Horse 3424 - Kyle & Jackie O To Go?

I can not tell you how I found this out because I want to keep the identity of the source a secret, but it seems that Kyle and Jackie O might have been quietly given their marching orders.

Their radio show which once claimed a market share of 15.5% in Sydney, has been progressively on the slide as audiences have decided that sexual innuendo, repeated derogatory broadcasting relating to sex, religion, appearance, et cetera, are not particularly interesting. This was further confirmed on the last day of radio ratings for 2024 when they no longer held the top spot.

Advertisers increasingly found the show troubling; with companies such as Flight Centre, Australian Super, AMP, and Bendigo Bank, either throttling back their advertising on the KIIS network or withdrawing it altogether. Parent company ARN Media must have been looking at this as well as the abysmal tilt at the Melbourne radio market, which never netted more than 5% of market share.

If this is to be believed then "The Kyle and Jackie O Hour of Power" will not be returning in 2025; with some other lineup taking over the breakfast radio slot.

To be fair the program was already on the skids back in August when the executive producer Pedro Cuccovillo Vitola announced that he had resigned¹. Perhaps things got even worse for ARN Media management, when a Senate estimates hearing did what Australian Communications and Media Authority could not do, and put on public record what the show had said. 

ACMA has repeatedly made ruling over the years, which have detailed sexism, racism, misogyny, and time and time again, radio and television presenters always avoid punishment from ACMA, because no matter how many breaches of the commercial radio codes of practice that someone makes,  ACMA is not a toothless tiger which can not bite but a toothless tree which can not even jump. The problem is that even thought ACMA has received more than 60 complaints about the show since the beginning of the financial year, as there is a co-regulatory system in place, complaints are not dealt with by ACMA but the radio licence holder. ARN Media and its predecessors have been fine with whatever scandals the show might have had, as evidence by their total lack of action.

What makes this interesting is that as I work in Mosman, that this rumour of The Kyle And Jackie O Show being cancelled is not coming from within the talent inside the industry but the people who move money around. The rumour is made all the more compelling when you consider that this appears to be a commercial decision rather than anything coming from the regulatory authority who can actually do nothing.

Probably an announcement will be made in early January, because that's generally how the cycle of these things work but keen observers should watch the entrances to Coca-Cola Place at  Mount St in North Sydney, because that's where the money is moved. If people who look like comedians, or other radio type people arrive, then it will be because the decision has been made. 

¹https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/radio/real-reason-kyle-and-jackie-os-executive-producer-quit/news-story/03d6e3415cd08330f32396fb0c37aa53

Horse 3423 - The Fentanyl/Opioid Crisis Is Rational

I have been asked by someone to comment on what I think of the Fentanyl/Opioid crisis in the United States. They wish to remain anonymous.

Before we get any further, we need to ask ourselves: What is Fentanyl?

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid drug which is used as an analgesic and an anaesthetic. It is between 30x and 50x more powerful than Heroin and about 100x more powerful than Morphine. For everyone of us out here in the cheap seats, an analgesic is a pain killer; it is for this reason that people want it.

Humans as electro-biomechanical meatbags with a squishy computer and a soul/spirit/undefinable consciousness (insert as appropriate to you belief set), like to imagine that they are rational decision making beings with rational agency. A lot of the time, they are not. A lot of the time, humans are irrational decision making beings but with rational agency which is driven by that most basic of drives: selfishness. Even when humans can acquiesce to what is good and good for them, if there is something which feels nice, then they will stump for that thing. When mapped through the drive of selfishness, so much of human decision making processes can be mapped through two sets of if/then gates.

IF: yummy, yummy, yummy THEN: DO.

IF: not yummy THEN: DO NOT WANT.

IF: not yummy THEN: AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

IF: not yummy THEN: ELIMINATE AT ALL COSTS.

Those statements of "all costs" include when the solution is actively bad or dangerous or harmful in the long run but yummy in the short run. One of the consequences of living in the here and now, and occupying a singular point in space and a singular moment in time, is that an irrational decision making beings with rational agency will make the choice to get rid of the "not yummy" at "all costs". Those costs may include death. However, as death is not now, then due to hyperbolic discounting, even the decision to do a thing which causes death, is acceptable if it means eliminating the "not yummy".

Fentanyl as an analgesic which is more powerful and effective than Heroin and Morphine, is a yummy solution to removing and eliminating the not yummy problem of pain. Humans hate pain. Pain is unpleasant. Pain is a thing which when mapped through the drive of selfishness is a thing to be eliminated at all costs. If Fentanyl as an analgesic is yummy, then DO.

So the fact that there is a Fentanyl crisis in the United States, seems perfectly rational and understandable to me. The Fentanyl crisis is a rational response to the not yummy problem of pain; which is only actually a crisis because the consequences are large and many. If a bad thing happens once, it is a tragedy; if it happens thousands of times, it is a crisis. I will even suggest that the reason that this is a national crisis is because as Fentanyl accounts for 75,000 deaths per year, it is a greater cause of death than the United States' other really big yummy thing which causes death: guns. America does not think that Gun Deaths are a national crisis because when passed through that same yummy/not yummy decision making process, shooting guns is yummy.

I understand why you would want to eliminate pain. Pain is unpleasant. I also understand pain. Pain is a thing which I live with constantly, maybe? After being hit by a car in 2022 and having a rod inserted into my leg and a plate and screws inserted into my shoulder, in doing the surgery, the surgeon although excellent and skilled, has given me a scar and a line of pain. It is like being stabbed with a pin, in a continuous line, for about four inches across my left shoulder. The best way that I can describe this is if it had a voice, it would be yelling constantly, 24-hours a day and 7-days a week, without cease, always forever. As one of those irrational decision making beings with rational agency, then I should be a perfect candidate for the use of Fentanyl to eliminate the not yummy.

But before this looks like self-praise, I have to clarify that the reason why I do not take anything for the pain, is that the unpleasantness of painkillers is in my mind, worse than the pain itself. Pain in unpleasant yes, but the nauseousness of painkillers is worse. The reason why I am able to live with pain is because after having run the two not yummys through my mind, the not yummy of pain is preferable to the not yummy of nauseousness. This is not some assertion of moral superiority but rather an acknowledgement that had any number of variables been different, then the outcome would have also have been different. 

I am nothing more than a bruised apprentice of a teacher, who is forced to go through this involuntarily; so if I have learned anything it is not through choice, nor is it because of any moral goodness that I have. Like anyone else, thanks to my selfishness, pain is a thing to be eliminated at all costs but thanks to circumstance, I am not allowed to do so.

