July 2017

Enjoy that birthday Jas, beautiful day for it.

Genius :)

Wow. Get your kids chewing hard.

The homebody's travel adventure shot.

So Pauly, listen to the minute or more of explanation starting at 6:18 to hear the genius of Brian May and electric guitar and amp design. I hate that it gets called 'the Brian May sound', as if it's some idiosyncratic personal taste thing. He did what nobody else figured out how to do, orders of magnitude more important than anything Leo Fender or Gibson etc. discovered, I think. He discovered how to: - have an electric guitar that can retain many of the harmonic properties of the underlying acoustics of the physical guitar itself, even when overdriven. Generally electric makers try to avoid that because it creates nightmare feedback issues, except in semi-hollow body jazz guitars, but those are rarely played overdriven, and can sound horrible when they are - can play at any point on a smooth continuum between clean and overdriven, so that no matter how overdriven it becomes, you can hear every note, even in complex chords that rock guitarists for example avoid because they sound total crap under distortion (or possibly they don't know the chords ;) ) - the thing sustains indefinitely. That alone is like the Holy Grail for overdriven guitar. EVH recently said his entire career has been about trying to find more sustain. May cracked it more than 50 years ago, this thing sustains without end.

Good resource for maths teachers, on exponents. I think Adele and other major acts have had the lesson already. How to screw the public, cubed. Sell pay TV subscription. Then charge $60 extra to watch a program. Then possibly even run ads during the broadcast? Yes I know, people are prepared to pay. Not this people.

You hear people talk about 'the economy' all the time. Which is kind of weird, because the economy doesn't exist. It's a myth. They do it I think because it allows people to bypass the messy work of doing actual politics. No need to consult with people and do the hard work of figuring out what's best for everybody if you can just focus on some numbers and say you're working with 'the economy'. It happens in organisations too, when managers think 'the company' is the figures and graphs they look at.

Happy Birthday Lydia!

Hope you have a wonderful birthday Michelle :)

Not strictly true. Some of the companies are making a motza out of the high bills, they're very happy.

Little things like this are sometimes a better comment on the world we live in. A queue, at that price.

Another twist on travel. Lucky Starr famously 'borrowed' Johnny Cash's "I've Been Everywhere Man" in 1962, and it became an anthem for the 'Big Lap' of Oz folk. Today we have Macca with a similar vibe in 'Australia All Over'. It's really interesting to try to understand why people want to accumulate places they've been, like kids collect trading cards. It means something important, I don't know the full answer but often people who have a passion for it also have a very jingoistic sense of place. It's probably a relic of empire, each person becomes a little Captain Cook, accumulating more and more places in their travels. And the passion for it is growing, with the Big Lap or journeys into the Australian heartland now the trendy thing. It's the mirror image of an age of fear, where migrants and foreigners are feared - at the same time the 'homeland' becomes a deep, patriotic thing.

"The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation." Denise Cummins

"This is the paradox of travel writing, and it's also something every traveller faces. On one hand, you want to share with your friends, with your family, with the world, these amazing places you've discovered. On the other hand, however, you don't want to make them any more popular than they already are. An influx visitors will change what made that destination so special in the first place." It's slowly dawning on people. But he told you where they are anyway, go forth and destroy.

"This is the paradox of travel writing, and it's also something every traveller faces. On one hand, you want to share with your friends, with your family, with the world, these amazing places you've discovered. On the other hand, however, you don't want to make them any more popular than they already are. An influx visitors will change what made that destination so special in the first place." Awareness is growing. Notice that he couldn't help telling everybody about these places anyway, because this is how it works. The whole point of him going there is to say to people "wow, I've been somewhere you've never heard of, and it's awesome, I'm awesome." It's like collecting exotic animals, there's a constant push to find the next thing nobody has ever seen before. It's what drives the travel industry, it consumes places, then spits them out and moves on. All to feed our need for endless distraction, and to position ourselves in status hierarchies back home.

The astronomical debt (mostly private, not public), fueling boom and bust cycles - that's the economic way of looking at it. Psychologically it means we live through cycles of extreme and crazy exuberance, followed by the inevitable crash that follows. Our societies are literally bipolar, it's not a coincidence that bipolar illness is absolutely rampant in individuals at the same time.

