I have to admit, I do not know who TV celebrity chef Ed Halmagyi is. I have no idea what television show he was on or the media commitments he has. What I do know is I am appalled at the attack on his establishment on Saturday night, the Hamas symbols painted on his bakery are just not on. Whilst this is a minority of ill informed idiots, there are protests at universities, there was a protest at the Sydney Opera House that embarrassed the whole country.

I really didn’t think anti-Semitism was real anymore, yes, I have been to Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland back in 2018, so I thought I was pretty well educated on the matter. I have been to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, that was in Berlin. I have made such I have read published text on the matter from a perspective of both history and a willingness for this to never happen again.

There was also the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in Paris, I was able to visit that in 2014, I had visited the memorial previously. That was a memorial for the 200,000 jews deported from Vichy France to the nazi concentration camps on the island of Île de la Cité in the centre of Paris. Countries under Nazi occupation deported their Jewish populations to the concentration camps, everyone knew it was happening and it was highly organised.

Sure, there are still neo-nazi groups around, but I really thought they were right-wing radical minority groups who were largely disconnected from the community. These are fringe groups that have no real traction in a civilised society, sure there are a few weirdos and conspiracy theorists, for the best part, the population is educated. So you can imagine my surprise with the anti-Jewish sediment running in Australia after the October 7 terrorist attacks in 2023. This is especially galling considering this is coming from our higher education institutions, this is not acceptable.

I cannot believe the Australian government is calling for a twenty one day ceasefire in the Israel/Hezbollah conflict. After the October 7 surprise attack, Israel was caught off guard from an intelligence perspective, the Israeli intelligence community was really asleep at the wheel.

After the Hezbollah leadership has been wiped out, there is no way Israel should back off now, they have targeted the Hezbollah leadership, wiped them out, taken out their communications network, and destroyed their infrastructure. The calls from the Australian government for a ceasefire is an incredulous move, they have no strategic or tactical nous whatsoever. Why would Israel now stop and allow Hezbollah to regroup to attack them? It really makes no sense, this is the time to enter southern Lebanon to wipe out the Hezbollah threat to Israel.

We all know Iran is behind funding Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi, they are attacking Israel from multiple fronts. Yes, Israel has US and British support as the US has a carrier battle group in the region as well as access to other bases in the region. Whilst Iran typically acts in a proxy manner, they have been directly attacking Israel with missile barrages in an attempt to overwhelm their missile defence system. Iran has plenty of balistic missiles and drones, they have been supplying Russia with equipment in exchange for assistance with their nuclear proram.

So far, no Iranian forces have directly attacked Israel, they know they will be humiliated in an international sense, their best bet is to destabalise Israel through their sponsored partners. We will see if this conflict escalates to a larger regional conflict, will see if the leadership in Iran works it out and backs down. I suspect not, I tend to think the Iranian leadership will try to escalate the conflict, they will fire more missiles at Israel, the coalition will respond with layered missile defences, then Israel will respond and this will be decisive.

Having worked from 1985 to 2005 in private enterprise, I joined a state government training institute in 2006 to present. I first noticed three main groups of employees in the organisation; the long haul staff who had spent 20 – 30 years as a state government employee. This group had a high working knowledge and expertise of engineering process and training; but were nearing retirement and already moving into retirement mode, they had been institutionalised and were not going to change.

This is with the exception of one manager who has past 65, and as such, is being paid out the old style superannuation who worked not only hard during the day but on average works 1½ to 2 hours in the evening at home. He is highly motivated, a work ethic that should inspire others to perform strongly to not let the team down. He is a highly valued team member but has no position power, requiring a transformational leadership approach as opposed to a transactional leadership approach.

The second group was former military personnel, mostly army, but also a number of former navy and air force personnel as well. The work ethic of this group is surprisingly casual; one would expect former military personnel to be highly structured and regimented, they are instead highly unionised and work to rule not doing more than is required.

The third group is starters from private enterprise who can further be broken into two sub groups, that is, the ones who discovered that once working for the state government, you can’t be fired and can do the minimum amount of work with no consequences. The second sub-group developed a strong work ethic in private enterprise and carries this into their new role.

The management culture is the laissez faire approach, in other words, management avoids conflict and takes a hands-off approach, no such performance management takes place as management prefers a no conflict approach despite team members clearly performing in a sub-standard manner.

There is a small group of highly motivated team members who drive innovation and change within the strategic portfolio, this group gains personal satisfaction from driving continuous improvement within the portfolio. The strategy of this group is to be an open group – that is any team member can join; however, the non-performing team members refer to the educational leaders as the purple circle.

A formal mentoring program is conducted by the motivated staff members welcoming new starters into the so called purple circle; they are given limited responsibility and roles as it takes approximately two years to develop into competent vocational educators. The majority of these new starters turn out to be highly productive team members.

I view this as a classic behavioral management dilemma; referencing the McGregor X and Y theories, I feel a more hands on management approach utilising a situational leadership approach as proposed by Hersey and Blanchard tailored to individual team members who are highly motivated and those who need to be constantly supervised to perform.

