Mimentum Blog

Posted By Mimenta on January 24, 2012

When I designed my www.kitchenheadquarters.org website, I asked to use some material from a medical publication and was told I could go ahead. I published the site about a month later and was immediately hit with a highly aggressive letter from a solicitor in the USA. Unless I removed the material within 24 hours I would be sued.

[I don't think the legal fraternity is too bright in the USA , or they think we are so gullible –

1. you can't sue someone for not removing plagiarised material within any time frame unless you specify what the material is . . .
2. and secondly because I am in Australia, to remove the material within the given time frame I would have to have removed it 24 hours before I received the letter (due to time zones and delays in postage).

It gave me great satisfaction to send that dopey invertebrate a letter requesting that he specify the actual content in dispute and do so by mail, a day prior to posting the letter so I could respond to it in the timely manner that he specified.;p ]

What had happened was that the medical publication had obtained permission to publish the material and had authorised me to reproduce it but they had not obtained permission from the source to publish and redistrubute it. Accordingly, I had become a pirate – unwittingly and in total innocence, I had breached copyright. Of course when I found out what they were objecting to, I edited the material.

If SOPA laws had passed, I would have been shut down. The complaint would have gone in and by the time I found out what the offending material is, the 5 days would have passed.

It’s easy to become an unwitting pirate. A picture or text from another website might contain material they don’t have the authority to redistribute and even if they allow you to reprint, you are the copyright pirate, not them.

I believe we all want something done to stop the theft of content on the Internet, The problem is what?

• It needs to be fair, giving people time to act before punishing them, while not letting repeat offenders escape with a feeble slap on the wrist.
• It needs to recognise that not all offenders are criminals, some have made an innocent mistake.
• It needs to acknowledge that not all sites are owned by corporations with staff paid to track their website daily.
• It needs to appreciate the fact that it will be dealing with people across International Time Zones with delays in communications.
• It needs to prioritise the offenders and go after the real criminals who are wrecking lives with ID theft and scams first, then chase the down-loaders. Do the people’s police work before the corporations.
• It needs to be punitive across international boundaries. Justice is not served by dragging some impoverished Vietnamese down loader to a US court where he cannot even understand the charges or afford proper legal representation. He can’t even afford the airfare!
• Disputed cases need to be heard in the country of residence of the site owner, rather than the web host, many of us use foreign web hosts because ours are too expensive (Australia is a classic illustration here, that’s why I use Bluehost in the USA).

Unless we plan laws for the Internet with these considerations, policing the Internet will kill it. Site owners will opt to have their sites deactivated in the USA and the Internet will focus on China with it’s larger population and greater consumer potential.

As a site owner in Australia, with websites registered in the USA, if my site was shut down in the USA, it would be far easier to open a new account with a different web host, (maybe Europe or China, where the Aussie dollar is worth more), than to try and reinstate the old one. The same could be said for a USA website owner too.

Yes something needs to be done to reduce piracy but SOPA is not the solution.

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Posted By Mimenta on January 21, 2012

The proposed U.S. anti piracy laws are being driven by the film and music industries. They claim that they are losing millions due to file sharing, stealing their content.

We already have laws to protect against content theft – they are called copyright laws. If these giant corporations are losing millions this way, then why don’t they do what everyone else does – use the full extent of the law and sue the offenders?

Why, just because they are big, should they be able to hijack the government to create special laws for their convenience?

A better suggestion, that would benefit everyone (and not just the big boys), would be to create an international task force to pursue the Internet thieves and scammers who lurk in countries like Nigeria, India, China and some Eastern Bloc Countries. Let’s create a new wing of Interpol with support from the United Nations, that can cross international boundaries and take punitive action. They could hunt down the ID theft data farmers and Phishing sites.

It’s time we started to respond to the “greatest harm” cases, rather than the “highest dollar” ones. I am sure we’d all rather see a Nigerian scammer who has taken a pensioner’s life savings brought to trial, than an owner of a peer to peer site that shared some movies.

But who are the real pirates here?

• Back in the days of LPs and Vinyl records, it cost a large sum of money to produce a single recording. You broke even only if a lot of copies were sold and as a result, the artists received a tiny percentage. Today to create a recording, it costs less than 2% of the 1980s cost of a vinyl 45rpm. But given the value of the dollar today, the artists get an even smaller percentage than they did in the 1980s. If it costs less today, shouldn’t the artists be getting a larger cut? Where’s the extra profits going? Who’s pirating who?
• When you muscle in and use all your power to and try and take over the law and pervert it to your own ends, to do you own policing, isn’t that a form of piracy too?
• Today recording companies don’t even have to provide the disk – thanks to places like itunes, recording companies make a digital recording and sell it straight to you, the consumer – no record, disk, not even a label! Where’s the overheads?