Hmmm yes. Not just me sayin' it.

"...up until about 2010, Facebook was mainly a website for young people. Young people doing stupid things. And it was glorious. But now, I can’t stand it. Now, all it is is one big family photo album full of weddings and babies all the time and I’m so bored with it I can barely bring myself to go on." You can do private life sharing in private FB groups. The amount of public oversharing of personal life details in peoples' main timelines - do friends of friends of friends really care about somebody else's holiday, or their kids? And FB is the first time in all of human history that there's a space where people can interact, globally, in real-time. Is the best use of it just to constantly post about ourselves? Is that a very 'social' thing to do? It's the slide night thing again, who wants to sit through endless details of other peoples' personal lives, old OR young?

That's how to open a rock show. The robot , 1977. Memories.

Unless you're vegan/vegetarian, is it actually possible to not like crumbed lamb cutlets? Genuinely curious.

Comment on a post from NASA, describing one of the spectacular galaxies astronomers have studied. It scares me that people like this are out there.

Number 4 would actually be my number 2. My number 1 would be people whose definition of a speed limit is whatever the person in front of them is doing, plus 20. https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-advice/top-five-most-infuriating-driver-habits-opinion-46061

Let's build a huuuuuge defensive wall, as high as a mountain. And then put a gate right there at the bottom, for people to break through.

I don't think there's anything more important than being kind. It takes real strength of character to be kind even in the most difficult situations, it angers me seeing kind people (especially kids) being taken advantage of or thought of as 'weak'. Only really strong people can be truly kind, most of the other things we see as strength in people are actually compensation for different kinds of weakness of character. Kindness also isn't 'niceness'. You can be cruel to be kind.

Happy birthday Captain Nimmo! It's been too long. Have a great day.

Sometimes in architecture, you'll hear people say that straight lines and square or rectangular rooms are sterile. So you get the Gaudis and the Lehrys, with their twisted 'organic' shapes. Christopher Alexander though, I think the best architect alive and even ever, put his finger right on why straight lines are actually the most human and embracing type of architecture. The reason? Because only a straight wall is 'fair' to the rooms either side of it. It's the maximum compromise between two rooms, the second you put any sort of curve in the wall, one room is encroaching on the other.

Kafka shared my passion for travel.

I worked at ANSTO for a while. It's true that the fear of radiation is way out of proportion with the actual risks. The greatest argument against nuclear power is the enormous cost, not the safety.

Charging interest on loans used to be called usury. Today it's a common thing, but for thousands of years there were arguments about whether it should be allowed at all. Jesus and the moneylenders, for example - religions played a critical role in the debates. There are actually good reasons to think that interest is a very bad thing. It's quite possibly the root cause of a lot of the world's problems. In our rush to be 'modern' and to get rid of things like religions, we've lost a lot of wisdom. Even from the point of view of basic maths, many people are unaware that even a tiny interest rate of say 2% results in exponential growth. Or as Aristotle said (paraphrasing), no good can come from money breeding money.

Anybody else having problems with Google services, like search and images?

Reminds me of the Australia of old, when we were proud to try to lead the world. Two decades now of people desperate for us to return to the 1950s has made us the laughing stock of the world. And built in a matter of months. This stuff is exciting, if they can pull it off. The world is changing despite the people who want it to stay the same, always follow the money.

Yeh.

Do you know anybody with 'Smiling Depression'? I think people with depression often seem happy, but it's good to see that people are more aware of that now. One of the main causes is social comparison, comparing ourselves with others. Social media is helping to create an epidemic of smiling depression, especially in young girls, but the behaviour goes across all ages. But it's not the technology's fault, it's how we're approaching it. As Aletheia Luna says, "Be mindful of the reasons behind your posts/pictures. Ask yourself, “Am I posting this picture/writing this status update to seek validation from others?”. In other words, are you posting merely to receive many likes, comments, or shares? Are you posting in order to gain attention or to feel better about yourself?"

I still remember our wedding day.

Trying to spot you here Pauly.

