Mind you, they probably look around at what’s on offer and decide “Yeah, Nah”! As do the girls.
Open Thread – Wed 8 Nov 2023
- The more you gets the less you eats
- Open Thread – Weekend 23 Nov 2024
- Open Thread – Thurs 21 Nov 2024
- Open Thread – Mon 18 Nov 2024
- From darkness to the promise of light
HB Bear … do you have a ticket for day five of the Test Match?
Whoops!.. McWho out LBW third ball to Bumrah. Ball kept low. Cap’n Woke comes out as night watchman.
They are two identical buckets of steaming excrement from the same source. One markets itself as a ‘Family Bucket’ and…
The bulk of the funding will be provided by the European Union, the United States, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom,…
Yes, I had the misfortune to see some of it last evening. Charlton is typical of the sort of smug oleaginous NPC ciphers that are now increasingly starting to infest politics – see also Porter, Minns and Hastie for example. Their faces are bland and blank looking reflecting a total lack of character and the ability to interact normally with other human beings. Consequently, they also believe in nothing except their own self aggrandisement.
They are a frigging scourge.
Funnily enough Charlton also had the gall to laud that gutless piece of sh*t and total failure Minns for supposedly authorising the pigs to arrest some of the crazed psychopathic nazi lunatics screeching “kill the Jews, gas the Jews” while blundering around the oprah house forecourt on that shameful Monday evening last month.
Seven of them, apparently. Grate work, Minns you ridiculous incompetent knobhead.
God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.
– Simon Wiesenthal
Shani had the misfortune to be wearing something particularly scanty at that rock concert. It would have been a red rag to the invading thugs who have been schooled since kindergarten that female flesh on show invites rape. They carried this idea over to any Israeli woman they came across, for the documented reports of rapine and vicious torture are evidence of that. The blood lust also laid its fierce eye on any Israeli child. The bonds of civilisation were simply thrown off during this rampage.
We read of this savagery to women and even to little children in much of history against Jews and other designated peoples (my Huguenot ancestors, for instance), and in the Shoa, but such savagery is still with us. Hamas made it so from every Islamic mother’s knee, that they should instill killing Jews into their children’s mentality.
Fearsome and dangerous stuff, full of invented mythology.
When you’ve lost the UN…
Hamas accuses UNRWA of aiding civilians fleeing warzone (8 Nov)
He doesn’t sound happy. Hopefully the IDF will put him out of his misery.
GreyRanga
” Is it just trolling, mutley isn’t bright enough, long held belief, probably not as the left doesn’t appear to have any beliefs coz it just onto the next thing and if it contradicts previous belief.”
The fat fascist fool went from “punch a Nazi” to cheering on actual Nazis marching through Australian streets without changing gear. He is a fascist fvckwit, no more, no less.
“Entering Gaza is NOT in Israel’s best interest.”
There are a lot of hawkish comments on the Cat currently, so I assume that everyone is still happy with the decision to enter.
I stand by my statement of 10 days ago.
The “ground war” has not started yet. The IDF have surrounded the northern part of Gaza and will begin operations shortly.
Whilst not in Israel’s best interest, it is in one persons best interest, for the time being.
Looked up whether Israel still has Capital punishment.
Turns out it does, for two crimes. 1. Crimes against humanity and 2. Treason.
Why did Israeli Intelligence fail so badly ref 7 October, even after warnings from Egypt?
Bibi is in trouble domestically and he will go to gaol for a very long time, unless, he is executed.
The civil war in “Chicago on the Dnieper” appears to moving along nicely.
Zaluhzny’s aide, (can’t recall his name), now sleeps with the fishes.
Now, who could be behind that? Maybe, ….., we will never know.
This comes after, you may recall, the dismissal of the SF Commander by the Defence Minister, who does not have the authority to act.
Anyway, Arestovich, has now “warned” ‘elensky not to attack Zaluhzny. (??????)
Arestovich, (of “we will be at war with Russia and Ukraine will be destroyed, but, the COOL part is, we will be part of NATO”-2019), is certainly shooting his mouth off a bit.
‘elensky has probably seen his last Xmas.
I expect the headline will be – ” ‘elensky killed in freak fishing accident, suffers a .45 wound to the head.”
Hello.
At what point do such people become enemy aliens?
Storm Asthma.
How come it only happens in Victoria? Never crosses borders.
Flyingduk sir, I exercised my theory “always go to court if you can” this week.
Took on the local council over their parking fine of $120. They issued it saying it was 1029pm – at night – in an area when it is signed as ok after 630pm. I forced their parking ranger to answer yes or no to whether these “facts” were true.
It was obviously a mistake on their part. When I had written to them saying it was not an offence and I would not pay it they simply changed a new ticket to 1029am and sent it to me.
The beak – a very pleasant fellow – found it rather amusing I think. Prosecution had a go at saying it was “obviously” daytime as their photo showed, but I countered by sayiing it could be any date or time and they should not be allowed to just insert any information to suit themselves. Result was the offence was “extinguished”.
Mrs TE was most interested not having been in court before. Two appearances – the first adjourned to allow the other side to prepare – but worth it to put it to The Man.
OK.
Just heard on 3AW that drivers are bound to report to VicRoads if you have certain medical conditions, and Type 1 Diabetes is one of those conditions. The lawyer carefully avoided any comment on this and any prior history of hypos.
Am I right in thinking that some of the top (as in biggest) news services in the world were fully aware of the Oct 7 massacre, knew exactly what they did because they were there with them photographing it?
And those services continue to lie about Israel and bleat about “proportionality”?
I think the likes of CNN, Reuters and AP are not just moral cowards, they are actively perverted, evil entities.
It’s one thing to report crimes. It’s another to engage in them.
Well done TE!
Rufus up set the Jews aren’t quietly boarding the cattle cars.
In QLD diabetics must also obtain an annual medical certificate stating fit to drive. I would imagine the same applies on VIC.
Today we celebrate the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica.
It is a feast day that is celebrated by the entire Church, worldwide. It marks the dedication of the basilica by Pope Sylvester I in 324AD. A Latin inscription in the church reads: ‘Omnium ecclesiarum Urbis et Orbis mater et caput’ which means ‘The mother and head of all churches of the city and of the world’. Even the façade bears an inscription saying ‘Dogmate papali datur ac simul imperiali, quod sim cunctarum mater et caput ecclesiarum’, meaning ‘It is given by Papal and Imperial decree that I am the mother and head of all churches’.
Today’s feast has been celebrated since the 12th century.
The Basilica of Saint John Lateran, Rome,
Attributed to Giacomo van Lint (1723-1780),
(Christian Art)
Airbus Albo just on Sky wearing a pyjama top.
How embarrasment (h/t Kylie Mole)
I regard these entities and individuals as accessories to the crimes committed.
I’m aware there are differences between jurisdictions, and that charging Filth Filter individuals or organisations with such offenses is entirely impractical. Nevertheless, from a reputational standpoint, I still consider them to be accessories to mass murder.
They might otherwise be described as ‘h@m@s adjacent.’
How is what these news agencies did any different to producing a “snuff film”?
They weren’t in a war zone. They can’t use that as an excuse.
They filmed murders and worse for money. Innocent civilians, sitting down to breakfast.
These disgusting LARPers should be charged as accessories once they are picked up. That’s if they’re lucky. Most likely they are dust.
From the Spectator.
Snap Muddster.
It’s been a while since an issue has produced such moral clarity. Hence the deluge of garbage whining and distraction squirrels.
Crossie Avatar
Crossie
Nov 9, 2023 8:20 AM
Vicki
Nov 9, 2023 7:54 AM
CEO of Optus HAS to go. If internal sabotage, the saboteurs will not rest until she is gone. Suggest a Optus customers get Sat phone or change providers. We will stay with Optus because we have a Sat phone & not worth the trouble to change .
Irrespective, the CEO is hopeless. Sad to say – but too many women are promoted beyond their expertise these days.
This woman ticked all the woke boxes which mean zilch when real competence is required.
I watched CEO of Optus Kelly Bayer Rosmarin on 7News Youtube last night – Like a Deer caight bin the headlights – Just Kept Repeating PR Slogans of “Very Sorry” & as to what went wrong – just kept avoiding question – kept saying “Technical Network Issue” but on constantly being pushed to define “Technical Network Issue”,kept repeating PR Platitudes
An Incompetent Female who has definitely risen above her Capabilities – A Pure Woke Appointment & is a Disservice to Women
The CEO of Optus has spoken to 7NEWS about the nine-hour outage that plunged millions of customers into telecommunications darkness. Kelly
Bayer Rosmarin says she is “very sorry we let people down”, as systems come back online. The Optus boss says ‘we exist to delight’ and that these outages ‘aren’t unprecedented’.
What the Filth Filter (media) are doing is normalising the murder of individuals belonging to an identified group based on the decisions of non-state actors to ‘outlaw’* such groups.
* I’m happy to be corrected, but my impression is that traditionally, the state declared a person or persons to be an outlaw – beyond the bounds of the law’s protection – thus permitting those so declared to be captured or killed by any persons; such actions being beneficial to the safety and security of the community.
Bring back “put your hand on the Bible” for citizenship, courts and any other formal occasions requiring the truth. Bring back a Christian prayer to start any major formal public proceedings. The Buddhist, Hindus, Jews wont mind. Only one group will not do this – fundamentalist Muslims. The Koran surpassed the Bible. Even Taqiyah ( lying allowed by the Koran) will not cover this.
It is the perfect filter. The Salafists ( fundamental Muz) would be exposed immediately.
Atheism will never combat Islam. It has no conviction and will allow Islam to gradually take over society.
Chanticleer
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is sorry – and a little defiant
The under-fire chief denies the telco got its communications wrong over Wednesday’s outage. But a new hit to confidence in the group will hurt.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin doesn’t recall the exact time she headed into the office after being told the telecommunications group’s entire fixed, mobile and broadband network had gone down early on Wednesday; as an Optus customer herself, communications were not smooth.
“I don’t remember. It’s been a long day,” she told Chanticleer late on Wednesday evening.
Fair enough. But in truth, it’s likely the first of many long days for the Optus boss.
You don’t leave 10 million customers in the lurch without serious ramifications.
It’s bad enough that this outage caused Melbourne’s train system to temporarily shut down, disrupted businesses across the country and forced essential services to scramble to establish communications.
But the undignified sight of Communications Minister Michelle Rowland pleading with Optus to give its customers more information means Bayer Rosmarin is likely to face her second political firestorm in a year, after Optus was scarred by one of the biggest public cyberattacks this country has seen in late 2022.
With all services restored on Wednesday afternoon, Bayer Rosmarin was unable to offer much in the way of explanation for the outage, citing a technical network fault of such complexity that “there’s no soundbite that’s going to do it justice”.
But she was deeply apologetic for the episode, and promised to share the results of a “root cause analysis”.
“We’re a critical infrastructure provider and we understand how important our connectivity is,” she said. “On every other day than today, we offer a fantastic and reliable service.
And so we’re very disappointed that today we let our customers down. We obviously don’t plan for that to occur, we plan for it not to occur and we will get to the bottom of every possible learning we can get out of this experience.”
But Bayer Rosmarin pushed back on suggestions that this was one of the biggest such outages Australia has seen, or even that such issues are unusual for operators of such a large and complex network.
“We’re very, very sorry that it happened. But I don’t think it’s something unusual in the grand scheme of things when you’re operating a critical infrastructure,” she said.
Bayer Rosmarin also stood her ground on the Optus communications response, which appeared wanting on Wednesday morning, as both Rowland and Telecommunications Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said on radio they had heard about the outage via the media.
After last year’s hack, you’d think Optus would be well-versed in crisis management.
But if lessons had been learned on that score, it wasn’t evident on Wednesday.
But Bayer Rosmarin insisted the Optus team was rightly focused on fixing the issue, and was limited in what it could say about the outage.
“Having a message saying the service is out and we don’t know when it will be restored, which was the truth, is not very satisfying,” she said. “So I don’t think it’s a problem with the communications, it’s a problem that customers wanted a different message.”
There might be a few politicians and regulators who have a different view.
But customers also have every right to be disenchanted with the handling of this mess.
Yes, the message Optus and Bayer Rosmarin could have given on Wednesday morning would have been unsatisfying for those affected.
But customers understand there will be outages.
