What Journalism Has In Common With Stockbroking

I'll dispense with the preamble. What journalism has in common with stockbroking is this:

An old model which was well established and profitable is transitioning with a lot of pain to a new model, which everyone is still trying to figure out.  

The old model was comfortable and cushy (for those at the top). The new model is a major change, culturally, psychologically and commercially, and it is not yet - but one day will be - profitable.

Sira Anamwong/freedigitalphotos.net

Journalism:

Another month in Australia, another horrible rupture for Fairfax. If I was a journalist I would probably write "the embattled Fairfax". After already pruning itself back in 2012 and again in 2013, this week the company announced it will cut the equivalent of 120 full-time jobs from its newsrooms.

That's a lot of journalists. It's hard to imagine the company even has that many jobs left to spare. (And according to staff, they don't).

And I really feel for Fairfax. Not only because I love The Age and am a subscriber who reads it every day, but because I think in very difficult circumstances they have been forging an evolution towards an online model quite well.  

New media is great. But blogs and tweets and news fragments do not fill the gap left by traditional newspapers. New media still needs journalists to write the stories, and "citizen journalists" just aren't as good.




Of course, we will get used to it. Just as we have got used to the passing of great puns in headlines (largely gone in favour of SEO), and elementary grammatical and syntax errors in broadsheet news (now that sub-editing, like everything else, is outsourced to cheap workers overseas). We got used to those things, and the world didn't collapse.

So, there is no choice - citizen journalists it shall be, and the real journalists will find work somewhere, somehow, in this new cacophony. Not all the ones being let go now, unfortunately, but future ones will.

Somehow I don't think either the paid subscription model used by most newspapers and journals online now, or the Buzzfeed model, will be the lasting profitable solution.

I wonder what it will be?

Stockbroking:

Stockbroking has always been a world of boom and bust, but ever since the 2008 crash and the Great Recession that followed (or still follows), it's been all bust. The stockbroking model as it was before then has truly broken and is never coming back. That's probably even a good thing.

Since 2008, it's been impossible to squeeze money out of traditional stockbroking. The margins are too thin; no one wants to pay for brokerage and research when they can get what they need online.

In Australia the ASX has piled more and more compliance obligations on brokers, and ever-higher liquid capital requirements to guard against insolvency collapses. In classic Law of Unintended Consequences style, the result has been an explosion of "shadow brokers" - small and nimble dealing and advisory businesses that range from serious, ethical companies with management and due process, to guys operating out of their loungerooms with, let's just say, less than that.

In the last decade that I worked in broking operations, I watched these companies come and go, the same people moving from license to license and company to company in a never-ending scramble to find some way to make money. Most of these people are straight up, love broking and just want to make money for their clients and themselves - but the landscape is unforgiving.

So now everyone knows the future is "online". The future is "robo-advice" (less risk of non-compliant customer management or advice), and "fintech".

But what is the best kind of company to run? What's the best service to offer: advice to customers, or services to dealers? How do you innovate and create a solution, and not be copied by a thousand imitators with the same access to the cloud that you have?

Time will tell.



I'd love to step 5 years into the future and see what's happening in both journalism and financial services. My guess is both will be profitable, but not exactly in ways people are building them now. The future will come up with something else.



Disclaimer: I work in FinTech and love it.   :)

Going for a drive

When I was a kid one thing our family did quite a bit was go for a drive. We were not driving to anywhere. Usually we would not even get out of the car. We were just going for a drive.

The 1970s and 80s I guess were the last gasp of the "driving as an end in itself" hobby. When you think about it, it makes sense. Cars took off as something that everyday people owned in the 1950s and 1960s, and at that time people did of course, go driving as a fun activity. The kids from that time were my dad and his generation, so they continued the practice, to a lesser degree, in their adulthood. Plus in my family's case, both my grandfather and my father worked in the auto parts industry, so they were into cars and driving anyway.

My dad like his dad was "a Ford man". In Australia in the 1970s you were either a Ford man or a Holden man. My dad like his dad drove a large Ford sedan, which he was entitled to lease or buy courtesy of his employer. These were nice cars, but being the 1970s they were not a patch on cars today. They didn't have retractable seat belts or air-conditioning. As kids we would get car sick in the back, and there was no DVD system to distract us, no sirree Bob! (Mine was a deprived childhood, obviously). But they were big, and on long trips up to New South Wales or Queensland there was enough room in the back for me and my sister to curl up and sleep, moderately comfortably, against the armrests or leaning on our pillows against the doors.