One of the most difficult things to get for your kids in Australia is good training in foreign languages. I would swap 90% of what kids are taught at school for good training in other languages. Up to 4 or 5 languages even. Research shows learning other languages is THE most powerful learning any child can do. Also in a time when there's so much distrust of foreigners, it's amazing what learning and speaking other languages can do for relations between cultures. Instead we bang on and on about bloody English, when a third or more of our own population couldn't pass the English test we give to migrants. Le Carre has also a done a service against the idiots who post stuff online about how apparently harsh and militaristic the German language is. It only is if you choose to speak it like a bad Hollywood actor in a war film.

Auditioning for The Godfather

The real reason electricity prices are going up? Gas prices are going up, the two are directly linked, because gas turbines are the newest additions to the power generation system. Look at the graph, it's a perfect match. And why are gas prices going up? Because we signed spectacularly stupid contracts to flog it off overseas for a penny. So now we're being screwed by multinational gas corporations, and that in turn is driving our electricity prices up. The Gladstone plant in the picture is where Australia's energy is leaving the country. Some people blame solar and wind. Those people are what the dictionary call idiots, or morons. They'll also tell you that the solution is to do more gas exploration. And they'll tell you that because they're doing the bidding of these same gas multinationals, who have already flogged off our existing supply offshore, and now want more.

"But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves."

How does a fella compete?

Just sayin', but I reckon we're lucky to be seeing GOT in the actual winter. Doesn't seem right to be watching it mid-summer. Sucks to be you, Europe and the US.

Happy birthday, have a great day :)

Such a confused topic. It's irrelevant whether fluoride helps teeth or not, the much bigger question is adding something to everybody's water supply. There are all sorts of deficiencies in the community that could be 'fixed' in the same way, but usually we don't think the solution there is to dump stuff into the water supply. Also if sugar is one of the main culprits, we always had the option of seriously attacking sugar consumption, before we took the pretty drastic step of dumping something into everybody's water to counter some peoples' over-consumption of sugar. I just don't think a measure like this would ever be approved again, it came at a time when people were more likely to take simplistic solutions to difficult problems.

Andrew Charlton usually says smart things, in this case he notes that societies are so fractured that there's almost no hope of any party sweeping them all together again, in 'the centre'. Instead different parties give smaller groups a "pure diet of exactly what they want". A bit like families who give up trying to find meals that everybody likes and instead give each person their own meal. As Charlton says, in history this usually precedes the destruction of at least one of the previous major parties and the search for a new one. At the moment that's looking more like the LNP than Labor. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/we-might-wake-up-and-find-the-peasants-are-revolting-elites-diagnose-our-political-disease-20170627-gwz867.html

Sammy J, genius :)

Both schools and universities have failed forever to understand that if you don't offer people a way to understand *and* quantify the quality of the work you do, they will do it TO you. Nature abhors a vacuum. Or as Gittins says, "Sorry guys, but more money comes at the price of greater accountability to, and scrutiny by, the mug taxpayers who cough it up."

We don't often think about the gigantic amount of fuel our passion for flying and travel uses. The larger planes, like the 747 or A-380, carry over 300,000 litres of fuel. So when you take one of these and fly to London and back, for example, that's close to 400,000 litres of fuel. That's about 300 TONNES of fuel. Yes, tonnes. There's an argument that efficient jet airliners average to about 2-3 litres per 100km, per passenger. That sounds good, but many modern cars do better than that on highways, and buses do better again. And when you add the enormous extra distance people travel in planes, it's nearly a tonne of fuel *per passenger* for a London round-trip. One tonne of fuel, that's what it takes to get you, as an individual, there and back. Calculating the fuel use to a per-passenger-per-kilometre basis is dodgy maths. It's like saying you're not an alcoholic if you only have a drink every hour, but then drink 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. There are over 100,000 flights per day around the world now, the volume of fuel used is between 500-600 million litres PER DAY. Which translates to nearly 500,000 tonnes of fuel used, per day. Half a million TONNES of fuel, per DAY.

