Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The message is clear; If you want a promotion to senior management in Atlassian, make sure the boss sees a photograph of you superglued to a street fixture.
Atlassian backs kids’ strike action on ‘climate change emergency’
Andrew Tillett Political Correspondent
Sep 3, 2019 — 12.01amTechnology company Atlassian is supporting its employees to attend the School Strike for Climate later this month as a growing number of businesses and organisations throw their support behind the international student movement demanding action on global warming.
Co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes wants other businesses to follow Atlassian’s lead, saying it was crucial the corporate sector and individuals stepped up, given governments’ inability to address climate change.
“At Atlassian, one of our core values is ‘Don’t @#$% the Customer’. This year, we’re taking that a step further with ‘Don’t @#$% the Planet’,” said Mr Cannon-Brookes, a noted supporter of renewable energy.
“Humanity faces a climate change emergency. It’s a crisis that demands leadership and action.
“But we can’t rely on governments alone. Sadly, in Australia, we can’t rely on them at all. Businesses and individuals must also play their part and this responsibility is even more urgent when governments fail.”
…
Read more: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/atlassian-backs-kids-strike-action-on-climate-change-emergency-20190902-p52n1e
Encouraging adult staff eager to attract the attention of the boss out to join school kids on the rampage; what could possibly go wrong?
Atlassian is less of a household name than the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple, but Atlassian is well known to the software developer community; millions of techies use their products to manage large high value software projects and other business processes.
Don’t @#$% the Customer’ is f**n rich from a company who announced only days ago they drop support for one of the two source code managements system on their platform, and will delete all customer repositories using it within less than a year.
If humanity faces a such a climate change emergency, they can show the way in the crisis by demonstrating leadership and action, and turn off all their servers which surely don’t run on “renewables”.
AND All the customers they forcibly drop support for should immediately resource their software and associated support to other companies. They might learn something if they lose half of their customer base.
Say what you like about them, but at least they have a big ASS in the middle of their company as all good companies should.
/snark
This is a serious question for you all…. What can anybody do to stop climate change? If they can stop it, then what is the normal weather levels they want?
The answer to your first question is “nothing,” leaving the second question moot.
At the depth of the last glaciation about 23ka BC , there we only a few thousand humans on Earth. That must be the optimum we should be aiming for , I recommend dialing CO2 down to about 160ppm, just about enough to keep some grasses alive.
Sunny, it is the nature of the climate to change, the notion that the climate should be stable is the big lie. The suggestion that extreme weather events are more frequent and/or more severe due to a change in the nature of the atmosphere of 0.013% is absolute nonsense, as is the suggestion that we can do anything about it.
Two questions you never hear from the main stream Propaganda Ministry because the answer is Nothing. They can’t control GSTs.
If they go fooling around they will only invoke the Law of unintended consequences and make things go from livable to not so much.
I think it is time somebody organized a march against Climate Alarmists. Unfortunately the large crowd that would attend cannot because they have jobs and need to pay bills and feed the family and Atlassian doesn’t offer paid leave for those folk only pink slips.
If the climate wasn’t changing, it would be broken. Normal weather is just what it happens to be at the time and place where you are. If you don’t like the weather where you are, move. Virtually any kind of weather you could conceivable want is available somewhere on the planet, and always will be despite the drone of alarmist prognostications.
Bait and switch. Done by companies often.
You “buy” the climate change story, and change your life, government, etc.
And, instead of a Garden of Eden Goldilocks Perfect Weather globe, you get Communism (a form of Totalitarianism where govt decides where you live, what your job will be, how much money you will make, how many children you might be able to have, and whether you or some one else will be assigned to raise any child or children you have).
One way to modify the climate is to put a lot of light and cheap satellites with big, reflective (and thin) solar sails into orbit in order to reflect away a small fraction (say a percent or less) of the sunlight coming from the sun. Definitely would cool things off, without making any debateable assumptions about how the atmosphere or oceans would respond to extra injections of this or that substance or gas. Note that as soon as other countries realized that sure-to-work actions were being taken to steal their sunlight, they would be extremely angry, possibly taking steps to stop it from happening. I have already read articles about how China is planning to put reflective satellites in orbit to re-direct sunlight onto their cities during the night, so that streetlights would be unnecessary, which of course would — again making no assumptions about how the atmosphere will react — heat the climate up, at least a little.
There may be many ways to fill the sky with satellites, but putting them up in sun-synchronous polar orbits (which always cross the equator at the same local solar time) would make it easy to program the correct angle of the solar sail. In fact, if you ever become worried about global cooling, for example during another glaciation episode, you could redirect the satellites’ solar sails to reflect onto the earth sunshine that would otherwise have “missed” the planet, which would definitely warm things up.
