Couldn't resist this

Having worked in the translation industry for more than 10 years, just couldn't resist posting this. The perfect example of what going for the lowest cost translation, and/or software/machine driven translation can do to your brand!

Working for Families, or WTF?

I am a parent. I have benefited financially from Working for Families Tax Credits (WFF for short), and I cannot really fault a government for trying to support parents financially in raising children. But I am, quite literally, about to bite the hand that feeds me. Certain things about both the WFF system, and the underlying thinking behind it, I have never been able to agree with, and on balance I think the whole system should be done away with.

WFF was introduced back in 2005. In budget 2011 the WFF was projected to cost $2.7 billion.  This is roughly 9% of the total social security budget (pensions, DPB etc.), but more importantly 11% of the total "individuals" tax revenue (PAYE, non-corporate taxes, and excluding GST revenue) generated.

So 11% of your individual tax payments are redistributed via WFF. To put this is context, the WFF spend is higher than the entire Government Transport and Communications budget. WFF spend is equivalent to 75% of the Law and Order budget. It is more than 20% of the Education budget. It is 13 (yes thirteen) times the entire budget of the Department of Conservation.

By any means this is a lot of money, and for the life of me I cannot fathom the logic for this programme to even exist. My objections are as follows.

WFF is for parents supporting parents with children up to the age of 18. Ergo, if you don't have children, or your children are over 18, your taxes are directly subsidising people who have children. But having children is a lifestyle choice, some of us choose to have children, some of us don't. Why should you, who perhaps chose not to have children, subsidise me, who choses to have them? If my lifetime passion is butterfly collecting, should your taxes subsidise that as well? WFF makes you financially responsible for my personal lifestyle choices. This is blatantly unfair and unjust.

WFF is incredibly complicated. It is divided into 4 categories; Family Tax Credit (FTC), In-work Tax Credit (IWTC), Minimum Family Tax Credit (MFTC), and Parental tax Credit (PTC). It is administered in part by WINZ and in part by IRD.

How much does it cost to administer? Answer: No-one knows!

The In-work Tax Credit (IWTC) is specifically meant to create a strong financial incentive for the unemployed to seek employment. But it doesn't. It only creates an incentive for the unemployed with children to seem employment. All those unemployed, childless ones, receive no such financial incentive to take on minimum wage jobs (jobs that are often unsuitable for parents due to the hours of work required or the transient nature of the work, such as in horticulture or agriculture).

WFF is paid to the principal caregiver. This is defined as "The principal child carer is the eligible parent or the person responsible for the day to day care of the children." All well and good. But what of non-custodial parents paying child support? Child support is calculated by IRD on the basis of the non-custodial parent's income. No matter how much child support you may pay, the child support receiver still gathers all of the WFF benefit, while the non-custodial, child support paying parent receives nothing. Again, this is manifestly unfair. If the non-custodial parent is making financial contributions to the welfare of the children, surely that parent should also be eligible to some of the benefit from any government largess?

In the year to June 2012, the median income from those receiving salaries or wages was $41912.00 per year. On that you would pay $6354.60 in income tax.  Of that, 11% or $698.94 goes to WFTC payments.

So what could we do with that WFF money?

If we got rid of WFF, we could reduce the 17.5% income tax bracket to 15%. The income tax for earnings between $14,001 and $48,000 could be reduced by 2.5%. This would have an immediate and beneficial impact on all full time wage earners in NZ.

We could employ over 38,000 people as police, teachers or nurses on a salary of $70,000 per year. By way of comparison, there are currently less than 8,500 sworn police officers in NZ. There were 51,000 teachers employed at state schools in 2011. There are 47,000 nurses currently practicing in NZ. How about we double the number of police, and increase the number of teachers by 20%? That would leave us about $1.3 billion to, oh I don't know, maybe pay doctors and nurses a decent salary so they don't have to leave the country to pay back their student loans?

Isn't that what we should be doing, rather you than subsidising my lifestyle choice?