You’d think with such a drop in production costs, the artists must be getting paid a lot more today!

Strange but allowing for inflation, they are actually making less per recording than they did in the days of CDs. Who is really ripping of the poor artist now?

Maybe we should decide who are the real pirates here, before we rush in to save any victims. If there is to be a law regarding stealing artistic content, it should be a law to set a fixed percentage of ownership for the artists to prevent the recording studio pirates ripping off the artists.

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Posted By Mimenta on January 18, 2012

The US is looking at proposed legislation to punish Internet pirates but the fix could easily end up worse than the problem.

There are two bills – the SOPA or “Stop Online Piracy Act” before upper house (House of Representatives) and the PIPA (Prevent Internet Piracy Act) before the senate. Basically they want the law changed so that websites accused of piracy can be quickly denied access to credit card transactions (and any form of online payments), be blocked from listings in search engines and denied service from any Internet provider.

The first concern is, how will these sites be identified?

It’s not as clear cut as you may think. I have several websites, none of them deal with any counterfeit material, so you would think this type of legislation wouldn’tn’t effect me. But on my blog site, about gardening, I received a comment that seemed genuine and I accepted it, so it could be displayed on my site. I was shocked a week later to find I got a counterfeit warning from Google, when I tried to access my site. It took 13 weeks to get that block removed – 13 weeks where that site earned no income at all. Even when the block was removed, it took another few months before my traffic picked up to previous levels.

Google had received a report that my website was counterfeit and reacted immediately, (much to their credit). It took me ages to find the cause of the problem then the process to get the site reviewed and certified as genuine, by Google, took 11 weeks.

Imagine if I had been blocked from Google and all other search engines, lost my ISP account and banned from any financial Internet access?

If it currently takes Google 12 weeks to review and remove a warning, how long will it take to review and reinstate a whole website, given that these laws will treble the current numbers of rejected sites?

With no ISP account, I wouldn’t have any fast communication link to rectify the problem. I have to seriously wonder if I’d bother. It would be easier to start all over again with a new Internet ID and new ISP account. On one hand I have to go to the local Internet café and write a heap of emails to bureaucrats and wait for their response before I can do anything – probably weeks; compared to filling out an on-line form and uploading a file folder, to be back in business in 24 hours.

Given that the website was not actually doing anything illegal, it only collected a link to one that was (an online casino site), was it really worth all the rigmarole?

I’m not against punishing the Internet thieves but we need to find some way that the innocents don’t get caught up as well.

Here in Australia, we have a system where the ISP is notified and contacts their customer, the site owner, for an explanation or a fix for the problem. If that is ignored, after a reasonable time, the site is blocked.

It’s easy for some politician, looking for votes, to shoot their mouth off with altruistic promises but first you need to understand the Internet and determine who the real offenders are. SOPA and PIPA don’t do that.

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Posted By Mimenta on January 3, 2012

Do you make a New Years Resolution with the expectation that you will probably break it anyway?
It seems most people treat their New Years Resolutions as a bit of a joke but why?
Face it. If you don’t change something 2012 will be the same as 2011. At best, someone else will change something and it will effect you. Will it be what you want?
Every change requires a starting point – a place where you can look back to and say. ‘This is where I changed, where it all started’. What better point to start than the resetting of the calendar at the New Year?

Secondly, you are changing something for a reason – an outcome or result. That takes effort and time. You might even have to overcome obstacles or temptations. It might require several attempts before it works. The New Year is a perfect change point and a resolution should be a commitment to change something, not just a desire to try, so don’t wimp out – Commit!

If you are giving up smoking, don’t make a New Years Resolution to cut back on cigarettes, give up. Take steps to combat the unpleasant results – withdrawal. Let your friends know and ask them for help, not to smoke near you. Think about the things you do that go hand in hand with lighting a cigarette and see if you can change them.

Perhaps you want to shed some weight. Don’t wimp out with, ‘I’m going to eat less’.
Think it through – weight gain is not about what you eat, it’s an imbalance between what you eat and the energy you burn. Athletes eat the sort of meals that would turn us into stranded whales but their high activity levels burn up all those calories (or kilojoules). Change the whole picture – both sides of the equation – eat lower energy foods (or less food) and increase your exercise.