Here's the kicker, the United States in choosing to run a private for-profit health care system, has by default let the market decide what the outcome is. The Fentanyl/Opioid crisis in the United States exists purely because the United States has decided that the existence of a universal payer/owner/operator of health care is a not yummy, and that most steps towards it are also not yummy. The decision making process as a nation is such that taxation which is seen as a not yummy, is worse, than the costs which can be hyperbolically discounted; which includes death.

The lack of a universal payer/owner/operator of health care or even any systemic steps towards it (the Affordable Care Act was a band-aid over a cancer), means that instead of going to a General Practitioner to undertake primary care, many problems for many people are allowed to become chronic because of market forces. Instead of basic maintenance, the United States health care system in many orders of magnitude, thinks that chronic problems are preferable because the "customer" will eventually be unable to avoid having to pay the costs and pay them for profit.

Of course a private for-profit health care system has a vested interest in not actually treating the underlying causes of sickness and disease, because by doing so it will eliminate the need for its core business. A private for-profit health care system no interest whatsoever in the existence of healthy people who have no need of their for-profit services.

This is why Fentanyl and other Opioid drugs exist in the numbers that they do. This is also why marijuana which is also not medicine exists in the numbers that it does. This is also why illicit drugs which are also not medicine exist in the numbers that they do. Pain medication, recreational drugs, and illicit drugs, are to a very large degree, the market solution to the problem of eliminating pain, in lieu of actual medicine and actual treatment of the sickness and disease, because people who can not afford basic health care eventually decide that they can not stand the not yummy any more.

Granted that the opportunity cost of proper health care and intervention is best measured by looking at health benefits, or years of life that aren't destroyed, or quality of life adjusted years, which could have been achieved with other programmes but that needs to be a collective decision by a nation of people who consistently report that the not yummy of taxation is worse. Fentanyl and other Opioid drugs quite frankly, are the rational choice in the face of a health care system which fundamentally doesn't care an iota about the first three words of the US Constitution.

Horse 3422 - The Jaguar Rebrand Is Wildly Successful

The motoring world absolutely flipped their wigs last week when Jaguar launched a series of adverts featuring their new rebrand; which effectively threw 76 years of heritage into the bin. Everything which happened before, which included winning at Le Mans, the elegance of the E-Type in the 1960s, the unexpected brawling nature of the XJS, the second time that they had a go and won at Le Mans again, and then briefly saw their name in Formula One, was all thrown away; in favour of a saccharine eye-diabetes hippy-dippy/woke/DEI/insert rightist-badthink here campaign, purely designed to really really really cause people to pee their pants. This is a rebranding as pure provocation; designed explicitly to get a rise out of people. It worked excellently.

Jaguar Cars Ltd. which itself is a subsidiary/brand of Jaguar Land Rover, very successfully to rebranded itself. This is going to sound controversial but I absolutely understand why they did it. I hate it with every fibre of my being, but as the chances of me ever buying a Jaguar remain at a constant level of nil, then my opinion here moves a corresponding value of nil dollars. If I hate it and you hate it too, then their rebranding has worked perfectly.

Tata Motors couldn't give a flip what squawking blather-bots like Rita Panahi think, but the fact that she gave them free advertising is probably quite hilarious to the marketing execs. If the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla Motors is anything to go by, or the election of his friend Donald Trump to the office of the United States Presidency for a second time is instructive, then yelling anything purely for the outrage, no matter how outlandish or mind-bendingly stupid it is, is excellent at getting you free publicity. Polarise the people. Controversy is the game. It doesn't matter if they hate you, when they all say your name. And say their name we have done. 

I think that the Jaguar rebranding is brilliant precisely because people like me and people older than me whose sensibilities are being offended, will all be dead soon. Dead people tend not to buy very many motor cars. Jaguar's rebranding excellently tells people like me that we aren't welcome, that fuddy-duddies even older than me who would have bought them, are allowed to keep their memories and they aren't welcome too. Jaguar's rebranding is very squarely aimed at people who are gaudy and awful but who more importantly, have loadsamoney.

I think that people have forgotten the late 1980s, when immediately before the stock market crash of 1987, neon colours and pastels were all the rage; precisely because the marketing people were all on cocaine and speed. This was the days of high finances where a credit card was equally use to rack up lines, as it was to charge exorbitant amounts of money on corporate expenses; knowing full well that they would never be checked because the other corporate people in accounts, were also all on cocaine and speed. Since 1987, the wealth of the world has condensated and consolidated even faster than it had during the first gilded age; to the point now where more than half of GDP across all OCED nations, is being given to people who do not actually work. The rewards of the economy of rents, dividends, and interest, collectively exceed that of wages.

What does this mean for Jaguar? Quite a lot. All the way back in 2003, Citibank in New York published a series of papers which described the idea of the emerging plutonomy. This is a parallel economy which operates inside the regular economy but one which is deliberately blind of 90% of people. Why bother trying to sell goods and services to anyone other than the richest of people, when they are the ones with all the money. Whatever the old rules of the game were, they are gone. When you add in the hollowing out of what used to be the managerial class and entire wipe-out of front facing service industries like banking, then the market to sell to that insanely rich 10% and 5%, is only getting richer and richer at a faster rate.

Jaguar Cars Ltd. are in the business of doing business. The fact that they sell cars is actually somewhat irrelevant here. What used to be all incarnations of Jaguar are also irrelevant. Jaguar Land Rover itself is a subsidiary of Tata Motors; which as an Indian Company, likely saw dwindling sales across Europe and America following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and then the Pandemic of 2020, and simply decided to abandon bothering to sell cars to those markets. If Formula One is the canary in the coal mine which tells you where the money in the world is, then the money in the world is not longer in places like France or Germany, but in places like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Singapore and the United States; all of which very much run dual economies.

Those place like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Singapore, as far as what they show us in Formula One broadcasts, are as gaudy and as tacky as all get out. In this respect, a gaudy and tacky rebrand to sell to these markets, is completely within context. Then when you add in the newer plutonomies like China and India, where branding also doesn't have to mean anything, then what does it matter. If Chinese car companies can basically sell things with practically no established brand at all, then for Tata Motors to trash any and all goodwill that they may have built up, purely to chase new money, then that's an acceptable business expense.

This is the context in which you need to understand the Jaguar Cars rebranding. Tata Motors which sits at the top of the group, honestly couldn't care a jot about what kind of nonsensical culture wars are being fought across the anglosphere, or what kind of permissiveness is allowed in Europe. Tata Motors simply doesn't care. The main business of doing business, is doing business. If that business entails selling motor cars, the Tata Motors is merely playing exactly the same game as Toyota or General Motors are in Australia. Poorer people can not buy as many cars as they want to sell; so Toyota doesn't even bother to sell a sub-$30K hatchback any more, and General Motors doesn't even bother to sell any family car any more. 

