Open Thread – Tues 18 Oct 2022
2,339 responses to “Open Thread – Tues 18 Oct 2022”
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I just flew back home from the Tax Summit (The Tax Institute’s national annual convention). The keynote presenter was the egregious Mick Trumble. He was advocating for the government to renege on the already legislated middle income earners’ tax rate cut from 32.5% to 30%.
He was asked whether there had been any justification for legislating it in the first place. As a former leader of a supposedly free market/individual liberty supporting party, he might have suggested that it was a good thing for people who earned money to be allowed to keep it and decide how to spend it. That didn’t get a mention. In fact Trumble dismissed every suggested justification for it. Is the Overton Window still even part of the building? -
Timbo – mUttley made a comment today stating that (Lizzee Trussed’s) “tax cuts were unfunded and would have sent the government’s budget further into deficit”.
This is the sort of irredeemable idiocy we are dealing with.
Collectivists – any of your hard earned income that the government allows you to retain is a “subsidy” and tax cuts are an “unfunded expenditure reduction”.
Sometimes, I sort of wish that I’d never become an economist.
Ignorance being bliss (or strength) and all that. 😕
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Ed Casesays:
October 21, 2022 at 9:03 pm
The security guard claimed it was two hours later.Bullshit.
CCTV shows the man left Parliament House at 2:35am
…
Ms Anderson’s team leader asked her to do a welfare check on Ms Higgins after her colleague returned from his break.At 4:20am, she headed to Senator Reynolds’ office.
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Ed Casesays:
October 21, 2022 at 9:26 pm
When The Brucester exited without Higgins, it sparked a frantic search.At 3:00am, Nikola Anderson went to relieve a colleague at the ministerial entrance who was due for a meal break. He told her he thought the man had been acting strangely when he left.
“My colleague had tried to make conversation with him and he seemed to be in a hurry,” she said.
“That was when my colleague and I decided that we needed to push it up the chain and notify our night shift team leader that there might’ve been something a bit strange going on.”
An early morning welfare check
Ms Anderson’s team leader asked her to do a welfare check on Ms Higgins after her colleague returned from his break.At 4:20am, she headed to Senator Reynolds’ office.
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tax cuts are an “unfunded expenditure reduction”
See also this monstrous dinobore …
Famous for announcing many many future non existent surpluses …
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At 3:00am, Nikola Anderson went to relieve a colleague at the ministerial entrance who was due for a meal break. He told her he thought the man had been acting strangely when he left.
“My colleague had tried to make conversation with him and he seemed to be in a hurry,” she said.
“That was when my colleague and I decided that we needed to push it up the chain and notify our night shift team leader that there might’ve been something a bit strange going on.”
An early morning welfare check
Ms Anderson’s team leader asked her to do a welfare check on Ms Higgins after her colleague returned from his break.
At 4:20am, she headed to Senator Reynolds’ office.Shut. It. Down.
Fire. Them. All.
Nuke. From. Orbit.
Salt. The. Earth. -
The alarmist kanks always default to the consensus. Look at this quality field of sceptic scientists:
Professor Anthony Barrett FRS FMedSci joins GWPF Academic Advisory Council
The other members of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council are:
Professor Christopher Essex (Chairman)
Professor Wade Allison
Professor Ray Bates
Sir Ian Byatt
Dr John Constable
Professor Vincent Courtillot
Professor John Dewey FRS
Professor Peter Dobson OBE
Professor Samuel Furfari
Christian Gerondeau
Professor Laurence Gould
Professor William Happer
Professor Ole Humlum
Professor Gautam Kalghatgi
Professor Terence Kealey
William Kininmonth
Bryan Leyland
Professor Richard Lindzen
Professor Ross McKitrick
Professor Robert Mendelsohn
Professor Garth Paltridge
Professor Ian Plimer
Professor Gwythian Prins
Professor Paul Reiter
Professor Peter Ridd
Dr Matt Ridley
Sir Alan Rudge FRS
Professor Nir Shaviv
Professor Henrik Svensmark
Dr David Whitehouse -
The “rent a riffers” rendering some pure pop … 🙂
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Tinta at 8:56.
…. they found out that the property had actually been bought and sold more than once. They didn’t get their property back I don’t know about compensation but that is a story quite old by now, and that happened while the NSW government still had control of Land Titles.
Defrauded under a paper titles system, right?