A while back I shared the fallacies around life expectancy, and how we think we're all living longer than our ancestors, when we actually aren't - it's a misunderstanding about averages. Another classic area where averages mislead us is sleep, I've lost count of the number of times people are told they need 8 hours sleep per night. Peoples' sleep varies, for good reasons, we shouldn't try to change our life to fit some average. And study of indigenous cultures gives further support to this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/20151015-paleo-sleep-time-hadza-san-tsimane-science/

Happy Birthday cuz! Have a wonderful day :)

Do you think the world has too many people, that overpopulation is a problem? I've posted about Hans Rosling before. He tragically died this year, which is an incredible loss, he was such a genius at presenting information about what's actually happening in the world. Spend 10 mins on this TED talk, it will change how you think about population, and the world. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth

Lol, um, stab in the dark - next year adding your age plus your year of birth will give you 2018. Just a guess.

A dad and mum have two kids. One of them is a girl. What are the odds of the second child also being a girl?

His sister calls it a big improvement.

Quickly becoming a hero of mine :)

I think @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato] sends me these because he wants me to be unpopular. http://www.traveller.com.au/what-your-friends-social-media-holiday-posts-really-mean-gxco10?&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nc&eid=socialn:fac-14omn0094-optim-nnn:nonpaid-25/06/2014-social_traffic-all-organicpost-nnn-traveller-o&campaign_code=nocode&promote_channel=social_facebook

Not a status update, more like the meaning of life.

Les Fehmi researches how we pay attention. He developed a technique called 'Open Focus' which helps people to move out of a common addiction to what he calls 'narrow-objective' focus, where we spend much of our days focused on individual things and activities, in an objective me-and-it sort of way. But he goes further, to show how our entire lives are dominated by this stressful narrow focus, as we accumulate experiences instead of just being. Just being was what religion used to provide for people, and unsurprisingly people are leaving organised religion in droves, and travelling and shopping instead, to accumulate ever more 'experiences'. Fehmi has shown in his clinic how many modern illnesses come from this addiction to narrow focus. "Our culture affirms personal relationships not by common experiences of oneness or union, but by the sharing or reiteration of common objective experiences...People can talk for hours about a football or baseball game, remembering each an every detail...They talk about the objects they've purchased or want to purchase. Or they chat about movies and television shows...We all remember commands like these from childhood and adolescence: "Pay attention to your homework"; "Pay attention to the teacher"; "Stop daydreaming"...What your parents or teacher really meant was that you weren't paying narrow enough attention...that you weren't doing a good enough job of excluding everything else...".

There's a lot of worry about privacy online. But the overwhelming majority of information on 'the Internet' is already information most people can't access, it's in the 'deep web' and the 'dark web'. This isn't an easy issue. But have a look at what sort of people and information dominate the 'hidden web'. Charming. We're all in it together, including in information, it's a worry how the same sort of tribal behaviour can't wait to reassert itself, even in the glorious world of the Net. It was designed to be open, but getting the balance right is hard. At the same time social media used is dominated by the sharing of personal information, it's a bizarre world.

Bill Shorten has been playing the long game. Now he's made inequality the central plank of his platform, which is both brave and the only thing any politician should be doing right now, it doesn't matter if you don't like Labor, if your preferred party or candidate isn't targeting inequality, ditch them. It's what caused Trump and Brexit, and the US and U.K. couldn't target inequality in time to prevent those. Here's our chance to do better. Every time there are massive wars, look for inequality. Or social unrest, look for inequality. Or terrorism - look for inequality. Or schools or hospitals or roads failing - look for inequality. Once things get out of balance, things turn nasty and don't correct until you have balance back. Put the rubbish about Left and Right aside and focus on balance. The world is doing ok, the only major problem we have is inequality, all the other problems we see are just symptoms of this one big problem.

This is exactly right. The obsession with finance has also been behind the destruction of banking, and politicians talking constantly about the 'economy', which is really mostly a fiction made up of financial indicators.

Is this men growing old gracefully, or disgracefully?

