I spent a good chunk of my career in consumer products and I know a bit about selling stuff. I collect examples of poor advertising – not dishonest or misleading, just foolish.

I came across in a concert hall recently Serendipity icecream. The pack said “Gluten free” and “made with 100% green energy”. Now, I can’t imagine how you would manage to put wheat into icecream if you wanted to. I suppose a very cheap icecream could be set with starch which might contain traces of glutin (it would taste dreadful) but this was certainly not a cheap icecream. (Actually it tasted very good – I pinched a taste from the one I bought my wife). So saying “gluten free” is just about as powerful as saying about a lettuce that it contains no artificial colours.

The green energy claim is presumably based on buying energy under a programme like this. Note the words “100% of your electricity consumption is matched with energy from renewable sources.” It does not mean that any more energy from renewable sources is generated as a result of your choice – just that they are going to label some of the energy they buy from an accredited green source as yours. If we follow that through we read “Renewable energy is generated from sources like mini hydro, wind power and biomass which produce no net greenhouse gas emissions.”

All quite correct under the rules but really just encouraging consumers who care about such things to feel comfortable, as they lick their icecream, that they are helping save the planet.

I also came across Joshua Gans in the HBR blog telling us that social networks, like Facebook, could ask people whether they think their friends would like a particular ad. This, he says, would help advertisers improve the effectiveness of their advertising.

I try to set him right in the comments. “whether viewers like an ad has little to do with its effectiveness…” I have no doubt that Gans is a very good economist. He should not be tempted into a marketing career.

My other life – aside from grumbling about politics ‘n stuff – involves a pretty serious interest in music.

Our friends at Skepticlawyer have allowed me to post  about someone who is, without doubt, the greatest musician who has ever lived and, quite possibly, the greatest genius to have walked the earth. If any of you are interested in stuff like that, please wander over.

I have never seen a media outlet provoke so much hissing and spitting as The Australian has over the past year or so. Not even The Truth which, at its worst, attracted many defamation suits but was not mentioned in polite company.

Certainly the Oz – in its leaders and (most, not all) of its opinion pieces – leans towards a free market position. It is not particularly conservative on social issues but unlike any other paper in the country it has run articles from climate change sceptics. Its choice of front page articles also sometimes display a government questioning position. Yesterday it ran a story on an auditor general’s report suggesting that much government expenditure was wasted. The Sydney Morning Herald led with the news that this year’s Tour de France winner had failed a drug test. But I don’t see the Oz as being as far to the right as, say,  The Age is to the left.

But the left leaning blogs boil with outrage at the Oz. On one blog there is a call for secondary boycott of companies that advertise in the paper. A while back one commenter on a blog proposed that the government use its Corporations power simply to close down the paper.I won’t link these blogs – you know who they are and you can read them if you doubt my assessment.

And it’s not that the Oz is particularly influential. It sells under 140,000 a day Monday to Friday and 300,000 on Saturdays. That is national and about half are in NSW and a third in Victoria. The SMH sells about 211,000 a day during the week (360,000 on Saturday) and The Age  200,000 and 280,000. So in NSW the Oz (roughly) sells less than one third of the SMH during the week and in Victoria less than a quarter of The Age.

The biggest selling paper in the country is, by the way, the Sunday Telegraph (650,000) which endorsed the ALP for the recent election.

Underneath a lot of the rage seems to be a belief that everything the Oz publishes is at the direction of Rupert Murdoch. This is nonsense. Murdoch has in the past directed his papers to run a political line when his interests are at stake but I doubt he has much interest in Australian politics these days. If he was intent on destroying the ALP government he would not have allowed the Sunday Telegraph to recommend a vote for it.

It is all even stranger when you realize that the most influential political commentators these days are the talk radio people – Alan Jones, Steve Price, Ray Hadley et al. They get no attention from the angry blogs, probably because the chatterers do not listen to daytime radio.