My dad always took care of his cars. I don't recall ever eating or drinking in one, though we must have been allowed to on occasion I suppose. He would get mad at us for wiping condensation off the windows, or for touching the window glass at all.  Dad washed the car regularly, and did the weekly oil and water checks, and kept the tyres inflated. So the car was always ready for a drive.

The best car I remember was a blue Ford Fairlane with leather seats and a white roof. I think that one had air conditioning. Which you'd think was a huge improvement but in fact often meant me and my sister sweltering in the back and not allowed to wind down our windows because the air conditioning had just been turned on and would kick in "in a couple of minutes".

But even in a nice car, going for a drive is not something that kids usually choose to do with their weekends. When Dad would announce we were going for a drive, my sister and I would groan and moan but there was no getting out of it so we'd get in the car and off we'd go.

Strangely I don't remember a lot about these drives. I remember the experience of being in the back seat of the car: playing games (or fighting) with my sister, feeling car sick, the prickle of the seat fabric against my bare legs (or the stickiness of the seat leather in the later years), the seat belt strap chafing my neck, the burning hot metal belt buckle on a summer day. I remember tinder-dry farmland and winding roads, and feeling thirsty.

The only place I loved going for a drive was the Dandenongs. I loved the tall trees, the filtered light, the quiet, and the green ferns. I didn't even mind that we never actually stopped the car and got out and enjoyed the forest up close. I just loved driving through it.

dmscvan/Flickr CC

I also loved driving on the freeway, driving at night and driving in the rain. I loved the feeling of snuggling against the car door, gazing out the window at the dusk, stars or streaming rain, and listening to my parents talking quietly in the front.


Last Friday after work I picked up my kids from Mum's house but we stayed there a bit later than usual because it was raining hard, and I prefer not to drive in pelting rain if I have a choice. When I told the kids we were waiting for the rain to ease off, M was disappointed. "But I love driving in the rain," she said. "It's so cosy!"

We don't "go for a drive" these days, but we do drive a fair bit, and I do love driving. I still like driving on freeways and driving at night. So my kids will have their own "driving memories" similar to mine, I guess. But without the car sickness, sweltering heat, or the elbow burn incurred from a hot metal belt buckle in summer.

How things have changed

I tell you it's uncanny. A couple of months ago I was thinking about music over the years and about how songs have changed since the 80s. I mused on two things: one is how no one does the "fade out" anymore. Until quite recently all pop songs always ended in a fade out, to the point where it was just the standard way to end a song. That no longer is the case. The second thing was how singers used to do their own "special effects" such as repeats and echos - e.g, Rod Stewart in Young Turks towards the end going "ti-ti-time is on your side, side side side" (etc). It's pretty funny when you hear it in an old song now, but back then it was, again, just standard.

Then a few weeks ago I noticed Slate did a whole article on the demise of the fade-out in pop music, and BAM, I can't talk about this now.

Slate has a way of capturing what we used to call the zeitgeist: things you were thinking or almost thinking yourself which means probably everyone was thinking them. Right there now are articles about how the internet has made us constantly "obsessed" with things ("cultural manias"), how popular Taylor Swift is, and how we should not attempt to bring back extinct species (in case you missed it, some guy wants to bring back dinosaurs, as if Jurassic Park never happened).

Anyhoo, then in the last few days I've been playing with a post in my head about listing all the ways that life is different now compared to when I was a child... Well, I know that's not hugely original. But still, now I see Neil deGrasse Tyson has just done the same thing. What's more, the first thing in his list is about toothpaste tubes, which was one of mine.  So therefore, before I have to delete all my draft posts and come up with something new (of which I have nothing), I'm just going to NOT read any more of Neil's list and I'm going to go ahead with my list as it is.

Things that have changed since I was a child

H is for Home/Flickr CC

Toothpaste tubes were made of metal, and would develop very sharp points where you squeezed them, which could give you a nasty scratch. They were also messy, because they had screw-cap lids which also tended to roll lazily off the benchtop and onto the floor while you cleaned your teeth.

Telephones had three sounds that don't exist anymore. The lovely soft brrrrr made by the rotary dial, which I loved, the lovely soft brrrr-brrrr made by the telephone ringing at the other end while you waited for the other side to pick up, and the horrible, jangly, nerve-wrackingly loud ring at your end when someone called. From the time I was little until the fairly recent advent of soft-tone phones, I HATED the sound of the telephone ringing. Remember that tiny little sound it made right before it started ringing, almost as if it was taking a breath before screeching? Like nails on a blackboard.

Blackboards.

Classroom work-sheets from mimeograph machines (mmm, that lovely purple smell...) *

Teachers thought schoolyard bullying was an inevitable part of childhood and didn't do much about it.

