Harvey Norman retail electrical goods chain, they tried to blame a downturn in retail turnover on online sales. Now the same old moaners have dipped into their deep pockets to pay a fat fee to Ernst and Young to back up their argument with a “study” into online marketing. Frankly their money would have been better spent on a psychic.

According to this report around 118,000 retail jobs will disappear due to the massive increase in online sales eating into the retail market. I’d like to know how they arrived at this figure, especially as this “study” was paid for by the retailers.

What was their figures for jobs disappearing as a result of retailers automating their checkouts (like Coles and Kmart) and outsourcing customer service roles overseas (India and the Philipines)?

If we are to believe this so called “study”, when we add these two projections together, to global financial trends retracting retail growth, we end up with zero shops in all Australia. For most statisticians, this wouldn’t add up – you’d take another look at your figures.

So, who’s lying, the Retail Chamber of Commerce or Ernst and Young?

My money is on the Retailers – they’d never pay for a flawed study. They’re not that stupid are they?

It seems that the Retail Chamber of Commerce can flash enough money around and buy any statistics they want and think we are stupid enough to believe them – personally I find that offensive!

In addition to figures that don’t add up, the Retail Chamber of Commerce is glibly not telling the whole story, trying to con the Government into creating an “un-level playing field” that is stacked very much in their favour.

Firstly, if I haggle in most stores, I can get 10% off the retail price, so that kills their argument that the lack of GST (also at 10%) is a deciding factor for online purchasing.

Over the next couple of installments we’ll expose the rest of the retailer’s lies for all to see as we tell the whole story and expose this scam.

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