The online GST rort; or why doesn't Google pay GST on advertising sales?

Recently there has been a fair bit of news about how multinational corporations manipulate income sources in order to book that income in the lowest tax jurisdiction they can. Most of that has focussed on corporate income tax, but there is a serious issue with GST/sales tax that concerns me for New Zealand businesses. Now while I am no great friend of the tax man, in order for NZ companies to operate on a level playing field internationally, there definitely needs to be some work done in the area of GST.

Most large international web platforms (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) generate a significant portion of their revenue from advertising. So do some our biggest NZ platforms (TradeMe, NZHerald, Stuff etc.). All no doubt attempt corporate income tax minimisation to the nth degree. But the one key difference is that while those onshore platforms (think TradeMe) pay GST on NZ derived AND NZ targeted advertising sales, those offshore platforms (think Google) don't pay GST on EITHER.

Hold on a minute. IRD states specifically on their latest GST guide:

“GST is a 15% tax on the supply (sale) of most goods and services in New Zealand...”

How can this be so?

I want to illustrate the unfairness of the current system by comparing Google and TradeMe. Both essentially make money from selling advertising; Google through Adwords PPC, TradeMe via listing and success fees. 

While TradeMe is specifically NZ, advertisers on Google can choose where in the world their ads are displayed, including NZ only. For the sake of this discussion I will talk about NZ and offshore businesses that specifically target NZ consumers via Google Adwords.

So for this discussion, the advertising service in both cases is provided in NZ, to target NZ consumers. 

So why is the offshore advertising platform, be that Google PPC or Facebook advertising, GST exempt,  while the onshore advertising platform (NZ Herald, radio station, NZ search engine etc.) is forced to charge GST? All of these companies are selling a product (advertising) within NZ, focussed on NZ consumers. Surely they should all be paying GST on those sales?

I think this is blatantly unfair on NZ businesses for the following reasons:

• Any NZ online advertising platform (i.e. TradeMe) who wants to compete within NZ against an international online advertiser is automatically at a 15% pricing disadvantage, because they have to charge GST while Google etc. do not. 
• Any NZ online advertising platform (i.e. TradeMe) who wants to compete outside NZ against an international online advertiser will also have to charge GST to their NZ advertising customers, while the offshore platform does not. 
• Should a NZ business choose to use a NZ company to manage its PPC campaign, it will be charged GST on PPC fees. But should they use an offshore company, they won't be charged GST.
• An overseas advertiser wins twice;  they don't pay GST on their advertising costs, and they don't pay GST on the sale of their product/service (but the poor consumer does if they get pinged by customs).

The fact is the advertising service is provided in NZ focussed on the NZ consumer; as such GST should be payable on the advertising cost.

So what of the cost? I think the costs fall as follows:

• Disincentive for NZ companies to develop online advertising/trading platforms, or websites that derive income from advertising sold within NZ (much better to set up offshore with a .co.nz).
• Financial incentive for NZ advertisers to go with the international platforms over local platforms
• Disincentive for NZ companies to use local online advertising management services
• B2C unfair competition in product and service sellers from overseas for the NZ consumer
• Revenue loss for IRD from advertising supplies provided solely in NZ

So, to summarise, Google, being offshore, is not required to charge GST for revenue earned from ads that specifically target New Zealand, yet TradeMe is required to charge GST, irrespective of where the advertiser (or ad viewer) is from. How is this a fair system?

The benefits of enforcing a GST charge on all online advertising targeting NZ would be:

1. Offshore advertisers would have to pay GST on their advertising costs to NZ consumers, evening things up a little with local NZ businesses
2. NZ developers would be in a fairer position when it came to developing web properties that rely on advertising revenue
3. IRD would increase the tax take. In 2009 Google NZ earned an estimated $150 million from NZ advertising; even if only 50% of that was ads targeted to within NZ, then there is revenue to be had, and a lot of it would be foreign exchange (offshore advertisers targeting NZ consumers). Add in Amazon, Facebook, YouTube etc. and target their advertising earnings from ads to NZ and this could be considerable.