Corporal punishment in schools - remember that? We didn't have "the strap" from my parents' days, but boys got a slap with a wooden ruler on the back of the legs, and girls on their open palm. Or girls were told to "touch your toes" and then a slap was delivered to the bottom. Creepy.  I still remember a teacher on the first day of class showing us a wooden ruler with black marks on the back which she said were made by "boys' legs".

More things were made of wood. Rulers, strawberry crates, even some kids' pencil cases (thanks Mum for reminding me of that one). Strawberries were only available once a year.

Our parents and teachers sharpened our pencils with a knife.

We ate less. I'm pretty sure I passed most of my childhood in a state of mild hunger, being fed only with three square meals and two small snacks daily; my poor deprived childhood....

Takeout every Saturday. Fish and chips, occasionally hamburgers, Chinese dim sims with rice and soy sauce, or my favourite, Kentucky Fried Chicken (that's KFC to you, kids).  We rarely ate McDonald's, but when we did, I always had the box of fried chicken. No nuggets in those days.

In school I learned that brontosauruses were real, dinosaurs were covered in scales, and there was this ridiculous new theory that a meteor might have wiped them out. As if!  We also learned that the global temperature was cooling and we were headed for another ice age.

Expensive, special-treat colouring books made of white paper instead of the normal scratchy brown paper. Expensive, special-treat comic books made of white paper with the occasional coloured page in them, when Dad shelled out for the 75c one.

Two-colour printing. Common in children's books, flyers, and posters. This was still a thing, just, into the early nineties, when in my early twenties I worked briefly for a university printing and publishing office.  People would bring in their floppy discs, let us know if the work was formatted or not, and we would book in some desktop publishing followed by some thrifty two-colour printing.

Book pages that had visible wood shavings in them.

I remember when toast-slice bread became available. It was so decadent! A sensible friend eschewed toast-slice bread on the basis that you will always eat two slices of bread so with toast-slice bread you are eating too much bread - thus giving me a lesson in moderation which I remembered but alas, have rarely practiced.

No one I knew got up before 7.00 am. That left ample time for breakfast and the work commute.

If you were lucky enough to have a trampoline or a friend with a trampoline, then you were unlucky enough to pinch the skin of your palm in between the springs around the edge. OUCH!

There was hardly any air-conditioning. Summers were spent sweltering in unbearable heat and bathed in a constant film of sweat. Car rides were torture. School days spent in boiling hot portable class rooms, where the only air came from louvered windows right up near the ceiling that the teacher had to open with a two-metre pole.

We drank less water I suppose, because we didn't carry water bottles around. Or we drank hot water out of drinking taps. Make no mistake, I don't miss this. When I was a kid I used to wish you could buy water in a can (soft drinks were my only reference for purchased drinks).

Homemade clothes. My mother made many of our clothes, even doing a Knitwit course and making us t-shirts and sweatshirts.  So when I grew up I made myself skirts, dresses and once even a pair of cuffed trousers. Then suddenly, at some point in the 1990s, it became more expensive to make clothes than buy them.

What else has changed in your lifetime?

* As Andrew points out in the comments, I might be thinking of a roneo/spirit duplicator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator) which I have for years thought of as a mimeograph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph) - similar, but different.

Stay at work mums, full time dads and others

I have stopped using the term "working mother" or at least I am trying to.

There are no perfect terms, because the term that each group of parents invents for itself annoys the others.

"Working mother" is annoying for mothers who are not in paid employment because they are home with their children: " 'Working mother'? What the hell do they think I'm doing all day?"

"Full-time mother" is hated by mothers who work in paid employment, including me. I am a full-time mother. I am a mother 24 hours a day as is every other mother. Motherhood (or parenthood) dictates how and where I work, as much as how I am at home. Also, what?: Anytime someone is away from her kids, she is not a mother? If you're a stay at home mother, when you leave your kids at kinder, or when you have a girls' night out, are you no longer a mother?

"Non-working parent" is wrong - for the same reason that "working mother" is.

"SAHM" (Stay At Home Mum) seems to be the preferred term by most, but what about the dads? They've started using SAHD. Is that a bit ironic, because it looks like SAD? I do wonder if "stay at home" is a bit annoying as it sounds a little patronising or limiting, like "housewife". Maybe just "At Home Parent" (AHP) is better?

"WAHM" (Work At Home Mum) is the one term that no one seems to grumble about. Or maybe that's just my misconception as a WOTHM (Work Outside The Home Mum - what, not going to catch on?)