Hearing the CEO or Optus executives or spokespeople on the front line may have at least given them confidence that Optus was on top of the problem, and fully accountable.
At heart, this is a question of confidence.
With last year’s hack still fresh in the minds of customers, Optus could ill-afford the sort of high-profile problem it is now facing.
The company’s poor communications response at the start of Wednesday, and its lack of a detailed explanation for the problem at the end of it, are likely to compound the erosion of trust from the hack.
And Optus can’t afford more slip-ups in the ultra-competitive telco market. Its earnings before interest and tax in the June quarter slipped 5.5 per cent, with revenue up just 1.1 per cent, which parent company Singapore Telecommunications blamed on “the challenging market conditions from competitive pricing and a weakening in consumer sentiment”.
Bayer Rosmarin has promised transparency on the cause of this outage, and must deliver.
Optus’ decision not to release an independent review of the cyberattack – despite the CEO’s promises to do so – was a mistake and this time around nothing less than a full and public explanation will suffice.
And if Optus won’t provide it, then Rowland should make sure the government does.
Why? Doesn’t she own a watch?
Optus will not be giving customers any compensation after major outage – as details emerge about CEO’s lavish lifestyle and series of blunders at the helm of the company
. Optus services entirely collapsed on Wednesday
. Customers were without essential phone and internet
. Bosses have said they are not considering compensation
READ MORE: Optus CEO’s $4million country mansion
Optus bosses have declared they will not compensate customers for the biggest communications outage in Australia’s history.
More than 10 million people and businesses were thrown into disarray on Wednesday after the telco’s network dropped out at about 4 a.m., preventing customers from connecting to the internet or making or receiving calls.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, 46, then created a PR disaster of her own when she went missing in action for seven hours as essential services and businesses struggled to cope.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin said yesterday evening that she understood how much people relied on connectivity and indicated the company would consider how to compensate them.
‘We’re now starting to think about ways in which we can thank our customers for their patience as we work through the outage today and reward them for their loyalty to Optus,’ she said.
‘We will definitely consider every avenue as we turn our attention, now that services are restored, to how we work with our customers.’
But Ms Bayer Rosmarin and managing director of customer solutions Matt Williams have since told media compensating customers for the outage period is off the table as ‘refunding people for one day is probably less than $2.’
When asked about businesses who paid higher rates for the service and were unable to make sales, Mr Williams said the same applied, that they would only be eligible for a small refund for the outage period.
‘We are not talking about compensation,’ he said.
Instead Mr Williams and Ms Bayer Rosmarin said they would ‘reward’ customers who stayed with Optus for their ‘loyalty and patience’ though did not provide specific details about what this would entail.
Meanwhile
How the Optus outage cost woman more than $1,000 – as young Aussies reveal how they struggled to cope without network for the day
. One woman says Optus owes her $1,000
. One man claims he spent hours housebound
That Rosmarin woman is a bit of a worry.
By this time, with a screw up so big that it cannot be swept under the rug, she should be explaining that she accepts that she is ‘ultimately’ (not proximately) responsible, so she will stay in the role (and keep the perks) while she labours to ensure it never happens again.
Tone Deaf
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin’s $15m Vaucluse mansion is the scene of an elaborate photoshoot while Australia grinds to a halt due to massive internet and phone outage
. Photoshoot at CEO’s home as Optus battled network crash
. Stylists ferried in luxury items like furniture and flowers
. Husband spotted overseeing shoot as country ground to halt
I feel the need to repeat my above post:
The goal of the F.F. (media: there’s a reason why the acronym sounds like an historical acronym) is to normalise the identification and eradication of a chosen group when that group has been declared a threat by non-state actors.
At the moment, it’s Israel and Jews. That will change. Another targeted group will follow this ‘success.’
The Filth Filter are an unarmed militia. Not brown, not black, but White-Shirts. A facade of neutrality, business, ‘service’ to the impotent masses.
Girl’s gotta eat.
(And get photos done, and meet with the biographer who is going to record her struggle against patriarchy and prejudice, all the way to the peak of a major telco, for the enlightenment of posterity.)
Everything you need to know about why ABC Radio is dogshit
The ABC advertised this week for Executive Producers for their Sydney and Melbourne radio stations 702 and 774.
Here’s their spiel:
The ABC strives for diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and to promote a culture of opportunity. Through its services, the ABC seeks to represent, connect and engage with all of the Australian community.
In line with our focus on diversity, applications are strongly encouraged from Indigenous Australians, people from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, people with a disability and LGBTIQA+ individuals.
The ABC also aims to achieve a gender-balanced workforce.
For more information about working at the ABC, please feel free to explore our careers page at https://www.abc.net.au/careers/
Note the focus is on the kind of person you are, not how good you are at making a radio show.
LGBT+++
Abioriginal
MultiCulty
Being a woman
Disabled.
Where is “great at the job” and “competent”?
Whities should not apply.
The news media was once a useful service as the public’s eyes and ears.
In the past 20 years, it has become a radical political movement to the left of the Greens.
99% of the news media has spent 99% of its effort in the past month providing propaganda support and distractions designed to justify Hamas’s murder of 1400 Jews in the October 7 terrorist attack in Israel.
Mz Rosmarin clearly forked the front of house management.
But, given there is still no clear technical explanation as to what went wrong, it’s a bit awkward to blame her for not being able to “define “Technical Network Issue”” on the spot.
The technical problem will be whatever it was – firmware, software, or exploit. The strategic issue is the ‘discovery’ that the Australian social economy is critically dependent on limited network coverage.
Yep, but isn’t preventing the Left from using their well-worn toolbox.
80 years ago they gassed us, now they gaslight us so they can do it again (8 Nov)
Yep. Sydney gets a mention.
Putting on more call centre staff so customer queries can be responded to in a timely and accurate manner would be a good start.
What’s that…you sacked 100 of them in September?
I think it’s Mz. Rosmarin’s career needs to be disrupted, rather than the business.
Tom, the last time that I can remember such a gross dereliction of duty and basic humanity was during the Rwanda massacre, when UN “peacekeepers” were told to stand down while innocents were murdered.
Those media knew what was going to happen. Perhaps not the grim details, but they must have got a sense of it. Then the buggers filmed it.
Any, Cats, wish me luck. I’m getting my horoscope rea to me about the alternatives to knee replacements…
Nah. I’m not biting on the class rage bait, DM.
Some Australians had to go without their phones for a day.
My maternal grandparents never owned a phone. There was nothing they needed to know that they weren’t apprised of eventually.
Qantas detailed thousands of cancelled flights days before Joyce share sale
Ayesha de Kretser – Senior reporter
Qantas supplied the competition regulator with details of more than 10,000 flights it had cancelled three days before its chairman, Richard Goyder, allowed former chief executive Alan Joyce to sell shares worth $17 million.
Mr Joyce sold more than 90 per cent of his holding in the company on June 1, with Mr Goyder’s approval, despite the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission having made two requests for information about flights that the airline kept on sale after they had been cancelled.
The regulator is now suing Qantas in the Federal Court, alleging that it engaged in false, misleading or deceptive conduct by advertising flights it would not fly.
Documents filed in the Federal Court on Wednesday by Baker McKenzie, the law firm acting for the ACCC, show that on May 29, Qantas had supplied the regulator with a spreadsheet containing the more than 10,000 flights on which the case now hinges.
The ACCC eventually excluded flights where consumers were informed within two calendar days, the documents show.
The Australian Financial Review earlier revealed that Qantas had received compulsory information notices – which require companies to hand over documents – on April 26, five weeks before Mr Joyce’s share sale.
There are also no rules preventing directors trading shares, unless they are acting on undisclosed information that they know is material to the price.
There has been some investor disquiet about the share sale, even before the ACCC filed its legal proceedings.
One fund manager, Centennial Asset Management’s Matthew Kidman, previously said Mr Joyce should have waited “until he departed the company in November”.
Mr Joyce sold the shares for about $6.74 each. Shares closed at $5.32 on Wednesday, having slid since the ACCC legal claim was announced. Mr Joyce’s share sale was approved amid a $600 million on-market buyback.
Qantas has been contacted for comment.
An airline spokesman previously said the ACCC had run “a number of investigations” into the company recently, “several of which have included compulsory information notices and which have not resulted in any adverse findings”.
“As recently as August 28, the ACCC told Qantas in writing that it was still finalising its investigation. The first time this issue crystallised into legal action was when it was announced by the ACCC on August 31,” he said.
Mediation on the cards
The new court filings show Qantas had produced evidence involving many thousands of flights by the time of the share sale, including in response to the original request, which was dated September 14 last year.
Mr Goyder has also shot down suggestions that he inappropriately approved the share sale when the matter was raised at Friday’s annual meeting in Melbourne, saying he had “zero concerns” about the board’s ethics.
In a brief court appearance in Melbourne on Wednesday, the ACCC’s lawyers argued that Qantas’ defence had missed the point of the case. Federal Court judge Helen Rofe said it was her preference that the parties attempt mediation – to which neither Qantas nor the ACCC objected.
The court ordered the two parties should file a statement of the agreed facts by February 23. Case management hearings are set to begin on February 28.
Me either. I don’t give a sh*t where she lives or what she was doing on the day.
Up until she knew about the problem. Then it should have been in to the office for a bit of crisis meeting action. Of course, she couldn’t do any of that remotely! Still surprised that when the upgrade went base over apex they simply didn’t revert to the existing programming.
So there must be a severe systems failure in there somewhere.
Optus CEO says ‘no soundbite’ to explain phone outage
Jenny Wiggins and Paul Smith
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin says a national outage of phone and internet services that disrupted 10 million customers, shut down Melbourne’s trains, and stopped some people making calls to emergency services was too “technical” to explain.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin told The Australian Financial Review that a “technical network fault” caused the outage but would not specify what exactly it was, or where or how it occurred, after the Singaporean-owned company restored all services by late afternoon on Wednesday.
“It’s a very technical explanation for what happened. There is no soundbite that is going to do it justice, so we want to really bottom out the root cause and when we have that very clear and in a digestible form, we will be forthcoming,” the CEO said.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin said she had “no idea” how long it would take to do a “full and thorough root cause analysis” of the outage.
She also said the outage was not “something unusual in the grand scheme of things when you’re operating a critical infrastructure like we are”.
The outage follows Optus’ hugely damaging data breach a year ago, which did not affect the operations of its telecommunications network.
The outage, which started at 4am on Wednesday, caused wide-ranging problems for some of Australia’s biggest companies, including the major banks, public transport operators and thousands of small businesses.
A statement posted on Optus’ Facebook page at 6.47am was updated during the day but did not explain the causes of the outage and did not allow customers to post comments.
Wednesday’s outage was the most disruptive since Vodafone’s “Vodafail” disasters over a decade ago, but telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said such events were not rare enough to be considered one-offs.
Telstra suffered a longer outage last year, but it happened overnight when fewer people noticed.
Providers need to co-operate
Mr Budde said telecommunications infrastructure was so important to the functioning of the economy and society that providers must work together if one of them was down.
He suggested Optus needed to have better disaster recovery planning, and redundancy in its networks.
“It is unacceptable for there to be a single point of failure in a network that can bring down an entire country,” he said.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority said it was examining whether Optus had complied with its regulatory obligations, which include ensuring emergency calls are transferred to Telstra when there is an outage and that “accurate and timely” information is provided to Australians.
Optus told customers on Wednesday morning that mobile phones and landlines were having problems calling triple zero, and suggested they use “alternative” devices.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin rejected suggestions that Optus should have provided more detailed updates or a general press briefing on the cause of the outage throughout the day, saying “there wasn’t more information to provide”.
However, the Financial Review has seen updates provided early in the day to wholesale customers of Optus saying that engineers were trying to identify faults with routers and router reflectors, and that their progress had been hindered because they could not access parts of the network using remote tools.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin said those customers had “more tailored and bespoke communication”.
So the Costs of People working from Home and Not Onsite are shown up in this statement from above
saying that engineers were trying to identify faults with routers and router reflectors, and that their progress had been hindered because they could not access parts of the network using remote tools.
Just to Help Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin saying a national outage of phone and internet services was too “technical” to explain.
Explainer
What early signs suggest may have gone wrong at Optus
Early indicators point to a problem with the way Optus routes internet traffic from place to place.