There is no doubt Rolex is one of the most recognisable luxury brands in the world. The Rolex Submariner is an iconic timepiece that has been imitated by many watch manufacturers over a long period. The Submariner was first showcased at the 1954 Basel Watch Fair so whilst not a super old design, the Submariner has plenty of history to draw upon.

The oyster perpetual description relates to both the case and the automatic movement. The oyster is the first waterproof watch Rolex ever manufactured based on the design of Paul Perregaux and Georges Peret referring to the screw-back rear case, screw-down crown, rubber seals with the crystal forming a watertight seal as the pressure forces the crystal against an internal lip. Apparently the original oyster watches had a screw-down bezel but this appears to be a superseded design now.

Apparently, legend has it that the term oyster originated from Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf believing a real oyster was sealed so tight that debris from the sea floor is unable to penetrate the inside of the shell. An oyster key is required to get into these watches with only authorised Rolex certified repairers allowed to service the watch.

The perpetual refers to the self-winding mechanical movement driven by a coiled rotor spring encased in the Oyster water resistant case. This mechanism consists of a half moon-shaped oscillating weight rotating in both directions on its axis driven by the movement of the wearer. This maintains the mainspring under a continuous tension providing the watch with a stable and constant energy source.

French commercial diving company COMEX adapted the Submariner and the Sea Dweller as standard issue saturation diver timepieces beginning in the 1960s to the sale of the company. It is somewhat ironic that a luxury brand built its reputation on working class origins with saturation divers issued the watches for free.

The abduction of Naama Levy occurred just over a year ago, she was 19 years old at the time and stationed at the Nahal Oz kibbutz surveillance base near the Israeli/Gaza border barrier. What was known is Naama was taken across the Gaza border and into the tunnel system. A year on, we do not know if Naama is still alive, how she has been held if she is alive and her potential state of mind after this harrowing experience.

What we can clearly see that Naama was beaten, she is covered in blood and bruises as she is pulled out of the vehicle across the Gaza border. We can clearly see she is bleeding into her pants, there would not be too many arguing she has not been brutally sexually assaulted. A year on, Palestinians are still dying in the fight to free the hostages. Hamas does not want to release women, the world will then know what happened to the women during the October 7 invasion and the continued sexual assault of the women held captive. The Palistinian apologists who support terrorism really have no answers for this brutality.

I began writing this post about two years before Covid-19, so I decided to scrap the original post and start again. This is a little unusual, I don’t like totally rewriting but this was worth revisiting. When face-to-face classes were suspended at universities, colleges and schools, students were required to continue their studies at home. This worked ok for the richer first-world nations, the outcomes for students in developing nations were unbelievably compromised.

Vocational education and training along with higher education had been slowly transitioning to online classes. Workplace based training and development has been pushing the technology constraints, unfortunately, state government colleges have failed to embrace technology. University students have the option of online or face-to-face classes so university students can optimise their time.

Mining companies have been utilising online site inductions for some time now, for me it is far better than losing a day of site time, I don’t mind doing the online site induction in my own time. Sure beats a three day face-to-face induction as I can race through the mundane information and just concentrate on what I don’t know.

As a learning and development graduate in 2014, I was exposed to current technology and practices. Whilst six years has passed, some of the systems we learnt used better technology than we use now, we didn’t have Zoom, although we had a video collaboration program.

As Zoom took over, despite its inherent faults, it was an instant success. Google released their premium service Meet, Cisco Webex had already been used by businesses for some time. For business, this was a natural progression as they were already using conferencing programs. Collaborative programs are now so common in business, it is not unusual anymore, people just accept it, so it is really well suited for learning.

Facilitators with no online experience were forced online, this led to poor outcomes for students and trainees. The learning content was outdated, not suited for online delivery and poorly constructed. Instructional design is mandatory for quality student outcomes, any educational and training institution not employing instructional designers treats their students with disdain.

What worked was organisations with online learning expertise, experience and processes. There is nothing wrong with online delivery for many courses. Whilst MOOCs were well received early, the clientele was mostly post-graduate learners and not new learners. They are motivated and well suited to online knowledge-based delivery as they have base knowledge, skills and abilities who are seeking to unskilled. As we move to more flexible delivery methodologies, online delivery is both a cost and time effective mode of delivery.

I have never flown Delta before, after reading about this, I don’t think I would much like to fly with them. Surely they had the opportunity to stop what was going on, this is disgusting behaviour, what were these people thinking? In such circumstance, do the crew have the power to restrain these people as they are creating a unhygienic situation, this is a safety issue and has ramifications for all the passengers.

So what happened, the parents of the child didn’t want to take their child into a toilet. So what did they do? They laid newspapers on the airline seat and let the kid defecate on the seat. Of course the smell went all through the cabin, I am glad I was not on that flight, they showed no concern for any other person on the flight. I ask myself, what goes through their minds? Although this incident occurred back in 2014, this is something you don’t forget. Unfortunately, this was not the first incident of this occurring, so you have to ask, is this normal behaviour?