Not one of these "lifestyles" is better or worse than the others, per se. Not one is a ticket to work-life balance - we're all as stretched and unappreciated as each other. There is of course just what works best for you and your family, or more accurately, what you have to work with and what you make of it.


But regardless of the terms we use to describe "mothering", one of the things driving change most is a critical mass of fathers being home with their kids.

There are so many of them now, and not all of them have blogs of course (pfft - what do those guys DO all day?) - but the ones I've noticed most as change agents are:


"World's Best Father" (Dave Engledow): this is the guy who created all the photos of himself with his baby daughter, she in various ignored or "helping" scenarios (sitting on an ironing board while he's ironing, etc) while he is usually looking away, reading thoughtfully and holding a coffee mug with "World's Best Father" on it.  The photos are genius, encapsulating at once all the best qualities of how we regard the stereotypical dad: involved with the kids but casually; making the kids fit around him instead of the other way around; funny; relaxed; borderline-neglectful-but-actually-good-for-the-kids.  Here are a couple of samples (these are all over the internet and they are a couple of years old now, so I've decided this is okay):

Reservoir Dad: RD is awesome, because he is very proudly a SAHD, and embraces the lot that goes with it, including actual, thorough housework. Not for him the superhero vacuum and willful blindness to dirty toilets and dusty windowsills - no, he happily and manfully tackles the lot.  I actually think this is BRILLIANT. He writes about being a primary carer and shows that when it's done by a man it looks pretty similar to when it's done by a woman; this post in particular is just wonderful and I love it.


Of course, dads bring their alpha guy privilege to stay-at-home parenting, and that's simultaneously irksome and fantastic. RD admits men get more support in some ways than women as parents, and he has a robotic vacuum cleaner which makes me completely jealous ... but at the same time why wouldn't you make things better for yourself wherever you can, and why don't women do this more?  - because we do it all properly!! and we're doing six million other things you can't see!!  ... Sorry, that just slipped out. Where was I?  Anyway, having more men take on the primary carer role (and more women the breadwinner role, and more men and women working part-time and doing a bit of everything), is a good, good thing, with great advances in mutual understanding and improvement for everyone all round.


I've kind of lost my thread with this post, but think I've said what was on my mind anyway, so I'll leave it here.

Meanwhile, if you want a bit of fun, take Buzzfeed's What Type of Parent Are You quiz.

I'm "overwhelmed" which I found a little disappointing. I'd thought I had moved beyond "overwhelmed" after eight years at this parenting gig, but I guess not. Buzzfeed knows best!

Dear Pixar

Dear Pixar,

You make great movies. You really do. Up, Monsters Inc, the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, WALL-E: all fantastic.

I just have one request, and it's not just mine; my daughter wishes it too. 

This is the request:

Can you do a movie with a girl protagonist? 

I know you're owned by Disney, and I know THEY do plenty of girls, but see, they're not NEUTRAL girls they way Pixar protagonists are neutral boys. The Disney girls are all beautiful, princessy and plucky. They're either princesses who want to be more than princesses, or girls who don't know they are princesses. They are the kind of game, doesn't-know-she's-beautiful heroine that has plagued girls' stories forever. (I love Tangled, but you KNOW what I'm talking about).

In contrast, the hero of every Pixar movie is Just A Boy. He's not special, or handsome, or a lost prince or a particular personality. He's just a boy. He can drive the story and be the star and every kid can relate to him because he's not spelled out or limiting in any way. Boys in stories can be that, you see. Because most writers are men they create a kind of neutral, go-to story protagonist who's Everykid.  When those same writers create a girl, they are suddenly creating someone "different", who is not Everykid. Hence all the lost princesses, the beauties, or the tomboys.

Can we have girls that are just Everykids? 

Not princesses. Not beauties. Not tomboys. Just kids. Who are girls.

If you're not sure how to do that, try this:

Write your next movie, starring your usual boy hero. Then after you've written it go back and change all the pronouns from he, him and his to she, her and hers.

Then get your illustrators to make the smallest number of changes possible to change their drawing from a boy to a girl. It should just be a matter of face and hair, in most cases.

A girl wearing jeans is not a tomboy. She's just a girl wearing jeans.

Can you try that - maybe?

Because I think that would be very cool.

If you want to see what that might look like, please take a look at the only two movies I know of which have "neutral girl" protagonists:  Coraline and Matilda.

You know what though - even those two use the girl's name as the name of the movie, which I don't think they would if the star had been a boy, so they're not entirely neutral. (The girl's name as the story name means the girl is "special"). But within the movie itself, I think both of those get this right.

