Risks are manageable if you’re a large corporate, but it’s a huge ask if you’re a start-up. Start-ups need capital and for most of us in Ireland that means the banks.  If you do somehow manage to get approval for a loan or overdraft, they’re routinely requiring personal guarantees before handing over the cash. For small fry that means that if your business fails in a big way you could end up bankrupt and lose everything and be on the sidelines for 12 years.  With risks like that is it any wonder that young knowledge workers aren’t willing to try the entrepreneurship route?

In the USA you can be in and out of Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy in a year and get back on the horse. As importantly, your core family assets (house, car and household goods) are safe. While never to be entered into lightly, it’s almost regarded as a right of passage for the entrepreneur in training.

Banks need to get fair in their business lending and government needs to put a proper structure in place to manage the failures in a humane way if they want to see a real culture of entrepreneurship grow in Ireland.

It’s an old joke, but frequently true. The Irish Internet Association are electing a new board at the moment and each of the nominees get a quick paragraph about themselves on the site. There are twelve nominees but only Trinity College alumni Clare Dillon and Catrina Sheridan see fit to tell everyone about their degrees and diplomas.

IT staff, no matter how good, will never be CEOs of major corporations. The one exception, John Reid of Citicorp, just proves the point, because he got fired too. Therefore IT staff are useless employees and no good at being managers.

A friend of his gets paid way more than you’d expect for someone with no responsibilities, and reports direct to the CEO. Why? Because from time to time he saves the company from ruin. This is Cringely’s Door Number Three. The natural position for the IT personality in an organisation.

He sees this as a precursor of tomorrows corporate structure. IT staff are used to coming up with quick “good enough” solutions to rapidly evolving technical situations. The pace of change in the wider world is speeding up to match, so business structures need to change, with today’s IT departments, with their loose quasi-meritocracy structures being a possible solution.

From I, Cringely

Jazz Biscuit: » Seize drunk drivers cars

It would be nice to have a body representing native industry for a change. The only companies in this industry getting any mind share from government are the foreign ones, who may provide lots of jobs and pay lots of taxes, but they take their profits home at the end of the day.

Ireland Inc. Let’s just do it!

I just saw this on Moby’s blog. CNN New Zealand did a vox pop on the streets of the USA asking questions like "where is the Berlin Wall?" and "What religion are Buddhist monks?" and asking them to point out places like Iran and North Korea on the map… It’s very funny and more than a bit scary, but makes you wonder about the information these people are being given about the world around them.

The US government & military are waging war abroad on behalf of their citizens without properly explaining to their people why, and communicating the repercussions (i.e. that nobody likes them or trusts them anymore). It’s often said that you can ask 10 people on the street why Iraq was invaded and 9 of them will say that it was to do with Iraq supporting Al-Qaeda, when in fact a fundamentalist Islam movement like Al-Qaeda would have nothing to do with a very secular regime like Iraq.

Over here every political and military action is scrutinised and dissected in the media on a nightly basis, so we’re pretty much on top of who’s doing what to whom in the world, but this obviously isn’t happening in the US. There’s a possibility that the heavily politicised media in the US (such as Fox News, which has a heavy republican bias) can mislead the populace into electing another leadership with a dangerous foreign policy agenda.

last night was really fun. | moby.com

Marketing execs are seeing Second Life, the leading “virtual reality” world online, as a new way for large corporates, such as Dell, Cisco and IBM to have a “presence”. They spend big money to design, construct and maintain showrooms that people can wander through and virtually examine their wares. Many argue that the volume of people using SL right now isn’t great enough to make the numbers add up, but the companies are seeing this as a long term thing. IBM even use it as a private colaboration tool. Rather than travel to meet face to face, or use teleconfernecing, they’re meeting virtually in a SL boardroom. Cisco are even using it to hold new employee interviews!

The RSU are going to picket the IBM building in SL on the 25th September. They’re giving out strike kits that include avatars with slogans on their t-shirts, and placards. It should be interesting….

From New World Notes, via Boing Boing

Update: John has posted a comment to say that the 25th is just the start of the public campaign. The actual protest will be a flash mob event, at a future date. Sign up at uniglobalunion.org to find out when the flash mob will form.

Right… I’m a business user of Shannon airport, so forgive me if I have a bias. Lots of people are saying that London is reasonably well served from Shannon by Ryanair, but “London” is a big place, and Ryanair’s main London airport (Stanstead) is actually half way to Scotland. The Gatwick link is a joke. One flight a day means no way to get in and out on the same day.

If you’re going on your summer holidays, and have all day (an hour to get into the city centre, and another 30 minutes to get the tube across town, and then another 30 minutes to get out to Heathrow, at a cost of at least £40 in train fares) to get to Heathrow, then that’s fine, for the rest of us, it’s 4 hours that we’d rather spend at home with the family.

Right now I can get the morning flight into Heathrow and be in town by 11am. I can do nearly a full days work and be back out on the 7:30pm flight. Because Heathrow is such a major airport, industry has grown up around it. A lot of technology companies (like Dell in Bracknell) are on the M4 corridor within a half hour of Heathrow, but outside London. Visiting these guys via Heathrow means I get to eat dinner with my kids. If I have to go via Stanstead I need an extra 2 hours in each direction on the M25. It requires getting up before dawn and not getting home until after 10pm. My other option is a 2 hour drive to Cork to fly out of there, or a 3.5 hour drive to Dublin…..

I’m in London at least a couple of times a month. If I lose a 1/2 day on each trip I lose more than two weeks a year sitting on commuter trains, rental cars and taxis in and around London. I’m just one person, but there are large companies around here who’s entire executive group are over and back to London at least as often as I am. This will cost them serious money. While they won’t (I hope!) pull out of the region because of this, they’ll certainly think of redistributing these higher paying jobs to other locations that are better connected to the real world.

Let’s be honest, the Mid-West is a backwater. Property and pay rates here are cheaper than Dublin, but Poland (which is very well connected to Heathrow by the way) is cheaper still, so the region will turn into a wasteland without some positive discrimination. This is why there are several incentive plans, such as the NDP, to keep industry in the area. The lack of a frequent direct link to the largest hub airport on the continent will lead to a net increase in the cost of doing international business out of the region. This is A Bad Thing. It’s already expensive to operate out of Ireland. Making business people piss away half their day to get here won’t make them think any better of us.

Al Gore may have been a lousy politician, but he knows how to drum up interest in the environment. If only he had been this active Bush-bashing in 2001.

On a related note, if you go and see the movie, aspoke.com will give you a free laptop skin. Bloggers can also get one by linking to the movie and the offer.

So what they’ve done is virtually shut down all mainline services to the southern half of the country. God help them if this is still the case on friday when half of Limerick and Cork are trying to get to Dublin/Rosslare to get the ferry to Cardiff for the Rugby. There’ll be blood spilt. I’ve got work in Dublin on Thursday & Friday and now I have to get up before dawn to drive up there, twice!

The whole lot of them should be fired! They’ve been told that their claim is without merit by the courts and their union, but they’ve decided to shut down vital infrastructure anyway. Greedy bastards!

The NewsWire has more info…