Think of all the energy, money, materials, resources, packaging, and effort it takes to make these ‘super long’ matches. At over 20 cm long (7.87 inches), these matches are handy and useful, but extremely wasteful. How hard would it be if the Redheads company were to place another red dollop of phosphorous at the other end of the stick, like the one I have mocked-up below? This would enable the matches to be used twice. Think of the savings! Here we come to an argument about scruples and ethics. If an extra dip of phosophorous (these are not diamonds) would cost all of 5 cents in total for all 40 matches, would such an innovation not deprive Swedish Match Australia Pty Ltd of revenue? Would sales halve? Or would more people find these matches economical and of great value? Would this be the right thing to do? Incidentally, it fascinates me when people fuss-about, trying to conserve energy and trees, when they do not realise that money itself, damages the environment. You see, a consumer could purchase 40 matches and discard them, or they can enjoy 80 uses instead of 40. This can save them $8.00, or whatever the cost of the box is. And this $8.00 takes a H-U-G-E amount of energy to generate. They have to work super hard to earn this disposable income (try costing out your environmental footprint while earning a dollar, and don’t forget the energy for your showers, travel, detergent, lunches etc). Why don’t companies realise that the best way to reduce the toll on the environment, is to reduce the cost of materials. An $8.00 saving per customer might translate into astronomical environmental savings, the likes of which environmentalists and do-gooders might never have imagined. This reminds me of the time when corporations started printing their annual reports using recycled paper. They boasted about it. Back then, such paper was approximately 40% more expensive. Imagine how many more products they had to have sold to make up for that huge waste of money, as if wasting money is not the same as wasting resources.

All this came to mind because the Redheads boxes boast a logo that reads ‘Environmentally friendly’ (in such a small font, that only 2% of the population has the eyesight to work out the text at that miniscule point-size). You can see the boastful logo as the fifth yellow symbol on the box, sporting the red tick. What could that mean? Why and how can matches be environmentally friendly? After studying the manufacturing process, I was amazed to learn that in a small country like Australia, despite all the automatic ignition gadgetry and gas lighters, Australians still use 2.4 billion matches each year. Think of the trees. Think of the many chemical processes that matches go through, to enhance their safety. Matches these days to not glow red when they are extinguished. This is due to a special chemical treatment. They burn evenly, due to another treatment. These Redheads were once an Australian innovation. They are now Swedish, after a buy-out. The timber comes from Scandinavia and the Baltic region. These super-long matches are made in Hungary (one of ten countries where manufacturing is based) and shipped to Australia. If we can somehow calculate the intricate processes, we would find it fascinating and mind-boggling. Not to mention the US$6.5 billion the company reports in relation to the cost-of-goods-sold, including tobacco products (being one of the world’s largest makers of cigars). The Swedish company employs over 12,400 people.

So I put it to you; if the company is so keen about the environment, so much so that the Australian division is a signatory to the Australian Government’s National Packaging Covenant (NPC), and if it cares to reduce wastage, packaging, wrapping, freight, and land-fill, not to mention the logging, fuel, and power, why should it not consider the double-dipping proposal above? Can you imagine how this simple innovation can reduce wastage by thousands of percent. That’s enough to earn the company many trophies at any environment convention.

It just comes down to ethics and scruples. No doubt the obfuscators will carry-on about safety. Obfuscators are amusing. I just don’t know how they can sleep at night.

So here is a suggestion to a solution: every person in the world must be given just one IID address. This stands of ‘Internet ID’. In the same way that any internet connection has one IP address at any one moment in time, we can implement a new layer that requires a connection to activate via an IID.

At present, we have one passport. One driver’s licence. One medicare number. One social security number. One tax file number. We can now all have one Internet ID. (Oh, I know all too well that some crooks have more than one of these things, but at least we know that they are scum, and when caught, we can deal with them.)