My daughter was at first curious, and is now increasingly irritated, at why every movie has a boy as "the kid" in it. When she asks me about it, or voices her irritation, that's one thing. But worse is when she is bewildered and even - not to over-dramatise what may seem a trivial issue - a little hurt by it, and she asks me why this is how things are. Then I have to explain things to her that I wish were not the truth, and I say "this will change" and I really hope it's changing already and she doesn't have to wait until she's grown up and write these movies herself for things to actually change.

I know there are more pressing problems in the world and compared to them this is not a big deal. But it's an annoying thing, and it should be easy to fix.

So, if you could give this a go (and NOT name the movie after the girl in it) it would be much appreciated here.

P.S. Can you also please pass this letter on to Dreamworks, Sony Pictures and Paramount when you're done.

Thanks very much.

Love,

Jackie, A and M.

Efficiency and Progress

Like many people I often wonder whether new ways are more efficient and I sometimes doubt they are. 
I'm also aware that automated systems allow much higher volume day to day so that we don't actually notice most of the efficiency gains, only the glaring non-gains.

Take these examples:

• Melbourne public transport: Myki vs paper tickets; automation vs tram conductors
• Petrol stations: self-serve vs full service
• Supermarket check-outs: self-serve vs cashier
• Stockbroking operations: "straight through processing" from trade date to settlement, vs the old days

Tram conductors vs ticket inspectors

When tram conductors were phased out in Melbourne some years ago in favour of automated ticketing, it did not seem to increase efficiency. Tram conducting was a good entry-level job for young people, and welcomed those who had been unemployed, were inexperienced or were covered in piercings. With almost no exceptions that I remember, they appeared to do a good job and some seemed to really like it. It fostered community on the trams, and made the system pretty easy for travellers.

When the tram conductors went, fare evasion seemed to immediately go up, and within a short time it seemed that whatever money was being saved on tram conductors was being spent on ticket inspectors. I would be very surprised if that cost has gone down.

On the other hand, could they really bring back tram conductors today? Would there still be people willing to take those jobs? Working nights and weekends as well? Could we really go back to leather satchels, uniforms, hole punches and paper tickets?

Long time since Melbourne streets have been this free of traffic
(photo: nicksarebi/Flickr Creative Commons)

Myki vs paper tickets

Myki is a pretty good system, from my experience. It really does seem to charge correctly, and charge you the cheapest available fare (though there have been issues with that). It's easy. It beats paper tickets that get bent or soggy or lost or forgotten (or maybe that was just me).

But there's a problem with Myki. You need to top up your ticket before you get to the station, as the lines there are long. There seem to be fewer places to top up a Myki than used to sell paper tickets, though maybe that will change.

Also, 'touching off' is very inefficient. Getting off a tram and touching off while you're being rushed down the stairs is hard to accomplish, and coming off a train it takes a LONG time to get through the turnstiles as everyone touches off in turn. It takes way longer than it used to for people to feed their paper tickets through. That will no doubt improve.

Supermarket check-out: self-serve vs cashier

I've mentioned before that I'm not an early adopter. I stuck to full-service petrol stations for as long as the last one existed in the southeast of this city, and I initially completely ignored supermarket self-service checkouts. 

I started using them when I had a small basket of stuff and the lines at the cashiers were long. They took a little while to get used to but after a very short time (say about, oooh, a year and a half) I began using them regularly. 

I have to say I quite like the short friendly chat with the cashier who scans your stuff, and it will be a shame when that goes (not to mention the lost jobs of course). But as former CBA CEO Ralph Norris said a decade ago when banks were closing branches, "We can't keep maintaining costly branches just because people want a social experience when they go to the bank." (It was something like that - I can't find the exact quote online because it was a long time ago, so I'm paraphrasing and perhaps I'm being unfair. But this remains one of my favourite PR mis-steps and quotable Evil Bank moments, so I hope I have it right).

It took awhile for us to accept pumping our own petrol, but we eventually did. We're accepting self-serve checkouts a lot faster from what I see.

Are they more efficient?

It's an interesting question. The answer must be yes, in terms of cost. Even factoring in people to show you how to use them and people to come over and correct your mistakes or unlock your DVDs, it's still more efficient, because those things are temporary.  Employing three people to help users, who will also perform other duties while they're there, is cheaper than employing six people as cashiers plus the people performing other duties.

On the radio today people were discussing self service, and the consensus was it was all very wasteful and inefficient, because of customers being dishonest, time taken to fix errors, etc.  And of course it would be quite easy to lie and steal when scanning and weighing things. No doubt plenty do.  Interestingly though, the system (at least at this stage) makes no attempt to guard against that.  