John Davidson – Columnist
Orange might be the new black, but it’s not a colour you want to see on your internet company’s dashboard. It’s the new bad.
On Wednesday, multiple panels on Optus’ dashboard were glowing orange, and the specific panels that were glowing orange suggested the company’s nationwide outage was caused by the notoriously troublesome “border gateway protocol” that internet companies around the world use to route internet traffic to its final destination.
It will take some explaining, but it’s worth knowing, because BGP is at the heart of how the internet works, and it’s likely to have played a major role in the huge outage suffered by Optus and its customers since early Wednesday morning.
When you visit a webpage or send an email, the data you send and receive is broken up into smaller chunks of data, known as “packets”.
Each packet lists the network address of its sender, and the network address of its recipient. Network addresses are numbers, such as “8.8.8.8” (one of Google’s many addresses), that uniquely identify a company’s network on the internet.
But in order for a network provider such as Optus to know that packets destined for “8.8.8.8” need to be forwarded to the US, where they will be on-forwarded from network to network until, milliseconds later, they eventually make it to Google, networks around the world share with each other the addresses that belong to them.
That’s one of the tasks performed by BGP. It’s how networks share the addresses that are on their network with other networks.
Network providers such as Optus run a mesh of BGP routers, that keep track of what addresses need to be forwarded to what overseas and local networks (remember, the internet isn’t one network, but a network of networks), and share their own addresses with other BGP routers around the world.
BGP is at the heart of the internet, but it’s notoriously tricky to get right.
In March last year, Twitter (now X) suffered a 45-minute outage when the Russian internet service provider RTComm misconfigured its BGP routers so they “announced” to the world that they were now the official destination for some of Twitter’s European internet addresses.
Traffic that was meant to go to Twitter’s servers ended up in Russia, where it hit a dead end and gave Twitter users an error until RTComm announced a correction, and that correction propagated to BGP routers around the world.
At the time, Cisco System’s network intelligence company ThousandEyes said it was hard to know whether RTComm had deliberately “hijacked” Twitter’s traffic, or if it was yet another case of an accidental BGP misconfiguration.
“It’s important to understand that accidental misconfiguration of BGP is not uncommon, and given the ISP’s withdrawal of the route, it’s likely that RTComm did not intend to cause a globally impacting disruption to Twitter’s service,” ThousandEyes wrote in a blog.
“That said, localised manipulation of BGP has been used by ISPs in certain regions to block traffic based on local access policies,” it wrote.
One way companies such as Optus guard against the deliberate or even accidental hijacking of their internet addresses is to use cryptographic signatures on their routing announcements, so when another network provider receives an announcement that traffic with a certain address is meant to be routed to a certain network, they can check that the announcement has been properly signed by the authorised owner of that address.
That signature system, known as resource public key infrastructure (RPKI), was what was glowing orange in dashboards around the world Wednesday, whenever anyone called up Optus’ network status.
The RPKI status for one part of Optus’s network showed dozens of misconfigured routes, as pictured above.
On a webpage showing the number of announcements being made by BGP routers, the global cloud platform provider Cloudflare shows that a BGP node owned by Optus made more than 940,000 route announcements in one hour early Wednesday morning, far more than the 2,000 or 3,000 that node normally makes an hour.
As the day wore on, the node continued to make far more announcements than usual (peaking at around 245,000 at lunchtime), though far fewer than the initial surge.
That flood of announcements could indicate a routine routing update went badly awry, though cybercriminals have been known to use BGP floods as a type of denial-of-service attack designed to bring computer networks to their knees.
At this stage, whether it was Optus that accidentally misconfigured its own BGP routers, whether someone else did it accidentally, or whether someone else did it deliberately, remains to be seen.
It’s also not yet clear whether Optus’ BGP issues are the cause of its outage, or a symptom of some other problem.
Stay tuned.
It was horrific. I couldn’t even get onto the internet until after lunchtime!
On the other hand, and more seriously, the oldies without mobile phones, like my mum, would not be able to call 000 in an emergency. Which may’ve led to deaths. That’s the downside of the NBN.
I the point is she was neglecting her job while doing some personal look at me stunt. Being without a phone could mean a loss of job opportunity or a loved one not being able ask to for help.
It’s time for people to stop treating CEO,s as celebrities.
One of the downsides.
I’m not prone to complimenting service providers for providing the service that I pay them to provide, but Aussie Broadband do a better than decent job in their customer support.
We had an internet outage earlier this week due to some local technical issue. We were both out at gainful employment, but within minutes our phones were pinged with messages telling us:
And then, a short while later, a text alerting that the problem ‘out in the street’ had been fixed, and the offer of assistance if connection hasn’t been restored.
Pretty useful information if you are not at home, but still rely on back to base internet connectivity.
Plus you get to speak to people in Australia if you need to contact their call centres – who seem to be able to make decisions without “I will have to take this up with my supervisor”.
All at a reasonable price.
Learn, other service providing bastards…
Tom wrote:
During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong had what was labelled ‘infrastructure’ to aid their spearhead forces. This was a support network (supply, logistics, admin, propaganda/intelligence, etc.), without which the soldiers could not have performed their tasks. While the general media was not included in that infrastructure, it arguably might have constituted another category, that of non-direct aid.
My perception is that our western media have been the primary enabler of the thus-far massively successful information operation against Israel. Given the resources and influence many of these media organisations possess – including access to high-status officials on all sides – ignorance of the observable facts cannot be accepted as a reason for what seems to be their policy: undermining the moral and legal right of an injured party to self-defense, the latter which includes not only the right, but the necessity, to degrade the capacity of a declared enemy to repeat their aggression.
Without the western media and their skewed curation* of the raw information, h@m@s would never have achieved the public relations feats they have.
*Curate =
[Merriam-Webster online].
C.L.
Nov 9, 2023 11:06 AM”
Yep.
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
Nov 9, 2023 11:06 AM
Any, Cats, wish me luck. I’m getting my horoscope rea to me about the alternatives to knee replacements…
Zulu,
Best of Luck,
– As someone with crook knees(Can’t keep standing still as knees lock up) & has been avoiding surgery for a number of years as I would be lousy at Rehab
I saw a GWS AFL Sports Knee Specialist Olympic Park over 20 years ago and he said if you are not having steroid injections in every 3 months & you are not taking pain killers, I could take the $10K for Surgery off you, but you are better to leave it
I will use a walking stick sometimes (surperb on trip to Milan earlier this year – to front of queue) but I really only need it for going downhill – no problem uphill – go up and own stairs sideways using railing to pull up or stabilising going down
After that usless monologue, would be interested in update as to what alternative to knee replacements are read to you from your Horoscope
The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch
I saw a GWS AFL Sports Knee Specialist Olympic Park over 20 years ago and he said if you are not having steroid injections in every 3 months & you are not taking pain killers, I could take the $10K for Surgery off you, but you are better to leave it
For what it is worth, husband had real crook knees some 10 years ago. He had an arthroscopy which accomplished very little. Surgeon (who is also a personal friend & not necessarily in it for the money – though who knows?) said he needed knee joint replacements. Shortly after, we acquitted a farm, with attendant up & down on tractors, walking here there and everywhere etc etc.
Voila – no knee pain anymore. Struth, I hope this hasn’t jinxed him!!!!!
PS on the other hand, plenty of friends of similar age have had knee replacements with great success.
So has that useless utterly incompetent shloptus bint been jobsacked yet?
If not, why not?
I ask this as soon to be ex-customer of shloptus.
A beauty. Gotta love the Optus thing. Spend a decade scrapping for a couple of percent of market share and give it all back in a day. Still reckon they will be lucky to survive this. New SELL signal – the CEO getting a photoshoot in their house. Actually I’m not sure my boss didn’t do that.
I had a charisma replacement five years ago and recently had a check-up. The surgeon told me it was wearing a bit thin.
Old Ozzie, I don’t understand a word of this, but it sounds very impressive, although as you note, it would bore the younger Cats here. Back in those days of the newness of computing, I had my first real date with Hairy, meeting him at his office in a medium-sized computer company where he was working back on some ‘real time’ problem. I sat there impressed at this new world, where he went into a room full of computers the size of fridges, took the back off one, and fiddled with the lit-up insides and the spinning tapes and returned to correct some diagrams on his desk.
I thought it was extremely sexy, so high tech and electrical, wires everywhere. On reflection, I may perhaps have been more impressed with the operator than the tech itself. I’ve always been attracted to competent men who just get on with the job. Especially if they come with high intelligence, great humanity and can make sparks fly.
And that’s it for me with boring the yoof about the tech days of yore. 🙂
That’s likely it for me for a couple of weeks.
A few odds and ends to take care of and we’re off to NZ, Deo volente.
Hope you’re all still here when I get back! 😀
I LOLd.
Have you tried getting it injected directly to your joint, using ultrasound guidance? Works a treat with some joint issues…
shloptus update – apparently their server farm in Sydney was evacuated yesterday due to the building “heating up”. Single point of failure, indeed.
Woeful. Just bloody woeful.
Travel safe, Roger. Don’t take any wooden kiwis.
Rabz, the front-page splash head in the Herald Sun today was a ripper: FLOPTUS.
Cassie at 6:41 – from the Paywallian quote
That is debatable.
I find ‘walking through’ various little niggles in knees or feet is a good practice. A good stride and gait can also improve posture and general strength. Happy to report that my fractured left foot done in 2020 is now equally as good as the other one, quite functional still.
Of course, in our travels I always rub the foot of any foot god I spy. For luck.
Can’t be too careful when it comes to older-age niggles.
Take whatever help you can get.
Roger – Watch out for wicked witches.
And if you find any red shoes, hide ’em.
Probably already posted (not smart enough to scroll up):
Honest Reporting.
Note that the article shows one of the photographers allegedly with a mastermind of 7 Oct massacre.
Please also note that I’m not familiar with this website, so use your discretion.
No.
I’ve seen quite a few photos of dead women at the music festival.
Everyone was wearing a short skirt.
You just had to be there and you were a target.
Many of the raped and murdered were left behind.
It was probably just poor judgement on Hamas terrorist’s part they picked Shani Louk to play the role of dead IDF soldier, the boots were a tell, but the ‘photojournalist’ avoided getting a shot of her distinctive tattoos which dim bulb hamas included in their photo shoot once they were inside gaza.
The telegraph article from two days ago also said Israeli soldiers found ‘abused’ children in the kibbutz.
And it’s not mere blood lust, it’s rape sanctioned by the muslim rape playbook aka the koran.
I linked a memri vid of a female Islamic scholar a few days ago explaining why muslim rape was godly.
Which many of us already knew.
Just like we knew about all the journalists inside gaza are part of the hamas propaganda machine.
It’s obvious to anyone with their eyes open.
Hairy still thinks I walk like a reluctant dog. He’s always 5 feet ahead of me.
That is simply because my legs are shorter than yours, I complain.
Has the Melbourne fantasy football fraternity’s leading intellectual
declared he’s anti-Zionist not anti-Semitic, yet?
When I need guidance on world events I always refer to the actor celebrity class.
Learning to make the sparks fly, then honing the skills…
Sounds like the choreography for Sydney 2000.
Its also what makes us handymen great value.
Sharni’s costume in the photograph that I saw was two-piece, with midriff exposed. It was not out of the ordinary for a rock concert, and I am not critiquing her for wearing it, but it was still a stand-out in the crowd of other young women who were also dressed in skimpy fashions and who were also attacked.
I don’t disagree that you simply had to be there to be attacked, btw.
You are always so quick on the oppositional draw, Rosie.
Apparently the underlying structure isn’t strong enough to sustain more than an average-strength charisma injection. “It’s not going to help in your situation anyway,” the surgeon said.
Well, I am not on Optus.
Enjoy.
You can get the whole thing removed and replaced with a ceramic one.
I don’t know but I was affected by it several years ago, out with kids at a parma place in Richmond, had to go to pharmacy and get a ventolin.
There were several deaths reported the next day.
apparently it is ryegrass pollen that’s the culprit
Have fun in NZ Roger.
Direct injection reminded me of a comment under the piece discussing the ’embedded with Hamas’ photographers.
Bloody surgeons.
While no friend of the ALPBC, to see Porter’s born-to-rule Lieboral train derail in such a spectacular fashion along with the utterly hopeless SloMo government couldn’t help but raise a smile. I guess that makes me a bad person.