The Jaguar rebranding is objectively tasteless but the thing to remember is that it isn't actually for you. It isn't actually for anyone with any kind of Western sensibilities. It isn't for the people who may have associated the brand with a sporting history, and years of elegance. All of the people for whom those things matter, either do not buy Jaguars at all, do not buy enough of them, or will be dead soon. As far as Tata Motors is concerned, trashing the brand is fine because quite frankly, the name is all that matters.

Horse 3421 - Raygun - The Story Continues

Australia, nay the world, is in mourning this morning after comedian Steph Broadbridge has cancelled ‘Raygun The Musical’ after legal threats from Rachel Gunn. 

Rachel Gunn, also known as "Raygun" came to prominence and notoriety after performing a now infamous kangaroo breakdance at the 2024 Paris Olympics. She received a score of zero in the competition against her three competitors and suffice to say, did not pass beyond the first round of the competition. 

If you knew nothing about the 'sport' then her progress to the Olympics would have seemed dull and boring. Raygun had previously represented Australia at the World Breaking Championships three times previously; then won the No.1 world ranking in breakdancing after the Oceania Continental Championships. On the face of it, if this was any other sport, then this would have been a fait accompli. However, whatever the heck that thing was at the Olympics is baffling to all and sundry.

How she was ever allowed to represent Australia at all, seems to be a matter of unchecked hubris. As a lecturer at Macquarie University's Faculty of Arts, her thesis entitled "Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: A B-Girl's Experience of B-Boying" seems to me to be the kind of academic 'research' that a university would let someone do, in exchange for many thousands of dollars, in the hope that they would go away afterwards. One of the vastly underspoken reasons of why there are so many utterly useless theses in academia, is that they exist almost entirely as make work projects in exchange for the university collecting fees (which they are kind of forced into). Daft PhDs exist because of daft causes.

Raygun is obviously back by old money, as evidenced by the fact that she went to private school, then university, and has now lawyered up to protect what is claimed as intellectual property. The legal claim from Raygun's lawyers which is being threatened, is that they wanted to make sure that Raygun's "brand is properly represented, and protected in all future endeavours." As I work in an accounting firm, which has seen many cases in both Family Law and with Taxation Law, the claim from Raygun's lawyers looks prima facie like it will attain its method of victory by legal exhaustion. That is, take someone to court and have them spend so much money that you can bully them into submission. This is a spite case.

When it comes to the now infamous kangaroo dance, the legal claim will be a one of whether or not the intellectual property can be owned. It is worth remembering that in Australia, there is no formal system of registration for copyright protection. Usually all that is enough to prove that someone was the originator of a thing that can be owned, is that the work be attached to a date stamp somehow; this already exists for Raygun, in that her 'work' was already performed in a public place that was recorded.

When it comes to Raygun's right to claim ownership of the work, it doesn't even require her to own the footage. The fact that this happened at the Olympics, means that the copyright over the footage is owned by the International Olympic Committee and it must be said that they are fierce when it comes to protecting their footage. 

Raygun's legal claim, if it ever gets to court, will almost certainly rest upon Section 31 of the Copyright Act 1968:

https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s31.html

Nature of copyright in original works

(1)  For the purposes of this Act, unless the contrary intention appears, copyright, in relation to a work, is the exclusive right:

(a)  in the case of a literary, dramatic or musical work, to do all or any of the following acts:

(i)  to reproduce the work in a material form;

(ii)  to publish the work;

(iii)  to perform the work in public;

(iv)  to communicate the work to the public;

(vi)  to make an adaptation of the work;

-  Section 31, Copyright Act 1968

Performing a dance, is a dramatic work. This means that Raygun has the exclusive right to to perform the work in public and to to make an adaptation of the work. As there doesn't need to be a copyright notice on it to be covered by the Act, copyright protection is free and automatic. As works which are under copyright are also protected in Australia, then the fact that this was performed in France, is irrelevant. This also satisfies the simple tests of this 'original work' being and recorded in 'material form'. 

However, the defence in this case is actually also contained within the Copyright Act 1968. There are many fair dealing provisions and of course one of them is for the purpose of parody or satire.

https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s41.html

Fair dealing for purpose of parody or satire

A fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or with an adaptation of a literary, dramatic or musical work, does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the work if it is for the purpose of parody or satire.

-  Section 41A, Copyright Act 1968

I would expect that Steph Broadbridge, who is a comedian, would claim that ‘Raygun The Musical’ is obviously a parody or satire of what was a really really daft thing in the first place. For this claim to be successful, the respondent (Steph Broadbridge) in this case would need to prove that the proposed performance was sufficiently transformed enough to satisfy the court that this was actually parody or satire. They might have a problem with the name ‘Raygun The Musical’ as this might imply that Raygun, which sounds like it could be a trademarked name, might imply the endorsement of Raygun.

If Raygun had gone to the Olympics as a work of satire in the first place, then she would have been a national hero. Breakdancing at the Olympics is something which deserves to be made fun of. However, someone who has lived a life of privilege, and who went to the Olympics and did what she did, who then decides to sue a small time comedian who might make her look foolish, only serves to prove the reason of why there should have been parody or satire of what was a really really daft thing in the first place, to be right.

The proper course of action should have been to buy tickets to the show, seen it on opening night, taken the parody or satire as part of self-deprecation, and then let the whole thing die a quiet and natural death. ‘Raygun The Musical’ would have just fallen away because in principle, this is a passing fad. Ironically, Raygun herself has gained infamy twice; firstly for being bad at the Olympics and secondly for being unfun.

Horse 3420 - Supercars Intends To Chuck Mortars At Its Own Dam of Legitimacy

On the V8 Sleuth Podcast this week, the following question was asked by David Zitterbart:

"Where did the incentive come from to Americanise the Championship structure? It seems weird considering we had a compelling championship this year and the American fan base doesn't like the structure and are demanding change."

- David Zitterbart, to the V8 Sleuth Podcast - Episode 487.

https://www.v8sleuth.com.au/podcasts/

What I found particularly disheartening about the way that this question was answered, is that it didn't actually answer the question. Admittedly, it is rather impossible to look inwards at a somewhat opaque organisation like V8 Supercars Holdings Pty Ltd; especially when it is majority owned by overseas investors.

The actual answer as to why Supercars' management decided to change to a Finals Series, is purely commercial. This is about selling advertising space and generating ad dollars. As it must be. Motor Racing is an expensive business; so from a business perspective, business always does what business does.

