I got halfway through the article thinking it was modern day slow reveal journalism, but no, the bird is actually called the powerful owl, lower case. No shit.
“Powerful owls are expressive and strangely compelling — their powerful ‘woo-hoo’ hoot carries across the night. It’s soulful [and] I love it.”
Not surprisingly there’s hardly any left and yet they’re simultaneously on the brink of becoming the next bin chicken.
The unexpected solution to this unexpected problem is, of course, that we give some academics (specifically, Ms Zvolanek and Dr Parsons) some money to ponder the inexplicable. I’m in.
Wait until a problem gets so big that the only viable solution is a tunnel, which just happens to be privately owned and operated, but substantially publically funded.
I think I like general anaesthetics more than any recreational drugs. Complete and utter blackout, with virtually no side effects, during or after. What’s not to like?
The issue with the Australian Constitution is that, written in the context of federalisation, it’s focused on the division of powers between the feds and the states.
It hardly even considers the people it is supposedly “protects”, i e. us.
A good constitution, as any American will tell you, gives the people or a person the legal tools to fight against any government that might have it’s own interests ahead of the people, i.e. all of them.
Possibly that is best argument for the voice. If it had got up, the rest of us could have them clamored for the same rights as the indigenous population.
Definition: trumped up first world woke movement enabled by weak minded academics working unwittingly on behalf of property developers wishing to build massive apartment blocks in the nice upper middle class bungalow suburbs of Australia on the basis that the government enabled high house prices of these heritage preserved suburbs excludes the poor.
“There are so many issues that still need addressing and it cannot happen now in the most efficient way. One is the high proportion of prisoners who are Aboriginal. The rate at which Aboriginal Australians die in custody is obscenely greater than the white and Asian settler community. Indigenous Australians do not live as long as whites, having an average life span that is eight years shorter. We would have had a federal mechanism for dealing with all that, on good advice from the people themselves.”
Thus whined one Tom Kenneally, when he didn’t get what he wanted.
I suspect the bleeding of the heart has deprived his brain of much needed oxygen.
Otherwise the obvious thought would occur to him; why on earth can’t these issues be addressed without changing the constitution?
In fact, the so called Aboriginal community and leaders could just get together and do something. That would be the same ones that were going to advise parliament.
If needed I’m sure parliament could throw some money their way. Its not as though we need to change the constitution for that to occur. They are the global leaders at giving money away for no expected return.
New fact 1: if your problem du jour requires politicians to be part of the solution, then you’re fucked.
“A State shall not coin money, nor make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts.”
So the goal here was that the states don’t print money, so they can’t then pay debts by just printing money, which would be inflationary (unless you’re American).
It’s effectively the states handing over the monetary system to feds when they federated.
But that’s not what it says.
In actual fact the states pay their debts by electronic funds transfer, using money raised by all sorts of nefarious means (stamp duties, speeding fines, etc), which is in breach of the constitution.
They can live in breach because no one is offended by it enough to take it to the high court.
If it were taken to the high court, my guess is the judges would ‘interpret’ the intent of the original clause and let things go on as they are.
Which begs the question, why not just interpret the constitution any way you want, for example to allow for the Voice without having to change the thing?
For fuck sakes, they’re just guidelines, mate.
Recently, in a majority ruling in Vanderstock & Anor v State of Victoria, the High Court found the Victorian Zero and Low Emission Vehicle Distance-based charges are invalid under Section 90 of the Constitution as it imposes a duty of excise.
Section 90 apparently says only the Commonwealth Parliament, not the states nor the territories, can “impose duties of customs and excise”.
See, they just make this shit up as they go. A road user charge is deemed an excise by the high court, because they’ve got special interests to protect. Namely their mates in federal parliament and the electric car industry, aka the car industry.
Not a single lay person in the country would have guessed correctly that a distance based road charge was an excise.
If they really wanted to they could have slipped the Voice into section 90 without bothering us at all. After all it was an excise on common sense.
I’m sure there’s something in the constitution which preserves my right to be rationally undecided on any specific matter. They can’t force me how to think, right?
The problem of course is that it’s a big exercise in forecasting what will happen if we change the constitution. I’m extremely sceptical about the prognostic capabilities of Australians. For example they collectively lost $9.3b to the pokies last year.