By any stretch of the imagination, advertising targeted to be displayed within NZ is a service provided within NZ. It would be a very simple matter for e.g. Google to add GST to any PPC charges earned from within NZ. Why isn’t the government chasing this revenue?

Whaling time again

The battle against Japan's so-called "scientific whaling" program has been going on for well over 20 years now, Japan using loopholes to venture into the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary to harvest whales. Personally I am not anti-whaling per se; I eat meat and fish, and can see no reason why whales, along with any other wild stocks if managed sustainably and humanely, should not be part of the diet of those who chose to eat them. I lived for 15 years in Japan, working for many years as a scuba instructor, and spent many evenings sitting in small coastal village bars alongside crusty old fishermen, debating the finer points of whaling over a bottle of sake.

I do object however to Japan coming down to our neck of the woods, and despite the vociferous objections of virtually all of the locals (from NZ to Chile to South Africa to Australia), exert their economic and political clout and blatant arrogance to ignore, in basically an Imperial fashion, what are quite obviously resources over which we and our neighbours should hold kaitiaki, or primary responsibility.

I view it as a clear cut case of cultural imperialism by Japan against the smaller, weaker nations that border the Southern Ocean.

The problem is, to date, we have seen bugger all progress negotiating with Japan. Both Government and so-called "Green" groups have followed an absolutist policy for decades; no whaling whatsoever, wherever, anytime. This is doomed to fail in Japan's case, where their feeling of being the victims of cultural imperialism themselves (along the lines of "Kiwis eat cows, so why can't we eat whales?") and the massive loss of face by high ranking politicians any submission to this policy would entail, makes it a cultural and political impossibility.

But the general awareness in Japan about the facts of whaling is extremely poor, especially the economics. Rarely discussed, even less often eaten, anything to do with whales are generally a non-event in Japan, except when some nationalist politician tries to drum up support by banging the Japan-bashing drum. So I thought I would lay out a few facts about Japan's whaling industry, and then a strategy for perhaps overcoming their opposition.

Economics
Japanese whaling has in recent years become a virtually nationalised industry. While the company operating the whaling ships is a private business, fully 90% of the costs of whaling (including ship-owners profit!) are guaranteed by the national Government, with only 10% of the annual whaling cost actually covered by sales of harvested whale products. In 2011, the Japanese Government drew some USD$30 million OUT of the dedicated Fukushima Tsunami recovery budget to subsidise that season's whaling expedition. Almost 2 years on from the disaster, people are still awaiting emergency housing in some areas, while their own Government takes that money and uses it to refit the whaling fleet.

Whaling home base
The home port for the Antarctic whaling fleet in Japan is Shimonoseki. In a press release, the Japanese Ministry of Fisheries stated that the reason for using Tsunami relief funds to subsidise the whaling expedition was to help rebuild the industry of the devastated Fukushima region.

Shimonoseki is in the far south-western corner of Japan; approximately 1500km by road from Fukushima, which is in the north-east. On Japan's main island, you couldn't get any further from Fukushima than Shimonoseki. Perhaps those in the Japanese Ministry of Fisheries should have spent some tsunami relief money on a map.

Whale watching in Japan
Whale watching is a growth industry in Japan, growing at around 6.4% per year, in a country that has been mired in deflation for over 20 years. In 2008 it generated USD$22 million in revenue, small cheese admittedly, but this is almost all generated in some of the poorest regions (and yes, there is real poverty in many coastal towns in Japan) such as Wakayama and Okinawa.

Whale meat stockpiles
Japan cannot sell the whale meat it harvests. They are reduced to giving it away to staff, or storing it in warehouses. Almost 90% of respondents in a survey in Japan stated they had not bought whale meat in the last 12 months. In 2012, Japanese whalers failed to sell 908 of 1211 tons harvested. That's 75% of the catch could not find a buyer. No wonder they are bleeding cash and have to go to Government cap in hand.