Prefer solar powered cloud making ships in the Pacific, cheaper and easier to turn off.
Not too sure about the Solar Sail proposal. Sails would need to be pointed away from the Surface which aims the satellite at Earth. The nature of Solar Sails is to produce propulsion from photonic pressure. Aiming the satellite at earth and deploying a Solar Sail would cause the satellite to be deorbited. Perhaps a horde of Mirrored Cube Sats. at the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point would be in order.
Would would need two sets of sails. Solar sails and regular sails for wind power.
Now that right there is funny!!!
It would only need to point towards the earth during the time it was between the earth and the sun. During the rest of the orbit it could be angled so that the forces stabilize the orbit.
Unless they can find to a way to get the thing to tumble in exactly the right way so that all the forces balance, they would have to use a huge amount of fuel to constantly change the angle manually.
Wonder if a specifically angled pinwheel shape would cause it to spin without imparting any specific directional momentum
The Earth manages this rather easily with things called “Clouds”. Furthermore it manages to create them where and when they seem to be most needed by evaporating water and allowing it to rise to where it can condense and block additional thermal rays from heating the earth below.
I’m sure without too much effort we can find a few other beneficial features provided by clouds.
Sorry to be snarky here, but you created a real howler.
Rain is one of those useful benefits. Like CO2, water is necessary for life, plus it’s the return path for much of the latent heat entering the atmosphere, but as an avid skier, I prefer it returning as snow, which paradoxically, returns even more of that latent heat …
By ‘big’ sails I am assuming you are meaning HUGE and by ‘lots’ I am going to assume you mean hordes of the things.
So, the plan is to seed orbit with a mass of new satellites of far greater surface area than even the ISS that do basically nothing else except block sunlight and have them all try and fit in more or less the same orbit in order to actually achieve the sorts of density needed to actually be ‘useful’.
Yeah. Absolutely no complications likely to spring up on that one.
You do realise that if you have even a casual conversation with people associated with space and the noble art of putting satellites into it and the topic of collisions comes up. Have a quick casual read up on the Kessler Effect. Space may be ‘big’ but in context it is not infinite.
They would likely need to be placed out at geostationary orbit between or slightly beyond all the weather satellites. Though between could jeopardize some stability from proximity issues and beyond could potentially block solar cells powering the satellites
It’s about the journey, not about reaching the destination.
Bring in the securities litigation army to go after any tech companies that fund that.
Absolutely. The directors of the company have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. link
They would be more concerned about the company’s inability to make a profit and the fact that it stays afloat by selling shares not products or support contracts.
The only reason the company is paying employees to protest would be to promote their software to control solar and wind farm computer programs.
The usual rich tosser worried about sea levels-
https://www.therealestateconversation.com.au/2018/09/28/100-million-sale-fairwater-australias-most-expensive-home/1538098966
But maybe he wants to get rid of the cow farts-
https://www.domain.com.au/news/farmer-mike-cannon-brookes-buys-point-piper-of-the-southern-highlands-for-14m-865224/
I am all in favour of companies being able to decide what they do and how they behave, including who they employ and what political stances they may take. But if companies and activists accept legislation and regulation that tells them they cannot discriminate then they cannot discriminate – so let’s see these guys offer paid leave to Climate Sceptics too.
Anybody willing to bet they would be quite happy to do so?
My employer, a major university, uses the Atlassian suite. If I have the opportunity to change that, I will. Thanks to Mr. Cannon-Brookes for revealing their true nature.
Same here. I do my best to avoid companies which virtue signal, whether it’s fish on their signs or child activists; I buy stuff which works, and if they have enough resources to waste on virtue signalling, I figure there’s a cheaper, more focused competitor out there somewhere.
Isn’t it amazing that all the technology companies that live in virtual reality instead of the real world believe in this crap. Another observation on my part is how many women seen to be taken in by these “crises”. They are too emotional for their own good.
And that is the very reason for the claims about the existence of the proverbial “glass ceiling” that prevent females from competing with their male counterparts in the business world.
“DUH”, females are born with an inherited “survival” instinct that pretty much forces them to make “emotional” decisions on critical/important issues, ….. rather than “logical” decisions.
And that is exactly why the United States does not need a female POTUS. (Britain and Germany didn’t fare too well with their female PMs, did they?).
This is getting a bit anachronistic. Lumping all women together and giving them generalized attributes is sooooo twentieth century. Come on people, please.
Samuel, your comment on Britain and Germany’s female PMs wasn’t well thought out. Maggie Thatcher made radical changes in British society that are routinely applauded by conservatives. And Tante Angela – well you can’t win them all.