So, if someone has a driver’s licence, and they misbehave, their licence is revoked. If they are undesirable citizens, their passports are cancelled. The same would go for the IID. If a person wants to send out emails whose sole purpose is to trick people into handing over their banking passwords, that person would have the IID cancelled. That’s your lot mate. Off the air you go. That’s the price of a cyberspace violation. Banned. Blocked. Out of the game you go.

The same would go for service providers (and those companies who host every song and every book and every film on servers in Russian). Service providers and repositories of intellectual property (thieves) ought to be banned, blocked, and locked up when they break the codes of the superhighway.

But hey, who has the will and the brain power? We all ought to be ashamed of ourselves. I am blue in the face.

How could we stop every petty criminal who enters a retail outlet today? We can’t. There are thousands of retail outlets all over the world. We simply cannot stop hold-ups and pick-pockets. But in cyberspace, it’s a trillion times simpler. Yet in cyberspace, the thieves are getting away with it. We have the tools to stop them in their tracks, and we are doing nothing. Do you want me to repeat that? I am turning purple.

Jonar Nader is a consultant and technologist with Logictivity Pty Limited. He is an author of technology and leadership publications, including ‘How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People’. His areas of expertise include terrorism, scams, fraud, security, and hacking.

Each service provider like Melbourne IT, GoDaddy, or Telstra BigPond, would select 100 or so clients who are willing to volunteer their services. I would like to be the first.

We would become Go Daddy Spam Sheriffs or BigPond Spam Sheriffs. We would just do our normal work, but our web-based email software would have one extra button on it that no other client has. The button would be called a ‘Banned’ button.

The rule would be that I, as an experienced net surfer, would be trained and trusted to know that I can only hit the ‘Banned’ button when I know for sure that, from my assessment, the email that has arrived to me is unsolicited and unethical. I know that some companies are genuine and they do send bulk promotional mail. But all Sheriffs would be trained to differentiate between an ethical company sending out unwanted promotions, and downright pests and criminals.

There are many ‘logic’ conditions that we would need to set. One could go along these lines: If, of the 100 or so Sheriffs, 25 of us ban a certain mail, then the server will go in search of every copy of that banned email and delete it from all the inboxes that might be owned by the thousands of other customers.

Each of the customers can sign-up for this free Human Filter Program by authorising BigPond or GoDaddy software to delete any mail that the Sheriffs have deemed to be spam.

Then the service provider can take other steps, such as to automatically ban domains that allow spammers to operate. The options are endless. But the human touch will mean that 100 people can do everyone a favour. I would be more than happy to become a Sheriff. I have to press ‘delete’ buttons anyway, so I might as well serve the community while I am at it.

This service is especially vital for inexperienced people who still do not realise that the bank did not send them the Phishing mail. I receive convincing and realistic scam mails from people pretending to be PayPal or eBay or the bank. 100 Sheriffs can wash an entire Go Daddy network of such scams so that busy and inexperienced users who have signed-up to this service, do not have to worry about scams and viruses, and the endless lottery wins and dead men who left behind well over $7 million in a bank account.

This is one real, powerful, workable, easy, inexpensive solution. How and why the likes of Hotmail and Google have not thought of this, I do not know. It’s been decades, and they still have no solution. I had sent this suggestion to GoDaddy and to Webhost4life and others, but they have not responded. No brain power. Lethargic and defeatist.

Jonar Nader is a consultant and technologist with Logictivity Pty Limited. He is an author of technology and leadership publications, including ‘How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People’. His areas of expertise include terrorism, scams, fraud, security, and hacking.

On the other hand, what if an honest person were to find your computer? They might want to contact you. For this reason, I would suggest that all computers have an optional identification screen that shows up the moment that they are turned on. In this way, a stranger can turn the computer on and realise whose it is, and contact the owner. The security password would not enable a stranger to look inside the computer, and this is a good thing. But how else would anyone know that it is your computer, short of you sticking something on the back, or engraving the casing? This is a free idea for Apple whose welcome screen does not allow the user to customise a message to a stranger. Here is what the welcome screen should look like.