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Sancho Panzer says: October 21, 2022 at 10:13 pm
Tinta at 8:56.
…. they found out that the property had actually been bought and sold more than once. They didn’t get their property back I don’t know about compensation but that is a story quite old by now, and that happened while the NSW government still had control of Land Titles.Defrauded under a paper titles system, right?
Used to be I wondered how this type of theft could happen. The case mentioned by Lysander @622pm is a corker & is the one that started me wondering how the heck this could possibly happen. The title deed is the possession of either the landowner or the bank – and thus tamper-proof. (or so you’d think)
Then something similar happened to me.
There is a reasonable expectation that the public service is pedantic & across their game, particularly those whose entire career is spent in one dept & rise to the head of that dept.
Hahahaha, hahahaha, hahahahah… hahahaha….. hahaha..The following is not intended to represent any state of Australia, especially Qld, & is not meant to represent any particular public servants, especially any in Qld.
A Liquor Licence in the state of … Kingsland… is a paper (parchment really) document. The original is so crucial & so unique that manual visual inspection of it is a key ‘tick box’ part of any visit to the premises by a Liquor Licencing Inspector.
(Say) I possessed two satellite locations. A satellite location is an indivisible part of the main liquor licence. They are mentioned on the (one & only) licence document & are unmistakable. (eg, shop 22 at 105 King street, Blackstumpville).
If two licencees agree, they may transfer a satellite location from one licence to another. This transfer requires the written consent of both licencees.
There is no mechanism for a forced transfer of a satellite. None. It is prohibited by legislation.
Imagine how surprised I was when I telephoned the department for some innocuous reason to do with one of the satellites & was told it wasn’t licenced to me, & some months earlier had been transferred to another pub in town.
Acutely conscious of the legislation, I enquired how this could possibly have been fucking well transferred?
“You wouldn’t sign the paperwork, so we had to do it without you”Despite there being absolutely no mechanism whatsoever in legislation, none, the liquor licencing department had conducted an illegal transfer without the knowledge of the outgoing licencee.
If the above story was true, the illegal transfer would have been conducted by the head of the department personally.
The transfer was permanent, could not be undone, & I was offered some (paltry) form of compensation, that wasn’t worth bothering with.
At that moment I understood clearly how such land thefts can occur.
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Despite there being absolutely no mechanism whatsoever in legislation, none, the liquor licencing department had conducted an illegal transfer without the knowledge of the outgoing licencee.
I am not terribly au fait with the vagaries of liquor licences Sal, so – you lost your licence and had to reapply?
Are you saying there was no remedy for this at all? The Department can arbitrarily take it off you?
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A couple of interesting sites
Australian Mapping China’s Tech Giants
This multi-year project maps the overseas expansion of key Chinese technology companies.
Launched in April 2019 and re-launched in June 2021 this website now includes 27 companies and 3800+ entries. Each entry is populated with up to 15 categories of data, totalling 38000+ data points.
About this project
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has produced a world-first online database, four policy reports and detailed analysis of each of the issues that have emerged from this project in a suite of sharable resources including downloadable data, thematic snapshots, and associated articles.
In June 2021 we re-launched this project with new data points on all 23 existing companies, as well as the addition of four new companies and two major new policy reports. For this relaunch we focused our analysis on what has changed for these companies during Covid-19 and we took a deep dive into China’s global data collection ecosystem and supply chain issues.
This project and database – which first launched in 2019 – fills a comprehensive research gap in understanding the impact of the global expansion of Chinese technology companies. Throughout 2018, the Centre received frequent questions from media and stakeholders about the international activities of Chinese technology companies, from their operations in particular regions or how widespread the use of their products were outside of China. These were always difficult questions to answer. There is a lack of publicly available quantitative and qualitative data and Chinese companies themselves disclose little in the way of policies that impact data, security, privacy, freedom of expression and censorship. When we began this project, what information was available was spread across a wide range of sources and had not been compiled.
A major impediment to transparency is that Chinese media is under intensifying content control pressure from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). There are very few investigative reports emerging from within China, which severely limits the available pool of media sources. The global expansion and influence of US Internet companies, particularly Facebook, has rightly received substantial attention and scrutiny over the past few years and this should continue. However, the same scrutiny is often lacking in regard to Chinese technology and social media companies and their global activities.