However the way that this question was answered, apart from not actually answering the question, seemed very dismissive of the underlying worry, that the Finals Series in NASCAR is hated by the fans because it is unbelievably stupid. From the outside and as a member of the peanut gallery, this looks like a case of people who have a vested interest inside the business, telling us the customer, that our opinions about the product that they want to sell, are irrelevant. Never mind the fact that it is us who buy the tickets to races, buy subscriptions for pay-TV like Kayo, and ultimately it is us the race fans who decide where out dollars go. Alienate the fans too much, and what you get is what NASCAR is suffering from which is a long tail of declining ticket sales, and ad revenues. Smash the race fans in the teeth with a cricket bat enough, and they will eventually get the idea that they are not wanted and that their dollars aren't good enough; so they will take them elsewhere.

But to address the elephant in the room: the reason why NASCAR fans have been complaining loudly and longly about the confected NASCAR Finals Serieses (the Chase, the Playoffs etc), is because the NASCAR Finals Series are irredeemably stupid. Now going on for 20 years of complaints and decisions which have actively delegitimised the championship in the name of 'entertainment' which just isn't very entertaining, have rendered the crowning of a NASCAR Champion ever more and more ridiculous. When Joey Logano was crowned champion with an average finish of 17.1; which wouldn't have even put him into the points of a Formula One race, the irredeemable stupidity of the NASCAR Finals Series was only yelled into the kosmos ever more loudly. Somehow, Supercars management, in a series of acts which look like they also want an irredeemably stupid championship, have decided that they want that in Australia.

However, Finals Series in Australian sports have existed for more than 120 years. We have come to expect them but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are good or even fit for purpose. Initially, the decision to have Finals Series was quite pragmatic. The reason why Australia has finals systems at all, stems from the fact that the initial seasons of top-flight football across various codes would have otherwise been too short. There were only 9 teams in the very first NSW Rugby League season in 1908, and the 1897 Victorian Football League season only had 8 teams. Likewise the current incarnation of the A-League also only started with 8 teams. At most, a full home and away season with 9 teams, is only 16 weeks; which is only just longer than one yearly/temperate season. 16 weeks before the last week in September, is only Jun 10; which is bang in winter. It is just not sensible to have a sporting season that short.

However, if you want a practical demonstration of just how unbelievably stupid a Finals Series is in principle, look no further than this year's Australian Rules football season. Part way through the 2024 AFL Season, the Sydney Swans went on a tear and established themselves clear at the top of the ladder by 12 points. You know what? Had there just been a simple league format, where the team with the most points at the end of the season wins, then nobody would have questioned that the Swans deserved a Premiership. 

And no, the existence of Finals Series in other sports, like Australian Rules, Rugby League, and Football, does not prove that in principle that a Finals Series is in any way good. If anything, the Australian Rules Grand Final also serves to prove that Finals Series in principle are irredeemably stupid. The fact that you have an imperfect round robin system, where everyone does not play everyone else twice, does not of itself justify the goodness of a Finals System.

In fact, the pre-season competition and the Finals Series could and should both be dumped; with those weeks reclaimed for regular matches. Assuming that we get to a 20-team competition, then a home/away series of matches would result in a 38 Round competition. If that sounds too gruelling for the players, then ditch reserve grade and play the squads with deeper rotation. The argument that someone coming tenth, who has no chance of winning the title in a league competition, should magically be able to win one, is based upon... pub quiz rules where the points don't matter and anyone can win? I just don't know.

But the unspoken thing here is that the fundamental difference between motorsport and other sports is that instead of having two teams go head to head, you have many teams going head to head, in every race. A motor race is a thing where the win condition is that in order to win, you have to beat everyone else; all the time. Over the course of a season, a champion should emerge; which is of course the point of holding a championship series. In any league system, where a champion is crowned as the result of being the best team over the course of a season, more or less proves inherently the fitness of purpose of a league. Perhaps the best example of this is the 1970 Formula One Season where Jochen Rindt had been so dominant, that even after he was killed during qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, had already earned enough championship points that no other driver managed to overtake his total. In a Finals Series, the best driver that season, would not have won the championship.

The excuse that the rules are the same for everyone, is unfortunately not good enough. That kind of reasoning, actually justifies the incident in 1981 when the Australian cricket captain Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl the last ball of a one-day match against New Zealand underarm. Yes, the rules are the same for everyone but if the rules are stupid, you get stupid results.

In fact, had a simple league system where a champion is crowned as the result of being the best over the course of a season, then there would have been 12 different champions in NASCAR, to what we have now. That's 12 times out of 21, or a 57% failure rate. Has it made championships more exciting? Not really. If anything NASCAR proves that if you start chucking mortars at the Dam of Legitimacy, eventually the dam bursts.

It is unbelievably stupid that Supercars want that for Australia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NofX3DXtAU

Horse 3419 - Black Companies Make Me Livid

I need to be very careful about out I write this post; because things that I mention here, might form part of a class-action and maybe a series of prosecutions. Provided that I remain vague about the circumstances and do not mention actual companies by name, I think that I should be at liberty to write this post.

Particularly over the last decade, since Tony Abbott became Prime Minister, Australia has been progressively culturally morphing closer and closer to being like the United States. As such, we should expect to see magic words like 'abortion' and 'woke' being waved about, to make people vote for things which actively attack their own interests. Beginning with Abbott especially, the employment of the three-word slogan and the deliberate tactic of making people not think, has been the gameplan of right-wing trashmedia and the consolidation of media assets and the white-anting of the ABC, has only made things worse. It was worked excellently.

One favourite strategies of right-wing trashmedia in this country has yet again been that demonising immigrants is fair game. Australia as an invader settler colony, not long after federation, explicitly passed racist legislation to keep out anyone other than white people. A suspicion of brown people was kept more or less intact until the late 1960s, and then when actual humanitarian crises started to happen as a result of the wars which we were only too happy to fight (after having switched foreign policy providers from Britain to the United States) it was only then that people who looked markedly different from the generic white people that were here, started to arrive.

The propaganda from the right-wing trashmedia likes to blame immigration for rising rents and lower home ownership rates, in spite of the fact that real wages have been falling since 1978, and that tax policy was changed specifically to benefit what is fast becoming a new landed gentry. We have amazingly generous provision in taxation legislation, designed to reward the accumulation of capital; particularly when in the matters of the 50% GST Discounting Rate and other helpful tactics like Negative Gearing, Trust Tax provisions, and Franking Credits. Yet the right-wing trashmedia, which doesn't need to rely on facts or the long story to convince its consumers of what they want to tell them, has no problem in blaming people who might have arrived yesterday, for 40 years of tax policy. At the same time, the right-wing trashmedia likes to accuse unions for keeping wages too high; even though wages have been sliding in real terms for more than 40 years.

In response to wages which companies think is still too high, when they would prefer to pay people literally nothing, we have seen the emergence of ghost colleges who hold out worthless qualifications in return for fees, and what we are beginning to see with so-called "black companies".