The image on the left is the current log in welcome screen on an Apple MacBook Pro. The image on the right is my suggested way that computers should load the welcome screen.

Oh and by the way, I have been asking for computers with handles! When will a company make a notebook with a handle? I just want to be able to carry it and walk down the road. A computer seems to have every gadget under the sun, yet, not a handle, despite it being a portable device. Strange what companies overlook!

P.S. Either way, what if you really do lose your computer and it never returns. Have you backed up all the important files? I should not have to remind you. I am such a paranoid archivist, that at one time, my local supermarket thought that I was a music pirate because I would purchase hundreds of blank CDs and DVDs (until I found a wholesaler who sold them in bulk at better prices). I used these to back-up my files. The last thing an author needs is to lose the manuscript. I had files shipped all over the country in case of an atomic blast, a bush fire, theft, or file corruption. I have had such bad experiences, that the paranoia lives on!

And so when it comes to the RTA and our government departments, I must borrow this from Stan and say, NATO! Of the thousands of people who die each year on roads, when oh when are we going to do more than place ads on TV? Stop talking in statistics. Stop wiggling your pinkie finger at young drivers. Who wants all that sexist rubbish promoted via posters, ads, celebrities, and ministers pretending to talk-tough. Stop talking. We want action, or otherwise, please go home and stop using the carnage as a photo-opportunity.

If a company like TAG Systems already exists, with rave reviews from foreign government departments who are interested in the technology, what are we doing about it? Shall we wait until a foreign company invents something at ten times the price? 3D animation has been around for years. Indeed, some of my lectures are presented using 3D animation, taking my audience on a 3D multimedia journey as I present my lessons about business and branding. If I have used 3D to replace PowerPoint for topics such as leadership and customer service, can’t we start using it to help drivers to learn how to drive? Young people have superior XBox and PlayStation games at home that are used for maths tuition and fighting wars. Can’t the RTA realise that animation and simulation are already in young people’s blood?

This is the in-ground three-lane simulator at TAG Systems' Victorian office. The company offers a range of education and entertainment technologies, including drag racing. Real boys can thrash their real cars in complete safety. Drivers can reach speeds that would otherwise be illegal, if not lethal. By understanding how the car behaves at those speeds, drivers will have first-hand knowledge about the tolerance of their vehicle. They will learn the limitations of physics. Drivers are told to drive safely. The safest drivers are those who know, from experience, what their car can and can't do. Nothing beats finding out for one's self, and this type of system can let them experiment and grow to understand that if they wish to disobey the laws of the land, they can never disobey the laws of physics.

Mr Anthony Walsh, the manager of TAG Systems Australia, said to me, ‘Our systems are so realistic, that when a driver is about to pass a low overhead bridge, they duck.’ I had often reported about this phenomenon. An extract from a radio interview wherein I explain this can be heard below.

The technology exists to provide realistic driving experiences to assist young drivers. I am not suggesting that driving simulators will solve every problem. I had outlined the other initiatives that would need to be considered in this other article.