“Kellogg’s [have] found that the zipper closures [on ziplock bags] sometimes “do not close properly or food gets caught in the seal,” and that their “current packaging set up just couldn’t cope with the addition of zip locks, as it would make the process much slower and more expensive.”
Diana Twede, professor emeritus from Michigan State University’s school of packaging, confirmed that cereal companies are reluctant to [use ziplock bags] because of the extra costs. So it is not a conspiracy on Big Cereal’s behalf to create a sort of planned obsolescence by making their product get stale (although companies in other industries have certainly been accused of doing so.)
If manufacturing an item becomes more expensive, a cereal company might then pass that cost along to consumers, who in turn might decide to buy a competitor’s product, said David Luttenberger, the global packaging director for market research firm Mintel.
Twede said that if a company decides to take the leap, they have [sic] no competitive advantage against their rivals.”
Proof positive that an oligarchy prevents innovation…
Doesn’t Elon Musk get bad press for his ownership of X?
Of course that’s from the competition, the journalists and publishers, whose profession is at threat from the internet-published opinions of the great unwashed. So we can take that with a grain of salt.
Musk has repeatedly said it’s up to the contributors to put whatever they want on X. He doesn’t want to be responsible for the content. Realistically it isn’t a publisher, it’s a soap box platform or a great big pinboard in the sky.
Too bad for the journalists that it seems most people actually want to be sucked in or titillated by complete bullshit. We’re far better off knowing and accepting that fact.
It works for call centres; we should outsource our military to the Filipinos.
It would be cheaper and probably just as effective. Roughly the same work ethic.
Of course, if the Chinese ever took an unexpected hankering for our landmass they’d have to come through the Philippines anyway, where our outsourced military would be ready and waiting to defend us.
“If you already own non-stick cookware, consider the following while using [the cookware, I guess] to prevent the release of PFAS: Cook at medium and low temperatures and use ventilation. Never cook on high heat, as this may release PFAS into food or the air. Use wooden cooking utensils to prevent scratching the coating of the cookware, as scratches can promote the release of PFAS.”
From my perspective, the issue in the sciences and engineering at universities is the seriously low quality of research that is tolerated, across the board. Don’t be fooled by a few supposed highlights here and there – the average is so bad that the whole sector would be better off dead.
This low quality is due to a number of factors;
1. The sheer volume of prior art behind which your lazy or incompetent researcher can and does hide. They don’t know or don’t bother checking the prior art when they embark on a new research program. Gone are the days when an academic had an encyclopaedic knowledge of their own tight little field.
2. Interdisciplinary efforts resulting in neither fish nor fowl, and a distinct lack of excellence in anything. This linked to problem 1.
3. The gap between invention and discovery. Funding has been pushed academics ever closer to invention, which they are universally bad at relative to the private sector. Discovery in the natural world gets ever harder as the shoulders of giants just gets bigger.
4. A general push for the appearance of results as opposed to actual results. Basically anything a university can market to the public will do, and who cares about the actual merit of the thing? Again this is linked to the sheer volume of info – everyone assumes that no one will ever do a prior art search or come back in a year’s time to see if the pronouncements ever came true.
5. University rankings which are based on research outcomes and then used to create education market opportunities. Has no one realised this is illogical? I once heard a plausible argument as to why better research leads to better education but for the life of me I can’t recall the argument. Its especially untrue for the vocational training that now seems to dominate universities.
6. The tyranny of citations, which must be the dumbest measure of quality ever. How has the sector allowed themselves to be enslaved to something so stupid?
7. Also the academic research leaders don’t do any research at all. They write grants, administer and educate and don’t have time for anything else. The role of organising the research groups is left to people who are themselves still in training; poorly managed in other words, with future leaders being taught by future leaders.
8. The unionisation of the places had lead to a situation where many highly paid academic staff take a permanent holiday after they get tenure.
9. The institutions are run by former academics, whose only claim to management capability is a will not to do any research or education, and to earn more money. Generally they exercise power by centralising all decision making upon their own person, because it feels so good to be constantly in demand. Essentially the pigs are running the farms.
It’s no wonder the sector is struggling for relevance.
My solution is to make all universities “for profit”. Not perfect and a few issues to iron out, but its the only option left.