Another sport destroyed by greed. Cricket is next. Tennis has been a bore for decades, the NRL is heading that way for the same reasons. http://www.planetf1.com/news/ferrari-offer-vettel-138-5m-three-year-deal/

Says it all, hazard reduction burns are about protecting houses, not people. The amount of smoke they produce is incredibly harmful to people, wood smoke is many times more toxic than cigarette smoke, the process is insane. "During autumn, the RFS treated 93,116 hectares to protect 23,171 properties. By area, the tally was less than half the previous autumn's 191,684 hectares involving 27,867 properties." http://www.smh.com.au/environment/return-of-the-big-dry-points-to-active-and-early-fire-season-across-the-south-20170720-gxfmy8.html

Sometimes old expressions have a lot of wisdom. Like 'keeping a sense of perspective'. How many of our problems are due to us focusing really narrowly on things and ignoring the full context? If we stop obsessing about the content of what we see as 'our' problems, and allow some awareness of the context of what's happening, suddenly they stop being about us and more about a situation that involves others too, and probably just needs a simple fix. Looking at the context usually solves any problem, all by itself. Les Fehmi talks about how narrowing creates uncomfortable feelings and emotions, whether it's muscle tension, fear, anxiety, depression. Then we make it all worse by further narrowing into these feelings and emotions, to try to get rid of them, as if they were the problem. "Diversionary strategies are often overused to the point of addiction; compulsive use of television, food, sex, gambling, travel, video games, loud music, alcohol, drugs, and especially work can all serve as strategic distractions to keep us away from - or help us manage - our pain." They're a symptom of our narrowing, we can get lost in the details of what we see as our problems, when in fact we may just have the focus on our life set much too narrowly. David Gorman uses similar insights in teaching people how to overcome sometimes chronic lifelong issues.

To continue my highly popular defence of politicians ;) Remember these people run the country, you may think they don't do it well, but we all know a lot of other jobs we've come into contact with where people aren't doing them well, it's not the point. Here's the data from the last census on the top 50 paying jobs in Australia (I notice CEOs are 49, which makes me suspect these are average figures, some CEOs make more than a million dollars per year.) Men first, then women. Perspective, people, politicians come in at 41. Medical specialists dominate the list, if you want to see why medicine costs so much, this is one key reason. And they're being paid with taxpayer dollars and your privately funded insurance (which is heavily subsidised by taxpayer dollars as well). 1. Neurosurgeon $577,674 2. Ophthalmologist $552,947 3. Cardiologist $453,253 4. Plastic and reconstructive surgeon $448,530 5. Gynaecologist; obstetrician $446,507 6. Otorhinolaryngologist $445,939 7. Orthopedic surgeon $439,629 8. Urologist $433,792 9. Vascular surgeon $417,524 10. Gastroenterologist $415,192 11. Diagnostic and interventional radiologist $386,003 12. Dermatologist $383,880 13. Judge — law $381,323 14. Anaesthetist $370,492 15. Cardiothoracic surgeon $358,043 16. Surgeon — general $357,996 17. Specialist physicians — other $344,860 18. Radiation oncologist $336,994 19. Medical oncologist $322,178 20. Securities and finance dealer $320,452 21. Thoracic medicine specialist $315,444 22. Specialist physician — general medicine $315,114 23. Intensive care specialist $308,033 24. Renal medicine specialist $298,681 25. Neurologist $298,543 26. Financial investment manager $288,790 27. Investment broker $286,530 28. Paediatric surgeon $282,508 29. Clinical haematologist $271,738 30. Futures trader $264,830 31. Endocrinologist $258,972 32. Australian cricketer $257,527 33. Rheumatologist $256,933 34. Dental specialist $253,442 35. Magistrate $246,737 36. Equities analyst; investment dealer $245,826 37. Paediatrician $239,405 38. Stock exchange dealer; stockbroker $238,192 39. Psychiatrist $234,557 40. Emergency medicine specialist $232,595 41. Member of Parliament $232,093 42. Pathologist $224,378 43. Company secretary — corporate governance $218,432 44. State governor $212,652 45. Actuary $196,144 46. Sports physician $187,468 47. Petroleum engineer $185,808 48. (joint with 49) Chief executive officer $181,849 49. Executive director; managing director; public servant — secretary or deputy secretary $181,849 50. Mining production manager $179,439

Exercise in un-narrowing (I just made up that word). Do you ever get pains while sitting at a desk, in your back or neck for example? Or pains while doing physical work of some kind? Our very common response to that is to narrow into the pain and treat it as a separate thing - we stretch or massage that spot, for example, as the woman in the picture is doing. Try going in the opposite direction. Broaden your awareness, so that this pain becomes a part of your broader awareness of that activity. That pain will then be 'legible' to you, you will start to feel it in context, "oh, I'm staring at this screen here, narrowing and blocking everything else out, and hunched right over the keyboard". A bit like the sort of awareness you'd have if you were sitting there chatting with friends instead, chances are you narrowed into the work activity and zoned out of the space around you, and that's what caused the pain in the first place.