There might be a clue in that. I have long thought that the reason the ABC gets so many complaints about its political bias is that a big hunk of its audience are upper middle class Liberal voters. Last time I saw surveys that group watches ABC TV and rarely commercial TV. So they believe it’s their ABC and grind their teeth when they watch the 7:30 Report or Lateline. I suspect that the left leaning true believers in the universities, the schools and the public service are mostly print consumers. They read – and take seriously – the broadsheets even though they deny ever buying the Oz. They don’t see the Daily Telegraph or the Herald Sun so they don’t complain about then, except  for Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, who they read online.

That’s as close as I can come to explaining the wave of rage directed at the Oz from the left.

With acknowledgment to Private Eye, an occasional reference to pretentious or pompous writings, mostly by professional journalists.

You’ve got to love a town that has warm mortadella, tonkatsu ramen, pie and mushy peas, blue swimmer crab sandwiches and caramelised hummus macarons…It says so much about who we are and where we come from.

Terry Durack in The (Sydney) Magazine for October. Perhaps the brackets deserve an award of their own.

Contributions to the genre are welcome.

I wonder what happened to the $600,000 water cannon the NSW government bought? The Libs were in favour so I guess they’ll keep it. Anyway, it probably doesn’t have a great trade-in value.

I wonder when it will be entitled to heritage protection?

The opposition will be in a difficult position over the NBN over the next three years.

It seems a majority of the population believe it is a wonderful thing the government is giving us and Turnbull is unlikely to change anyone’s mind in the short term. So the opposition is going to look and sound very negative. At the next election voters will be told by the government that the coalition wants to snatch their broadband away. If in three years some people have got fibre and the rest are waiting, a threat to stop the rollout will not be popular.

Perhaps by then the early adopters will have seen that they have lost their ADSL connection. Presumably phone and pay TV will also be delivered by the fibre. If they are charged anything like the real cost there should be some grumbling. Even rioting in the streets perhaps. But more likely the NBN company will be told to hold wholesale prices down for some time. That will be popular politically but will make it just about impossible to get private investors. (Of course the government could require super funds to contribute to nation building by investing in NBN but I don’t think they would dare).

So if the coalition wins government in three years time it will inherit the problem. With all the delays, cost overruns and the usual cockups we see with governments executing major projects.

What does the coalition do then? Seal it off ? Sell it (or give it away) as an unfinished project? Finish it then sell?

Not easy. I hope someone is thinking about all this.

Bob Ellis in Unleashed

Another is the Prime Minister’s avowed belief in free trade. Though it drives dairy farmers to suicide (as Bob Katter correctly yelped) and props up child slavery in South-East Asia and encourages Tasmanians to stop growing apples and to sell their family farms to red Chinese corporations and though (as Bob Katter correctly screeched) no other country actually practises it, and though no Australian actually believes in it, it nonetheless soothes and solaces some sad souls to murmur from time to time a prayerful affirmation of it, as the Prime Minister did last week in a public response to Katter that lost his vote. For though it’s an international disaster that kills tens of thousands of children a week it’s appropriate to speak well of it, to call it the only way of doing things. And though protectionism worked well for 5,000 years this, though currently disastrous, is clearly the only way forward. We’re moving forward with free trade, repeat after me. It kills more people than Asian flu but we’re moving forward with it, march in step there.

There is a very old joke (from the 50s I think) about the Communist Party organiser telling the crowd  how wonderful it will be under Communism. “When the revolution comes comrades, you will have caviar for every meal”

One fellow puts up his hand and says “But I don’t like caviar”

“When the revolution comes comrade you will have caviar whether you like it or not”

Reports earlier this week noted that only 50 per cent of homes in the Tasmanian towns of Midway Point, Scottsdale and Smithton had opted to have broadband fibre optic cable installed.

But Senator Conroy says the debate about take-up has become irrelevant, as eventually anyone who wants a fixed line will have to use the fibre network.

“The deal that we have with Telstra is that they are decommissioning, closing down the copper network,” he said.

“To have a fixed line in what we call the 93 per cent footprint, the only way at the end of this process you’ll have a fixed line is on the NBN’s fibre network.

This from the ABC news.