And southern NSW, hubby affected for past few days.
Guess what, the Optus board members from Singapore owner were in town this week. Coincidence? Perhaps …
As for BGP as cause, it’s either mis-management of the signing & broadcasting (RPKI) or someone hacked their BGP systems and started broadcasting invalid routing config messages at 20-50X the normal rate.
Incompetence on several levels, whatever the exact steps in this Optus mess.
Ha ha.
I was undertaking Management Studies at a non-sandstone late last century and there was an entire text devoted to “business transformation” at Optus and the old Government Aircraft Factory.
Might now be an MBA case study for a whole different set of reasons.
Schadenfreude ( / ????d?nfr??d? /; German: [??a?dn??f????d?] ?; lit. ‘harm-joy’) is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another.
Yep. I haven’t driven since my stroke ( distance judgement and relflexes are shot). Medical conditions are a self reporting item like the duty of disclosure with insurance. 99 times out of 100 not a problem but …. Watch this space.
I wonder how useful the brand ambassadors are in this situation?
Cheifs of ‘optimism’ and ‘inspiration’.
You know, the surfer, racecar driver, tennis player
Roger.
I don’t know for sure, but there is definitely a reporting requirement.
It was reported that he was returning from a clay pigeon shooting event. I suspect his guns will be gawn as well.
On the Asthma issue and living in Melbourne I haven’t had issues for years but last year and this year I have been impacted.
What I did notice three weeks ago was flying back from Brisbane for work. No issue in SEQ. Arrived in Melb late evening and within an hour lungs were reacting to something. Not sure if pollen or marxism.
The revolution wasn’t catered.
Not only that, they photographed Shani Louk in the back of the ute. At that time she had already been raped (did they film that for their “private” collections?), as her clothing was disarranged, and she might already have been murdered, also on camera.
Then they captioned her as an “Israeli soldier”., in an attempt to legitimise the event.
No-nonsense Aussie bloke issues a brutal review of Anthony Albanese’s time as Prime Minister
. Punter delivers blistering critique of Albo’s government
. Brands the PM ‘hopeless’ and ‘Mr Photo Opportunity’
A no-nonsense Aussie has lashed Anthony Albanese, predicting he will be remembered as the ‘Australia’s worst ever Prime Minister’.
Bernard Thompson, from Cowra in NSW’s central west, penned a devastating critique of the first half of Albo’s premiership.
‘In my opinion, future history will remember Anthony Albanese as arguably Australia’s worst ever Prime Minister and he’s only half way through his term,’ Mr Thompson wrote to the Daily Telegraph’s letter pages.
The enraged man blasted Mr Albanese’s spate of foreign trips – which has seen him visit Washington, China and the Cook Islands in recent weeks – and said he wished he spent more time on the domestic agenda.
‘I wish Anthony Albanese (Mr Photo Opportunity himself) would spend more time visiting the country he’s supposed to be the Prime Minister of and start delivering on all those “plans” that Labor told us they had prior to the last election,’ he wrote.
Mr Thompson then savaged the Labor leader’s grand plans to transform Australia into a ‘world powerhouse’ for renewable energy.
‘Good old Albo and his “comrades” haven’t even been able to deliver on the $275 reduction in household energy bills they promised nearly a hundred times at the last election,’ he wrote.
The scornful punter concluded his blistering missive by delivering a damning, one-word critique.
‘On his recent visit the Chinese media described Anthony Albanese as “handsome”, I think the word “hopeless” is more accurate,‘ Mr Thompson wrote.
PS Click on Link to Vote – Is Anthony Albanese doing a good job as Prime Minister?
Current NO – 96% on 1145 Votes
If it was the BGP system generating/broadcasting crap data then the internal systems at Optus would also be affected. So fixing the BGP would be delayed in a big way as nobody could connect to BGP or other related systems involved. Think of an emergency for your org where nobody has a saved contact list and the company shared list gets scrambled. Same thing.
Only solution in worst case is to drive to the data centres, enter the room and connect to servers via a cable to make manual fixes. But even doing that requires coordination via communication (Telstra?) so that inconsistent BGP routing messages don’t get sent out.
Total clusterfork and instant dismissal in all large firms I’ve worked for.
Puffin chuckin‘.
In Cafe news, male grey butcherbird has been arriving every half hour all yesterday and today, and he hangs on the flyscreen like a large moth. I think that means his second clutch for the season has just hatched, and they might be peckish. Oxytocin is frying his brain! You can never have to much Coles mince stashed in nearby trees just in case. He’s a lot of fun!
Tom
Enthusiastically helped by useful idiots like our very own fat fascist fool mUnty.
Very funny.
It’s a crowded field.
I shouldn’t laugh, but seriously, if this happened here and especially in the UK a couple of times, I am sure Art galleries and roads would be problem free once more. 😀
Muddy
Bear in mind that a senior Saigon correspondent for Time and other news sources was actually a senior Viet Cong officer. The media (at least some of it) was in on the deal.
Most men look good in a suit.
“These IT genius’s design a billion dollar comm’s system with a single point of failure? LOL”
Like most carriers, they probably use MPLS, so they are comms guys not IT guys.
In any case, such systems (internet or comms network) are designed to be flexible and the routers all talk to each other to “propagate” the best way to deliver data. This means that when something “breaks” (eg, cable dug up, fire etc) you don’t need 1,000 people updating 100,000 routers, you just update one and let it propagate through the network.
The downside is, if someone makes a router advertise the wrong kind of route, it can propagate and break the entire system. This happens to the internet here in Australia, well maybe not regularly, but certainly more than you might think or know of. It is usually less of an issue for the internet because there are several companies that all “peer” their routers and not all completely trust the other guys. But inside Optus’ network, it’s ALL Optus gear, so the trust is implicit.
In such systems, it is imperative that anyone who interacts with it is thoroughly trained in what I call the “measure with micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with axe” system – you leave yourself orders of magnitude “spare” for errors and you double and triple check everything, even asking someone else to quadruple check it first. Because if you don’t invest in the training and process requirements, we get what happened to Optus yesterday – systemic failure that takes a long time and lots of $ to fix. They probably lost an order of magnitude more money from this one mistake than they saved on training.
I was guilty of writing this stuff off during my career but when it goes wrong it is a big problem. Just ask QANTAS.
A very great pity munty doesn’t work here.
It is past the hour where some news services need to be declared enemies of the state.
In Israel and the US.
Extremism is thriving in Britain and our leaders have already surrendered – Paywalled
So far the Government’s response to the eruption of hatred has failed to meet the scale of the problem
ALLISTER HEATH
Where is Rishi Sunak? Britain’s Jewish community is more fearful for its safety than at any time since the Second World War, according to the Chief Rabbi; lies, conspiracy theories, genocide denialism, blood libels and violent language are rampant at demonstrations and on social media; and what is the Prime Minister actually doing about it?
The lack of leadership from No?10 is heartbreaking.
“Holding Scotland Yard to account” is insultingly insufficient.
Senior Tories have expressed their disapproval of the marches and of the language used, but this is mere talk, and too sotto voce.
There is no game-changing strategy to shift the narrative, no plan to combat disinformation, no immediate proposals to tighten legislation or ban dangerous groups, no moves to prevent train carriages, poppy sellers or branches of M&S from being targeted.
Abominable ideas – such as the lie that Hamas didn’t kidnap any Israeli children, and that posters of hostages are fake – are spreading, and yet there is a vacuum, an abdication of responsibility in Whitehall and it is emboldening every kind of maniac and inflaming every kind of hideous tension.
None of this was meant to be possible. The modern British model is in crisis: a tiny minority is under immense pressure, and the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the BBC, the Government, the human rights advocates and the virtue-signalling middle classes are doing the bare minimum they can get away with.
The law is being reinterpreted in bizarre ways and thousands of anti-Semites – Islamist extremists and the far-Left principally, for now – are getting away with behaviour that wouldn’t be tolerated were it directed at any other minority.
Are all still equal in front of the law?
This is not about one demonstration on Armistice Day: the crisis is far greater. It is about the total failure of all of our institutions, the implosion of an entire ideological superstructure, the ruination of a country’s very idea of itself. It is about extremists being asked to provide advice and embedding themselves within the police and military, it is about the normalisation of calls for the destruction of one country – and only one – based on a falsified narrative, it is about the gradual waning of our collective memories of the Shoah, it is about hate preachers who don’t even care if their words are caught on film, it is about the Left-wing middle class’s moral cowardice.
Don’t get me wrong: Sunak is on the right side. He is a moral man, a true believer in the modern, multi-faith British dream, and he supports Israel and passionately detests anti-Semitism.
Yet what is he, in practice, doing about the explosion in Jew-hate that is shaming our great country? Going ahead with the endlessly-delayed Holocaust memorial is not enough.
Ministers are acting like commentators, not leaders, and their (usually excellent) words are being drowned out.
The Government cannot even find it in itself to ban Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps or vote against a call for a ceasefire at the UN, even though opposing such a move is its policy.
It seemingly can’t tell any of the quangos what to do.
It isn’t properly fighting the battle of ideas, let alone using its legislative powers.
There has been a gigantic regression since the David Cameron years.
In 2015, the then prime minister delivered a powerful speech against extremism.
He made it clear that his problem was with the extremists and their twisted ideology, not with mainstream British Muslims, whom he rightly embraced.
Cameron understood that bad ideas had to be fought, which is why even educated lawyers or GPs or academics can harbour evil thoughts.
Since then, the Tories have launched many reviews into extremism, largely or entirely ignoring their recommendations.
Dame Louise Casey’s review into opportunity and integration argued that “too many public institutions … have gone so far to accommodate diversity and freedom of expression that they have ignored or even condoned regressive, divisive and harmful cultural and religious practices, for fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic.”
There has been limited progress since then – some lessons have been learnt from the Rochdale child sex abuse ring – but few of Casey’s broader ideas have been enacted.
The next major contribution was Dame Sara Khan’s Challenging Hateful Extremism.
She listed every kind of threat, from “harrowing tales of abuse levelled at Jewish MPs” to Ahmadi Muslims being persecuted at school. As she wrote, the problem emanates from the far-Right, the far-Left, Islamist and other forms of religious fundamentalism and animal rights extremism. It fell on deaf ears.
Last but not least, Sir William Shawcross’s Independent Review of Prevent revealed horrifying failures at the heart of the counterterrorism programme.
Among its findings was that some taxpayer funding distributed by Prevent has been handed to groups that promote extremist views, that books by mainstream centre-Right commentators were being tarred as “cultural nationalist ideological texts”, and that Islamist extremism was being grossly under-investigated relative to the number of anti-terrorism cases.
Ominously, Shawcross noted the shocking prevalence of anti-Semitism within the cases he observed. He identified that Prevent doesn’t sufficiently understand or focus on anti-Semitism, that it must “better address the anti-Jewish component of both Islamist and extreme Right-wing ideology”, and that extremists “operating below the terrorism threshold” must be targeted.
The Tories have also failed in another way. They turned a blind eye to the rise of Critical Race Theory, that crucial component of the woke belief system which, among many other terrible pathologies, is explosively anti-Semitic.
Universities, museums, cultural institutions and corporate HR departments have succumbed to this destructive ideology and its nonsense about “colonialism”, “white privilege”, and “intersectionality”.
Jews are considered part of the “oppressor” class, and thus cannot truly be the victims of racism.
Yet it isn’t too late. Sunak could make a speech that is even more powerful than that delivered by the German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck. He could legislate to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir and other groups.
He could launch a massive counter-extremism plan.
I pray that he will rise to the occasion.
Despite all these building bankruptcies there must still be good money to be made .. house building! ..
Above part of the Prospect Dam cycleway I ride along some company is building a single street accessed thru the Pemulwuy(Graystanes) estate .. now into their 3rd year house frames are, actually, going up! .. the 1st 2 1/2 years was spent levelling the area and building retaining walls .. the, actual site is on the steep hill off to the Parramatta side of the dam so they had to dig out & flatten around a 100/150mts width, the retaining walls are . to put it mildy, MASSIVE! .. the front one just above the cycleway is 25mts high and made with giant rock boulders the rear one is the same, at least, 5 mts higher than the framework of the tallest (2 storey) house below it .. It’s a one road affair with what looks like, maybe, 40 houses in progress ..