Whatever it is, think it through. You know what you want to change, so now ask yourself:

1. How will I change this?
What are all the factors that need to be altered for this change to occur. (e.g. stop smoking, get rid of all cigarettes in the house, ask friends to help by not tempting me, avoid smoking situations like . . .). Do they need to happen in a set order? Write these down in order.

2. What exactly do I need to change to make this happen?
Write down a list of the changes that you personally have to make. These are things you can control. Keep this list handy.

3. What obstacles are in the way?
These are the hurdles you will have to overcome – list them. Some will be recurring (e.g. cravings) but some can be removed and increase your chances of success.

4. When?
Set a date. You might have to do some groundwork first, move some obstacles out of the way, like getting rid of the existing supply of snacks, if you’re aiming to shed the pounds. Whatever it is – set the time. When that time comes – DO IT!

Now for the master stroke – the success secret:
Most people will slip up on their New Years Resolutions. Don’t kid yourself that you are any different. You’re going to fall off the wagon a few times but unlike “most people” who would give up, you’re not “most people”. Get straight back on that wagon again. Each time it gets easier.

Accept that falling off the wagon is part of the road to success. Failure only comes when you don’t get back on that wagon again. Go back to your lists from steps 1 to 4. Was this something you had already anticipated?
If so, get over it – you knew this was coming. Get up, dust yourself off and pick up where you left off. If it wasn’t on the list add, so your are not caught by surprise next time. Lastly, take a look at what caused you to fall off the wagon. Is there anything you can do to prevent it next time or to strengthen your resistance next time?

Treat your New Years Resolution seriously. Take these steps and you will succeed.

And who said it had to start on the 1st of January anyway – all of 2012 is a New Year!

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Posted By Mimenta on December 26, 2011

A recent survey of disputes, here in Australia, placed Telephone and Internet companies (Telco’s) at the top of the hit list.
Don’t you just wish that your Internet service provider (ISP) had the sort of crappy Christmas they give you?
Well, I just have!
This is what just happened today (24th December 2011) – not a story but the truth.

After I received a service suspension notice today on Christmas eve, for a fully paid account, then being told that Dodo billing and Dodo Customer Service was only available during weekdays when I called Dodo to try and fix it, I decided to deliver Dodo an Xmas gift with the same amount of good will and Christmas Cheer that Dodo had delivered me.

The difference is my gift will cost Dodo a lot of paperwork to fix. As an added bonus of good will for my Telco, this article has been published on 4 websites with an exposure to over 8.4 million readers (or should we call them possible Dodo customers?). Effectively that’s going to cost Dodo a lot of advertising to try and win over those readers.
Maybe Dodo will start to listen to us and provide real customer service.
(Oh . . . and if you’re not a Telco – Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy prosperous New Year)

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

Email reply to Dodo, (my Internet provider) 24th December 2011

Dear Dodo

Re: Suspension Notice sent 24/12/11

I have tried to contact you regarding this matter but your customer service phone system will not accept my phone number.Your website contact times out before it loads a contact or email page.

This account is paid up to date in full via BPay and the next bill is not due until the end of December.
The invoices on your own website confirm this, along with my Bpay receipts but at the top of my account details it says I owe $69.50
Please be advised that: You lost the direct payment ability on this account because you started to double dip my bank account, paying invoices twice.
You are the only Telco who demand a fee for Bpay of an account.
Your automated phone service sucks – If I really was a “valued customer” I wouldn’t get to talk to someone faster by pushing a sales of a new product number than a customer service number. It would recognise my phone number or allow me to talk to an operator when if rejects it after several attempts.
Your customer feedback survey is a joke – you are more intent on finding out if the Dodo employee was nice, than if the problem was actually solved.
You lost our landline business due to poor connections with line attenuation, even worse customer service and the competition was cheaper and I can talk to an Australian 6 days a week if I have a problem.
We have had outages and you do not credit customers for lost services.
While you charge customers for a 24/7 service, you are one of the few Telcos who provide no customer service on weekends.
Get real Dodo – you were too tight to pay Australian wages, so you went offshore. Are you so miserly that you can’t pay a Phillipino on a Saturday?
Regrettably since I cannot contact you because your automated phone system won’t allow me access, I have no alternative but to refer this matter to the TIO (Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman) for resolution.