To me that says they've factored it in. The system has to be easy to use to keep customer goodwill, at least until they have a critical mass of acceptance. So they might be luring us in making it easy to use until they make it more theft-proof later.  Or, the cost efficiencies are so great they are prepared to wear some loss from petty theft in exchange for the automation.  

And this is the big picture on these types of automation: companies are prepared to pay to get these systems in - even, perhaps, to create short-term inefficiencies - because in the long term, they are needed.  

I don't think they always get their projections right though. I'm sure Melbourne public transport vastly underestimated the cost of ticket inspectors, Myki and Myki upgrades. 

But one thing we don't as customers or users necessarily notice, is the huge jump in volumes that happens during the transformation period while things are being automated.  Can you imagine full-service petrol stations now, with the number of cars that line up at petrol bowsers? Instead of each person doing their own (even factoring in those who dawdle inside and browse the shelves before paying), imagine the same petrol station with one or two attendants pumping everyone's petrol, as there used to be.

It's the same with tram conductors (though I hate to admit it, because I've clung to my tram-conductors-are-cheaper-than-ticket-inspectors belief for so long). Could a single conductor on a tram cope with the number of people passing through now?  As it is, three burly ticket inspectors at each super stop can barely cope with the numbers.

Stockmarket operations - straight through processing 

Now to my world. I work in stockbroking operations (the "back office"). I've worked in this industry for 13 years, as a processor, supervisor, manager and project manager. Long before my time, the settlement of trades was manual. I mean completely manual, as in collecting bits of paper from the trading floor, running between broking houses and the stock exchange, and typing things into computers.

These days when we bitch about a manual trade booking, we mean a trade has fed in without a reference number and we have to manually key it in so it books to the right account. 

But the thing is, those manual trade bookings are actually still a real headache. Because we no longer have the teams of people that used to manage all the manual processes, 2 people can manage the electronic bookings and settlements for quite a large stockbroker. But it only takes a few manual trades to add a lot of work to their day. (And it's not always as simple as typing in a number of course).  There is also increased complexity in systems, because enhancements had been added over the years and more permutations in booking and settlement are possible. This was made possible, of course, by automation.

So is trade settlement more efficient?  Absolutely - no doubt. 

Do we use less paper? No - possibly we use more, what with reporting, compliance and audit requirements.

Are there fewer people working? Yes.

Do those people work fewer hours? On the whole, yes - but work is a lot more condensed than it used to be. These days there are no smoking breaks and sometimes no lunch breaks, and people in general work at full speed throughout their day (and that, of course, is called "productivity").

When I review or compile our statistics each month, I see approximately 50% of trades are "STP" (straight through processing, i.e. fully automated). That figure is too low, of course, but still, 50% is a huge number of trades that just do their thing without any intervention required by us at all.

In a nutshell

Does automation make things more efficient?  System-wide, on the whole yes.  At a personal or experiential level? Probably mostly yes, but as customers or users we don't always feel it.

What do you think? 

Do you miss tram conductors? 

Do you hate, love or grudgingly accept automation?

The End of Cursive

Recently in a doctor's waiting room while flicking through a National Geographic I found a little article about the decline of cursive writing ('Disappearing Act', National Geographic, July 2012).

I learned cursive writing in school in the US where I went to primary school in 1979, 1980 and 1981 (Grades 4 and 5 and a bit of Grade 6).

Palmer script as I learned it in the US as a child.
I still remember it perfectly.

Before that I'd been learning the simpler 'Victorian Modern Cursive' that is taught in schools in Australia - my kids are using it now.

Victorian Modern Cursive, from the back
of my daughters' school writing books

On my first day of school in LA we were given a writing assignment, and I looked at the curly cursive letters on the board and freaked. I put my hand up and when my teacher came over I whispered, in shame and panic, that I couldn't do that kind of writing. She told me it was fine and to just use my normal writing. So naturally instead of doing that I invented some weird hybrid between the writing I knew and what I could see on the board, and I decided that I would be using the same writing as everyone else by the next day.

I don't write like this naturally anymore, but it easily comes back to me:

In 1982 I started school in New Zealand. I was in Form Two (grade six equivalent) and I think from memory they were doing some sort of cursive, but I was allowed to stick with my American writing which I did, though again I changed it a bit to fit in. I dropped the curly capitals for straight printed capitals, and I gradually dropped my cursive r's and s's for versions closer to print.

Once I was in high school, I don't think anyone cared how we wrote, as long as it was legible. At university, we took notes by hand in all lectures and tutorials, and all our essays were handwritten. I could write for hours before my hand cramped up, unlike now.


I now write in my own confused scrawl.