The flight was from Beijing to Detroit, that would have been a long flight, forget about eating on that flight. Whilst Chinese social media lit up, they have a point, these people did embarrass the country. This happens all the time, maybe not this exact incident, but people misbehave and bring a country into disrepute with other travelers. I just hope I am never on an aircraft where this type of incident occurs, at the very least, they should be charged and banned by the airline for any future travel – that should be a serious ban.

I have been asked what the button at the 10 o’clock position actually did on the Omega Seamaster series of dive watches. It was a fair question so I thought about how I could explain to my work colleagues who really didn’t comprehend the complexities of helium in diving. I had heard of the helium escape valves on the Rolex Submariner dive watches and how the professional divers preferred these dive timepieces.

The purpose of the helium escape valve is due to the molecular structure of helium gas, the gas is 2.63 lighter than air. During deep decompression dives greater than 60 metres, various helim mixes are utilised with commercial divers spending extended time at depth. During the dive (compression) phase divers are at depth, they enter and exit a diving bell that is held at the same pressure as the surrounding water pressure. During the dive phase, the lighter helium gas is able to penetrate the seals and enter the timepiece.

During the decompression phase, the surrounding air pressure is reducing [gradually] allowing the gas absorbed in the diver’s bodies to diffuse out. The pressure differential between the surrounding pressure and the watch case can cause the crystal to pop out. To prevent this occurring, there is an internal valve that is either automatic [Rolex] or manual [Omega] allowing the gas to escape. This allows the pressure to equalise ensuring no damage occurs  to the timepiece.

Whilst this is a  requirement for commercial saturation divers,  professional divers such as dive instructors, dive guides or technical divers have no requirement for the helium escape valve but this remains a feature of professional dive timepieces. Even for most commercial divers, the helium escape valve is not required as depths and durations do not require such extended decompressions on the ocean bottom. Really this is more marketing than mechanics.

I walked into Mazzucchelli’s Jewellers in the Karrinyup Shopping Centre in Perth’s northern suburbs to purchase a Tissot PRS 516 for my nephew’s eighteenth birthday later in the year. I enquired about the Tissot PRS 516 and the TAG Heuer Formula One quickly discounting the wrist feel of the entry level TAG Heuer Formula One for the more robust feel of the Longines Conquest.

For not a whole lot more, I was able to upgrade to the Longines Conquest. I believe the Conquest is a much better option even if the Tissot PRS 516 is a chronograph inspired by classic 1960s motorsport. The Conquest I chose for my nephew is a three hand model although a chronograph is available, the dial of the three-hand model is clear and uncluttered. Later when I discussed watches with him, he did not like a chronograph as the dial is too busy.

The 41 mm stainless steel case is water resistant to 30 Bar [300 metres] and fitted with a screw-down case-back embossed with the Longines winged hourglass logo enhancing professional level water resistance rating. The large screw-in crown is protected with a crown guard that is fitted externally. The three-piece H-link bracelet is stainless steel fitted with a triple safety folding clasp keeping the bracelet lines clean, the bracelet is pretty top notch.

The black lacquered dial is polished with Arabic numerals at the 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock positions and hour markers around the dial with the date window positioned at the 3 o’clock position. The silver polished hands and markers have a luminous coating allowing low light reading of the dial. I really enjoy the chambered bezel adding to the minimalist look of the Conquest, dating back to the original release in 1954, this timepiece isn’t over complicated. A scratch resistant sapphire crystal is treated with multiple layers of anti-reflective coating on the underside.

I chose the the L157 quartz movement as my nephew is young and wont fully appreciate the engineering of mechanical movement plus the servicing costs of a mechanical movement are a little prohibitive for a young man starting out on his life journey. A quartz movement better suits his stage of life, the accuracy of the quartz movement is fantastic and he won’t need to be continually resetting the time as I hope to find him an apprenticeship and he shouldn’t wear a wrist mounted watch in the workshop.

The private sector is set up to offer performers opportunities, the private sector is a different monster entirely. I see individuals excelling in the private sector, I also see talented, but ethical individuals going nowhere in the public sector. This is the culture of the organisation, the culture requires talented individuals with drive to question their decision to join government institutions and I think it is fair enough. The old rule of talent moving to the private sector and plodders moving into government still holds true.

Not only is remuneration better with salary, bonus and conditions, it allows the motivated to excel. In comparison, the sheltered workshop attitude of the government reinforces the differences between private enterprise, with the emphasis on enterprise and government employees dragging the chain around. The term leadership is bandied around, I really don’t see a lot of leadership in government organisations, I do see a lot of toxic behaviour though. 

So, where does this leave us? How does government businesses become more competitive? It starts at the management level, the performance management process is the foundation of exacting workplace performance. The non-performers need to be exposed, they need to be evaluated and feel the pressure to perform, if not, maybe it is time to move them on. Naturally, they need to be given the opportunity to improve, but if not, then find someone who will.