Please be advised that if you disconnect or suspend our service while this matter is in the hands of the TIO, you will be effecting my business and I will seek appropriate redress for losses. This is now the fourth time you have made a mistake with this account (which is why I took my other business elsewhere) and my patience is wearing very thin.

Is the reason you don’t provide customer service because you don’t want customers?

————————————————————————

Note – this article is not copyrighted – feel free to copy and distribute it.

Update – 26th December 2011 – I am lodging this from a friend’s place because at around 1:00 AM on Christmas Eve Dodo cut of my Internet service. Can’t staff the phones or fix a problem but they can cut your Internet off. Luckilly we had taken our landine business to another Telco. So much for Christmas Spirit!

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Tags: bad business, Bad Service, business advice, Business fail, Business information, complaints, consumer advice, consumer complaints, consumer warning, Dodo Internet, Dodo Phone, faulty products, online business, Online Business creation, starting your own business, Telco complaints, Website design, worst ISP

Posted By Mimenta on December 23, 2011

Watch out for this scam. It’s been around for while and seemed to die out but I received a call today. It goes like this:

You will get a phone call from someone with an Indian accent asking to speak with you by name. It can be a man or woman, my caller said he was Patrick. He or she will claim to be from the “Money Saving Experts” possibly calling on behalf of the government who is trying to return bank overcharged fees to the right owners.  He will ask if you heard of the recent court action that found a lot of these late fees and overcharges were illegal. He will explain that they have to make sure the customers listed are the right people to return the money to and his job is to check the details he has in front of him. To allay your suspicions he may even tell you that you won’t be required to give any personal details over the phone, only confirm the details he has in front of him (or her).

He will then verify your full name, address and mobile phone number with you, when he has called on your land line. It is the amount of information they have on you, that makes you wonder if this is legitimate.

From there your caller will then ask you to phone their Finance Manager on 0280 147 527 (in my case Joe Marsh but there are different names used) to authorize the release of the money, which is anything from $1,000 and something, to $6,000 plus dollars. To do this you will also need an “Reclaim Approval Number”  which the caller will give you. The caller will get you to repeat the numbers several times – Indians just can’t accept we have any intelligence.

If you try to get any verification from the caller, you’ll be told to go to the website www.moneysavingexpert.com and he can also quote a business registration number (which our research showed was expired in 2009). The website does mention refunds of bank fees on it, so these lowlifes have really done their homework.

You will then be asked whether you want the money deposited into your bank account or sent to you in cash at the nearest Post Office.

If you phone the number they gave you, you caller will promise your a hefty refund either by cheque or direct bank account transfer. Either way they will tell you that there is a tax on the funds and a bank transfer/Western Union fee. The lot will total about $300. They will get you to transfer the money to their account (which is in India) so they can release your refund, which of course will not appear until the next day . . .  but never does.

These scammers are based in India. Their information comes from your account details processed by an offshore customer service center – probably a phone, power, gas, water or mobile phone account provider. To make it seem even more likely, those scabby Telcos and utilities companies who want to cut costs, use these Indian Customer Service centers so they can retrench workers at home and give these scammers access to your information.

These guys don’t have enough to steal your identity or your bank account. They rely on you making the payment to them and claim the refund was sent, when you ask why it didn’t arrive. If you persist they will ask you to call into your bank and check up the transfer receipt number, which is completely fake.

Because you only lose $300, it will cost too much to track and prosecute these scammers, so their victims give up. letting them prey on others and so it goes on. That’s the real scam – they know that they will get away with it because they know you and the  law won’t go after the little fish.

If you let them know that you have caught them out, they can become quite abusive.

For more details http://whocallsme.com/Phone-Number.aspx/0280915007/14

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Tags: anti-fraud, anti-fraud advice, Computer security. computer fraud, consumer advice, Email Scams, fraud, Identity theft, Internet fraud, Internet scams, Internet security, Phishing

Posted By Mimenta on December 20, 2011

Last week we went to the supermarket here in Melton, Victoria. There’s two of them close by; a Safeway and a Coles, almost next door to each other.

We were in Safeway and I noticed the canned cat food was not on special. I recalled seeing the cat food was on special in the Coles supermarket only a few days ago and decided to purchase it there – it might still be reduced on special. It was and we bought a few other things as well.