Perhaps you may have heard of a "dark supermarket" or a "dark store". These places generally have an online shopfront, and then a large warehouse which exists to fulfill orders, without needing to have any kind of physical customer interaction. After an order has been filled, the order is then put on a small truck and delivered directly to the customer's door. While there is a small need to hire staff to pick and fill the orders, the land, labour, and capital, needed to operate a physical store out in 'the real world', no longer exists. Some customers actively like the idea of having their things delivered to them as it means that they do not have to interact with staff or leave the house.

A black company is one step even better. A black company might operate a dark supermarket, or a dark store, or a call centre, or a data entry company, or other such business which also does not need to have any kind of physical customer interaction but then maximises profits even further, because without public scrutiny, it can find even more profits by underpaying wages, stealing wages; all without any kind of watching eye from the public, and because the people who work there are often hired under the guise of studying at a ghost college, or other kind of immigration/visa scheme, teh consumers of right-wing trashmedia are already on the side of the companies who employ these people and best of all, actively hate them.

Without any oversight, a black company is perfectly at liberty to hire a large number of young employees and then force them to work large amounts of overtime without overtime pay. A black company is also perfectly at liberty to scrimp on things like air-conditioning and ventilation because not only is there no oversight but recent immigrants are highly unlikely to be members of a union either.

In addition to conditions which would be unacceptable out in 'the real world', I have now seen reports of bullying and harassment, both physical and sexual in nations, of workers by their superiors. In addition to this, there have also been reports of superiors threatening young employees with disrepute and refusal to write or provide any kind of reference if they indicate they might quit. As these young employees' visa and immigration is contingent on them having a job in many cases, the threat of being fired and/or not having a reference, or a loss of reputation even though that is in all likelihood materially untrue, is very very scary.

One particular company which operates a dark supermarket, currently has the issue that its warehouse workers have found out that they have been underpaid, and as they are not union members, they feel that the have very little power to actually do anything about it. This has resulted in strikes; which the company is quite prepared to wear because even $50 million in lost sales is apparently an acceptable price to pay while it starves out its striking warehouse workers. They are ultimately replaceable and as none of them are ever likely to take up any kind of formal industrial action through the courts, then the wages that this company doesn't have to pay while they are on strike, is kind of a wash in comparison to the lost sales. This is quite apart from the fact that the surveillance and conditions these workers endure is completely beyond the pale.

Meanwhile prices have risen in real terms and well beyond the rate of inflation; thanks to a combination of sneaky predatory practices and possible collusion within the market and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott's political party, rather than blaming the company for their action, has taken to blaming the federal government for a rise in grocery prices. The right-wing trashmedia love this, because they get yet another reason to continue demonising immigrants. Out of sight does not equal out of mind but it does mean that you can dehumanise someone for fun and profit; particularly if you a corporate psychopathic cussjack.

The sad thing is that as the economy moves to being more online and less about having shopfronts in the real world, big corporations under cover of dark stores can operate black companies with even less scrutiny than they used to in the past. A business which operates a store front has to cover things like rent, electricity and post wages but a black company which can consolidate its floorspace, can pay less and actively skimp on workers' conditions in complete impunity. Black companies even more than faceless corporations act as if they have no responsibility to either the nation or the people therein because it turns out that both democracy and decency die in darkness.

Horse 3418 - The Case For Continuing To Collect Income Tax On Social Security From Seniors

Matt Whitman of both the Ten Minute Bible Hour¹ and No Dumb Questions² fame (links below) tweeted a twoosh on the Elmo X Machine on Wednesday:

https://x.com/MattWhitmanTMBH/status/1864178422492135589

I'm hearing there's talk of getting rid of taxes on social security, which seems obviously good to me.

What's the case for continuing to collect income tax on social security from seniors?

- Matt Whitman, via X, 4th Dec 2024

This is a classically excellent put question of the form, "Given P Why Q?" where we are asked to find the reasonable case to arrive at Q from P. There is a stated reasonable opinion and the question which follows is also reasonable. 

Firstly, I live in Australia; which means that I am most familiar with how the taxation system works here, and being an accountant who takes worked on both sides of the fence (both out here in private practice and inside the dark box of the Australian Taxation Office with the mice on treadmills in cages) I have at least a passing idea of the basics of how taxation works and more importantly, civic telos in operation.

Secondly, I need to clear away the discussion about the right of the state to collect taxation. Even going back to the ancient world, soldiers were paid in coin, which they could use as a universal token system to buy goods and services. The state always owned the coin. That means that they always had the right in principle to lay a claim on the coin that they issued in the first place. Any statement that "taxation is theft" is from the outset a lie, because even if you worked for it, the dollars, pounds, lira, euro, dinar, shekels, and wurniks that you have in your possession, were always actually the stuff of the state who always had a claim to take it back. The word "taxation" itself is derived from Latin which means "I pay"; where the person paying tax is always merely paying back the state for the provision of services (usually defence and law) which it has already provided.

So then, having established that the state always had the right to lay claim to taxation, Mr Whitman's question is grounded in the secondary moral domain of fairness. This is again an excellent position to be asking a question from; because one of the features of a good law, of which taxation law is a part, always has to do about the fairness of that law.

In addressing that issue, I refer to Section 6.5 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997. 

https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/itaa1997240/s6.5.html

Income according to ordinary concepts ( ordinary income )

(1)  Your assessable income includes income according to ordinary concepts, which is called ordinary income .

Note:  Some of the provisions about assessable income listed in section   10 - 5 may affect the treatment of ordinary income.

(2)  If you are an Australian resident, your assessable income includes the * ordinary income you * derived directly or indirectly from all sources, whether in or out of Australia, during the income year.

- Section 6.5, Income Tax Assessment Act 1997

Part of what makes a law a good law, are the components of simplicity, predictability, and fairness.

A good law should in principle be as simple as possible and stated as simply as possible. The law even though it might have perfectly good reasons why it exists, doesn't need to state why it does. The most basic road law of driving on the left (or right) is of itself arbitrary and it obviously exists for people's safety but the law has no need to entertain the reasons of 'because'. 

A good law should in principle be as predictable as possible. As a law is a general statement of behaviour, conduct, operation, method et cetera, and as law exists for the regulation, standardisation and protection of society, then the law should be written in such a way that someone should be able to follow it and know what the general case is for the thing which the law covers.

A good law should in principle be as fair as possible. Since the law is itself an imposition upon the absolute freedom of people to do whatever they want, then the law should simultaneously exist to maximise people's happiness or utility in their reasonable and fair conduct as well as to fall on all people equally. The law should also take into account that what is fair for someone might not necessarily be fair for someone else due to circumstance. This is the underlying principle of equity, which is also an excellent foundation for law.