Current warehouse stockpiles of whale meat sit at around 5,000 tons.

Cultural right
Japan has a long history of whaling and eating whale meat, just as most coastal cultures do. Yet Japan never ventured to the South Pacific until the mid-1930s, let alone Antarctica, and when it did it was harvesting whale oil to sell to its ally Nazi Germany. A very short history indeed of whaling in Antarctica.

Putting aside history, any claim by Japan to have a cultural right to harvest whales from outside its own territory in 2013 would be the same as the French claiming a cultural right to harvest sturgeon for caviar from the Caspian, the Vietnamese claiming rights to harvest Rhino horn from South Africa, or the English demanding their right to harvest beaver pelts from Canada. Quite blatantly ridiculous.

Why just Japan and not Norway or Iceland?
Japan is not the only nation conducting whaling. Norway and Iceland both have active whaling fleets. Japan frequently complains that is is being unfairly picked on, and that opposition to Japanese whaling is "cultural imperialism" or "Japan bashing".

The crucial difference is neither Iceland nor Norway conduct whaling at the opposite end of the planet from where they are. They don't come to Antarctica to whale in the International Whale sanctuary. They whale within their own waters, and Iceland at least is open that it kills whales for food. And as far as I am concerned that is totally legitimate, as long as it is done sustainably.

Whale meat is toxic
Research has shown again and again that whales and dolphins inevitably concentrate high levels of toxins. Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan found concentrations of mercury 900 times the Japanese government limit from supermarket sold whale meat.

Independent local council members in Taiji, Japan, where dolphins and pilot whales are regularly harvested, had dolphin meat from a local supermarket independently tested. It showed concentrations of mercury 10 times higher than the recommended level.

This from the country that gave the world Minamata disease, one of the worst cases of mass mercury poisoning.

Yet whale and dolphin meat is served in school lunches all over Japan. It is sold to the schools at only 30% of the wholesale price, as a way of promoting Japanese culinary culture.

My point is
If someone wants to eat whale meat, more power to them. I have no objection to Japanese, Norwegians, or anyone else wanting to eat whale (providing they are aware of the toxins in it). Nor do I object to Koreans eating dog, Thais eating snake, Kiwis eating lamb or Arabs eating goat. I would just ask that any animal's life is taken with respect, and that nothing be wasted.

What I do object to is when a major world power comes down to our back garden, where we have spent years painstakingly trying to repair the damages of another age, and decides they can unilaterally extract whatever they feel like, with absolutely no regard to our opinion. And even more objectionable is when some species are still threatened with extinction; now the Japanese are not only stealing our heritage, but the entire worlds'.

It reeks of arrogance, Imperialism and outright bullying. It really just stinks.

What should we do to get them to stop?
Of course maintaining the diplomatic and political pressure is necessary. The Australians are bringing a case at the World Court. But I think the anti-whaling media, Government and the Green groups have got their approach all wrong. With Japan, the one way to effect change is to remove emotion from the argument entirely. Any reference to whales being "wonderful" "cute" or "sentient", or whale killing being "inhumane" or whatever is just not going to work and just dovetails in with the Japanese feeling of being persecuted. Most Japanese have bought into the "cultural imperialism"/"Japan bashing" propaganda forced down their throat by their politicians and media. If we can remove that from the debate, and stick to facts and logic, we might actually get somewhere.

So stop with the emotion, and just present the facts (which most Japanese won't know). I think many in Japan would be gob-smacked when they find out that, with a Government debt to GDP ratio the highest in the world, a massively expensive reconstruction effort in Fukushima, and a moribund economy, that their Government is wasting money in this fashion. Let's also explain the rational, logical, reasons for opposition, the physical danger of consuming whale meat, and by using analogies such as those above question their cultural "right" to steal something that doesn't belong to them under any pretext.