How they managed to get the area re-zoned is anyone’s guess as all around is/has been water catchment for Prospect Dam/pipeline since , whenever, the Dam/pipeline was built .. 3 times since they started and before retainers were finished it was all washed away in heavy weather .. this is a steep, 1 in 3 hill, area but now roads/lighting are in and building underway ……
Sooo maybe in 6 months folk will be living there .. can’t see any change out of ,at least, $1million per property given the amount of work/heavy machinery & acquiring the land must have cost but it must be worthwhile profit-wize to have pushed it all thru ………
Tho for the folk at the back wall the view out of the rear windows will be quite daunting .. straight into a, mad made, cliff face .. I’m assuming they have some system, in place, to divert the water when the rains come LOL!
kneel> excellent point on “savings” vs “costs”. Clueless management will often ignore risk to save money and boost their personal payouts.
For anyone interested, here is a diagram of the layers involved for a company like Optus hosting networks and customers who require network access.
BGP routing updates are (or should be) protected by certificates owned/manage by Optus to prove the updates are reliable & safe. Somehow that process broke down yesterday leaving Optus & customers unable to connect.
Im not, and not because I dont believe Israel is not justified in seeking vengeance.
I believe the decision is fraught for several reasons
1) city fighting *always* heavily favours the defender because it happens at close quarters with abundant cover – this negates the technological advantages of Israel, particularly airpower and artillery.
2) Hamas *must* know their attack would trigger an Israeli invasion, and will have prepared for it.
3) This is a classic asymmetric war with asymmetric victory conditions – Hamas wins by not losing, Israel loses by not winning – the only path to an Israeli victory here is to raze gaza and eliminate the entire population *and* the diaspora, and they lack the political, economic and military power to do that. Worse still, as in all guerilla wars, each insurgent killed generates more than 1 to replace him from the host population, due to collateral damage.
With property, construction and contracting never mistake activity for profit.
I had a charisma replacement five years ago and recently had a check-up. The surgeon told me it was wearing a bit thin.
I had a charisma transplant a few years ago. Unfortunately it rejected me.
Just walked to my beautician for a treatment. Walked up Castlereagh Street and on every pole there were pro-Palestinian posters with vividly coloured photos of bloodied and dead Palestinian children. Walking to my appointment I tore as many down as possible, walking back from my appointment I tore more down and two men, of middle eastern descriptions, walked up to me and asked me, in their gruff voices, why I was taking them down, and I responded…
Because I can and I will, and don’t either of you come near me or I’ll call the police.
I shouldn’t laugh, but seriously, if this happened here and especially in the UK a couple of times, I am sure Art galleries and roads would be problem free once more.
You cannot reason with these retards; they are so full of moral virtue and a sense of superiority that they regard people who disagree with them as subhuman. And they’re so arrogant: the guy gets out of his car with a gun and they lecture and abuse him. FMD.
Image of press embedded with Hamas on 7 October:
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1722351099619791099?s=20
BoN,
I had a brolga in my backyard just now. The same one as a day ago.
Prior to this I’ve only ever had one brolga visit about 6 years ago.
Beautiful to watch.
Because I can and I will, and don’t either of you come near me or I’ll call the police.
You’re a brave girl; but be advised: you’re dealing with complete bastards; and if they can they will assault you so always, always, make sure you have back up, are covered by witnesses who are sympathetic or have a quick getaway in place.
“You’re a brave girl; but be advised: you’re dealing with complete bastards; and if they can they will assault you so always, always, make sure you have back up, are covered by witnesses who are sympathetic or have a quick getaway in place.”
I have no doubt if it was in a park, I would have been. But it was Castlereagh Street with many people around, so they thought twice.
Worth reading. Hope there is a unified fight back on this otherwise small businesses will see their end days.
From the Australian
“Jim Chalmers’ position untenable in Rankin if IR laws that slash ACCC powers pass
Treasurer Jim Chalmers will have a lot of explaining to do in his electorate if the IR reforms are allowed to pass. Picture: Damian Shaw
registered-breach-pixel
By robert gottliebsen
9:35AM November 9, 2023
On top of the latest interest rate rise and without any widespread community debate, Australia is heading towards intensifying the sufferings of the vast numbers under mortgage stress.
And to compound the suffering, the powers of the ACCC’s chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb are set to be slashed to enable large transport cartels to be established and independent truckies destroyed.
Australia is being insulated from this crisis by seven national heroes — the independents in the Senate — who are preventing the passage of the 784 page “Albanese” industrial relations legislation.
Today I return to the subject to describe the untenable position of Treasurer Jim Chalmers because the people in his electorate of Rankin in Queensland will be among the worst sufferers if any two of the independents buckle.
Chalmers should be dreading the prospect that sometime in 2024 he will have to tell his Queensland electorate the horrible truth of what is going to hit them.
He is no fool and he must be aware what could be ahead.
And the new blows are set to be so severe on a large percentage of his electorate that there will be community revolts that are likely to be so widespread and intense that it will be impossible to use interest rates to curb inflation.
That’s what happened in Argentina many years ago.
These are extreme words, but they are justified.
My job is to alert the community in advance to prevent it happening.
Rankin has affluent people in its community, but is dominated by mainstream Australians with more than 65 per cent of them voting No in the recent referendum.
Chalmers obviously knows his electorate is dominated by people who are suffering because their base income is not matching their mortgage interest payments.
But they do not want to lose their homes and, sometimes with bank help, they are bridging the gap using the gig economy and benefiting from the 25 per cent premium entitlement if they work on a casual basis rather than being full or part-time employees.
And, as they see it, thanks to Chalmers, there are plenty of jobs.
Higher interest rates are not the only looming crisis for Chalmers in Rankin.
Rankin, which includes the suburb of Logan, is a wonderful place to base small independent trucking businesses.
If Chalmers mixed with the Logan truckies, he would know their flexibility and price competitiveness often outflanks the majors who are becoming very annoyed.
But Australia benefits from independent truckies’ low costs and most truckies are doing well. The small truckies love their trucks and are among the safest operators in the country.
And they know they have the protection of Ms Cass-Gottlieb should the majors use underhand illegal tactics to beat them.
Cass-Gottlieb is their hero for taking on the might of Qantas.
But the industrial relations bill ruthlessly strips away the ACCC’s powers to protect truckies and exposes them to a body to be set with the power to destroy them.
It can force them to sell their homes because the dwellings are part of the security for the bank loan financing the truck.
If two of the seven Senate independents allow that bill to go through, Logan will be a centre of one of Australia’s biggest and longest running protests as the 50,000 truckies fight for their homes and livelihoods.
The only answer Chalmers can truthfully give them is: “it wasn’t me who did this”.
Meanwhile, once the transport regulation powers of the ACCC are shredded and Cass-Gottlieb effectively demoted, transport cartels and costs will rise sharply as will inflation and with that will come pressure to raise interest rates further.
To date, like other government members, Chalmers has been able to tell his electorate that the higher interest rates won’t last forever and the government is beginning to take actions like creating the budget surplus, reducing spending and various subsidy programs to bring about reduced inflation, which will eventually lead to lower rates.
And he his telling the truth as he sees it.
Again, if two of the independents crack and the incredible IR bill passes in its present form, then the fury of most of the voters of Rankin — not just truckies — will become white-hot.
As the bill now stands, not only will most of them not be able to work casually and therefore suffer a 25 per cent cash pay cut, large parts of the gig economy that they use to gain supplementary income from will become almost impossible to operate.
Platforms like Airtasker, which Rankin residents use to find those jobs will close or be curtailed.
New amendments will help, but will not alter the thrust of the legislation.
The government did a deal with the hotels association, which apparently gives some protection for the casual hotel workers.
But the agreement was a farce for the rest of the community’s casual workers because the tests that need to be to passed to allow someone to be allowed the privilege of working on a casual basis are simply too complex for any employer to take the risk.
Under the hotel deal, the government is to ignore the penalties for employers, but that’s a smokescreen because they can be put back at any time and made retrospective to destroy enterprises.
Casual work is out and take-home pay cuts are set to be widespread if the bill passes.
How does Chalmers explain to his electorate that the government is deliberately increasing their mortgage stress knowing it will force people out of their homes?
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is off on another trip, but Chalmers needs to hitch a ride on the next available Albanese plane and explain to him what’s actually happening Down Under.
If there are no seats on the plane, then Chalmers must simply hope that the independents continue to act in the national interest and block the bill.”
Multiculturalism is worth fighting for and the fight has arrived.
That is debatable
It is dead. We all know what babaganoush and pitta taste like. It was only good for restaurants and exotic music to remind the rapidly wrinkling baby boomers of their first youthful OS trip to Turkey or India in the 60s and 70s.
The land of tolerance, Pakistan, has the right idea. Moving 2 million Afghans out of the country in a few weeks. I wonder if that will come up in the next speech by the Teals and Greens.
Good post.
Alistair Heath accurately documents the deliberate collapse of the British social compact. One point I seriously disagree with:
Cameron’s PM-ship was certainly not any sort of high-water mark of British common sense and good order. He floundered around in the slipstream of the appalling Blair years – where the ‘Cool Brittania’ reaction to Thatcherism empowered the institutions Heath points at to adopt the present shopping list of Marxist woke twaddle.
The insurmountable problem to the immediate issue, the thing that allows London to be taken over by Hamas and its supporters, is the post 1981 concept of community policing. Public order laws and conduct are now fully negotiable – and the more unsettling you are the more negotiable they are.
Team Sunak has no chance of putting this genie back in its bottle.
Police doing some good work.
—-
Steve Inman:
The only type of drag show I can get behind
CHINA – China new coal transportation rail network.
100 new coal fired power stations to add to the 3095, all needed to provide the West with products, including solar panels.
So we can pretend we are carbon neutral
From – https://joannenova.com.au/2023/11/un-admits-world-will-crash-through-paris-agreement-goals-by-a-factor-of-two-for-2030/
“But it’s okay when we (Muslims) do it!”
The law abiding gun owner wins the day.
—–
Steve Inman:
Armed Robber vs Armed Customer
Speaking of which China just opened the new 1,800 kilometer Haoji Railway — specifically to carry coal
It has 770 bridges spanning a total of 381 kilometers and 468 kilometers of tunnels.
They started it in 2015.
No one is holding back on fossil fuels here: Wow, that is some bridge.
From the Comments
– Look how the Chinese get things done, unlike Australia which labours(sic) to get any infrastructure – be it roads or energy security completed on time and on budget. Try and tell proponents of renewables that traditional fossil fuels are here to stay. Deluded and smug nation we are.
– Aye, I was thinking along that lines too – UK’s HS2 rail project, Scottish A9 Trunk road Dualling ( effectively stalled and just bitsy peacey), Hah! and the Scottish Ferry building fiasco. Maybe should have built towers like that across the Minch and Pentland Firth. Och aye the Noo!
– The fact that a developed nation like China (falsely claimed to be Third World by the useful idiots and their Elite leadership) is continued to be allowed to use coal tells you everything you need to know.
– Plus, as the Left keep telling us –endlessly-, we all know windmills are the cheapest and most reliable way to produce electricity, so why do they bother building two coal power stations per week?
“Was Involved in Uk Teletext, and US DARPA supported the evolution of the ARPANET (the first wide-area packet switching network), Packet Radio Network, Packet Satellite Network and ultimately, the Internet…”
I recall downloading and compiling the source for Mosaic on a Sun Sparc workstation – of course, there was ONLY a CERN website at the time… never did build anything to cross-reference and HTML-ify the GB of data we had.
Linux kernel version 0.2 or so, but they did have all the build tools (FLEX, BISON, gcc etc), which was handy with a multi-platform environment (Spark, 68K, x86) so you could cross compile once you had a working tool-chain on one platform. That made our custom software easily “movable” depending on users, umm, quirks/preferences.
That’s because it was a lot of crap Lizzie.
Honestly do you really think terrorists, who had been told by their leaders to rape everyone they could*, stood back and made judgementa about who had the skimpiest outfit as they raced to kill and rape as many people as possible, sometimes they killed first and raped second.
I watched an interview with a 94 year old survivor who had somehow survived a grenade attack saying how she had seen her grandson shot in the stomach and had to watch terrorists do unspeakable things to her granddaughter before killing her.