How the rich rip the rest of us off, part 231. There are over 800,000 family trusts in Australia. Family trusts are instruments to minimise tax paid, by distributing income to members of your family so your own taxable income then appears less. Those 800,000+ trusts hold more than $3 TRILLION dollars, and cost the taxpayer over $3 billion a year in lost taxes. They are overwhelmingly set up by the rich to minimise tax. And yet all people can seem to do is attack 'dole bludgers'. Makes you want to bang your head against a wall. There are more family trusts than there are people on the dole.

Luck and morals, real thought-provoking topic. Three examples, and funny how we make morality something separate to the practical everyday lives we lead. I don't think it's separate at all. 2 drunk drivers, both caught. One hits a pedestrian and injures them, the other doesn't. The former will get a much more significant charge. Is that moral or fair? A 3rd drunk driver drops their keys on the way to the car and ends up getting a cab home. Are they more or less culpable than drivers 1 and 2 above? A generation buys into the property market during economic boom times, and ends up saddled with enormous debt, that mostly goes to pay the previous generation in their windfall gains. What's the morality of this situation?

Four Corners exposed some of what's going wrong in managing water resources in the Murray Darling. Elinor Ostrom (now deceased) is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. She studied how groups of people can successfully share common resources, like water, based on decades of empirical studies. Her life's work on this was distilled into 8 principles, which you can use in any group situation where some common resource needs to be shared, whether that's water, land, Scotch Finger biscuits or whatever. This also was one of the first empirical bodies of work looking at how to govern something effectively, mostly governance is based on assumptions and prejudices. You can use it at home or at work, in group situations. 8 Principles for Managing a Commons 1. Define clear group boundaries. 2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions. 3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules. 4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities. 5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior. 6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators. 7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution. 8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

Love that old biblical line about selling somebody out for 30 pieces of silver. Anna Bligh is at the Press Club, in her new role spruiking banks. An ex-Labor Premier, spruiking banks. All the goodies, Australia's biggest taxpayers (not hard when you're hoarding most of Australia's money), we need strong banks blah blah. We need strong childcare too, nobody is giving it billions of dollars in assistance.

We tend to not trust 'big business'. But maybe that's a mistake. 97% of businesses in Australia are small businesses. 60% of these fail within their first 3 years. At the same time wages and working conditions have been in decline for some time. This isn't a surprise, as the bigger a business is, the more economies of scale, and the easier it is for the business to afford better working conditions - there are just more people and more money to divide the work between. Having worked for both small and large businesses, give me big every time. I don't trust the passion for the small and the 'local', it's a deep and ancient tribal instinct in us that usually ends with violence. Australia needs more larger businesses, our worshipping of the small is hurting everyday people. http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/09/28/small-business-failure_n_8187166.html

Scott Morrison is on TV rejecting inequality as an issue, and reinforcing that the LNP will always target 'equal opportunity' instead. (That's why until Turnbull they had next to no women in their cabinet, obviously the LNP women have little merit.) This is where we need to dig into the philosophies of the parties. Here are some Tony Abbot quotes, you can see that the philosophy is that wealth or poverty are all your own doing: "I’m prepared to accept that lots of people in work are doing it tough. But that’s true of lots of people at — on comparatively good incomes because they have heavier responsibilities." "We can’t abolish poverty because poverty in part is a function of individual behaviour. We can’t stop people drinking. We can’t stop people gambling. We can’t stop people having substance problems. We can’t stop people from making mistakes that cause them to be less well-off than they might otherwise be."