It wasn’t until we went to pay for our groceries, I noticed the queues were longer and there were only three checkouts open. There’s usually about 4 or 5 tellers open when it’s this busy. Three checkout stalls had been removed and there was an open area with self scanning machines there. A staff member was approaching customers with small purchases, trying to lure them to the self scanning machines.

She came up to us and in a voice the other customers could all hear, asked us if we would like to use the self service machines, rather than stand in a queue. She was brimming warm smiles and confidence.

“Why?”, I replied,” is because I live here. I teach here at the High School and I know how hard it is for my students to get a job. Just look around you. We have only three tellers employed now because your manager thinks these machines will replace a couple of tellers – and eventually probably you too. I’d rather stand in a queue for 30 minutes and get so frustrated I’ll go somewhere else next time, where a person serves me, than use those things. Sorry but no thanks.”

Unphazed she glibly smiled and replied,”Well that’s how we keep prices down so we can pass the savings on to you.”

“Oh really? Then tell me what extra items you put on special when those machines were installed to make up for the teller’s working hours you reduced?”, I asked, annoyed that anyone would think I was so stupid to swallow this corporate sales spiel. “Don’t give us that corporate rubbish. The savings in wages go straight back to your shareholders and directors wages. Did the tellers get a pay rise when they switched to those machines. They should have. They are the ones who are really paying for them.”

I was pleasantly surprised to hear a murmur of consent from the other people nearby. It’s reassuring to see others are not sucked in by the corporate spin doctors trying to tell us how much better off we will be. As I left I picked up a customer feedback form. I have filled it out and will post it today.

But it got me thinking. There were 15 other people there, all not using those automatic teller machines, just like me. Judging by their murmuring, they too felt like I did . . . but only I said anything.

Was their silence also contributing to the loss of jobs, just like those automated teller machines were?

It’s our community and it’s time we spoke up when we see things we don’t like.

To a corporation, silence is the same as consent.

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Tags: Australia retail, Coles, community responsibility, consumer advice, Consumer information, employment, ethics, grocery shopping, job losses, retail, Safeway, shopping, speak up

Posted By Mimenta on October 31, 2011

QANTAS must think we are all very gullible and it can hold us all to ransom.

They have a hidden agenda – to “Asianize” the whole business, losing 35,000 Australian jobs to a developing country where wages are far less than here in Australia but they still want to trade on the good image of being an Australian airline.

It’s nothing but a corporate con job. Let’s recap over events in the QANTAS saga:

• In April 2011, QANTAS was embarrassed when it was caught out training ground crews and cabin crews overseas. At a time when airlines were shedding staff, why was QANTAS doubling up? It was training staff for strike breaking way back then.
• QANTAS in May 2011 was discovered trying to create a subsidiary airline in Singapore. QANTAS planes could fly there, need urgent repairs or checks and in the process be serviced outside Australia, where labour is half the price and the checks are not as rigorous. .
• At the Annual General Meeting, shareholders were told that QANTAS made a profit of $540,000,000 last year and read the riot act about how hard it is to compete. The executives gave themselves a 36% pay hike along with extra share bundles. The CEO, Alan Joyce, gave himself an added 2 million dollar pay rise. Did anyone think to ask, if the company is doing so poorly and it’s future really is so bleak, why would the executives all want huge share holdings?
• QANTAS says it cannot guarantee job security for any workers and fights the unions, offering a pay rise that is less than inflation, that cannot be told to the workers, so they cannot vote on it and that QANTAS will not be legally bound to pay it. What kind of deal is that? It’s the kind of deal designed to inflame the dispute and give them a some kind of justification to take radical action – shut the whole airline down.
• We are supposed to believe that the decision was so spontaneous, the government could only be given 3 hours notice. The fact that passengers got even less warning says just how much the QANTAS executives really care about their customers and the airline.
• Of course it is purely a coincidence that this happened when the CHOGM conference was on in Perth and Heads of State, their entourages and press would be flying home, the Spring Racing Carnival was on in Melbourne (including the world famous Melbourne Cup), the world renowned Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race in NSW and the International Surfing Carnival in South Australia. Not even Christmas would see a better time to hold Australia to ransom by grounding their national airline.
• The three Unions involved said today that they have discovered the QANTAS caterers were told last week that their services would not be required this week. That’s a lot longer than the three hours warning the government was given which is much more than the poor stranded passengers had.

But what’s it all for? What do they want?