So then, if we consider that the law should be fair simple, predictable, and fair, then what is the case for collecting income tax on social security from seniors?

The Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 makes literally no distinction about what kind of income is income and assumes that all income derived from all sources is ordinary income. Income from all sources, is a pretty simple statement. Income from all sources, is a predictable statement. And since the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 applies to everyone equally, then the law is fair in the sense that there are no exceptions as to whom the law falls upon.

Social Security, Old Age Pensions, Welfare Payments Superannuation Payments, et cetera, are in principle no different to Wages, Rents, and Dividends. As a Dollar is one of the very few things which is perfectly fungible, that is that one dollar is absolutely identical and interchangeable which any other dollar, then there is no reason whatsoever why the taxation system should care a jot about what kind of ordinary income it is.

Nor should the taxation system should care a jot about the age of the taxpayer. Since the state provides services equally, (defence, law, roads, schools, hospitals) without distinction of the age of taxpayers, then there should not be a distinction made. The law should not care a jot if the taxpayer is 2 or 102.

The question of fairness, should be properly addressed within the substance of the subject of the law itself. In this case, since Social Security are ordinary income, then the question of fairness is not about age of taxpayers, but rather the amount of income since dollars are perfectly fungible. 

Someone who has a very limited income, is very much going to miss one dollar being taken from them, whereas a millionaire is not. Ten Dollars might be the difference between whether or not a homeless person eats today, whereas Lord Phillip Fortherington-Smythe who is the head of a multi-national multi-trillon dollar corporation and who looks at balance sheets and profit and loss statements where 000's are stated, can't even see the existence of Ten Dollars. 

One of the interesting things about money is that the marginal utility of that last dollar, actually decreases the more of it that someone has. In the end it decreases so much that the actual marginal utility of that last dollar, is such that very rich people don't even know about individual dollars. I live way down at the bottom; where I can tell you that a loaf of bread has 20 slices in it and costs $2.39 at Aldi, whereas someone in the board room of a major corporation who has servants, might not even do their own shopping.

So for this reason, the best taxation law with respect to income, imposes progressive rates of income as it makes logical sense, to charge the people who actually derive the most benefit from the regulation, standardisation and protection of society, as measured in the dollars that they derive in ordinary income, the highest marginal rates on that last dollar.

If we assume that our theoretical senior, has no other income apart from their social security payments, then in my country they are on $1144,40 per fortnight which is $29,754 per year. Once you also factor in tax offsets for deriving such a low income, then the amount of taxation which is assessable on $29,754 per year is $0. Yes this is a matter of semantics but the social security payments have been assessed as ordinary income; and $0 of income tax to be paid is still an amount. I think that that would probably satisfy Mr Whitman. More importantly, it does so because the law was simple, predictable, and fair in the first place.

Is the law in his country that well designed? If not, that's a problem with the law and not the principle. 

¹ https://www.thetmbh.com

² https://www.nodumbquestions.fm

Horse 3417 - THE PEOPLE v PAUL McCARTNEY [2024] - Judgement

The Fake Internet Court of Australia

THE PEOPLE v PAUL McCARTNEY [2024] - Judgement

H3417/1

It has come to this fake internet court's attention (and definitely not for the first time) that the decisions of a certain Paul McCartney of Liverpool, have resulted in untold suffering and dismay for roughly one twelfth of the year; starting on or about the last Friday in November (owing to the existence of the United States' Public Holiday of Thanksgiving). Starting in late November, across radios and shop tannoys all over the world, this terrible horrorshow beings with the simple noise of:

wob wob wob wob wob wob wob wob

wob wob wob wob wob wob wob wob

wob wob wob wob wob wob wob wob

wob wob wob wob wob wob wob wob

Oh no. It has begun.

These are the facts as this court sees them:

The terrible horror which is unleashed on the world every year, as shop decorations change from orange and black, to brown, to red and green, is one dastardly component of the soundtrack of the season. That terrible horror which has been unchained and allowed to roam the world like an unthinking beast, every year since 1979, is "Wonderful Christmastime".

It might have started out as an innocent song, as Paul McCartney having rocked the world in The Beatles, then quietly put it to sleep again with Wings, then decided to branch out on his own and release a solo career and music therein into the world.  

Sure, the song of itself isn't a bad thing, but it isn't particularly a great thing either. Unlike playing Whamageddon in which one tries to avoid listening to Wham's "Last Christmas", or the yearly defrosting of Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You", "Wonderful Christmastime" arrives on radios and tannoys for three and a bit minutes of mind-bending, soul-sucking, spirit-crushing nonsense before going away again. "Last Christmas" is like trying to eat a kumquat. "All I Want For Christmas Is You" is a yearly does of ear diabetes. "Wonderful Christmastime" is the equivalent of eating mashed suede.

The mood is right.

The spirit's up.

We're here tonight,

And that's enough.

This is first verse; which is lyrically as impressive as an average first grader's story in a creative writing class. You might be impressed if this was a child in kindergarten, but if a first grader submitted this, you would seriously consider whether even they had put in the effort. 

The second verse is worse than the first and is such a curse that I want to burst:

The party's on.

The feeling's here,

That only comes,

This time of year.

Four lines of rhyming verse like this, if it appeared in a greeting card, would rightly be seen as drivel and dross. I will even go so far as to say that this kind of drivel is more offensive than outright offense or abuse as it insults both the intelligence of the sender and the recipient of the greeting card. This however, is not in a greeting card but a song; which gets wheeled out every single year. We know that Mr McCartney is better at producing songs than this.  We know that Mr McCartney is better at writing better lyrics than this. Maybe if this was a Roud folk song we might deign to forgive it but the fact that this was a song which was put out for commercial consumption, just pounds my mental hazelnuts into paste and then folds through Castrol TTS two-stoke additive. The result is unpalatable. 

This is same chap who brought you such things as "Love Me Do", "I Saw Her Standing There", "Blackbird" and "Yesterday" with the Beatles. Granted that I think that the useful catalogue of Beatles songs nominally ends with the end of the Revolver album, that still doesn't change the fact that Mr McCartney was talented way beyond compare. Then with Wings and when the first one said to the second one there "I hope you're having fun", we should have realised that his career and body of work had peaked and was kind of dribbling out. That's fine. There is no shame in being one half of the writing duo from arguably the most successful band of all-time. However, likely due to his name and the supposition that it alone would sell records, "Wonderful Christmastime" was not only approved and pressed and sold.

Judgement:

In considering what kind of judgement is to be handed down, one must first consider what kind of crime has been committed. The punishment should be commensurate to the crime perpetrated. This fake internet court, although being fake, still believes in the principle of equity. 