Thanks @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato] for this one. The real problem with our antibioitc use isn't humans, it's animals. Farm animals are fed tonnes (literally, tonnes) of antibioitcs each year to help fatten them up. It's a scandal. http://www.sciencealert.com/experts-advise-we-might-not-need-to-finish-courses-of-antibiotics-after-all

What I like about Europe is that it's smart. And proud of it. https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx543/european-cities-are-taking-back-public-services-from-private-companies

The end of the clunkiest, most inefficient and stupid technology - the internal combustion engine - is in sight. Also a huge victory for air quality and sound pollution. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/world/europe/uk-diesel-petrol-emissions.html

Nick Hanauer, smartest billionaire in the world. "From 1950 through 1980, during the heyday of the Great American Middle Class, a combination of New Deal programs, a corporate culture of civic responsibility, and a powerful labor movement provided a majority of American workers with health insurance, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, pensions, job security, rising wages, overtime pay, paid vacation, paid sick days, a 40-hour workweek, and access to affordable, high-quality education. These are the benefits that provide the economic security of a decent and dignified life that defines what it means to be middle class, and that led to an unprecedented increase in living standards and economic growth. And under the old economy, they were, and still are, largely provided by one’s employer. But in transforming the traditional relationship between employer and employee, the new economy is quickly stripping away these benefits. That is why it is essential that we imagine and adopt new policies that guarantee all workers the basic level of economic security necessary to sustain and grow the American middle class, and with it, the economy as a whole."

Bun or bump? There are ethical debates about women and babies - some see a woman as a 'container' for a baby (bun), others see the baby as a part of the woman herself (bump). Echoes of The Handmaid's Tale, the idea that women are just containers for babies. Like a string bag to put your oranges in. The baby seems obviously a part of the woman's body, in a way it can't be for men, it's partly their flesh and blood. Also interesting that some of the strongest believers in the 'container' view seem to stop caring the second the child is born - they don't fight for better childcare or education, children are only a hot topic for them while they're part of the women carrying them to birth. Which suggests that it's not really about children, for them, it's about women, and control over them.

Happy birthday Jude :)

Yes!!

A big thing for me, the amount of whinging and outright attack of officials has spread into amateur sport too. It's pathetic. As the article says, nobody ever says 'the ref won us the game'. But losing is always the ref's fault, apparently. Grow up. http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl/news/nfl-referees-blown-calls-controversy-fans-college-football/vz9x9ja888os1m4lmtpo1gtis

Don't you feel their pain? Speed as low as 50 Mbps! Here out in the regions, where dragons live, you'd be lucky to get 10 Mbps most days. http://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/residents-fight-to-stop-nbn-and-telstra-from-axing-state-of-the-art-hfc-network-20170725-gxi8bh.html

"The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally...If the average American family still got the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would have an astounding $13,000 more in their pockets a year."

I've been looking at the research on air ionisers. These suckers really work, they inactivate bacteria and viruses in the air, as well as particulate matter. In a trial in a U.K. Hospital, they reduced the rate of transmission of an airborne bacterial disease to zero, which surprised even the researchers. So I'd recommend these highly, if you want to reduce the risks of catching colds and flu for example, and wonder why they don't install them in public buildings and public transport, especially hospitals. You can even get cheap portable ones to carry with you. (The ones that generate ozone are a waste of time, you want a negative ion generator.) Some house air conditoners, like the Panasonic ones I bought, now have this built in, and don't just kill bacteria, viruses and moulds in the air, but also on surfaces. Do they have these in hospitals, do you know, Dave Nell Thompson?

There seems to be water falling from the sky. Will need to Google.

Sometimes I miss teaching :)

Happy birthday Carms!

In the last few years of people arguing about politics, and talking about 'the Left' and 'the Right', not enough people have said what this Republican Senator is saying. That this isn't about two sides of politics, it's about politics, versus chaos. Angry people providing simplistic 'solutions' to complex problems, smashing our institutions in the process. Happening right here in Australia too, where we have anti-government people IN government, trying to wreck the place from within. Egged on by more angry people on the outside (usually angry old white men in the media). Notice how Republicans are sick of Trump talking 'to the base' - something Abbott constantly does here as well. This is not about Trump, he's a sideshow. It's something much more dangerous. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/31/my-party-is-in-denial-about-donald-trump-215442