If you look at the history of this referendum, Labor announced the referendum before they detailed what we were going to be voting for. The voice mate, just the vibe of the thing…
This forced the coalition onto the fence at the beginning. Albo must have known that eventually the coalition would oppose it, because they’re basically cunts who don’t want to give anything away if it might impact what they or their mates have. Plus they harbour old fashioned racists, but so do the other mob.
So, here we are. Without bilateral political support the voice is going down and any political pundit could have predicted this.
If Dutton supported the thing he would have been killed by the nutters in his own party. Now he doesn’t, he’ll lose all the progressive votes that the coalition need to ever get back into power. These being the teals they lost at the last election.
Either way, it’s classic wedge politics at it’s best. Looking at it logically though, Albo threw the indigenous cause under the bus for his own gain.
Nice fellow! I’m sure there’s some sort of justification going on here, like “once we’ve won the next election we’ll do something better with a bigger mandate, like a treaty”. Or something like that.
I’m not a fan. It’s all bad juju and it will end in tears.
What Dutton should have lied is “yes, will back it unilaterally”. Lacking a political goal, Labor probably would have deferred the thing furthermore.
It’s just goes to show that in politics being in power is like moving first in tictactoe. With wedge behaviour you can either win or draw unless you’re completely useless.
The number of times that we change parties just shows how useless they really are, even at their own game.
“At the heart of the mean-spirited, reality-denying “No” campaign is the seed of a dangerous, yet quickly propagated, idea: that intergenerational trauma does not exist.” screamed the author.
The article finished with this pearler of a nonsequeter that would have made Jane Austin proud…
“Lifeline: 13 11 14”
I was going to vote yes but they’re literally making me nauseous.
What worries people isn’t making unusual choices per se. When these weird choices fail, it’s the reputational damage resulting from making such a left field decision that worries most.
You see, in most fields of endeavour we all regress to the mean no matter how smart or trained we are. That is, you can make any choice you want and over time your success rate will be the same as the dumb fucker who lucked into your role, but down the road.
So just quietly the smart ones know that their reputation matters more than anything else. The results, well that’s up to the gods.
So if you see someone eschewing a smart but left field option then you know that they care more about themself than the cause.
The natural enemy of the Nowist is the political type, either right – the Pastist, or left – the Futurist. Let me explain…
Your Pastist just wants their slaves back, and your Futurist just wants utopia where there aren’t slaves. Of course both want the other completely eradicated, or at least in permanent hell. Nice people…
It’s much easier and nicer just taking things as they are, and not trying to change things. Things will change anyway and you don’t need to be the angry and dissatisfied agent of change.
Besides, in it’s glorious stupidity, the present is bloody funny. Even if it’s not.
I’m not sure what all that’s got to do with hydrotherapy but I do know this: a Nowist sometimes attempts to change the past by shouting at their antagonist, just like your average 5 year old. It never works, and they never learn, because in their hearts they just don’t care.
I just watched a detailed three part BBC documentary called “Putin and the West”.
Basically it’s a hatchet job on Vlad the lessor, made by his enemies.
Little effort was spared to create the impression that no effort was spared to make this advertorial appear completely unbiased.
What I got out of it is that they’re all mad; politicians, dictators and their collective advisors and servants. The lot of them. Except just maybe Zelensky (or he’s simply the best actor).
There’s a lot of speculation as to why Putin doesn’t share the values of the West, and what his values actually are.
One thing for sure, he doesn’t mind collateral damage whereas his Western counterparts go to great lengths to pretend that they abhor collateral damage.
And yet they collectively start wars that have much collateral damage. They do this and then claim three ameliorating factors;
1. They don’t know why the other bastards are so unreasonable
2. All their allies are also unreasonable and not one of them can act unilaterally, unless it suits them to do so
3. They’re way too dumb to be able to predict what the other fucker will do in response to whatever is their fucktard action de jour.
Actually are they that dumb? Mankind has solved much harder problems when there’s a quid in it. For example, we can design and build Landrovers, poker machines and catflaps.
Coming to my conclusion, these problems aren’t anticipated and presolved because there’s a quid in chaos and war.
Sometimes that quid is power, sometimes fame, and sometimes just a quid.
At the core the issue is whatever those Freudian-style mummy and daddy issues are that drive people into these leadership roles.
To fix it, we need good AI to weed the fuckers out before they even get going. There’s no point trying to fix them because my guess is that they’re beyond repair by 8 years of age.
