Author: Peter Shaw

Is the founder and president of Princes Park Touch and the leader of the LocalHero project!

We should all name and shame

In any society there has always been behaviour that is legal but undesirable. In the past this was discouraged by the close community bonds that existed that most valued and were fearful to jeopardise.

Unfortunately those bonds are breaking down. My startup is working to remedy that by introducing functionality to “name and shame” individuals who act poorly. Here it is in action:

Hall of Shame


There is no logic in lockdown

Crunching the figures and applying logic to determine the actual “benefit” of lockdown

The Victorian covid slogan is

Staying apart keeps us together

lying government propaganda

Lets do the maths and see if this is correct. Here is a simple calculation based on figures that are widely available and making assumptions that allow for the worst case possible.

Here are the facts, I´ll base my calculation on, they are all based on the worst possible outcomes anywhere in the world:

  1. In the worst effected cities in the world COVID-19 has killed so far 1 in every 600 people. Note this is at a city level. The worst country (Peru) is actually 1 in more than 1000.
  2. The median age of death of coronavirus in Australia 82.5 years. I can´t find a wordlwide figure but figures in other countries are similar. So lets assume a mean age of death from COVID of 80 years.
  3. A that age the average person (who has lived to 80) can expect to live anoter 10 years .

Lets crunch the numbers

365 days in the year * 10 years / 600 people = 6 days per person

So the maximum possible benefit per head for lockdown is an extra 6 days of life per person. I need to reiterate here this is the extreme upper bound of the benefit. If I rejigged these figures to account for the fact that the average covid death is an 82 year who is LESS healthy than average and that the worst country has a death rate better than 1 in 1000, then this figure is less than 1 day. If I rejigged it to allow for an average outcome worldwide the figure would less than 6 hours per person

So we have decimated the world economy and compromised personal liberty everywhere in the world for this. Obviously not everything in life is about crunching numbers but I don´t know about you but quality of life is a thing and I’d happily sacrifice 6 days of my life to live the last 6 months in a normal way.

We can all come to different conclusions on these decisions but these sort of figures reresent the real collective risk that covid poses to our society and to me it is sad that no one is talking about them.

WordPress development is apathetic

I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead deveopment seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins.

There has been a lot of discussion that WordPress is becoming less user friendly and indeed it has got some traction as the recent WordPress 3.8 is certainly aimed (amongst other things) around making the dashboard more user friendly. Given this I don’t think wordpress is becoming less user friendly, however it’s never been friendly to newbies.

Instead I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead development seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins. These are great but a better WordPress platform would make these sort of improvements easier. Indeed a better platform would enable people to build their own UI. Thus rendering the rolling MP6 (and similar initiatives) into the core moot (because developers would be rolling their own version of the dashboard through plugins).

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