Always a sure sign of a bad economy: cheaper cuts of meat, and booming chicken sales
THE bleak economic climate is forcing shoppers at Coles to trade down from T-bones to sausages, in an attempt to cut their shopping bills.
In the latest sign of the drift to thrift, consumers are also swapping expensive cuts of meat for chicken and eggs, and branded products for generic and private label goods.
Jeremy Schoemaker makes a lot of sense
Money quote:
I am always amazed at how scared people are to fail. I fail all the time?¢‚Ǩ¬¶. or at least what other people would consider to be failures. I would rather call them experiences.
Learning from your failures and trying until you find success is an amazing experience.
People always ask me if I can show them how I learned to make money, program, market, build websites, etc. Here is the secret. I FAILED! And failed a lot.
As the sun sets over Victoria
let us remember those who have fallen.
Those who lived an Australian dream
The retired, first home owners and those in between.
Let us forever remember that even in the digital age
we were unable to save them.
and lets us respect them by learning from the disaster.
We cannot raise the dead
but we can learn from their deaths.
let us learn in years to come
better ways of saving the living.
At this dark time we remember the fallen
like those who fell before them
and know that together we can make this country better.
May generations hence remember this time
and those that have died
if only as a beacon as to why we should always strive to advance civilization
and the safety it should, and always must provide.
I’m still just….fuck.
Victoria is like a morgue today. People are quiet, the look of horror on their faces, even if they weren’t directly affected.
This isn’t to say that they are some how worse off than those who were directly affected; they simply aren’t. But this State is in a state of shock, that is made worse every time we turn on a radio or view tweets or online video footage.
There is nothing more depressing than hearing reports of a rising death toll, or seeing the Prime Minister on television look like he’s seen a ghost, and on the verge of breaking down.
This is the worst disaster in Australian peace time history, and for those who were born in the 70s or later, their lifetime.
And yet from the depths of despair rises the true Australian spirit.
I saw a man on TV last night who had lost everything not complaining of his loss, but praising that unlike his neighbor, he had survived.
The fire fighters, most volunteers working non stop for days to save more lifes.
The outpouring of support, through donations from individuals and business. I didn’t get to make my donation to the Red Cross until this afternoon because they had so much traffic the site was nearly constantly offline.
Even in its darkest hour, Australians rally together. That is the true Australian spirit.
This is in response to Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby in the SMH (via Stilgherian)
Hon Kevin Rudd MP
Prime Minister of Australia
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
Re: proposal to filter Christian Churches
Dear Prime Minister
I write to you about the utmost urgency of protecting children from pedophilia and other deviant acts. As your Ministers (particularly Senator Conroy) have repeatedly told the media, somebody needs to think of the children.
I take this opportunity to ask you to consider a proposal to filter Christian Churches in Australia in line with the Government’s commitment to protecting children with Internet censorship, and indeed would urge you to give this proposal priority status given the shocking risk to children Christian churches present.
According to statistics published in the United States (ref), around 4% of clerics in the period from 1950-2002 were accused of abusing children. Worse still, this abuse, in over 60% of cases occurred for over one year. Notably, clerics who abused children usually did so at a rate higher than one child per cleric, at a rate of approx 2.3 children per cleric.
There are, according to some figures around 7,000 Christian Churches in Australia, possibly more, with 2 million people attending a church every week. If the American experience applied here (and there is no reason to believe that it does not, particularly given we have more Catholics as a proportion of our christians) around 280 clerics (possibly more) will be fiddling with children this year. That is an unacceptable risk in a modern society, and it is vital that the Government think of these children.
I propose the Government introduce a Christian Church filter on the same grounds as the proposed internet filter.
1. That access to suspect Christian Churches be blocked, with no recourse or means of appeal once they are added to the Christian church filter.
2. That “unwanted” churches have access blocked as well, such as those that don’t agree with the Government. Again, there will be no recourse should a church be blocked, and no means of appeal.
3. That the speed of access to all Christian Churches be reduced to up to 87%. A national speed bump scheme would be effective here. Given the cost to Government, private operators could install the speed bumps and charge a toll for the cost of installing them.
I’d note Prime Minister that the filter is not as effective with smaller speed reductions, and it would be ineffective without being properly implemented.
4. That access to 3-6% of Christian Churches be blocked at all times, for no reason other than it’s acceptable, and you can never be too sure, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Who is blocked should change daily, just to keep the churches on their toes.
5. That access to Christian Bibles be limited to adults who choose to opt-in. The bible, as you’d be aware, includes multiple accounts of illegal activity, including beastiality, murder, and even drownings….and sometimes this violence involves children. Children should be spared from this filth.
Prime Minister, I urge your Government to truly protect the children of Australia from the Christian Church and implement this scheme at the first available opportunity. If the Government does not support this scheme, then truly it must be supporting pedophilia and child pornography, as Senator Conroy believes all opponents of protecting children are.
Prime Minister, won’t you please think of the children?
Yours sincerely
Duncan Riley
Stilgherrian writes in today’s Crikey (miraculously available for free online here) about Telstra playing silly buggers with high speed internet, in particular the sit back and wait for the opposition to deploy before launching services that are already there trick.