Some journo reckons that Australians simply don’t want to stretch their brains to political issues, rather they want to focus on real estate, YouTube, and beer.
Hence if there is political accord (between all the parties) on a matter they just go along with it. Otherwise they push the panic button on that horrible day when they are forced to vote, at the threat of fine.
In the distant past that means there must have been some accord on the issue of compulsory voting. You see, those Australians, they got done over on that day by the people with serious psychological disorders that go into politics. Fuckwits to a woman, that insist on both changing things against popular request, and telling people what to do say and do and think.
I’ve calculated the exact age when, for the first time, I had forgotten more than I knew. It’s pi years of course, which in my case occurred on 4th August 1967, which just happens to be the National Chocolate Chip Cookie day in the US. You might notice it’s an irrational number (so did it actually happen?), but then so is this post.
The problem with democracy, it seems to me, is that to get what they want a lot of people spend a lot of time telling other people what to do or say or think. Technically, it’s called a second order cluster fuck, and my good nature is the natural victim thereof.
Possibly a type of screw thread or a subtractive anachronism that associates as an initialism, or both. Certainly has an unwarranted gender bias. But hey, who’s making up the rules here?
“This is just the beginning for Femtech. For years, women’s health issues have taken a back seat, with a lack of research leading to a limited understanding of how women’s bodies work and a failure to develop treatments, procedures and solutions aimed specifically at women and the illnesses and health needs they have. The coming years will see this sector continue to thrive and we are excited to be part of it.”
Assuming that most human plans end in disaster, which they do if you wait long enough, I’m wondering what the average half life is between opportunism and despair?
So Qantas has been sprung selling cheap tickets for flights that don’t exist. When the customers find out the flights are cancelled, they don’t get their money back just a voucher.
They want to fine Qantas hundreds of millions, but that’s just punishing the shareholders who had nothing to do with it.
They should instead force the board to resign for lack of prudential oversight.
That would get all the other boards to take notice. “Don’t touch my sinecure!”
So I was asked how I was going to vote for the autistic mousetrap known as the Voice.
My response was:
0 stars out of 5 for value for money
1 stars out 5 for potential efficacy for better outcomes for indigenous peoples, whoever they are and however they’re defined
5 stars out of 5 for ameliorating the guilt of the middle classes that will do anything to help the condition of indigenous peoples, except of course hand over any of their income, wealth or privilege
5 stars out of 5 for polarizing and distracting the nation on a mission that has no chance
5 stars out of 5 for bringing together the lunar right and blackface panthers in a hilarious shotgun wedding arrangement
In total, that is 16 out of a possible 25, which puts me as a yes. Whodathought?
But the reason this vote is going down has nothing to do with the issues at hand. The majority simply hate the nanny-state wokes and wets (and their cunty methods) that are promoting it and will not let the unusual chance of returning the favour go by.
Dr. Lozada-Hidalgo said: “We are effectively stretching an atomic scale mesh and observing a higher current through the stretched interatomic spaces in this mesh – this is truly mind-boggling.”
So get this, protons can’t go through the normal holes in Graphene because the holes are too small. You make the holes bigger and, bingo, your academic’s mind is blown.
My PhD supervisor was in the department of theoretical chemistry at Sydney University, which meant when though my PhD was in physical chemistry, that I was officially enrolled in theoretical chemistry. They needed the numbers basically.
This meant that every week I got to go to theoretical chemistry seminars. Although blindingly bored by their gumpf, absent a mobile phone, my brain slowly pieced together their spiel.
Good for actually nothing, they we’re all trying to solve problems which mankind already had adequate solutions to. There were three of four competing schools of approach, and geez weren’t they competitive.
When one accidentally got close to a real life measured value you should have seen the crowing. The politics in academia are vicious because the stakes are so low…
Basically it was a whole field of applied mathematics. The basic equations were unsolvable with current computers, so massive assumptions were made to render the computation feasible.
Train spotting, if your will. My shortcut is better than yours…
If and when we have quantum computers all these mathematical short cut assumptions can be thrown out of the window. Basically 100 years of academic bullshit, tossed.
The Overton Window assumes that, on any specific political issue (that is, an issue that influences the way people vote) that all opinions are spread like a normal gaussian, with the X axis being the degree of agreement or otherwise, when the political matter is posed as a proposition.
Today I would argue that this assumption is broken.
