Horse 1770 - Fragments

Going forth and back on the trains and buses of this metropolis that 4½ million people call home, I'm usually scribbling away in an exercise book; writing things. A lot of those things become blog posts, some may eventually become passages in a novel and still others hang like dead possums and sneakers on the electricity lines.
Unlike Henry David Thoreau's description of a black fly in The Maine Woods (1862), these fragments are not "small but perfectly formed" - they're mangled.

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I don't know exactly how far down you'd need to go but I assume that the further and deeper down you went, at some point, the density of the Sun must reach 1000kg/m³, which is roughly the same as water at about 4°C.
If this be true, then provided you could somehow build a non-melty ship and crewed it with a non-melty crew who could withstand the temperature, then it would be possible to sail said ship ON the Sun. Of course, it'd be advisable to go at night; so it wouldn't be so hot.

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Hockey's budget isn't really that much different from previous governments' in all honesty; it can't be and it also can't not be. This means that trying to declare a "budget emergency" when the figures that you've just published declare otherwise, just looks plain silly.
Anyway, Government deficits by definition are when government spending outstrips revenues collected. This means that by definition, more money is being injected into the economy, which is expansionary with respect to aggregate demand. Business loves this because it means that their customer base is still inclined to want to buy stuff; buying stuff and services is the engine room of the economy.

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Clearly as the above set of equations demonstrate (because no-one really wants to see a bunch of futile drawings), there just aren't enough nodes for the number of pathways to make the solution to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem, even solvable.
Admittedly that didn't stop The Soviet Air Force from changing the problem drastically in 1941 when they bombed the place to a smouldering pile of rubble; the RAF didn't help either. Only two of the bridges that were around in Euler's day still exist and so the modern day solution is so simple as not to be worth considering.

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The thing is though that neither CHEP nor their lessees really have a clue as to the whereabouts of all of the pallets under lease - as a business model, to make people pay rent for something that they don't know where it is, is pure spun genius. It is estimated that between 20%-25% of all of CHEP's rental income comes from the lease of missing pallets and the reason that people continue to pay is that it's cheaper to do so than to actually pay out the terms of the lease for the pallets.

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I'm not even sure what the X4 is; nor what it's for; nor who the expected market is; nor why it is. The ground clearance appears to be less than that of a normal 3-series and as far as boot space goes, you're probably better off buying an X5. An X5 has a more sensible tailgate door.
It's not even particularly attractive either. If you want a pretty BMW, get a 4-series; get a 1-series even.
The X4 therefore fails into the same cast of cars as the X6, which have no discernible purpose whatsoever.

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I still maintain that Hockey is the best man for the Premiership that the Coalition has - either him or Malcolm Turnbull. Hockey, Turnbull and Wayne Swan (who I think is still the best person for the post of Treasurer on either side of the House) are probably part of Team Sensible. Hockey is in a bad place as Treasurer because I don't think that he's either the best person for the job or carries enough political force to be able to change his minders minds.

If Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke were logically one generation and Keating and Howard were the next, then we should have had Kim Beasley and Peter Costello squaring off against each other but that never happened. Instead we got Rudd and Abbott who formed Team Vindictive with the technocrats like Swan and Gillard and Vaile forced to the margins.

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The rate of fall of price of electronics is so quick now that surely it must be possible now to produce a smart phone with access to the internet for less than the price of a bag of rice. Okay, this sounds trivial but it means that if WiFi or access to the internet became widespread in places like Gabon, Burkina Faso or Chad, if a famine broke out, it means that for the first time, those people can actually complain to the rest of the world before humanitarian aid reached them. How good would that be?
It would just be ace to give voices to those who are currently voiceless. NGOs and Aid Organisations currently have to spend amazing amounts of time forging networks. Just imagine the speed with which that could be done in future.