I write in Victorian Modern if I'm writing with my kids, but I still find it a funny, ugly-looking script. I always think it looks weird when I see adults writing it (people my age and younger). It looks like children's writing. And can I share how much I hate the lower-case p?

My kids are using the non-joined up version, and it's probably the only version they'll ever use.

These days, more schools are dropping cursive, as there is no longer any need for it. I'd be surprised if kids growing up now ever use handwriting in future for anything other than very short simple notes.


If you grew up learning cursive, your first reaction might be sadness or outrage at this calamity, but you would be wrong. You might be surprised to learn (as I was) that cursive only came about because it was the easiest way of writing with a quill and ink, to lift the pen off the page as little as possible. Ever since the printing press, cursive has been on a decline in favor of block printing (National Geographic, July 2012).

Even my American Palmer script is a simplified version which was no doubt reviled in its day. My mother writes her name in lovely old-fashioned cursive prettier than mine, and my grandmother used to have even lovelier handwriting.

Spencerian script - via Wikipedia Commons.
Beautiful but am I alone in associating this with
drafty old school rooms and slaps with a wooden ruler?

So farewell, beautiful cursive. I'll miss you sometimes. You've given me some good memories. But times change and so does writing. If it didn't then where would we be?

When Language Evolves Wrong

Language evolves. Pedants, get over it! I smirk or eye-roll at those who get uppity over things like these:

• Slang / teenagers speaking like US movies
• Foreign-born shopkeepers or business owners with more pressing concerns than written grammar, putting apostrophes in the wrong place on window signs  
• 'Over' used with a number instead of 'greater than'.
• Adjectives used as adverbs - "when language evolves wrong" [ironic use, see], "when things go bad" ["badly" is fastly disappearing]
• "their" used as a gender-neutral possessive pronoun instead of the cumbersome "his or her"
• Split infinitives - surely no-one cares about this anymore
• Fragmentary sentences and sentences that start with And. Move on. Literature did, some time ago.

But we all have our language pet hates. And though I thought I was pretty cool over this stuff, once I started listing them I found I had quite a lot.

So here are mine:

• "less" used with plurals, instead of "fewer". I know - this battle's long lost, I need to GET OVER IT
• the incorrect form of a word (noun/adverb/verb) used where there are two forms - e.g. "the account has been setup" [set up]; "please login" [log in]; "Big savings everyday" [it should be "every day" - or else make it an adjective, as in "everyday savings"]
• "factoid" used for "fact". A "factoid" is not an interesting tidbit of information, but a supposed-fact or a folk-belief presented as fact, such as "Eskimos have 200 words for snow"
• incorrect word formations caused by people forgetting there is an actual other word for what they're trying to say - business English is a big offender here. My biggest problem at the moment is "in agreeance" instead of "in agreement"
• malapropisms that become widely used (hello again, business English): "Let me take a new tact" (tack); "this is a one-of situation" [one-off]; "they are one in the same" [one and the same]
• parentheses, m-dashes or semi-colons used incorrectly - such as when each part of a sentence divided by a semi-colon isn't related or doesn't form a grammatical sentence, or, as is becoming VERY common now (tsk tsk), when the bit in parentheses can't be taken away without destroying the grammar of the sentence around it (in which case it shouldn't be in parentheses)
• lists where one of the items doesn't match the verb in the list header. You know the sort of thing: "All reports must be: (1) typed, (2) not have errors."  Or where there are not enough "and"s in the sentence because the list ends with a pair that needs its own "and" - e.g.: "ribbons, buttons, needles, odds and ends" 
• too many commas, or commas in the wrong place (Though I am all for the Oxford comma, and other commas before "and" where they increase readability)

Then there are the classics: 

• "infer" used for "imply"; "disinterested" used for "uninterested"  - though I am starting to care less about those (there's that evolution happening)
• your/you're; there/their/they're
• its/it's (I can see this one evolving into a single all-purpose "its" right before my eyes)
• me/I, me/myself (business English, I'm looking at you again, with your attempt-at-formal "please contact myself at...")

Photo by Faisty.com via Flickr Creative Commons

And the ugly portmanteaus - 

• the ones that are too cute, like "staycation" 
• the ones that try too hard or don't rhyme with the original word, like "mansplain" (I HATE that one). 

But unlike the anti-portmanteau commentators I've read, I quite like "chillax" and "recessionista". They are inventive and fun and they work. (Says me anyway).