Back when, what kept people in a tight gaussian distribution was that they were mostly using the same sources of information, ie broadcast media, to which they had a level of agreement or disagreement response.
Now the number sources of information have exploded, mainly through the web. So the glue that create the Gaussian, broadcast media, had been displaced. So we have pockets of people all over the curve; it’s multimodal now and not a Gaussian.
Which is why I guess you see perfectly sensible politicians contemplating policies that, on the face of it, would be outside the classical Overton Window.
For example, Albo is pushing the Voice, when clearly it’s not politically smart to do so.
ChatGPT could only get off the ground right now, in an era where political correctness means one rarely hears an argued opinion. What you hear is wordy discourse masquerading as considered content.
And that’s what ChatGPT gives us. It’s like having a politician in your pocket, never directly answering the query as posed and certainly never getting off the fence.
I’ve just read an article that highlights how the top earners in the US have slowly gone from tax payers, with the highest tax rate pealking at 90% under FDR, to govt lenders today.
That is, rather than pay tax, they now lend the govt money and get the bond rate as interest.
What an interesting idea. Remove taxation altogether and get everyone mandated to lend some percentage of their income to the govt.
The percentage of income to be lent would be higher for higher income earners, or the interest rate would be higher for lower income earners.
People might stop avoiding paying tax if there was a financial return.
And the govt might need to spend it more carefully if they needed to pay all that interest. Of course they could print the interest but only if they were incentivising enough growth to absorb said printing without causing excessive inflation.
The ‘cherish’ in ‘love and cherish’ just means sex. By contract you’ve just got to keep fucking them. If you don’t then that contract is terminated by one or both parties. Unfortunately the termination clauses are only written down in legislation and case law, so you only find out how fucked you really are after the fact.
Arguably in both countries it’s rule by law and not the rule of law. That is, are the law makers subject to their own laws? Mostly not, by differing means.
Ultimately, all people that rise to the top of the political system are there for money, power and fame. That’s an a constant everywhere.
Then there’s selective truth, as practised by conspiracy theorists and all new age post enlightenment bullshit artists. They outright deny any truths that don’t suit them, on no grounds at all, as if they’re denying reality itself. The next minute they’ll proffer a truth of their own and expect all rational to people to agree.
Frankly, it’s worth adding to the DSM.
They think this random approach gifts them a natural advantage over rational people. Sometimes true but I’ve learnt to simply ignore and walk away. It takes away their meager benefit which they don’t deserve.
This is the fundamental truths they learn at private schools;
1. Your gain is someone else’s loss. i.e a mercantile view of the world.
2. How to be high functioning hypocrites.
No 2 is needed to practice winning via no. 1. The hypocrisy is used to promote a fair world, duping others into being little fair bunny rabbits, whilst raping and pillaging. A great double tactic.
3. A total sense of real time amnesia as to the truth and practice of these rules. Utter deniability.
The consequences? A life full of material gains and a dread of the deathbed when it all becomes apparent that the one life was squandered
“Rose’s paralysis confines her to a wheelchair and limits Sofia’s freedoms. The proprietor of the clinic, Gómez, is charismatic but may be of questionable skill. While Rose undergoes treatment, 25-year-old Sofia becomes obsessed with Ingrid, a seamstress. Later, Sofia visits her father in Athens, from whom she has been estranged, and spends time with his new wife and daughter. Athens seems to be in a state of collapse, and the novel pictures both Greece and Spain in the throes of economic and political turmoil. Sofia is an anthropologist by training, and this informs her perspective on events.”
Crypto might not be as obvious as a pyramid scheme but there are some similarities. The people who bought into digital currencies have a keen interest in recruiting others to continue purchasing these currencies. The more people that get involved and buy into crypto, the higher prices will go. That means those at the top, the early buyers, will become even wealthier. In fact, 1,000 people own 40 percent of the entire Bitcoin market. That means relatively very few people are getting rich from Bitcoin.
The only real utility that crypto has is:
tax avoidance
low cost transfers for payment
Said utility is more than offset by the huge energy bill. So in summary, yes, it’s a pyramid scheme.
What is needed is a low energy cryptocurrency! Here we go:
Always, Viv uses the subordinating conjunction, sometimes, as a discourse marker, and that’s as far as he gets in his explanation of anything. Cracks me up.
Let’s hope he’s not accused of a crime anytime soon.