The QANTAS executives are pressing the government for a series of concessions comprising one or more of these benefits :

• exemption or some offset to counter carbon tax. Airlines will be one of the hardest hit industries and adding a carbon tax fee onto ticket sales will kill QANTAS when other airlines don’t have a carbon tax.
• permission to bring cheap foreign labour into Australia on temporary visas to replace more expensive local labour on a ratio of X foriegn for Y local employees.
• restrictions of competing airlines access to routes. Competitors might be allowed to land at less airports (eg. Sydney only) compared to QANTAS who can access all capital cities. Hong Kong has a similar system of protection for their national airline.
• limited employee wage indexation to ban future wage demands, along with the reduction of penalties and/or allowances.
• protection from industrial action by listing the industry under the essential services act, giving the government authority to ban any industrial action.

There’s a couple of small problems that QANTAS has overlooked:

• Everyone has a point beyond which they will give up and leave. There is a point where you recall a name and all you get are negative memories, a point where the brand is forever tainted. If you are one of those people who couldn’t make it to your child’s wedding, the important meeting, seeing your child in hospital before they operated, or the connecting flight for your once in a lifetime holiday, you will always associate the QANTAS name with disappointment. The TV News stations here are saying that the grounding of all QANTAS flights has effected 80,000 people world wide. When those people travel again, do you think they will choose QANTAS?
• QANTAS executives have lost sight of their business. An airline uses planes but it’s really about people – the fare paying passengers. QANTAS has lost it’s passengers. It wasn’t a cut price airline to begin with, it relied on it’s reputation to win business. Now it has destroyed that reputation, which raises the question, even if it started flying tomorrow, can it regain that reputation or has Alan Joyce killed our airline?
• QANTAS claims “to call Australia Home” but as an Australian they are doing everything we detest. You are supposed to look after your mates. You give folks a “fair go” – you treat them fairly. The penultimate rule for all Australians is – you always get your mates home, a tradition handed down from Gallipoli and the one that QANTAS has just thumbed it’s nose at when it left at least 1,310 travelers stranded overseas.

QANTAS wants to take it’s servicing overseas. It wants to source it’s pilots and cabin staff overseas too.
Maybe the QANTAS executives should move what’s left of our national airline overseas and get all it’s business there too – perhaps Ireland. Ireland has an airline called Aer Lingus.
The crafty, deceitful QANTAS CEO, Alan Joyce, could move the wreckage of QANTAS there and call it Cunning Lingus.

Perhaps it’s time we started a new truly Australian airline because Alan Joyce has killed QANTAS.

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Tags: Air Travel, Australia, Business information, business success, consumer advice, Creating a business, Current Affairs, faulty products, fraud, Making money, QANTAS Airlines

Posted By Mimenta on October 29, 2011

If your business was making a profit even though it was tough times and your staff’s wages had slipped behind the cost of living, wouldn’t it make sense to top up their wages?

If you had shareholders and they made a 4% profit on their shares, when everyone else made a whopping loss, even the big superannuation funds, wouldn’t it make sense to share a bit of that with the people who helped you make it?

Is QANTAS the Un-Australian Airline?

Apparently if you are on the QANTAS Airlines executive, all this points to giving yourself a 36% pay rise. Directors are asking shareholders to vote them an increase in pay from $1.1m per year to $1.5m and increase of 36% as well as a bundle of shares each (www.perthnow.com.au/…/qantas…/story-e6frg2qu-1226179674633). All the while, you will let your staff’s wages fall further behind the cost of living and then ship in foreign labour on temporary employment contracts when they leave.

Rather than dive into a discourse on another case of corporate greed (it’s so common now it doesn’t warrant mention in the news any more), I believe the foreign imported labour issue warrants a mention.

• When I board my next flight, I’d like to think that the people who serviced that plane weren’t the cheapest the airline could find in some third world country.
• It’s comforting to think that nothing in their instructions was lost in translation or mispronounced due to a strong accent when they told the airframe engineer to tighten those bolts.
• I’d like to think they weren’t in fear of deportment if the boss asked them to do something a bit shifty, like cutting corners somewhere, to get that plane in the air a bit sooner.
• It would be nice to know that the quality control inspectors felt secure enough in their jobs to fail a second rate repair job before I got onto that plane.
• I don’t mean to appear racist, but I am not impressed with the those overseas customer service centers. Sometimes they say yes when I am positive they don’t understand. I shudder to think what will happen when they give these guys a spanner and a jumbo jet.