And England (as opposed to Britain) had a remarkable female leader, who gave her country unprecedented prosperity that wouldn’t be matched for another 300 years. And peace, interrupted only briefly by a stunning military victory over the richest and most powerful nation in the world at the time. And started the fossil fuel industry by promoting the use of coal to conserve wood for more useful purposes like iron smelting, shipbuilding and those quaint half-timbered houses. And started the whole empire building thing. Queen Elizabeth I was a real leader, and there don’t seem to be many of those around these days.
Smart Rock – September 3, 2019 at 12:09 pm
Sorry bout that, Smart Rock, ….. but it comes “free-of-charge” cause it is encoded in their inherited DNA.
Smart Rock, …… “HA”, …… I wasn’t writing a book.
“And that is exactly why the United States does not need a female POTUS.”
‘Need’ a female Pres? No
‘Can’t Have’ a female Pres? Also No.
Probably only time you ‘need’ a female in a role is when you are talking gestating babies. In nearly all situations… well… family friendly situations at least… cough… you don’t ‘need’ a female, you ‘need’ the best qualified and motivated PERSON you can find. If gender differences give someone a physical advantage over another then deal with it.
And that “gender difference” is EXTREMELY critical when it involves decision making.
Aka: “Hell hath no fury like an emotional female, suffering with a bruised ego, being insulted, being criticized, etc.”
And therein lies a probable answer to Eric’s question “What could possibly go wrong?”
There is a long history of impressionable young women being taken advantage of by men affecting to take care of their concerns.
Many of the newly wealthy have an irresistible urge to socially advertise their success. I wonder why his business partner is keeping out of the news.
Atlassian is based in Sydney. Until now, there has been no reason to avoid Australian software.
Leave a well thought comment on their website.
Time to find a replacement for my Atlassian portfolio of applications.
I dare say that if you asked any of these people about entropy and enthalpy and what an adiabatic lapse rate was, you would get a blank stare in return.
You can strike gold if you come up with software that sells well.
So, you’re a geek who got lucky. That will make you think you’re a genius. There’s no telling what you’ll try next. Just ask Elon Musk.
Well, now that you mention it, Elon Musk designed, built, and sold the best selling electric automobiles in world history .. and he also is leading the world’s most largest and most successful privately owned space rocket company .. and Jeff Bezos, another one of your software geniuses, operates the worlds largest and most successful retail enterprise in human history. Both are totally self made multi-kajillionaires.
You may want to recalibrate your notions of who is smart and who is not smart.
Both guys may not be popular here on WUWT, which is pretty much ground zero for haters of anybody not named Trump.
Also near ground zero for all who Hate Climate Realists as well
Elon Musk is a visionary … but his company developed both solar panels and cars that spontaneously catch on fire. Being smart means getting rich before all the consequences hit …
I don’t hate anyone, Duane. But I do think that you’re a Designated Hitter.
He designed and built the cars that he sold?
Really?
As to the claim that they are the best selling, that also is not a supportable claim.
No wonder you hate Trump so much, he’s actually done the stuff you imagine your heros doing.
Look Duane Elon has done a great job soaking rich virtue signalling tossers with expensive electric sports cars so they can offset their private jets and make them feel good about their Hummers and other sundry ICE collections while lecturing the deplorables as to why they can’t afford an M3 just yet as if it makes any difference. He also ed a nice Unicorn big battery to provide cover for SA Labor to stick in 9 diesel generators that can consume 80,000L/hr of refined fossil fuels to fix the obvious looming problem with unreliables and the MSM went along with the scam.
As for Geoff Bezos and Amazon he’s provided a great platform for purveyors of goods and consumers to get together but I don’t think all the goodies are being delivered by bicycle or handcarts just yet let alone fashioned by hand or with the aid of horse power and the millstream. It pays to have a bit broader perspective than chucking a few solar panels on the roof and changing some light globes with your establishment when sitting atop the fossil fuelled food chain like that and don’t bite the hand that feeds you so well.
Tesla is a money sink. link Now that all the automobile companies are paying serious attention to electric vehicles, Tesla looks doomed. The logic of the software industry doesn’t work in the automobile industry.
The problem isn’t whether Musk is smart per se. The problem is the danger that he will overestimate his capabilities. Hubris is fatal.
Setting a low bar there Duane. In case you haven’t noticed, electrical automobiles are a niche market that has been monitored with casual interest since the words electricity, wheels and engineering were first used in the same sentence. People are curious, but still buy the objectively more practical ICE vehicles.
Claiming Musk is the best in his field is like saying that Duane is the best contributing commenter named Duane who posts to WUWT. Narrow the field down fair enough and even people like you and me can become leaders.