By 1962 the Municipal Association of Victoria was calling for stricter enforcement of the Police Offences Act 1958 in relation to the use of fireworks in public places, and in 1963 new regulations were gazetted by the State Government, limiting the size and power of fireworks. A decade later the Public Health Commission recommended a total ban on small fireworks, and while exploding fireworks such as bungers and crackers were banned in 1974, it was not until 1982 that all shop-goods (as opposed to display or novelty) fireworks were banned, as a result of pressure from the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists and the Australian and New Zealand Burns Association.
Met another one; a distressed ex-spouse that has been left. As usual the demon leaving party has an undiagnosed psychological issue (in this case Narcissism), is a bloke, and (on paper, at least for a little while) had most of the privileges that society can offer.
Why is he a nutter? The story-teller is unwilling to face the fact that:
(a) He didn’t like being with her, but
(b) Had so much empathy that he couldn’t face telling her this, so
(c) Left via the back door, forever blackening his name in the view of her confidants.
Better still, the confidants, being weak minded as they usually are, extrapolate this data point to the whole humanity, or at least half of it. It’s the same sort of heuristic that leads to racism.
Not one of them questioned the story as told (e.g. what did she do, or what did she not do to make the marriage a happy blissful place, even tolerable?). They don’t have the capability to critique, an art form that is being lost.
Basic rule of thumb; distrust a story where the teller is the victim. Or at the very least, use your imagination to see how the stated facts could fit an alternative ethical construct.
The stock price of companies used to be underpinned by their ‘inherent value’ but that has changed for a number of reasons:
Complex financial systems has enabled people to make money off all forms of derivatives, many of which are not tied to actual company value. Otherwise known as gambling.
All that global productivity has ironically lead to an excess of capital available for gamblers
Put these two factors together and you have a formula for chaos in the markets. God help those poor CEO’s who just want to strategize, plan and report their good efforts. No one seem to cares.
Who cares about dividends when one gamblers gain is another’s loss. Of course all these gamblers think they have a special angle, tools that give them a % edge of the rest.
Query is whether the average return of all players is negative or positive? It depends on the cost of money, which is pretty cheap the the moment since the US has discovered it can make as much money as it likes, without destroying its economy. Surely a short term proposition that!
So the issue isn’t changing the day, it’s the precedent. The Conservatives don’t want the fucking millennials telling them what to do. Fair call too. They aren’t the brightest.
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
The numbers don’t lie, black fellas in our country are hard done by.
The why is interesting. Without understanding the why, nothing can be done.
Rather than changing things so the black fellas can be like us, the answer is probably best achieved by meeting somewhere else.
Can’t see us changing our seriously fucked up lives but. We’re too attached to our fucking stupidity; tax avoidance, houses, cars, private schools, OS holidays and jobs spent staring at monitors.
It’s a competitive grab for the same resources. We are mercantilists pretending we’re not. Our gain is always someone else’s loss. The more that large groups of society are out of the game, the better off we are. Hence the silent racism.
The only solution is that we let go of our shit lives. Black fellas don’t want to be like us. We don’t even want to be like us.
In our screwed up world view, whoever is not like us is disadvantaged. We even convince them of this fact, and make them unhappy in the process.
Do nothing but channel your inner Ghandi. Let go of your crap or your envy or your disdain, whichever applies.
My view on inflation is that printing money doesn’t lead to inflation unless there is an under-supply, and therefore cash competition for, of staples; bread, milk and accommodation, and the like.
If all that extra cash is directed at discretionary spending items then there is naturally less competition even if the items are in short supply. So no inflationary effect worth worrying about.
So why don’t governments just ensure the staples are ok and print as much money as they want? Hang on….
“In Barack Obama’s America, the federal government will use another $2.4 trillion in borrowing authority to give to Big Labor and government bureaucrats. Your taxes will go up. Gay “marriage” will be forced down your throat. You will lose your guns and rely on bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to protect you from harm.”
“The “calorie” we refer to in food is actually kilocalorie. One (1) kilocalorie is the same as one (1) Calorie (upper case C). A kilocalorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water one degree Celsius.”
The people that become endeared to conspiracy theories are really just rallying against the enlightenment.
That is, they don’t think that constant improvement, innovation or increases in productivity are a good thing. And they’re not necessarily; it’s undeniable that we’re killing the ecosystem that we live in.