Claiming Shani Louk’s skimpy outfit was, well anything, is utter nonsense.
* as testified to by captured terrorists.
Gixxer petrol tank cleaned of rust.
Filled it with nuts and bolts and small rocks from the garden, added small quantity of vinegar and attached it to the concrete mixer. Gave it a few hundred rotations and voila!
“Steven Crowder
@scrowder
BREAKING: 7 Nashville officers were just placed on admin leave in connection with the release of the #NashvilleManifesto.
The powers that be are more concerned about finding the leaker than they are about the contents of Audrey Hale’s anti-white manifesto.
Interesting.”
Yup, just the facts Ham’Mam…
A toy and a prayer mat lie among the rubble after an Israeli attack hit a family home in Rafah, Gaza, on Tuesday. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Anadolu/Getty Images
Another Pallywood production..
Do editors ever wonder why papers are losing credibility?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/nov/08/gaza-diary-part-18-how-many-people-are-we-going-to-lose-before-we-get-out-of-this-nightmare
Much wow, freaky, huge coincidence.
He knows of one whole family (5) killed by the eeeevil Israelis out of 2 million in Gaza/
Im not saying its 100% bullshit, but looking at numerical odds alone, it seems a little unlikely.
There are a lot of hawkish comments on the Cat currently, so I assume that everyone is still happy with the decision to enter.
Im not, and not because I dont believe Israel is not justified in seeking vengeance.
And what alternative action could Israel pursue , Duk?
The western world is at a crossroad (possibly a way past that crossroad, actually) –
we have made some terrible choices in the last generation, all buffered by optimism, altruism, and a dozen other “isms” generated by “affluenza”.
Among them, the concept of multiculturalism was perhaps the most damaging in the long term. Our species is fundamentally tribal in nature and although the most powerful cultures/nations have permitted intermarriage and cultural intermingling, it succeeds only when laws are strictly enforced. Religious beliefs can be one of the most disruptive influences, even in very strong states, as many nations, such as the late Roman Empire found.
Democracy and the ideas of personal freedom that this political system generated, have always been vulnerable to subversion in nations that have not maintained a strong sense of nationalism. This is where we are today.
Israel, on the other hand, does not enjoy the luxury of a loose sense of citizenship. You are right that this sortie by Hamas was elaborately planned. But it is a life and death struggle. May God be with Israel.
1st Pass rain will probably miss us – 64 km Sydney (Terrey Hills) Radar Loop
But 2nd Pass will definitely get us
128 km Sydney (Terrey Hills) Radar Loop
I like this chap, seems well informed.
And all the right people hate him.
Imagine debasing yourself as an ëconomist”by endorsing a government which has inflation running at 120%
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/08/argentina-election-javier-milei-economists-warning
The election of the radical rightwing economist Javier Milei as president of Argentina would probably inflict further economic “devastation” and social chaos on the South American country, a group of more than 100 leading economists has warned….
….
..whose signatories include influential economists such as France’s Thomas Piketty, India’s Jayati Ghosh, the Serbian-American Branko Milanovi? and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo.
The letter said Milei’s proposals – while presented as “a radical departure from traditional economic thinking” – were actually “rooted in laissez-faire economics” and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people”.
…
Milei, who bursts into uncontrollable fits of rage at the mere mention of the 20th-century English philosopher and economist John Maynard Keynes, is unlikely to be impressed by the open letter. Milei considers Keynes, who challenged the idea that free markets could provide full employment and economic growth, a Marxist.
A new podcast by the Spanish newspaper El País interviewed one of Milei’s former neighbours who, in an attempt to make small talk, mentioned Keynes in the lift. “But you are a communist piece of shit,” Milei reputedly shouted at the woman all the way up to the 10th floor. Milei has also attacked Piketty in the past, calling him a “turd” and “a criminal disguised as an intellectual”.
Didn’t watch the debate but I saw some clips & stills on twitter.
Chris Christie gets bespoke suits.
Which fit him terribly.
Trump’s bespoke suits are very well made & hide his girth well.
Christie’s make him look cartoonish.
Chris Christie needs to realise that the establishment GOP donors have chosen Haley, not him.
He’d be better off spending the next election cycle concentrating on his health.
1st Pass rain will probably miss us – 64 km Sydney (Terrey Hills) Radar Loop
But 2nd Pass will definitely get us
128 km Sydney (Terrey Hills) Radar Loop
The first rain hit us a while ago. Lovely thunderstorm, but gauge only recorded a few mm – though could be more at other end of property.
Any rain very welcome.
Captured Hamas terrorists could be charged with rape – Paywalled
Israeli investigators have collected evidence of sex attacks against women during the deadly cross-border raid on Oct 7
By Nataliya Vasilyeva, MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT, IN JERUSALEM
Israel is reportedly considering whether to charge Hamas fighters with rape, after a witness testified about a suspected gang rape at the site of the Supernova music festival massacre.
Investigators from the Israeli police’s Lahav 433 national crime unit have collected evidence of sexual offences against women by Hamas attackers during the deadly cross-border raid on Oct 7, Israel’s Haaretz and Maariv newspapers reported on Wednesday.
One female survivor of the attack at the music festival near the Gaza border has given testimony, saying while she was hiding from the terrorists she saw a young woman gang raped and murdered.
“As I was hiding, I could see in the corner of my eye that a [gunman] was raping her,” the woman was quoted as saying.
The survivor reportedly testified that other gunmen also appeared to have raped the victim and later shot her in the head, then mutilated her body.
Another witness who was hiding in the same area but did not see the rape reportedly informed the investigators that he was told about the incident by the surviving woman as it happened.
Previous accusations of rape by Hamas fighters came from emergency responders of the Zaka group who collected the bodies from the ransacked kibbutzim and the site of the festival. Some of the responders said that they saw the naked bodies of dead women that showed signs of abuse.
Israeli authorities are believed to be holding hundreds of suspects involved in the Hamas attack.
The Israeli authorities previously did not officially report any instances of rape but several women taken hostage by Hamas on Oct 7, some of them partygoers captured at the festival, were paraded naked in the streets of Gaza.
Shani Louk, an Israeli-German woman who went to the festival, was seen half-naked and unconscious laying face-down in the back of a pick-up truck filled with gunmen in Gaza.
She was later declared dead when authorities found bone fragments that matched her DNA.
And these are the Gazan Palestinian Hamas Barbarians that The Australian Labor Party/Greens & some TEALS et al support
Bruce, a rather bedraggled young Kookaburra has taken to arriving on our verandah railings and looking hopeful. We give him some of Attapusses rejected kangaroo mincemeat, and he gobbles it up, making heavy weather of doing so with that great beak they have as his tiny body wobbles on the narrow feeding ledge. A couple of his feathers are all askew and I suspect he may have entangled with a crow, and escaped. He does seem a little shellshocked and grateful for care. They are sweet birds.
US universities including Cornell, Harvard and MIT raked in $13B in ‘undocumented contributions’ from foreign donors: report
Easily Bought
Over 200 US universities including elite institutions Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been accused of raking in $13 billion in “undocumented contributions from foreign governments,” according to a new report.
A sizable portion of the funds were said to be donated from authoritarian regimes around the globe including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE, the report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) claimed.
The huge windfall of cited money was not recorded with the US Department of Education between 2014 and 2019, the NCRI said.
Carnegie Mellon University received the most from foreign entities in that time span at $1.47 billion while Cornell University scooped up $1.29 billion, Harvard University notched $894 million and MIT collected $859 million, according to the report.
Qatar donors easily contributed the most to institutions, at $2.7 billion, though England was second on the list and provided $1.4 billion.
About $1.2 billion flowed from China and another $1.1 billion came from Saudi Arabia, per the report. The UAE reportedly contributed $431 million.
The authors of the report state in in its conclusion it:
“Raises the sobering possibility that international actors are using undisclosed channels to funnel large amounts of money into college campuses (including elite institutions that often have outsized influence on American culture and politics) for purposes harmful to the democratic norms of pluralism, tolerance, and freedom.”
Captured Hamas terrorists could be charged with rape – Paywalled
This could be one of the valuable developments, in terms of the position of “doubters” in the West.
It is one of the most upsetting aspects of the aftermath of 7/10 that many people are still either ignoring the atrocities, or astonishingly, claiming they are “manufactured” by Israelis.
The Oz
Aussie big wave hunter Laura Enever breaks record, surfing a monster
“I felt the wave lift me up and when I jumped to my feet I looked down and I thought ‘holy cow this is the biggest wave I have ever been on’,” she recalled.
“I took the drop and was going down for an eternity but I made it and I looked up and saw this four story building falling down on me.
The grainy distant footage shows someone taking off on a monster wave. …however it appears to me (and I could be wrong), stays low on the board for the drop, stands up at the bottom and gets wiped out. Not sure I’d call that a ride. I would expect standing during the drop and riding out of the wave.
To be clear I would certainly talk it up …but for global news to celebrate it? I think not.
“It wiped me out, but I made the drop.”
CL at 11:06.
Not the point.
Optus charges good money for a service and they failed to supply it.
Failed spectacularly.
And just 12 months after they managed to spray the private details of millions of customers all over the web.
Ms Rosmarin’s photo shoot story is entirely relevant, as it is emblematic of the narcissistic cult of personality she runs.
Inform yourself. Go look up the number of SJW causes she has embroiled Optus in, the latest being da Voice.
At the time of the data spill (which is the correct term for it) I made the point that the core technical part of the business wouldn’t rate in the top ten issues discussed at Exec meetings and Board meetings.
She deserves every bit of criticism she is copping.
If there are no seats on the plane, then Chalmers must simply hope that the independents continue to act in the national interest and block the bill.”
Lambie & Pocock have dun a deal, this morning, on 4 other clauses of the bill being side-tracked so the rest of it, including I assume all the above, is thru the Senate ………
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-09/senate-passes-split-ir-bill/103084278
November 11th will be a show of strength and intimidation by the muslims throughout the world.
Downloaded and compiled Ingres database on Sparc. Initially code updates were sent on tapes via courier and there was zero tech support except for fellow geeks in same city. Fun times.
There is a vaccination available for collaborators.
I’ll be surprised if it happens at my local, but I’ll be ready if it does.
Munificence
In the days of the Ottomans, the Sultan decided to visit the villages on the edges of his empire. In one poor village, way across the lava fields, the waves of dunes, and near the Mountains of Paradise, the Sultan’s entourage arrived in full splendour. The Sultan, to show his munificence, declared, ‘My fellaheen, every day you travel far to fetch water from a well. I, your Sultan, will build you a zir (a large vessel for holding water) so you will not have to go to the well.’
The crowd cheered, ‘Suleiman Akbar.’
Then a voice from the crowd came, ‘But who will fill this zir?’
In a slow voice so everyone could hear, ‘I, Protector of the Poor, will appoint a zir filler.’ Another cheer.
‘But if he is sick, what will we do?’
‘I will appoint an assistant to the zir filler.’ Cheer.
‘But, but, who will pay them?’
‘I, Suleiman the Magnificent, will pay and appoint an accountant to look after it.’
‘But… but…’ ‘And an assistant accountant.’
The Sultan looked around, pleased with his brilliance.
‘But, the village nearby will steal our water.’
‘Alright,’ he boomed. ‘I will appoint a guard… and an assistant guard. Now, anything else?’
‘But who will manage all the six people, your magnificence, and where will they work?’
‘I, your Ruler and Benefactor, will appoint a manager, assistant manager. I will build an office block with many floors for administration, including HR, animal care for the donkey, its keeper and the assistant donkey and its keeper, logistics, WHS, Communication…’
Yeah, it was thought a million are going to turn out in London alone.
Fury as ‘ONE MILLION’ pro-Palestine protesters set to march through London on Armistice Day (2 Nov)
A million Nazis marching in London on Remembrance Day makes Mr Mosley look like a piker.
Well Done Australian Labor Party – PM “Never Here” Albooverseasy, Blackout Bowen, Penny “Palestinian” Wong and Who is Jim Chalmers
Australia records biggest income decline in the developed world
Michael Read – Economics correspondent
Australian households have suffered the largest fall in living standards of any advanced economy over the past year as high inflation, a rapid increase in mortgage repayments and rising income taxes ravage household budgets.