Over the years I have flown in a range of real cockpits. I have visited military air bases. I have flown in the Qantas Flight Simulator. I was an editor of ‘Formula One’ racing magazine, and I have experienced real and simulated environments of every shape and description for entertainment, for education, and for way-out applications in rooms and via headsets. Having worked at Acer, Compaq, and IBM, I was there when supercomputers were used to play chess, predict the weather, test nuclear bombs, and land us on Mars. As IBM’s spokesman for deep computing and high technology, I have written about virtual worlds and telepresence. Not only have I reported about them, but I have also fantasised about them (as I did in my book ‘Z’ where the bonus (missing) chapter outlines my vision for the future of simulator technology). I have interviewed the biggest brains at Intel, Texas Instruments, Apple, and IBM. The really good simulators involve ‘immersive virtual reality’, the kind that makes you faint with fear, even though you know that you are in a room, and no harm can come to you. TAG Systems is not trying to compete with Hollywood. The company is producing realistic systems that use the driver’s own car. Mr Walsh said, ‘Our company has spent the past six years in researching and developing a driver simulator that allows you to drive real vehicles in 100% total safety inside a virtual world with all of the vehicle’s components in operation including the engine, transmission, steering, accelerator, brakes, and all in-cabin controls.’ By this, Mr Walsh means that the car is on. A real car, with the engine turned on, revving and driving on a custom-built dynamometer, with laser steering sensors and computer generated imagery to create a new driving experience. Sure, in ten years from now, the technology will be better and even more stunning. But why are we tolerating the carnage on the roads, and spending millions on advertising, when nothing beats the hands-on experience? We have the technology to get going. Why are we not providing this fun learning environment to young people as a matter of urgency?

Think of a young person you know and like. I guess they enjoy driving. How would you feel attending their funeral after a car-accident that could have been avoided? No-one should be allowed to drive until they have had serious training. Simulators can help. We have the technology. What are we waiting for?

We are a nation of NATO spin-doctors. We wait until something really bad happens before we launch into enquiries and inquiries and reviews and panels and committees and sub-committees. By the time anyone is ready to report to the minister, the minister is gone, and we have to start all over again, if, that is if, the budgets are not scrapped.

By the way, here are some of my old radio interviews about virtual reality. More can be found in the ‘Radio’ section of this site, within the Technology menu and the Future menu. To listen, click on the green play arrows.

Different types of virtual reality.


Virtual reality defined.


Virtual reality beyond entertainment.


Cyber-sickness from microsecond delays.


Virtual versus remote.


By the way, if you would like some statistics, try these, borrowed from the website of a company in Victoria called Driver Education Australia. It says:

The death and injury on Australian roads is costing the nation $17 billion each year, according to a University of Queensland;
Over 60% of motorists are still killed at intersections;
The risk of being involved in a crash doubles with each 5 km/h increase in speed over 60 km/h;
Fatigue is a factor in approximately 20% or crashes;
Excessive speed accounts for 20% of all fatal crashes;
The approximate cost of each fatality to the community is over $1,300,000;
Each major injury costs the community over $150,000 in direct health care;
Males constitute 72% of all road users killed;
The 17 to 25 age group accounts for the largest numbers of fatalities.

If you do not believe these figures, take a look at RTA’s web site and search for the word ‘death’.

With so many fatalities on the road, who can say that virtual-reality driving simulators are expensive?

Young drivers are killing themselves and each other. So much so, the NSW government spent two million dollars on the Pinkie campaign that says, ‘Speeding. No one thinks big of you’. In a previous article, I explained why the Pinkie campaign is demoralising. In so doing, I promised to provide some of my ideas about how we can reduce deaths on the road.

If you would like to read my article about my disapproval of the RTA campaign, click on these links to read Part 1 and then Part 2. Then you can read the following suggestions in context.

Here are some suggestions that I believe are essential in the fight against this unnecessary carnage.

1) Reduce the driving age

When a problem becomes too difficult, society pushes the problem out by shifting the fence posts. Many have called for an increase to the age when learners can get behind the wheel. I am calling for a decrease in the age.

Start drivers at fourteen. This does not mean that they can go on the road. It means that they can go to special learning tracks, use their parent’s car, or hire a car, and be allowed to drive with a licensed driver beside them, or a certified trainer beside them. The central strategy behind this is to demystify the motor vehicle so that it is no longer a symbol that represents ‘coming of age’. We need to ensure that driving is no longer a big deal. At the same time, younger people are exposed to driving, the rules, the mechanics, and the physics of a car and how it handles.