As I recall, QANTAS moved to get it’s aircraft serviced off shore and we had a spate of accidents:

• a sudden altitude change on Flight 72, an Airbus A330-300 from Singapore to Perth, injured some of the 303 passengers when steering/navigational equipment malfunctioned.
• A Qantas airlines 747-400, Flight 30, with 346 passengers and 19 crew members on board, had an explosive decompression event over the South China Sea about 200 miles from Manila. On landing a large section of the fuselage was found to have disappeared forward of the wing root.
• 29^thAugust this year, QF74, a QANTAS Boeing 747-400 engine exploded less than an hour after leaving San Fransisco airport. Two weeks earlier the Roll Royce RB211 engines had an Air Worthiness Directive issued for a lubrication problem. The Qantas position is that it didn’t immediately inspect its RB211 engines because it wasn’t required to by the new directive. Instead QANTAS loaded 212 passengers on board that flight for a 13 hour trip to Sydney Australia. Inspection of the wing damage resulting from the explosion revealed it was sheer luck that the damage hadn’t sheered the vital controls apparatus in the wing. It was only a matter of a few inches.

QF74 Engine Damage

• A Qantas Airbus A380-842, registration VH-OQA performing flight QF-32 from Singapore to Sydney, Australia with 440 passengers and 26 crew, was climbing out of Singapore over the Indonesian Island of Batam about 20nm south of Singapore, about 6 minutes into the flight, when the Number 2 engine (inboard left hand) emitted a loud bang. Debris, some with the QANTAS emblem fell onto a road in built up city district Dutamas of Batam and some debris including a turbine disk struck through the walls of a house on the ground in Batam.

Debris from QF32

To be fair, QANTAS had a great safety record up to the last few years, which would be fine if I had a time machine to go back and fly on one of those planes. I don’t and I’m stuck on this plane now, with a disgruntled staff, repairs done in some third world nation for the lowest dollar, all administered by a management that is bleeding the company dry while it tries to tell me the Indian accent from “the captain speaking” is safe and normal for an Australian airline.

Sorry guys – it doesn’t convince me that I should be on that aircraft – I want a refund!

By the way, JetStar is also a subsidiary airline of QANTAS, so if you are thinking of flying (and landing safely) to or from Australia, you might want to try some other un-Australian airline.

BTW – I don’t work for QANTAS or have any involvement in the current industrial action with QANTAS. I’m just an ex-customer.

Category: Business, Consumer advice, Current Affairs, Education, Mimentum | Comments Off
Tags: Air Travel, Aircraft mishaps, Airline, airline accidents, airline safety, Australia, Consumer, consumer advice, Corporte greed, outsourcing, QANTAS, travel

Posted By Mimenta on October 4, 2011

Unlike Chernobyl, the radioactive material is not all in the reactor. Above each reactor core is a spent fuel pool. The reactor’s rods that have been irradiated, lose their ability to produce enough thermal energy to provide steam for the generator facility. These rods are still hot (both thermally and radioactively). For three years, they will have to be kept cool and a small distance apart from other rods, while their reactivity dissipates enough to be safely handled. These rods are still highly reactive, just not reactive enough to produce enough heat and super heated steam for generating electricity. They are actually straws of zirconium alloy, filled with finger tip sized pellets of Uranium oxide. Out of the reactor they have to be stored in a special frame called a pod, that keeps them apart to avoid nuclear fission.These are then immersed in a cooling pond under circulating water.

Workers load a pod of over 100 rods into a storage bay in the cooling pond above the reactor core.

Between 60 to 80 tons of these rods are stored in the cooling ponds above each reactor. With four reactors at the site, that means we have between 240 tons and 320 tons of radioactive material on site. In addition, TEPCO also had a separate storage pond with additional rods cooling off. This extra pond was not damaged during the earthquake but the tsunami washed over it, distributing the radioactive cooling water over the surrounding land.We do know from radiation readings that at least three storage pods are damaged. One is known to have melted down (TEPCO now say two and possibly a partial meltdown on the third -Thursday 26th May 2011) and the other two have at some time had low enough cooling water levels, to have exposed the rods to air. This could be the result of leaks or the uncirculated water boiling off.

Category: Current Affairs, Education, Environment, Mimentum | Comments Off
Tags: Current Affairs, Effects of Japanese nuclear disaster, Nuclear meltdown, nuclear power, nuclear reactor, radiation, radioactive contamination