This court had to consider the possibility that in exchange for being part of the most successful band of all-time, that Paul McCartney must have sold his soul to the Devil. The Devil apparently thinks himself something of a fine musician but keeps on losing in head-to-head contests. Even when the Devil went down to Georgia and demanded to challenge some Johnny to a fiddle contest, or for two chaps to play the best song in the world, his failure was eminent. However, when one considers the absolute dross that Mr McCartney has released in addition to some of the funnest pop songs of all, we have to admit that this is not the work of the Devil, and to be perfectly honest, "Wonderful Christmastime" is not so nefarious that it is diabolical. It is just bad.

Normally this court would make orders of instruction but in this case, it is likely impossible to undo the psychic damage which has been allowed to take place. Unless one is able to tightly control terms of copyright like George Lucas has done, once the bird has been released it is practically impossible to recapture it again. This fake internet court is unable to make any meaningful judgement.

But this does not change the fact that you Paul McCartney, are guilty of both psychic negligence and culpable moral hazard. You have brought hateration and holleration into this fake internet court and as the nature of this malfeasance is such that we can not act, then all we can do is point the pointing finger of shame at you and hope that you think about what you have done .

If we ever see you back before this court, the penalties will be severe. Get out; lest you make a mockery of my courtroom. We are already perfectly capable of making a mockery of this fake internet courtroom as it is. You are malevolent and have now ensnared others in your villainy. Can you not see what trouble thou hast wrought? 

- ROLLO75 J 

(this case will be reported in FLIR as H3417/1

Horse 3416 - From Korean Drinking Game To The Premier League

"How" in this case is the form following the function of "what", and "what" this is, is a story which involves several links in the chain. So then, we shall start at the end and work our way backwards.

Liverpool 2 - Manchester City 0

Gakpo - 21'

Salah - 78' (pen)

2-0 is a fairly routine scoreline in a football match. 2-0 is a scoreline which seems comfortable and normal for a side which is in the ascendancy and which is at the top of its game. But when Mo Salah slotted (pun intended) away the penalty in the 78th minute against Manchester City on Sunday which is the side who by rights should be kicking all and sundry to the kerb, 2-0 suddenly looks dangerous. This 2-0 scoreline gave Liverpool 3 points and sent them 9 points clear at the top of the table. This 2-0 scoreline is immediate cause for abject fear in everyone else in the chasing pack.

However when the crowd erupted after Mo Salah's penalty and started singing, the radio commentary team at BBC Radio Merseyside were obviously confused as they couldn't understand what was being sung. I however instantly recognised the tune as I have heard it on the bus, on either 2Day FM or MIX FM. If a song has found its way from the hit parade into the songbook of football fans, then this has the potential to be something which lasts way longer than just a passing fad. Just occasionally, something from the passing parade of pop songs, has the potential to last as long as "Go West" by the Village People, or maybe even "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" by John Kellette.

The lyrics as sing by the Kop at Anfield are:

Mo Salah, Mo Salah,

Mo Salah, Mo Salah,

Mo Salah, Mo Salah,

Uh uh-huh, uh-huh.

Which in principle tells you nothing about the song in question. The original song in question is "APT" by Rose and Bruno Mars; which makes it unclear about whether or not this song should be classified as a K-Pop song or not. A glance at the lyric video for the song, tells you instantly what Rose and Bruno Mars were singing about in the first place.

The chant in the original song, and the reason why it is so transferrable (a bit like "Oh Mickey, you're so fine") is as equally earwormy and also why it shot to the top of the charts in Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

Apateu, Apateu,

Apateu, Apateu,

Apateu, Apateu,

Uh uh-huh, uh-huh.

"Apateu" is a the loanword in Korean for "Apartment" and finds equivalents in Japanese and some dialects of Chinese. However even then, we are still no closer to working out why anyone would be singing this.

"Apateu" is actually a drinking game. The rules are simple. Several people in an apartment (presumably) put their hands into a big pile-up in the centre of the group. Someone calls out a number; then people take their hand from the bottom of the pile and place it on the top. When the nth hand has been placed on the top of the pile, that person wins/loses and must drink from whatever the thing in question is (apply other rules as necessary).

And that's it really. No really, the story is that simple. It still doesn't explain why the crowd of an English Premier League club, is stealing the tune from a K-Pop song for remanufacture with its own words though.

Football crowds have been stealing songs from everywhere, nominally since the 1950s. Legend has it that the first song ever sung by a football crowd, spontaneously by the crowd rather than just as a formal thing like a national anthem or "Abide With Me" which has been sung at every FA Cup Final since 1927 (Arsenal and Cardiff City; originally at the behest of King George V), was "Yes, We Have No Bananas" by a Liverpool crown in 1959, while they were trying to get rid of a brass band playing at half time, by drowning it out. 

Liverpool famously has "You'll Never Walk Alone" across both the Shankly Gates and the top of its full crest; which was take from Gerry And The Pacemakers' version of the song from 1963; which itself is taken from the 1945 Rogers And Hammerstein musical "Carousel" and is sung to a widow after her husband committed suicide following a botched robbery.

The fact that a Liverpool crowd should steal a song from K-Pop, is in the grand scheme of more than six decades of football songs, entirely expected. The fact that BBC Radio Merseyside has no idea what the song was or where it came from, is also entirely expected though perhaps if they'd listened to Radio 1, they would have been informed. The fact that I knew the song, and am questioning about whether I knew about this song because I was once a spry 20-something, has me wondering about the nature of reality. 

Is this central chant which has now escaped into football crowds something new, or did this actually exist 20 years ago or more? Did Rose actually write this, or was this already old? Is this new and have I therefore gaslight myself into thinking that this always existed? Why can I not get this out of my head now? Am I doomed to forever have this rattle around in my head like the song "Bananaphone" by Raffi? Or does APT just die a natural death on the terraces and get consigned to the dustbin of history? Who knows?

What we do know is that this weekend, it got real weird real quick. Anfield went K-Pop.

Horse 3415 - YOLO and WOLO

 In late 2012, the acronym YOLO entered pop culture for a brief period of time. 'You Only Live Once' is supposed to express a kind of happy-go-lucky mode of living in the moment; without giving a jot about the consequences. YOLO for a time, became the motto of people about to do something really stupid, or people about to do something which they would temporarily enter woo-mode for, such as drinking excessive amounts of fermented vegetable product¹ in a short space of time, or some kind of mild but ultimately silly attempt at temporary happiness like jumping in a river.

Of course the acronym is utterly pointless to Buddhists and other people who believe in reincarnation, as they do not believe that you do only live once but live many times. YALA 'You Always Live Again', which I assume is the Buddhist equivalent of this phrase, never really caught on though.