I have ordered the new iPod Touch. OK, I am a sucker for new toys. I did not buy an iPhone because I don’t use a mobile much but I am fascinated by all the other stuff..

When you order something through the Apple online store, you get an email telling you when it will be shipped. Now, Apple does not carry much stock in Australia and online orders are supplied from the factory in China. My Touch was shipped from Suzhou, a large city in Jiangsu Province not far from Shanghai. I believe that most iPods are assembled there by Wintek, a Taiwanese company which also makes the touch screens for Apple and other companies.

My Touch left Suzhou on Saturday, was shipped from Pudong airport (Shanghai) yesterday and arrived in Sydney today. I can trace all this through TNT which does the shipping. I guess I will get delivery tomorrow or Wednesday.

The reason I am interested in all this nerdish stuff is that I once understood the science of physical distribution fairly well. I learnt that, for good customer service performance, you should keep inventory in a warehouse as close to the customer as possible. That cost extra inventory, because you had it spread over the country, but it meant you could satisfy customers quickly and minimize lost sales due to out of stocks. The calculations behind this  were beyond my mathematical ability but I understood them enough to ask the right questions.

So you still see large warehouses on the outskirts of cities supplying supermarkets and other stores. And a lot of large trucks on the roads. Distribution costs are (under the old rules) minimized if you could do the long line-haul in bulk loads and break bulk as late a possible in the chain.

I also understood that with valuable goods it sometimes was worthwhile to do distribution from a central warehouse.

Apple’s distribution would have made no sense to me then. My Touch is shipped as a single item, under its own consignment note, from the factory to me. My guess is that it has never sat in a warehouse – it comes straight off the line into the distribution pipeline. It travels by the most expensive way possible – as a single item by air and then by courier. And still I reckon that distribution is a fairly small part of the cost of the product.

Obviously Apple are not dumb so they have carefully optimised the system in a way I would never had understood when I was shipping products around the world.

Containerisation was the first very big efficiency improvement that made much international trade possible. The distribution of information digitally and relatively inexpensive air cargo are making the next leap possible.

Apologies to those bored out of their brains by this (you could have stopped reading). I began thinking about it while thinking over regulatory reforms and infrastructure that will make these things even smoother. The NBN is really not very important in this. I’ll bet if you asked Apple they would tell you that an NBN is well down the list. But I hope someone cleverer than I am is thinking about what can be done to make all this smoother.

Or perhaps someone is thinking about how they can regulate it.

I used to have quite a bit of time for Ross Gittins. He seemed to do a fairly good job of explaining basic economics in his SMH column. Lately he seems to have lost focus and developed a tendency to ramble. His latest, under the headline Rationalists just don’t get the new paradigm demolishes any suggestion that an Abbott government would have begun a new era of economic reform. I don’t remember reading anywhere – even here – that Abbott was a reformer so I think Gittins has bravely knocked over a straw man.

After pointing out that neither Keating (as PM) nor Howard did not achieve much in the way of reform (close to the truth) he says Let’s get real. Whether the rationalists like it or not, the era of widespread reform is long gone. Well, this rationalist does not accept that the era of widespread reform is gone. There is still much to be done and one day a brave PM will return to it.

Gittins then goes on to show a glimmer of hope

Gillard’s need to win the support of the independents may increase the likelihood of a few reforms going through. Andrew Wilkie, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott each support serious action on climate change and a tax on mining.

Good grief! I suppose any change can be described as reform but what most of us are on about is action that gets government out of the way, not new laws creating new barriers to enterprise.

My main complaint about this is what seems to me to be very wooly thinking. Argue for action on climate change and a mining tax, if that’s what you believe in, but don’t try to say that those things are economic reforms that should appeal to those of us who have learned to think rationally .

Anyway, Gittins is optimistic about Gillard and finishes with

After Labor’s disastrous first term, it has a lot to learn. But I reckon Gillard has a much steeper learning curve than Rudd. One thing Labor must learn is to stand its ground and fight for unpopular policies, not get its spin doctors to change the subject.

I agree with the first and third sentences. The second sentence I doubt.