These people would rather return to the bad old days when things were constant, life was shit, and the king and church we’re always right. Their mistake is to think that the only solution is this one.
However these Luddites don’t know all this; it’s just the vibe of the thing. To make their point they refuse to use reason to make their point. Or rather, they misuse reason to make their point, ensuring they get their point across just the same.
But they didn’t bank on the Trump effect. Essentially the beneficiaries of the enlightenment started using their own tactics against them.
That is, Trump misuses reason to get his way. He constructs conspiracy theories at will. And all the time he is an agent of the people that benefit from the fruits of the enlightenment.
Not surprisingly, this is sending the conspiracy theory types mad. They know they’re being fucked over but they don’t have the tools to figure out how.
Watching an election here has as much appeal as a Collingwood-Port Adelaide grand final. Somehow you’d like both teams to lose and their supporters to fuck off forever.
There’s three candidates for whodunnit Corona; the Chinese, the Americans and the “Europeans”.
Either the Chinese or the Americans would have dunnit for the same reason; global economic dominance.
The Chinese because they have no chance at any other sort of dominance and achieving any form of it would allow their dictator to remain incumbent.
The Americans because they fear the rise of China and want to fuck them while they can.
China’s benefit from this is purely economic; they get to buy all the distressed assets on the cheap and also get to replace domestic production in a bunch of countries with Chinese imports.
America; well it sees China’s output drop and raw materials dry up. The people riot and Xi, well he goes.
I favour the Americans because they’re the ones saying they’ve analysed the Corona bug and that it’s not man made.
The euros; they’d only do it to save the ecology. But they can’t keep a secret nor can they organise a piss up in a brewery. So I doubt it.
Both the Americans and the Chinese would be more than ok with the collateral damage. The euros would struggle.
The meltdowns in equity, credit, debt, and money markets look like textbook signs that the coronavirus crisis could tip the global economy into another GFC-style liquidity crunch.
The fear is that inter-bank credit lines will dry up again as banks lose confidence in each others’ creditworthiness and become reluctant to lend to coronavirus-hit companies.
However, there’s a bigger issue at play. There is reduced expenditure and consumption due to lockdowns and closures; leading to reduced employment and thus even less consumption.
Supply chains are very interdependent, much more so than people imagine, and they are getting massively disrupted as all sorts of businesses shut down.
The result? A flow on effect where even more businesses shut down because it’s easier to do that than adapt to this difficult environment.
The government is making it worse by allowing businesses to put themselves into cold storage, with no fixed costs. No rent, no labour costs, no debt repayments, etc. All government mandated.
As a business manager, you could go for broke and try to make it work, or have a nice holiday and wait for the whole thing to blow over. Australian business types don’t have much character, so taking they’re taking the easy option.
The Chinese on the other hand, they go for it. Someone’s else’s loss is their gain. You make cars one day, then a pandemic hits and days later, you’re making face masks.
The result? It’s not a lack of liquidity for business that will result in the next recession; it’s a short-term lack of customers and a lack of balls. When it’s all done at least another 25%, if not more, of Australian business activity will be transferred to China. Another 25% will be bought at bargain prices by the Chinese.
Although it begs the question, why bother? There will be a flow on effect to Australian consumers such that they will not be able to afford as much. So as a market, we’ll be shite for just about anyone.
The share market will take a big hit just like the GFC. But for different reasons. Then we had a liquidity crisis. Now we have a consumption crisis. At the end of every supply chain, there lies consumer consumption that ultimately drives all business activity.
So the best thing a government could do is to keep people employed and give businesses good reasons not to shut down.
The super funds should wait for the stock markets to halve in value and then go on an overseas spending spree. This assumes there will be some sort of bounce in the global economy when the virus thing settles down.
That’ll be true unless it lasts longer than 2 years. My rough estimate is that the half life of business knowledge and skill in hibernation is about one year. So after 2 years you pretty much have to start from scratch and re-invent and re-learn everything that you once knew, as a business and as a supply chain.
Two nights back I had a dream wherein I was listening to Bob Dylan play live.
The odd thing was he was playing a song that doesn’t actually exist. And it was great.
Which means that I composed, played, recorded and arranged a Dylan track completely in my head.
Since this is very unlikely to have turned out very well (that is, I have no musical talent or skill) I can only conclude that my brain was lying to me. It must have been actual shite.