The global scale reached by China’s giant technology companies needs to be understood with an account of the unique party-state environment that shapes, limits and drives their global behaviour. This sets them apart from other large technology companies expanding around the world. This project seeks to:
And
Report Announcement – VideoTranscript 08.27.2021
My small research group, Marco Polo, has a copy of the laptop. And we want to write a comprehensive report—
that’s analogous to the Mueller Report—on real foreign collusion.There’s an amazing Australian think tank [ASPI] that has mapped out every single Chinese entity and their influence across the world in their Belt & Road Initiative. We’re going to be doing the same thing with Hunter. With the EXIF data that’s on these photos, we’re going to be going through and mapping out who he was meeting with and when.
and
Hunter Biden’s Laptop Documents At Least 459 Legal Violations, Watchdog Group Says
A year-long exploration of Hunter Biden’s laptop has yielded a 630-page report that its authors say document 459 violations of state and federal laws and regulations by President Joe Biden’s son and his business partners.
Marco Polo, a nonprofit formed by a one-time aide to former President Trump to enable a team of cyber gumshoes to take a deep dive into the laptop that the crack-addled Biden left at a Delaware repair store, claims the report is a road map for local, state, or federal prosecutors to pursue charges. The group also sent its report to each member of Congress.
The timing of the report’s release, coming two weeks before the midterm elections, has a certain symmetry to the laptop’s initial introduction to the public. In 2020, days before the election, the New York Post published news of the laptop’s existence, as well as bombshells from it, but social media suppressed the story after the FBI had warned companies of so-called misinformation
The team put together by Garrett Ziegler, Marco Polo’s 26-year-old founder, has mined the laptop with digital savvy, and produced a thorough report that is anything but vague or superficial, weighing in at 1 gigabyte because of the number of screenshots from the laptop.
“I’ve been focusing on this for 13 months,” Ziegler told The Daily Wire. “It was really a thing of necessity. I recognized how rich the material was. It requires utter focus. It is so hard to write something comprehensive about it and do anything else on the side.”
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Reading is a struggle for quarter of our teenagers, NAPLAN 2021 testing reveals
exclusive
Natasha Bita
Education Editor
@natasha_bita
1 minute ago October 21, 2022
No CommentsOne in four teenagers cannot read at the minimum standard as high schools fail to provide remedial teaching, damning new test results reveal.
Data from the 2021 NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) tests of 1.2 million children reveals that a quarter of year 9 students and nearly one in five year 7 students failed to meet the minimum standard for reading.
High school students are twice as likely as primary school students to have problems reading at their year level. In primary schools, 11 per cent of year 3 students and 12.5 per cent of year 5 students failed to read properly.
The data will be presented at the Learning Difficulties Australia conference this weekend by Five from Five project founder Jennifer Buckingham, who promotes evidence-based reading instruction for children.
Dr Buckingham’s research shows 57,000 teenagers started high school this year semiliterate. She warned that schools were failing to get struggling readers back on track – one in three students who failed to read well in primary school also failed to meet minimum literacy standards in high school. “High school students with low literacy and numeracy need intensive intervention as soon as possible,’’ she said. “A significant number of students do not meet minimum standards, year after year.’’
Dr Buckingham, who has advised the NSW, Victorian, South Australian and federal governments on the need to reintroduce explicit instruction and phonics, said most students who struggled to read were the “casualties’’ of poor methods.
She said 85 per cent of students with reading difficulties did not hail from disadvantaged groups eligible for extra funding.
“The majority of kids who are struggling with literacy are not necessarily kids with a disability, low SES (socio-economic status) or Indigenous backgrounds,’’ she said. “They are just instructional casualties; garden-variety learners who haven’t learned to read. This is a problem affecting all children.’’
The data has sparked demands for teenagers’ reading and writing to be tested at the start of high school, so teachers can intervene with remedial reading strategies.
Anne Castles, scientific director of the Macquarie University Centre for Reading, warned that 40 per cent of 15-year-olds “are not reading at a functional level’’.
She said poor literacy could affect student results in other subjects, such as history, maths and science, as students could not comprehend lessons or understand questions.
“If you can’t read in high school, your self-esteem is affected and there is a loss of motivation,’’ she said. “It’s a failure of the system to acknowledge that basic reading still needs to be taught and assessed in high school.’’
Professor Castles has been awarded a $3.2m Australian Laureate Fellowship via the Australian Research Council to improve literacy standards in high schools. In an interview with The Weekend Australian, she said testing the literacy of students starting high school would be a “good idea’’.