Stilgherrian mentions Telstra vs iiNet over ADSL 2, but the tactic goes back further. I mentioned it in passing in September, but here’s a better explanation.
Back in my days in Government, we had a lot to do with rural broadband, or more precisely the lack there of. Even into mid sized towns or suburbs of sometimes as many as 10-20,000, there was no ADSL. Telstra would constantly suggest that it wasn’t economically viable to provide the service.
The Howard Government launched Broadband Connect, one of their better policies that saw providers subsidised per user for each ADSL connection they place. I don’t remember the figures off the top of my head, but depending on the locality it may have been $2k-$4k per user, possibly less for outer suburban areas; for memory it also changed at least once over the life of the program. Under the scheme I had for a time a free cable internet connection for 3 months, with free cable modem…and no lock in contract. The scheme not only bought ADSL to bigger towns, it saw small communities for the first time getting access. I remember one location with around 200-300 people getting ADSL, and a couple of places under 1,000. As long as you got enough people to sign up, the Government subsidy covered your startup costs, and you might walk away with a profit.
It was a great program, and even in the South West of Western Australia there were maybe 3 or 4 different companies playing for a cut.
But this is what Telstra would do.
They’d get wind that XYZ ADSL was coming to a particular town, then out of the blue they’d announce they’d made ADSL available themselves, usually 2-3 weeks before the smaller company had their service available. They’d back it up with an intensive mail campaign that told people that ADSL was now available in their town. It may have included a phone campaign, although I don’t specifically recall.
The thing with Broadband Connect is that it was open slather; you weren’t awarded a Government contract to provide an area, instead who ever got in and signed people up got their cut.
So you’d have these usually small companies, investing decent money providing ADSL for the first time to communities that Telstra claimed weren’t economically viable to service, finding themselves beat weeks from launch by a mass campaign from Telstra.
Whether the capacity was in or not before as Stilgherrian suggests in the case of ADSL 2 and Cable I don’t know, but the speed to which Tesltra would magically make available these services would suggest just that; that Telstra has the tech in place, and that it would only provide it when a competitor was going to open.
That they’re still doing this in 2009 is a disgrace. It is unbelievably anti-competitive, and for Telstra to sue over the National Broadband Network if it can already be providing, at least to capital cities the SAME service in beyond all belief.
Structural separation, as I’ve always argued is the only solution. Telstra retail and wholesale must be split for the common good. If we have the capacity to provide 100mbps connections in capital cities now, it SHOULD BE PROVIDED NOW, not in a year or two when Telstra decides to use it to undermine the competition.
Besides, we’ll need these speeds to counter some of Conroy’s Great Firewall of Australia 🙂
Via Larvatus Prodeo an interesting piece from The Monthly Review placing Obama to the right in a world sense with this nifty graph.
Money quote:
“In other words, Barack Obama does represent change from the era of the Bush administration. He is the limited change that’s possible within the logic of the current system.”
More at the Monthly Review here.
Via FullTimeCasual, King St. Newtown the song. Besides what I think is an XC Falcon early in, not much has changed on the street. Well, the Hub closed down, long the Sydney Adult Theatre location of choice, and Coles New World doesn’t look that way anymore…but the rest looks very familiar. Still, I’ve only done that drive a handful of times in the last 12 years. My memories are still very much slanted from my childhood growing up in Sydney.
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Traffic profile: highest post accounted for 13.5% of traffic.
Finances: profitable (that is, more income than the cost of paying writers excluding me). However unbeknown to us, the ad figures we were working with were make believe from one provider. We’re profitable, but not by as much as we’d believed. Further revenue decreased significantly this month per page view, so while we brought more in, it wasn’t relative to the increase in traffic. We are looking at ways of countering this in January. Whether this is representative of the market, our ad provider or a combination of both is to be seen.
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I’ve so far managed to avoid Christmas shopping, not helped by the fact that I can’t stand crowds….probably some sort of medical thing, but I feel claustrophobic in large crowds and ill to the point of near panic. Only at Christmas I might add, I wonder if there’s a phobia for that?
But I digress: she who must be obeyed spent 4 hours shopping on Bridge Road Richmond yesterday, long famed as one of Melbourne’s cut price fashion strips, and usually busy at the best of times. Her exact words to me is that she couldn’t believe how quiet the shops were.
She also said that she’d heard shop owners discussing how quiet Christmas trade was this year, and even customers saying they’d been to Chadstone (the largest shopping center in the Southern Hemisphere) and that they could easily find a park, which in good times is hard any day, let alone a week prior to Christmas.
Our local shopping strip Camberwell has definitely been quieter for months, and while the number of people is up getting close to Christmas, it’s not the mad house you’d expect in a good year. I can drive the strip in under 10 minutes at lunchtime on a Saturday (so yesterday)….
God knows then how the SMH is saying spending will be up $700m this Christmas. I’m going to head to Chaddy Monday morning for a quick shop, and will report back then, but it certainly smells like bad times to me.
Duncan Riley on SiliconANGLE Chiang Mai One