As for SpaceX? So? It’s not actually rocket science. Musk himself doesn’t know squat about engineering. He has grand ideas and throws money and Twits at the problem and the unwashed masses of squee get all excited about how Musk is doing all these things himself. He isn’t. Musk isn’t running a magical space programme, he is part of a supply chain supplying to an existing one. As for being a ‘private’ company? Well if you want to argue the subtle differences between publically listed and ‘private’ companies then go ahead, but if you are suggesting that Musk himself is funding all these projects you are being misleading.
As for Musk’s amazing shiny successes, they all need to be taken into context with his collection of awkward failures. His Boring Company for instance. Formed to become a world leader in tunnelling. Later used to market ‘flame throwers’ to idiot man-children. Honestly this is a serious question. Are you a serious engineering company, or are you a novelty toy company targeting developmentally stunted adults?
Musk’s gift to the world is that he is not afraid to dream big.
Musk’s burden to the world is he is arrogant enough to believe dreams are formal qualifications.
Honestly Duane, you need to develop a healthy bit of cynicism. Stop believing all the promises you read on Twit and start believing when you see it WORKING in front of you. Support success. Criticise stupidity and failure. Monitor the unproven. Ask questions.
There is no real Right and Wrong in the universe. There is what is successful at the time. You are allowed to change allegiances. If you don’t believe me then feel free to message me on your Nokia smartphone, because if you are not running anything but a Nokia I am going to be assuming you totally agree with me.
So they’ll get paid leave, unlike the other climate “strikers”: the students, the unemployed and the unemployable. It makes you wonder how many of the “strikers” are paid to carry signs and chant mindless slogans.
Most of those “slogans” were either Self Thunked or parroted from other self thunked slogans
Clearly the board of the company is scientifically illiterate. That doesn’t bode well for the soundness of decision making. If you have shares, sell.
Cannon-Smith may be an expert in information systems but he is an idiot in real world knowledge. He thinks Elron Musk is a visionary which says it all.
Eric Worrall
Productive “work hours” will slowly be diminishing as the employees increase their “inter-office” discussions on how to best appease their boss on global warming “cures”.
I actually had that happen once, you’re not allowed to disagree when it happens, even staying quiet gets you into trouble.
Renewable drivers, disposable converters with marginal performance. Good enough for as a niche solution with qualifiers. Save the planet, remove the Green blight.
It’s always ‘we’…and never China, India, the developing world
They know it….and everyone that figures that out knows it’s a s c a m
Let’s see if Atlassian supports employee strikes over climate change.
The first three letters in the company’s name are totally unnecessary.
Remove letters 1, 2, 3 and 5 and it becomes asian, which is where all our jobs will be going once these guys finish destroying our economies.
I find it truly amazing how companies manage to stay in business when the post-modern mindset today is to pay employees not to work. I’d really like to learn the magical financial mathematics they are using to cook the books with to make that look like a good idea.
Big tech, social logic.
They can start by banning the use of private jets. First exec that says that in the boardroom will soon be fired,
Options:
1. Take day off, go to protest but hold placard with opposite view.
2. Take day off, pretend you tried to go but your solar powered electric bike failed due to excessive shadowing.
3. Take day off, go fishing. Say nothing.
4. Take day off, spend day in garden, have F***G HUGE bonfire, post pics on social media.
Like most tech companies they have no idea of how the real world works they think it runs on faith and good feelings and it will only be when it comes crashing down around their ears that they will realise their mistake. Maybe!
Meanwhike in Oz, we have John Kerry pontificating about climate change and the rapid increase in the US of jobs for solar and wind turbine technicians.
It must be a different John Kerry who is heavily invested in fossil fuels.
Oh. These are the JIRA people.
JIRA… Yeah… We use that in the Day Job.
Its a CodeMonkey management and tracking tool that excitable young project managers keep trying to implement for our (non software) tasking.
I have heard it works well for software, but outside of grad project managers it is at best tolerated and at worst stubbornly rejected and openly belittled as a pointless work generator.
This insight on how woke the parent company is goes a reasonable way towards explaining some of the design choices in creating this software.
I would like to say, as a former user, that Atlassian produce excellent, useful and pretty reliable software.
That he may well do Griff but he seems to have forgotten in Oz it runs on 75% coal fired power and comes to all our computers on steel pylons made from coking coal for starters-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/company-news/atlasssian-billionaire-mike-cannon-brookes-tells-bhp-to-drop-its-coal-lobbying-mates-or-stop-claiming-it-cares-about-the-climate/ar-AAGLfda
None of that then no Atlassian but these IT geeks and nerds are not exactly noted for social intelligence with their noses stuck always in their computer screens.
One more reason to avoid the business community as much as humanly possible. Buy as little as you can and avoid Silicon Valley products as much as practicable. Hang onto tech until you have no choice but to upgrade (or ditch it altogether). Refuse to participate.
(No, it won’t stop this, you’re at least guiltless.)