And then give the politicians and bureaucrats of Japan an option, so that they can save face. Just trying to boot them out of the South Pacific will never, ever work; the loss of face would be inconceivable for those powerful ones who have hoisted their pennant to this particular flagpole. This "face" is all important in Japan, and needs to be respected if we are to make progress. Just banging away with an absolutist approach is never going to solve anything.

I would ask that those concerned consider offering to enhance Japan's whaling quota in her own waters. Trade off the average take from the Southern Ocean of Minke whales (not endangered by any measures) over the last e.g. 3 years against their domestic allocation. Allow them to catch (non-endandgered species) of whales, and proceed to lose money hand over fist, domestically. Bring the industry reality into their backyard. And then let the Japanese whale watchers and Japanese whale killers battle it out domestically, while the debts mount up and the warehouses of unsold whale meat overflow.

Perhaps then we would actually see whaling become an issue for the Japanese public at large, debated by Japanese vs Japanese, rather than the current Japanese vs gaijin (foreigners), removing this most polarising of sentiments in Japan.

I am calling on the Green groups, the Governments and the Media, to exercise some understanding of realpolitik. And eventually, I feel confident, this kind of approach will lead to the collapse of the Japanese whaling industry altogether; because it is a 100% unsustainable business model; because the diehards will, you know, die out; because the whale watching industry will eventually gain the economic upper hand, and most importantly, because hardly any Japanese want to eat the stuff!

Tips for spotting online B2B scams for SMEs

Most SMEs know that there is plenty of valid business to be done online, from simple networking via social media through to developing your own point of sale interface. But we all know that there are plenty of rip-offs and scams out there as well, and while many of these are the same as/similar to B2C scams, there are some important differences. So how do you sort the wheat from the chaff?

I first got involved in the online marketing business in the late ‘90s. Since then the core of our business has been promoting products and services online across multiple languages. Approximately 90% of my customers I have never met (even when their office is only a couple of blocks from mine!); everything is done remotely. Over the years I have seen a plethora of online scams, and now tend to be pretty rigorous when checking our potential business partners.

So I would like to outline a few of the most common B2B scams here I get in my inbox, and then how I audit potential new business partners wherever they may be, at zero cost to me other than about 10 minutes online.

First, to the top 3 scams I see in my inbox.

1. The request for quote, because I don’t know how much to charge.
This is perhaps the most common scam. A newcomer in your industry gets the opportunity to quote on a contract. Being new, they have no idea how to price the service/product on this scale. So, they pose as a buyer and ask you to quote; no doubt you will also ask a bunch of highly relevant questions and end up supplying a whole raft of extra information such as terms and conditions, parameters for products/services sold etc. So you have just given them everything they know to get the contract, and they have basically scammed the knowledge you have spent years building.

2. The purchase and overpayment so please send me back the difference scam.
I order a product/service from you and pay upfront via a wire transfer. But I pay too much (by accident). So I ask you to send the goods/provide the service, and refund me the difference (typically via Western Union or an online payment processor). Note sometimes I will ask you to hold the funds as a credit and then send a second quick fire re-order, but repeat the overpayment on the second purchase and then ask for the refund (double or nothing, as they say). Unfortunately those funds were sent through a hijacked account. You send the goods/complete the service, pay the refund, and you are doubly out of pocket.

3. The absolute faker claiming to be who he/she is not.
It is incredibly easy to create an entire business identity online that does not exist in reality.  Within 72 hours you can buy a domain name, have a whole other company’s website cloned and up and running, with a Linked In profile, a Facebook page, a phone number in the country of choice which redirects to anywhere etc. Basically you can position yourself as a very legitimate looking operator and away you go.

OK, onto the scam busting.

Being an SME, we generally don’t have the time, scale or the cold hard cash to deal with international credit checks, letters of credit, checking business references/referees (and those are easily faked anyway) etc. etc. Most contact comes via email, so I will start with this and then move on to other things to look out for.

The things I check typically take me about 10 minutes maximum, and have kept me and my business out of harms way for 10 years now.