Inflation-adjusted disposable incomes have hit their lowest level since June 2019 after falling for seven consecutive quarters, newly released data from the OECD show. The data are also adjusted for population growth.
The figures underscore the political challenge facing the Albanese government, as polling consistently shows the rapid rise in the cost of living has become the single most important issue for voters.
In the 12 months to June, Australian household incomes slumped 5.1 per cent, the sharpest fall recorded across the OECD, according to analysis by The Australian Financial Review.
The outcome was in contrast to the OECD as a whole, where living standards increased 2.6 per cent as countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and France recorded real income gains.
The decline means Australian real household incomes are now just 18 per cent higher than in 2007, compared with 22 per cent across the OECD as a whole.
While headline inflation in Australia is lower than the OECD average, nominal wages are also growing at a much slower pace than many other advanced economies, including the UK, Canada, the Euro Area and the US.
Jarden chief economist Carlos Cacho said the OECD data showed Australian households were victim to a perfect storm of factors that led to materially worse outcomes than other countries – surging population growth, persistently high inflation and a household sector dominated by variable rate borrowers.
“The pass-through of interest rate hikes to households is faster and stronger for Australia than many peers,” Mr Cacho said.
“Norway and Sweden are the next two countries with the weakest real disposable income growth who are also seeing a material drag from interest payments.”
The share of outstanding mortgages with variable rates is higher in Australia than in any other advanced economy except for Norway, according to Reserve Bank research.
With the cash rate at 4.35 per cent, a household with a $500,000 loan is paying $1210 a month more on its mortgage than it was in May 2022, representing a 59 per cent increase, according to RateCity.
Disposable incomes surged at the onset of the pandemic as the Morrison government unleashed $429 billion in fiscal stimulus, which experts have since found dramatically overcompensated households for the losses experienced due to COVID-19.
Excessive stimulus meant the Australian household sector accumulated a far larger savings buffer than the average advanced economy, according to economists at the US Federal Reserve.
While those savings have supported households over the past year, the researchers found the buffer was almost depleted.
Income tax and population surge
Mr Cacho said bracket creep was also a factor behind the rapid decline in living standards.
Australia is among the cohort of 21 OECD countries that do not index their tax brackets for inflation.
Seventeen OECD countries automatically adjust their brackets to compensate for higher prices.
Because tax brackets are not indexed to inflation, increases in nominal wages lead to increases in average taxes, since a greater proportion of a worker’s pay is pushed into the highest bracket applicable to them. Economists call this bracket creep.
As a result, a near-record 16.2 per cent of household incomes was lost to income tax in the three months to June, according to the national accounts.
Deloitte Access Economics lead partner Pradeep Philip said the decline in real incomes highlighted the importance of fundamentally overhauling Australia’s tax system.
“The overreliance of taxation on individuals is something that has to shift dramatically,” Dr Philip said.
“The key thing is to shift the mix away from direct personal income tax to other sources.”
Dr Philip said Australia’s 2.2 per cent population growth rate explained about one-third of the decline in per capita incomes.
“The problem is not population growth per se, because there are a lot of benefits from population growth, and Australia has unambiguously been a winner from population growth,” he said.
“The solution is actually to grow the economy to accommodate that high population growth, because then we create a virtuous cycle.
“We want people coming in because there are skill shortages. We need reforms that lift the supply side and growth capacity of the economy.”
Southern Tablelands, poured for an hour. Good stuff.
Bad stuff, killed my first snake of the season. In the outside cat run. Cat had it bailed up in a corner, nearly shat myself when I walked in. Note to self, sharpen spade edge.
ps, not sad for snake. Stay away from my house and yard.
I make speeches from the throne all the time, but none of them stink as badly as this one does.
On Point: Time To Strike Ayatollah Iran?
November 8, 2023
Despite waging proxy offensive wars throughout the Middle East — wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, in the Persian Gulf littoral, Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel — Iran’s ayatollah regime has escaped deadly retribution.
The Pentagon jargon term for “we’re really going to kill you” is “kinetic attack.” That means conducting violent and destructive attacks using very powerful weapons delivered by military forces.
Recent U.S. military moves in the Middle East at least suggest Iran could face devastating offensive kinetic retaliation.
Undisguised military moves are a form of diplomacy. However, military deployments –even suggestions involving missile submarines and heavy bombers — don’t mean an American counterattack on THE ayatollahs and their vicious allies is imminent, especially with the Biden administration in charge.
The Biden administration has a dismal leadership record. Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco demonstrated instinctive gutlessness.
Reviewing recent events helps frame the facts indicating U.S. offensive preparations.
In a column published Oct. 25 I discussed Iranian proxy attacks on two different fronts that involved American military forces.
Iraq-Syria Front: On Oct. 18 Iranian proxies in Iraq began launching drone and rocket attacks on U.S. forces and assets in Iraq and Syria.
As I write this on Nov. 7, the attacks continue. The attacks have wounded American personnel — 46 wounded according to one source. The U.S. has launched limited strikes against Iranian proxies in Syria. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned the U.S. would strike back if attacks continued.
Red Sea/Arabian Peninsula Front: On Oct. 19, the USS Carney, a Navy guided-missile destroyer in the Red Sea, downed several missiles and drones launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
The Pentagon concluded the missiles and drones were targeting Israel, not the USS Carney.
Reasonable conclusion, since the Houthis routinely target Saudi Arabian cities and oil facilities.
The column included this warning: “Guided-missile warships carry a limited number of offensive and defensive missiles.” Even cheap suicide drone shots by Houthi fighters eventually “deplete a warship’s missile magazine and leave it vulnerable to a coup de grace.”
The enemy goal: the ship runs out of defensive munitions. With no anti-air, anti-missile, or, to use a term pertinent to Israel, with no anti-projectile munitions, and very likely the next volley of enemy projectiles strike ship, kill U.S. Navy sailors and sink it.
A nation state, like a ship, can run out of anti-projectile munitions.
Israel has a very advanced anti-projectile defense systems. Israel can identify and intercept and destroy incoming projectiles — from the small (mortar and artillery rounds, short range rockets), to the semi and middle range (rockets, drones and short range ballistic and cruise missiles), to the medium range (longer range drones, medium range cruise and ballistic missiles, strike aircraft) and long-range ballistic missiles and drones.
Iron Dome is the primary short defense system. The Arrow-2 is Israel’s mid-range defense weapon and Arrow-3 can handle longer range threats.
So far only cheap drones have been used in long range strikes. However, Hamas (from Gaza) and Hezbollah (from Lebanon) have fired thousands of rockets.
Word is Israel is running out of Iron Dome’s Tamir anti-projectile rockets. The U.S. has begun shipping Tamirs to Israel.
But why let Iran set the battle conditions and force Israel to expend defensive munitions?
The alternative: Attack the enemy that empowers Hamas. Iran.
On Nov. 5 a U.S Navy Ohio-class guided-missile submarine passed through the Suez Canal. The sub can carry 154 Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles. That’s a lot of conventional firepower. On November 6 the Pentagon touted the deployment of B-1 strategic bombers to the Middle East. B-1s can carry more bombs than B-52s and stealthy B-2 bombers.
The sub and heavy bombers send this signal to Tehran: the U.S. has the military platforms in range to deliver a “simultaneous strategic bombing strike.” In a short time frame, aircraft, cruise missiles, drones and perhaps ballistic missiles with conventional warheads deliver hundreds of precision weapons, hitting nuclear targets and air defense sites.
A bluff? Stay tuned.
There are a lot of hawkish comments on the Cat currently, so I assume that everyone is still happy with the decision to enter.
Take off the gloves – the UN can go and get.
No supplies, no water, no electricity, no internet, no fuel, no “aid”.
Let Hamas use their hidden supplies until they run out.
Their leaders are swanning it up in luxury in Qatar anyway.
Send the Greens over there to sort it out. Better infesting that dung heap than ours.
Yes, it seems so.
The extent of criminality, if any, might be determined by how much he knew about that, and how wilful he might have been trying to get around it.
Hmmmm. “Surging population growth”, if only there was some way for the government to control that!
The Sydney Opera House steps will forever be known as the place where the anti-semites were permitted to assemble and chant “Gas the Jews”. We will never live it down.
I completely understand that fella in Panama.
The Sydney Opera House steps will forever be known as the place where the anti-semites were permitted to assemble and chant “Gas the Jews”. We will never live it down.
Still hard to believe that our iconic Opera House was the venue for such an abomination as that “protest” of Hamas supporters which revived and celebrated that stain on humanity – the Holocaust.
This instance shows perfectly that even, or especially, technicians dealing with communications technology are not able to be effective if working remotely. New operations manual will need to be put together to prevent future disasters though a manual is useless if your staff are incompetent.
There is a lot of talk about “Brand”.
The trouble is, it is no longer viewed as an output of all the actions of an enterprise which builds trust with customers.
The Todd Sampson types believe they are the Masters of Brand Creation and can fashion a “Brand” out of thin air, or smokescreen any damage to public image through soppy advertising.
When you have an established, long term brand (Apple, Qantas, Coca Cola) never, ever let a Todd type anywhere near it.
They will always want to improve it, or “leverage” it.
Rates, roads and rubbish are so yesteryear for local councils. Hun:
FMD
I kept the former landline number when my suburb was changed over to NBN even though I knew it was useless as a backup which it used to be even when the power went off. I kept it because it didn’t cost much when bundled up with the internet and a few elder relatives in Australia and overseas preferred to contact us that way.
Swimming pools in Aboriginal communities are apparently closed because of a shortage of qualified lifeguards:
Let’s get this straight.
Everyone agrees that pools are a Good Thing in remote communities, not least because they get the kids properly washed and disinfected, something their parents don’t do.
The pools are paid for and maintained at considerable expense by (net) taxpayers, none of whom reside in these communities.
Yet, none of the unemployed adults, many of whom are parents, are stepping up to be lifeguards?
This highlights the cultural sickness that cannot be spoken of, but that is at the core of the poverty and deprivation in these places.
When I was growing up in the Shire, the surf lifesaving movement was a core social agglomerater of disparate individuals, and well respected. It was voluntary, unpaid and supported by local fundraising events.
The people who visited the beaches around Cronulla were not always from the area, and the people who were rescued were usually unknown to their rescuers.
Yet, here we have communities where most, probably all, of the patrons would be known to potential rescuers, yet it takes a gubbmint program, no doubt with bribes attached, to get enough lifeguards to be able to open the pools. Hopefully.
That is the pathology that no-one is allowed to mention, let alone talk about.
I look forward to the explanations about how colonialism and inter-generational trauma are responsible. Note they they never explain exactly how these mechanisms work for them, but did not work for convicts, Holocaust survivors, post WWII immigrants who arrived with nothing, Vietnamese refugees ditto – and so on and so on.
Looking at the barren wasteland of failed Leftism that is TheirABC, I see a story that reiterates and reinforces the culture of failure:
Translation: Give me and my friends and relatives millions of dollars to buy and run these places.
Well, we’ve been there and done that, and it doesn’t work.
Here’s the thing. You can’t embrace another culture (4WDs, hip hop, grog, gambling, porn, motor boats, helicopters and mansions) without giving up some of your own. It is simply dishonest to pretend otherwise.
The gravy train is all about the lie that nothing has a cost.
Well it does, as the little kids being abused out of sight and the women in the Darwin morgue tell us.
OldOzzie
Nov 9, 2023 3:30 PM
Possibly the only ABCcess presenter/interviewer worth feeding Richard Fidler had an excellent interview with an Aussie lass lacked up by the mad Mullas in Evian prison for 2 years.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations/kylie-moore-glbert-iran-prison-freedom/102959984
Worth a listen.
As she says at one point, the other “normal” prisoners told her it was SOP for the regime to imprison foreigners in order to get crap they wanted from the host countries. Funds unfrozen/ spies released etc.
In 2018, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was lining up at the airport in Iran to board a flight home to Australia after an academic conference, when she was pulled from the queue.
Accused of being a spy, Kylie was incarcerated in the political wing of Tehran’s Evin Prison, where she was kept in solitary confinement for months.
Her loneliness was broken only by long interrogation sessions, until other women prisoners reached out to her and together they established a secret communications system.
Kylie spent two years inside the prison system, hoping the Australian government would get her out of there, and refusing offers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to spy for the regime in return for early release.
Its a mafia state.