2) Learn from the Scouts

A driver, from a young age, needs to earn badges. Learning to drive needs to be segmented into chunks of learning. Special attention needs to be paid to special segments, for which special badges are awarded on completion, and again upon testing. These segments include all the major parking skills. I am appalled at the number of drivers on the street who cannot reverse-park, or who are neither competent nor skilled at other simple manoeuvres. Start them young and teach them about the various aspects. There would be a special badge for car maintenance to include technical know-how about batteries, tyres, oil, and other basic technical and electrical awareness.

3) Use computer technology

Instead of spending millions on TV campaigns, let’s invest in some driving simulators. Pilots use sophisticated flying simulators. Why are there none for driving? Teens would need to pass a range of levels of driving simulation tests before they are tested on the road. The technology surrounding immersive virtual reality is so grand these days, that such simulations are right up the alley of drivers who are now growing up using excellent multimedia games.

4) Ditch the P-Plates

By all means, the L-Plates work well in that they play an important role. Unfortunately, I believe that the P-Plates create more problems than they solve. My sister, whose teenage son loves cars and is a good driver, has noticed how his mates are somewhat embarrassed by the P-Plates. This explains this problem well. The P-Plates are a constant reminder that the drivers are junior. The psychological issues surrounding this are deep and complex. In my opinion, if we remove the P-Plates from the equation, but still retain all the P-Plate provisions and provisos, then young drivers are not rocking-up to a party, signalling their inferiority. This level of inferiority (which is made worse by the Pinkie ad that demeans young men by teasing them about the size of their penis) is part of the showing-off factor that leads young drivers to put lives at risk. By the way, one young driver who this week went from red P-Plates to green ones, said that the computer-based test that he took was beyond a joke. He felt that upgrading to his green plates was a waste of time in terms of the test and what it was trying to achieve. The computer-based test leaves a lot to be desired, and does nothing to seriously train and test a driver’s competence.

5) Reduce the blood alcohol levels to zero

Yes, zero tolerance and zero everything for all drivers, no matter their age. Who in their right mind would still contemplate that any driver, who can kill innocent people on the road, should be allowed any level of alcohol in their blood? No doubt ample studies prove that adults who have 0.05% of alcohol in their blood can still function lucidly. No doubt. And this is not the point. It’s not that people cannot operate a death-trap missile at 0.05, but that the problem occurs when drivers start to drink sensibly, then slowly they drink just a bit too much. No two bodies are the same. Drinkers do not know when to stop with any sense of precision. They are not digital vessels with a dashboard. They simply will not know which next sip is the one that starts the decline. Once they decline, they will lose sensibilities. So by saying zero alcohol, we remove the burden and the responsibility from the drinker to make any decisions while drinking! No-one who can sit in a death-trap missile called a vehicle, ought to have touched alcohol for 24 hours. 0.05 confuses drivers and it gives them an open door through which they can enter. Shut that door. If anyone is going to protest about ‘social drinking’ and ‘culture’ and every other reason why drinking is ok, they would have missed the point. Such people could not be serious. I would think them to be weak-willed about the carnage, and ignorant about the real issues.

By the way, I do believe that the 0.05 reading does have a place in society: anyone in the street (walking or running or sitting or travelling on foot) who has a reading in excess of 0.05 ought to be locked up. If people want to drink and then walk into the street, they ought to be locked up. Clear enough? Alcohol makes the brain a floppy bit of jelly. Just go into town on a Friday night and tell me how else you wish to solve the endless violence and unruliness by drunken louts. Bring back the night fun where people can walk the streets and meet people and dine and play and laugh and sing and stay up late and make new friends. Instead, we have idiots and drunks who are abusive, destructive, and down right jelly-brained to spoil the fun. Lock them up. If they want to drink, they can drink at home. The public place is no place for idiots to be let loose. It is not safe for anyone to walk the streets, thanks to our silly social acceptance of a liquid that sozzles the brain and gives people an excuse for ghastly antisocial behaviour.

So, drivers must be at zero; not even an after-dinner mint that has any alcohol in it. As for pedestrians, nothing over 0.05!