1. Free email addresses.
The use of hotmail, gmail addresses etc. generally raises a red flag. If someone contacts me B2B from XYZ@gmail.com I tend to err on the side of caution immediately. However, in some areas (China and SE Asia especially) “freemail” is used quite commonly in business, so it isn’t an automatic disqualification.

2. The “from” address and the “reply to” address are different.
What a lot of people don’t know is that it is actually very easy to scam a sending email address. With a compliant SMTP server I can send an email purporting to be from your email address, and you would have no idea I had done it. But of course there is no point if the reply to said email then goes to you! So I will set up my email sending preferences to send from XYZ@yourdomainname but the “reply to” email address will be to my own email account. This is one of the biggest red flags. How to spot? I could tell you to expand the headers and look at the source code of the email blah blah blah, but all you need to do is click “reply” (don’t send!) and compare the email address you received the original email from to the email address the reply is going to. If they are different beware!

3. Their name
Anyone that does not provide their full name, position and full company contact details in their email footer gets a big fat question mark. Had one today, which was just signed off as “Nick” on a potential contract worth quite a lot of money. We will wait and see how legit it is.

4. Check the website
Probably your greatest tool in verifying an identity is checking details on their website. Here are some of the basics I use when approached by a potential customer.
a. Check that the website holds full contact details and real people’s names. The website should have the company physical address, phone number, as well as at least an introduction to some of the actual people behind the business. If it doesn’t I proceed with caution.
b. Read the website. Look for examples of bad grammar, spelling mistakes, incomplete sections.
c. Whois. All domain registrars provide a whois tool (or just go to whois.com). Enter the prospective client’s website address. Key information to look for:
i. Creation date: this tells you the date the domain name was first registered. So if Bob from bigbrandname.com claims to have been in business for 12 years, but the domain was registered just last month, you have to ask why?
ii. Date billed/date registered to: many scammers register their domain name for the minimum time possible, because they know the domain name has a limited use by date (i.e. until they get busted and move onto the next one). While I personally do tend to wait until the reminder notice comes to renew my domains, keep an eye on this.
iii. Registrant contact name: Make sure this is filled out completely, and usually the registrant name will be one of the owners of the company. Check website, companies office details etc. and compare. If you are worried because of scam 3 above, drop the registrant an email to verify.
iv. Registrant phone number: That phone number will have a country code. So again, if Bob claims bigbrandname.com is a UK company, but the phone number points to Poland, questions should be asked.

5. If you are worried about scam 3 above, copy a complete sentence from somewhere inside their website (don’t use the homepage as this is the one scammers typically customise for their needs). Try to copy a sentence from the first paragraph of a page, as the further down a page of text you go, the less complete search engine indexing is. Paste into your search engine of choice and search. See what websites pop-up with the exact same text. Recently there was a discussion on Linked In about a company that claimed to be a legal firm in Australia; turns out the scammers had bought a domain name and cloned an entire website from a US firm and were sending out those wonderful “You have just received an inheritance from long lost Aunt Bethel” emails. Note this should be something you do fairly regularly for your OWN website as well, to make sure your website isn't being scammed.

6. The Companies Office.
Many jurisdictions provide online access to a register of companies. Search. Compare names/addresses between company register and whois results.

7. Western Union.
Any business offering to pay, or wanting to be paid by Western Union, should be seriously questioned. Western Union is untraceable. Once the money is sent, there is no way of tracking where it actually ends up.

8. Social media checking.
Here, much like on the website, you are again looking at age of profile (not number of connections, as these days you can pretty much buy as many connections/likes as you want). But look back over posting history to see how much and how frequently the user posts. Scammers are as lazy as the rest of us, they will generally do the absolute minimum to get away with it.

9. Social media joining.
For many industries there are groups within social media (e.g. Linked In). Within those groups there are often scam alert pages. Join up and share. Perhaps the best way to nip some of these scams in the bud.