Calibration achieved; dreams can be complete lies. Don’t trust them.
In Australia in 2017 the “common” flu deaths was 1,255 with 251,142 lab-confirmed cases of flu. A death rate of 0.5%. (source: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/3303.0~2017~Main%20Features~Deaths%20due%20to%20influenza~5)So far, of all countries, Germany has had the most “aggressive” (read; intensive) testing for coronavirus. The number of deaths to date in Germany is 267 and the number of clinically proven cases is 43,938. A death rate of 0.6% (source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)There’s plenty of error in these numbers. The biggest issues:1. Unreported clinically proven cases not included in the data, for both coronavirus and especially the common flu, since there usually isn’t the same degree of panic associated with common flu symptoms. Also, for both common flu and coronavirus, there are many unreported asymptomatic cases.2. The deaths recorded against these diseases probably needs to be weighted for each case, based on the severity of the underlying conditions. That is, most people that died had pre-existing conditions so, for example, a very morbid person maybe shouldn’t be counted as one death, but a small fraction of one since the virus wasn’t the major cause of death but just the last straw. This way the severity of the illnesses being compared could be factored into the statistics.Even allowing for these and other sources of error, the raw death rates for the common flu and the coronavirus currently are very similar despite the fact that many people have partial immunity to the common flu strains, so probably don’t get as sick as they otherwise could.So the real issue with the coronavirus isn’t its morbidity. Rather it is its virulence. Without an vaccines or inherent resistance the virus is supposedly free to spread completely through the population. Especially since it spreads during the symptomless early stages of infection.For example the population of Australia is 24,600,000. If 100% of the people caught the coronavirus and the death rate remained at the German rate of 0.6%, then we could expect 149,488 deaths in the first wave.Note, in 2017 the total number of reported flu cases in Australia was just 251,142, just 1% of the population. That is, without any lockdowns, closures, social distancing and the like, only 1% of the population caught the flu (although this is probably a lower bound to the true figure, because of unreported cases).Assuming the coronavirus mutated it would come back around and each time it would have a lower death rate, and infect less of the population because of (a) inherent partial immunity, and (b) vaccines as developed by then. After a few years it would become just another “flu”.The issue with the coronavirus is that the peak in the first wave of infections and deaths could totally overwhelm the medical system, leading to deaths that otherwise might not have occurred. By way of example, in Italy the death rate from Coronavirus is 10.2%, up from the German baseline of 0.6%. This is primarily a result of the medical system getting overwhelmed, but also the quality of the medical system and the underlying poor health of the elderly population could be contributing factors. The major difference though is probably that the Italians are probably not doing much testing, so the number of reported cases is drastically under-recorded leading to an exaggerated death rate.Our government-led imperatives to slow down the spread of the virus are all based on the proposition that if they do not do so, then the population will be very ready to blame the politicians for any subsequent unnecessary deaths.Country-to-country comparisons will give the electorate the ammunition they need in order to blame the politicians for any lack of action.Since the politicians are elected or rejected by the people, it’s quite Pavlovian of them to behave the way that they are now. Basically, it’s “bugger the economy” for a while.However at some point, re-winding the economy backwards in time (as measured by consumption per capita of energy and raw materials) will cross over some emotional threshold where a majority of the people will consider the effort too great for the benefits of saving yet more people from an untimely death.My guess (based on living a few years) is that after a few weeks of the “big re-set” that we have already wound back to 1990. I don’t think the Australian people will be willing to go back past 1960, no matter how many lives that doesn’t save.The real trick for the silly buggers “in charge” will be to finesse the attenuation of the economy so that the medical system can “just cope”. This way, no unnecessary deaths will occur. As the population gets more resistance and vaccines become available then the economy can slowly adjust back to its previous completely unsustainable state (based on ever-increasing high levels of personal consumption).Of course, nothing will be learned.
If the economy goes back to 1960, I think it’ll be good for everyone in the end to consume less and recall what is truly important. Who knows, we might accidentally dial back the pollution and greenhouse gases a little in the process.
As to the politicians, well, mostly they’re recycled real estate agents, or similar. There’s plenty more lining up to take the limelight. All of them of the similar calibre.
In the long-run, of course, we’re the pandemic on this planet, so we’ll be corrected out of the picture one way or the other.
offshore westerly 