6) Teach physics

No young driver ought to be granted a licence until the driver undergoes a thorough ‘advanced driver training program’ that includes driving extremes. Unless drivers understand the physics of the car, in relation to wet roads, oil, speed, braking distances, and other extremes, how will they know what kind of weapon they are in charge of? We train drivers to be safe. This is bad. We need to train them in what ‘unsafe’ feels like. They must experience, first-hand, what wet conditions really mean. Many gamblers go into a casino thinking that they might win. This is a grand level of stupidity. Every gambler who understands the laws of probability would soon change that mindset and enter a casino convinced that they might not win! Similarly, every driver is told to take care, yet the problems occur when the driver makes judgements and decisions about things of which they have no knowledge, no skill, and no experience.

Every young driver must know what 5 km/h translates into, when it comes to emergency braking. They die on the roads when they presume that they can take a corner or overtake a truck. While at high speed, they make decisions that they have never before made, about physical aspects that they had never before experienced. This is ludicrous. Teens die of bad decisions. Let us give them a driving track on which they can make those decisions so that they will know how to calculate their decisions at high speed. No driver should be given a licence until they pass high-grade serious physical engagement with vehicles.

7) Upgrade the driving test

I recall my driving instructor: a lazy person who would charge me for one hour’s tuition, yet drive most of the way, only allowing me to drive for approximately ten minutes. What a joke. Then the driving test was another pathetic exercise. Both the trainer and the examiner were below-average dills who might still be out there neglecting their duties. If we really want people to drive safely, we should not allow unsafe drivers on the roads in the first place. We need to overhaul the entire training and testing procedures. All driving instructors must be able to pass stringent high-level driving tests, the kind that the elite drivers at the White House or Buckingham Palace would have had to pass. Then the young people would have to pass similar stringent examinations, both written and practical.

You see, there is no point in telling people to ‘do’ anything. Telling does not work. What’s the point of asking someone not to drink petrol? They have to make that decision for themselves. Why don’t more young people drink petrol? Think about that. No-one tells them not to. They know not to. They have decided not to! Telling someone to slow down, is useless. Telling someone that speeding is stupid, is equally useless. Drivers must arrive at that conclusion for themselves.

When teens arrive at their own conclusion, they will be obedient to themselves. They will know their limits. They will understand by ‘understanding’, instead of merely reading signs and rules that mean nothing to them. Therefore, stop telling and pleading and insulting and humiliating young drivers. Teach them until they completely understand how a vehicle works, and how they can take better control of it.

8) Other ideas

I have a very long list of other suggestions, but these will suffice for now. There is so much more that we can do, and need to do, but our democratic system is a slow bureaucratic one. Sad indeed.

Parts of busy Sydney are filled with goons and idiots of every description. The night life includes louts and drunks causing havoc. Instead of using police resources to lock-up the unruly trouble-makers and parasites, we see undercover police in unmarked cars harassing the wrong people just so that they can fill their night. I took this photo one busy night. The taxi driver was pulled over for a miniscule driving offence that ought not to have mattered in terms of priority. His misdemeanour pales next to the rough hot-heads who go about terrorising the town, its shopkeepers, and law abiding citizens. In the same vein, there is a police team that hides down the road from my home, and they wait for a driver to so much as touch the un-raised round-about so as to book them. How pathetic. Oh dear, we have a lot of work to do before we can call ourselves civilised.

Since writing this article, it has come to my attention that a Victorian company has already produced a driving simulator. Read about it here.

This article was written by Jonar Nader, author of ‘How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People’. Jonar is a consultant whose website is www.LoseFriends.com

Incidentally, a week after posting this article, the police force was out in force, to arrest drunken behaviour. It was a good show, but it would have been better to have delayed the media exposure until after the blitz. In any case, you cannot reason with drunks. The issue is not one of locking-up drunks, but of treating the whole problem of excessive drinking, and venues that serve alcohol when they shouldn’t.