10. Language
For many non-native English speakers, it is a bit of a struggle to communicate well in the international business language, English. So we should all give benefit of the doubt. But a bit of knowledge about the potential business partner’s first language can go a long way. For example, I had contact in English recently from a potential business partner who claimed to be Japanese. Looked fairly legit, until he started referring to himself as Matsuyama kun and Matsuyama san. Anyone who knows Japanese knows you would never append “kun” or “san” to your own name; they are “honorifics” for use with other peoples' names, never your own. So if you receive enquiries from an e.g. French person in English, show them to a French speaker to see if they look like they were written by a native French speaker.

Finally, if I have been through all this, and although the prospect seems legit, I still have a bad vibe, I set up a video Skype to discuss the details, with the proviso I would like to record the video (I use an add on app called Call Recorder from ECamm Network). Even though the chances of me (or law enforcement) identifying someone half way around the world from a grainy video recording are almost zero, scammers are terribly reticent to show their faces. On the other hand, most legitimate business people welcome it.

Thanks for reading, and hope it has been of use. If you have any tips on how you flush out the fakes, please email me or post a comment and I will update this page for future readers.

There is no such thing as an Asian

OK, having lived overseas in Asia for most of my adult life, you kind of get used to being lumped into a category of "Westerner". Most commonly (at least in Japan) is that you are an American, although, as I look a lot like Mister Bean, some peg me as a Brit.

Well, one thing I would really like Kiwi's to get their head around is that:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ASIAN

Asia describes a geographical area. In some definitions, NZ and Australia are included in Asia.

but THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ASIAN

While the mass media would love you to believe that it is true (look here for a sample), the truth is that saying that someone is "Asian" is about as accurate as saying someone is "White".

The media constantly feeds us this "Asian" mythology. We constantly hear about "Asians better in education", or "Asians fueling drug trade". But in reality, "Asians" don't exist! You cannot say that Thais = Koreans = Indonesians = Japanese, not to mention the fact that they are all individuals? How nuts is this?

What a load of media sound byte bullshit. Designed for you, the media consumer, to digest and reconfirm prejudices and stereotypes you have been inculcated with since birth.

We have all to be aware that the media continues to compartmentalise (I hate American English spell checkers that tell me I am spelling it wrong) and package information so that it confirms the prejudices THEY THINK WE HAVE.

I urge you, write to your local newspaper, your TV station, your Radio station, and tell them that they cannot continue in this manner. In fact, why should the ethnicity of anyone appear in the media at all?

Is it germaine to the content, that a particular person is of XXX ethnicity? Does it matter that   the Westpac bank fraud was made by an ethnic Chinese? Does it make a difference that Mr. Dotcom is German, but as a resident of our country he is persecuted by the authorities at the behest of the USA? If Vietnamese are involved in drug dealing, how is their ethnicity relevant?

And as for Maori and Pacific Islanders (yep, we are part of Asia too). The media continues to bang the drum about how "bad" we are. I won't bother posting links here, we all know how much appears in the media. Yes, the stats and the facts point to depressingly high rates of offending across the board, but let me ask you, how much is a self-fulfilling prophesy? If the world continually tells you that you are shit, on a 24/7 basis, how long before you end up actually believing it and behaving accordingly?

I started this blog with the premise that there is no such thing as an Asian. I will finish with:

Why report the ethnicity at all? In a free society, ethnicity should have nothing to do with how  well you may succeed or fail, what offenses you may or may not commit, and how the world  should view you. It is irrelevant, and reporting based in ethnicity should be banned.

And we are all so scared

What has happened in the last decade? Why have our governments decided to encourage us to be so afraid?

From terrorism, from random acts of violence, from car crashes and drunken drivers.

When in fact, we have never been as safe as ever before?

Seriously, the chance of a random act ending up in our personal demise has never, ever been so low!

This is the 21st century! We are safer than we have ever been! Yet, the powers that be continue to try to convince us that we are in mortal danger, day by day,

Who do you trust?