There are also a few phrases I hate - just HATE. These are:

• "It was on for young and old." I've always hated it - so weird and old-fashioned and strange. 
• "Flat chat" for "busy". "Flat tack" is OK.
• "First in best dressed." This one has come about within my lifetime and I'm not happy with it. When I was a kid, only the root phrase was in use, which was "first come, first served" or "first in first served". I may be wrong but I have a dim memory that "first in best dressed" came about through application to wardrobe-related-only situations as a play on "first in first served". So that was cool and all, but then the specific phrase supplanted the general phrase*, and now the new phrase makes no sense.

(*Let it be known I have no issue with this phenomenon in itself. I am quite happy with "walk the talk" which has evolved from "He can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?" - though thinking about it, it's a shame to have lost that phrase. It was too long to survive I guess.)

But I am utterly relaxed on these:

• incorrect usages of over/more than/greater than [because I personally get this wrong a lot - therefore, not important]
• use/usage [meh - both can be correct, 'usage' is not always wrong]
• the American expression "I could care less" for "I couldn't care less" [I could care less about it]
• replying "I'm good" to "How are you?", instead of "I'm well" [I use both]
• "is" or "are" for implied-plural nouns - e.g., "my bank is profitable" or "my bank are not passing on the Reserve Bank interest rate cut". Either is correct (the grammar, not the situation, boom-tish).

On the other hand, I find really odd and jarring that American grammar of using "would" instead of "had" for the past or conditional perfect: as in, "I wish you would have told me" instead of "I wish you had told me", or "if I would've known" instead of "if I had known".  That's annoying.

Oh, but have I mentioned that I also hate it when people correct other people's grammar, especially on social media?  It's snobbish, cheap, and rude. (Grit your teeth and write a blog post instead).

Finally, if I have made grammatical mistakes in this post: this means that you are a pedant and language evolves and GET OVER IT.   :-)

What do you hate?

What could[n't] you care less about?

The Second Amendment and Cultural Change

Americans should persist with gun control efforts. They should not give up just because it seems impossible now. Cultural change takes 20-30 years, possibly more.


Here is the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The impact of poorly designed legislation

The rest of the world reads this and has two thoughts:

1. That's nuts. However, if you insist on this right, then:
2. "well regulated" - means there's room for gun control

Within the US, there has been debate on the interpretation of the Second Amendment since soon after its ratification, with argument over the meanings of "well-regulated", "militia", "keep and bear arms" and "infringed", as well as varying interpretations of the intention of the amendment based on wording, sentence structure and the meanings of the words in 1791.  There is disagreement on whether the amendment is about ensuring the security of the state, protecting an absolute right of the individual, or protecting a limited right of the individual.

As well as that to contend with, there is the anger and bellicosity in public responses to any attempt to sell gun control in America - like this one.

There is the whole huge weight of history of gun ownership and the right to bear arms in America, which we don't have in Australia.


But, cultural change is possible.


It seems trite, and I hope it is not an offensive comparison, but look at the efforts in Australia over the last three decades to change attitudes to drink driving. In the 1970's in Australia we thought it was our constitutional right (if we had believed in such things) to drink ourselves into a stupor and drive home every Friday and Saturday night.

My own family history feels typical. When I was a kid in the 70s our family get-togethers were raucous drunken affairs sometimes ending in tearful or angry confrontations between aunts and uncles about whispered events that we didn't understand. Everyone drank and smoked and swore and was racist, and  in short it was a totally different world to how we all live today.  It took a long time for attitudes to drinking to change in Australia. It is still underway. But things did change. In general attitudes and behaviour now, we're a long, long way from 1975. Even my family came round!

Cultural change is possible. It is slow, and it takes a couple of generations, and how much is due to government intervention such as the TAC ads and how much is due to the slow pull of cultural history, it's hard to say. But it does happen.

So here's what you have to do in America when trying to tackle the Second Amendment:

Photo released by The White House on 2 Feb

At the White House website, while trying to search for this photo, I found that entering 'Obama' and 'shooting' into the search engine produced pages of Obama's public addresses in response to shootings.  So many it's shocking.  Slate online magazine is tracking the number of fatal shootings in the US since Newtown, and it is distressing how fast that number keeps growing (1,903 as at 14 February; 2,496 as at 1 March).

Ronald Reagan was in favour of gun control. John Howard is in favour of gun control. The majority of Americans are in favour of some kind of gun control. So surely, it is possible.

Here is the White House's plan for reducing gun violence. It works within the weight of history, allowing the right of individuals to bear arms and not attempting to change the Second Amendment (God forbid!). It attempts to tackle some of the issues with steps that probably should be in place anyway.

It's a good start.


Good luck, America. I love you, so I wish you every success in tackling this huge, critical problem.

'Need Change?' by Maggie Smith
via FreeDigitalPhotos.net