The Productivity Commission’s review of the national school reform agreement – which sets out funding priorities for governments – revealed that one third of children who struggle to read in year 3 fail to improve by year 5. And 28 per cent of those with reading problems in year 7 remain semiliterate in year 9.
Less time spent talking about the “Stolen Generation?”
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Moving is another option.
Rheumatic heart disease still killing Australian children but a landmark study makes inroads -
The Mayan population predominates over the Mezitos, those with Spanish blood.
wait till you get to the bestial dog pottery . .. that’s a hoot!
Haven’t come across this yet, but there’s still time!
I did purchase in Mexico a small pottery bird that is very traditional. You blow into a horizontal slit on its base and on its chest is a small hole, so it acts as a whistle. Used in hunting, not just a child’s toy.
I was whistling away quite happily for a while.The Guatemalan Mayas, btw, are known as the most heavily syncretic religious group, integrating elements of their older cosmology into Catholicism; the Church seems to go along with it or at least not overtly proscribe it. A very common belief of all in Guatemala, which fascinated me, was a belief in a slightly malevolent female white spirit (shades perhaps via Spanish influence of the old European White Goddess? but it could simply be indigenous) called the Lloola, who seeks to take the souls of newborn babies. As a result, universally in this country, mothers do not hang any newborn’s clothing and nappies out to dry in the open, but always undercover, which this spirit does not like. Our educated Catholic tour guide told us she and her family automatically followed this cultural tradition because everyone else does.
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Crossie:
First there were the Nord Stream explosions, then the cable to Shetland cut and now to parts of France. Are sinister tests underway or somebody playing silly buggers? Before the covid I would have said coincidence or silly games, now I’m not so sure.
Someone who can’t read the data on cables is breaking them to force their enemies onto satellite where they can read the traffic.*
So it must be Elon Musk!
🙂
*If you have 2 methods of conveying secret information and one is compromised and the other isn’t, you convince the enemy their secure line is compromised so they switch to the one you can read. -
Crossie:
Climate protesters who glue themselves to anything at all must be ridiculed as much as possible. Only when they realise that they are not admired but made fun of will they stop the nonsense.
I was kind of hoping the brats who chucked the soup on “Sunflowers” would be pissed on by the bystanders.
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Calli:
Why would they want you to turn it off? Does it interfere with the airplane’s navigation or the airline’s prestige?
I doubt it would do anything apart from asking the equivalent of “Are we there yet, Mum?”
However it does give an amorphous bureaucratic blob the opportunity to create a ‘rule’ for your ‘safety’ and then force your compliance or face the consequences.
Every little rule is a strand of cotton that will eventually tie the people more firmly than chains.If it saves just one life.
It’s to save the planet, peasant!
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J.C:
Turtlehead/CMD
Can you explain who the ‘Turtlehead/CMD” is so we can respond appropriately?
Or are you trying to create another round of disagreements, in which case we take this to the Dueling Thread where I can provide evidence of your duplicity and viciousness? -
JC says:
October 22, 2022 at 3:50 amEr.. no.
Digitized is eons easier, can be suitably targeted through AI algorithms. Alterations happen in the dark.
A WEFfer’s wet dream.Anything and anyone can be targeted if the intent is there. “Easier” doesn’t equal intent and purpose. In other words if there is a will there’s a way.
100% correct, but what if a new process makes it easier to do it?
When one does an MBA, one learns about the principles of friction and contestability.
In summary: removing external barriers to any action makes that action more likely.Simple!
Now expand that to the securing/managing of the largest private asset class in Australia.. by a faceless, increasingly unaccountable and even hostile power.
Imagine what is then possible.. as they say… at the stroke of a pen.And if anyone thinks this is mere paranoia, they haven’t been paying attention to the last 30+ years.
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Zulu
Professor Castles has been awarded a $3.2m Australian Laureate Fellowship via the Australian Research Council to improve literacy standards in high schools. In an interview with The Weekend Australian, she said testing the literacy of students starting high school would be a “good idea’’.
The Productivity Commission’s review of the national school reform agreement – which sets out funding priorities for governments – revealed that one third of children who struggle to read in year 3 fail to improve by year 5. And 28 per cent of those with reading problems in year 7 remain semiliterate in year 9.
Less time spent talking about the “Stolen Generation?”
Steal the fascist left’s language from them, call it what it is:
Development of a new Stolen Generation, a disgrace to Australia.
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