No-one should be allowed to go there at all until they change their ways.
Muddy
Nov 9, 2023 2:57 PM
Thanks Muddy.
race riot anyone?
They’ll be extremely patient, but I’m not sure a large number of ex. military types are going to put up with people dishonouring their dead for very long.
November 11th will be a show of strength and intimidation by the muslims throughout the world.
Yeah, it was thought a million are going to turn out in London alone.
Fury as ‘ONE MILLION’ pro-Palestine protesters set to march through London on Armistice Day (2 Nov)
The absolute nadir of Islamic immigration.
Roger
That’s the problem, Roger. The only ones who can declare a person an enemy alien are the ones who have written the laws. And they are not going to do that.
Currently there is a great lifting of the carpet on our collective floors and foundations. What is being exposed is the rotten edifice and power structure underneath that has eaten away the fruits of the Enlightenment.
We can repair it, but it will be a painful task to overcome the rot of the last 150 years.
Jeebers, the old Sydney town has gotten pretty dark all of a sudden.
How clever of them to keep it all in one place. I suppose relocating half the infrastructure elsewhere to minimise risk is too complicated for those geniuses.
YOUR reaction is the action, James Lindsay keeps telling us.
Watch the pro Palestinians goad the “normies” to provoke a reaction.
The spotlight will switch to the reaction, not the marchers, especially if the reaction is caught by the BBC which has form in these matters. The reaction will be used to ‘prove’ that Britons are racist Islamaphobes and result in more repressive legislation.
The High Court couldn’t find any rights for Australians during the pandemic but they can find rights for terrorists and now for stateless people refused visas on character grounds:
The landmark High Court ruling that’s left Anthony Albanese in a political pincher
I’ve come along way from being an anarchical , anti-monarchical, Trot… but I don’t think King Charles is going to help fix UK’s immigration problems.
We need a Richard I “lionheart”
calli
It looks like another dead cockroach has emerged from under the carpet.
Most of us are standing back and looking in horror at the putrid mess that is being revealed from under our feet.
What did CNN, Reuters & Associated Press know, and WHEN did they know it?
The email record will be interesting.
Argentina here we come. Look out when China falls over.
Fury as ‘ONE MILLION’ pro-Palestine protesters set to march through London on Armistice Day (2 Nov)
Western world is “reaping the whirlwind”.,
Just a reminder that gazan ‘civilians’ flooded in behind their hamas brothers.
Avi Yemeni has an interview up with a reservist/resident blaming many of the atrocities on so called civilians.
Of course the videos suggest they were all involved.
all join in
Decided in three minutes! Almost as quick as Pell’s acquittal!
Now, all Dutton has to do is tell sneering Leftards like Barrie Cassidy and David Marrsehole, he “doesn’t believe” the outcome, and carry on…
Ms Bayer Rosmarin should have a whole unit dedicated to her career.
Sancho Panzer at 3:47 – all true but you need both. Rolex are possibly the masters of branding.
IT’S THE RAPTURE!!!
Argentina here we come. Look out when China falls over.
IF China falls over we are screwed beyond all comprehension.
Still there will be some justice in seeing ex-uni tarts asking Balanise tourists if theyd like “jiggy jig”..
Which reminds me of a awful/funny scene i saw at a Feraldton bank.
There were about 5 dusky (heads like robbers dogs and figures to match) ladies trying to change various foreign notes at the bank.
The back and forth was going on for a while as i waited in line.
Then out of the blue one exclaims “You mean Ive been phukin all weekend for $15″…
The ladies had been providing services to desperate (and blind) mariners at the wharf and had discovered the joys of foreign currency conversion.
If only Montys economics course had been so instructive to him.
Israel: Israel and Iran
November 8, 2023: The major effect of Hamas’ attack on Israel is that it makes an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran inevitable, at least against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and probably also its oil export facilities.
This will happen when Iran gets close to developing nuclear weapons carried by ballistic missiles.
Given that Gaza’s Iranian proxy nutball Hamas regime just made a suicidal attack on Israel with Iran’s help, Israel simply cannot chance Iran’s equally nutball mullah regime making its own suicidal nuclear attack on Israel as soon as it has the means to do so.
A single nuclear airburst over an Israel city could kill several hundred thousand Israelis. Even if Israel doesn’t pre-emptively nuke Iran, Israel certainly will if Iran nukes Israel first. It’s really a question of who nukes who first.
Israel lacks the non-nuclear means to prevent Iran from developing such weapons. Iran’s nuclear program is now too widespread and dug in. Only the United States could do so, but it won’t, or at least not effectively, unless Iran overtly attacks the US, and maybe not even then if there is a Democratic President at the time.
Such an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran would spark world-wide rampant nuclear proliferation, which is a close to worst-case scenario for America’s own security.
But a nuclear-armed Iran would cause the same rampant nuclear proliferation even without attacking Israel.
The open favoritism and funding of Iran by the Obama and Biden administrations, particularly including the latter’s recent easing of oil sanctions on Iran, has created an impending disaster for America’s national security.
The Biden administration exacerbates this by calling on Israel for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Nothing could more convince Israel that it must rely only on its own strength concerning the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran.
Iran’s reaction to any major military action against it will be to launch thousands of guided missiles at the oil infrastructure of every other country in the Persian Gulf, excepting possibly Qatar, mining the Persian Gulf, and attacking shipping there.
This threat has definitely deterred attacks on Iran so far, but now Israel’s survival depends on nuking Iran before Iran has the capability of nuking Israel.
So, if there is a real good chance that Iran will attempt to stop everyone else’s exports from the Persian Gulf anyway, the downside from anyone else attacking Iran first is diminished.
And the United States could avert an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran, and thereby also the ensuing rampant nuclear proliferation, by itself pre-emptively attacking Iran using only conventional weapons.
No Democratic administration would do this because, for them, Iran’s nutball mullah regime are “misunderstood friends” who provide lucrative income opportunities.
But a Republican administration might.
Iran’s mullah regime has degenerated into the usual Middle Eastern oil kleptocracy with all the usual vulnerabilities.
The mullahs are now very corrupt, and that has produced such widespread suffering that Iran’s people are trying to overthrow the regime.
Oil kleptocracy regime survival depends on adequate sharing of the oil income with its regime protection forces, which here is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Inadequate sharing results in undesirable consequences for the regime, which do not always mean rebellion or regime overthrow.
The principal regime protection force of the ex-Soviet Union was the KGB, almost all of whose key personnel went into business for themselves (chiefly theft of state property) after Soviet hard currency earnings tubed when the Reagan administration decontrolled American oil and natural gas prices.
That was part of the Reagan administration’s plan to destroy the Soviet Union through economic warfare. That resulted in the KGB’s senior officers being mostly incompetent losers when the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991.
In Iran’s case, failure to support enough of the Revolutionary Guard in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed will almost certainly result in their being less energetic in suppressing attacks on the regime by the majority of Iran’s people. And Iran has a critical vulnerability.
98% of Iran’s oil exports flow through the one port of Karg Island.
Iran’s other oil ports lack even 10% of Karg Island’s capacity. Two American cruise missile submarines, carrying 154 non-nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles each, could completely knock out Karg Island for months, and its production could not be significantly restored in a year.
I.e., Iran’s oil income would pretty much cease for long enough that its mullah regime would be overthrown by their own people. And their nuclear weapons program would cease for lack of funding.
Karg Island is the strategic center of gravity in any conflict with Iran. Israel would certainly nuke it in the process of destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Iran would then take down as much of the entire Persian Gulf’s oil production as possible but, if the US launches a pre-emptive attack, a significant portion of that damage could be reduced by other non-nuclear attacks on Iranian naval forces and missile bases.
And Iran will try this if significantly attacked by anyone, which is pretty much guaranteed given that Israel is as determined to pre-empt Iran’s nuclear capability as it is to exterminate Hamas in Gaza.
No Democratic administration in this century will do anything to damage Karg Island.
It is highly likely that this will result in the worst strategic disaster in American history. Rampant nuclear proliferation will be that bad.
We better than most can economically afford the thoroughly intrusive security measures required to protect against terrorist nukes when the threat can come from anywhere, as opposed to Islamic extremists alone.
But the price of domestic security, when foreign security fails due to a failure of Presidential leadership and will, will be something much more precious – our freedom.
Freedom everywhere will suffer due to those same security precautions. The greatest loss of freedom will come in those countries which are freest, i.e., especially America. Especially us.
THIS is what is really at stake – the freedom which makes us Americans.
Their watches are great but there are a number of competitors that are arguably equally as good but do not enjoy the name recognition or price performance in secondary markets.
FX is tricky. Do I divide or multiply?
Chief Justice Stephen Gageler, just days into his new role as the head of the court, spoke for three minutes. His manner was mild but words wide-reaching. He told the court “at least a majority” of justices agreed sections of the Migration Act were unconstitutional.
If it were a TV court drama there’d have been gasps.
Court watchers expect that among those supporting the ruling was Justice Jacqueline Gleeson, the daughter of the former chief justice who dissented in Al-Kateb all those years ago.
The 2023 case relates to a Rohingya man from Myanmar. He too had arrived by boat, but in this case in September 2012. He received a bridging visa in September 2014, and was later arrested and charged with a child sexual offence the following January. This prompted the government to cancel his visa.
He pleaded guilty and went to jail. Authorities released him on parole in May 2018 and then immediately detained him because he didn’t have a visa to remain in Australia. H has been here ever since.
Lawyers for the man successfully argued that Al-Kateb was wrongly decided and that it was unconstitutional to detain a person where there is no real prospect they could be removed from Australia.
There are 2 parts to this BS. One is that if a prisoner who is not an Australian citizen who has committed a heinous crime but is refused a return to another nation and is therefore stateless cannot be deported from Australia. The other is now that person cannot be indefinitely detained once their prison citizen expires as was the case previously.
One can only hope that one of these judges or a family member suffers at the hands of one of the many miscreants who will now be released and inflicted on the wider community as a result of their insufferable judgment.
Some lessons are only learned by experience.
wild guess every Palestinian charity is funding hamas, willingly or unwillingly
Someone above was speculating the “backlash” to the million muzzie march would be the story…
Gruinaid has already started.
Far-right groups plot London rally against pro-Palestine march on Armistice Day
Extremist organisations and football hooligans have been urged to gather at Cenotaph in central London
………..
There remains little evidence that the calls from far-right figures will lead to significant number of their supporters coming out to cause trouble. On Tuesday, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, defied calls for the march to be banned, citing a lack of evidence of a risk of serious public disruption.
Nick Lowles, the chief executive of Hope Not Hate, said: “Parts of the far right are trying to mobilise against the pro-Palestine demonstration taking place this weekend around central London. However, these are by no means united efforts across the groups intending to head to London on Saturday.
“What remains to be seen is whether these groups have the power to mobilise in the way that they could several years ago. Tommy Robinson, his supporters, football hooligans and other far-right groups have failed in recent years to drum up sizeable numbers, but their appetite for confrontation could still pose a risk even if there is a small presence.”
It’s a rewards program for politicians who have been shafted by the voters, eg Mike Baird, Gladys Berijiklian, Anna Bligh etc.
Not if we start diversifying our exports to the rest of the world and slowly scale down those to China. CCP has shown us their teeth and we should start backing away.
Well I backed every horse in the Oaks except for the first 4.
No more punting today.
Aaah yes, the “nuanced and sophisticated” take.
Except that 2 of the most peaceful countries in the world are Germany and Japan despite Dresden, Hiroshima etc.
Insurgents only exist when there’s hope for their cause. Otherwise, it’s fear that is the dominant driving force.
Pogria
It will only take one person to snap and it will happen. Not necessarily with a gun, but someone who is already on the edge may just say “enough” and drive through.
new Germans won’t be be pleased about the huge increase in exports.
Not if we start diversifying our exports to the rest of the world and slowly scale down those to China.
On one side, inertia, net zero, mass migration, “shell be right” and vested interests.
On the other Turtlehead Bowen working with all his intellect to future proof the economy and launch us into the future.
I was wrong, we are DOOOOOOOOMMMMMMEDDD!!!!!
Well I backed every horse in the Oaks except for the first 4.
No gambling today.
Too hard.
Bad luck about the Oaks, Toad; except it hasn’t been run yet. 5:10pm AEDT