As with all vapid and ultimately substanceless things that pass by in the never ending pop culture parade, YOLO eventually faded; just like 'girl dinner' and lime green 'brat summer' have done in the more recent past. YOLO as a concept has also faded due to the fact that the people who would have become obnoxious teenagers and party people in their early 20s just haven't been replaced with anywhere near as much disposable income, even as in 2012, and their ability or even desire to drink excessive amounts of fermented vegetable product in a short space of time, or even adopt a happy-go-lucky mode of living in the moment, has very much been tempered and quelled by the demands of having to pay even more of what little income they get in rent, to their grandparents. The fact that we have struggling nightclubs in my city but record numbers of cruise ships arriving, where the average age of people taking a cruise is 79, tells you where the rewards of the economy are actually going.

In contrast as we cooked away in a Penrith train doing 6km/h, because of blank signals further up the line, I heard the guard in the rear car having a discussion with someone about WOLO happening up ahead. Yes, you read that right. WOLO; not YOLO.

WOLO?

Why Only Live Once?

What On the Livingearth is going On?

WOLO signs generally indicate that either due to the heat, or signal failure, or places where points are locked, or places where the dead man's arm hasn't raised, et cetera, that there are speed restrictions on the line ahead. This might be because the maintenance engineers have determined that there is a chance that the track could buckle, or that the points might unlock, or that because signals are not working that drivers may enter the block but purely operating on sight rules only.

In trying to determine what WOLO actually means, I found several operations manuals across Australia, and even the explanation of "Welded track Operations for LOcomotives" but this has to be a backronym. Unless a car in a set starts with a T to indicate that it is a Trailer car, then they are some kind of drive car in an Electrical Multiple Unit (EMU) or Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU). Actual Locomotives on the railways, are almost exclusively found on freight trains; with the most common exception being the XPT with Locomotives at either end of the train.

WOLO as it turns out, is likely to be nothing more than a code word; which was picked because a telegraph operator could memorise this and tap it out in a hurry. I have not actually found the NSW Railway Telegraphic Code Library but the existence of this tome is referred to a lot; which apparently contains more than 100 four-letter codes which telegraph operator would use to transmit messages around the system in a hurry (RYZY apparently means² that a particular box car has malfunctioning Westinghouse brakes and needs to have some other system applied to them; such as squeeze retarders in a hump yard). If this story is true, then WOLO is like flying the yellow Q-Flag for Quarantine, or the black flag with a red circle on it which is "The Meatball" flag and indicates that a car has a mechanical failure and is forcibly being retired from a motor race. WOLO as both the telegraphic code in the past, and now just as a word on a sign, is about communicating things in a hurry; which is ironic given that the thing being communicated in a hurry is an instruction to move slowly.

Speaking as someone whose days ahead of them are fewer than the days already passed, the benefit of applied and forced wisdom, after also having both the yellow Q-Flag and the Meatball flag applied in life, YOLO and WOLO look very much like two-sides of the same coin.

WOLO signs are about posting limits on operation before a train running over the tracks causes a critical failure. This seems to me to be a useful analogy when it comes to mental health. As I am not a psychologist, concepts like boundary setting and developing resiliance sound fine in the abstract, but I neither have the ability to offer any kind of advice; nor should I do so.  

People generally do not need to be told YOLO before they embark upon some mildly amusing/bonkers/irresponsible endeavour but weirdly people almost always seem to need to be given permission to WOLO. Sometimes people need to be told WOLO or else suffer burnout, or some other kind of mental health failure. Humans are strange. For reasons that make no sense to me whatsoever, as someone who grew up and learned that being bored was acceptable, that watching clouds go by was fine, whose internal monologue was/is constant so I'd better put some kind of output instrument in front of it, that when people say that they can't stop, it makes zero sense to me. 

¹Bread makes people happy. Fermented vegetable product makes people laugh. Money makes the world go round.

²RYZY is different to Skibidi RIZZ Toilet.

Horse 3414 - Yes, Shakespeare Could Have; Easily

The older that I get, the more that I am convinced that the purest of all the Sciences is Mathematics; that the universe itself is underpinned by certain immutable rules; and that even the existence of matter and space and time and here and now itself, is actually just a series of vibrations which are also governed by those same laws of Mathematics on some deep deep deep and unobservable level. 

However when it comes to things which are observable and where data exists (data is beautiful), things can be calculated and explanations given based upon that observable data. As someone who works in a job where simple arithmetic is king, and as someone who doesn't actually live in the real world, I can tell you that data is enough to explain all kinds of lovely things. The maths simply doesn't lie. What does lie, are the people who generate the numbers, and they do so with the stories which they tell. 

While watching a video from Rob Words on Youtube¹, which was trying to work out how many words that William Shakespeare actually gave to the English language, immediately my mind raced to find the explanation of the unaddressed question of if he actually wrote all of those plays and sonnets. This is quite apart from the fact that the biggest reason why his corpus of work has survived where other people's has not, is due the to the fact that Shakespeare operated on the south side of the River Thames and the Great Fire Of London, which was the hottest event of 1666 and 50 years after The Bard died, mostly burnt out quarters of the old city on the north side of the river. Shakespeare's stuff survived because it didn't burn in a fire.

Nevertheless, the question of if he actually wrote all of those plays and sonnets is partly one of asking if it is at all possible; the answer to that can be found in the data.

"Alexander joins forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays Defending the new United States Constitution, entitled The Federalist Papers.

The plan was to write a total of twenty-five essays with the work divided evenly among the three men.

In the end, they wrote eighty-five essays in the span of six months.

John Jay got sick after writing five.

James Madison wrote twenty-nine.

Hamilton wrote the other FIFTY-ONE!

"How do you write like you're running out time?

Write day and night like you're running out time?"

- Non-Stop, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda (2016)².

How many layers would we like to cut through in this meta-onion? LOTS. The actual number of essays that Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers was unknown until textual analysis could be completed with computers in the 1960s. Again, the data already existed; there just needed to be the means to calculate it. 

The PDF of The Federalist Papers which I am working with, contains all 85 essays plus a foreword plus discussions on how they relate to the US Constitution. The PDF contains more words than are contained within the 85 essays; so is an over-estimation. This is excellent for our purposes.

There are 189,274 words in the document.

189,274 / 85 = 2227 rounded up to the nearest number.

Using me as the guinea pig, and a comparable example of an essay writer, doing a countback of all the words in this blog, lands in Horse 3286 and the word "is". If Hamilton wrote 2227 words per essay, and I wrote 1503 words per essay, then we can assume that Mr Miranda's question posed "How do you write like you're running out time?" is answered "pretty easily". If I can put out an equivalent number of words to the entire Federalist Papers, working alone and in my spare time, every year for more than 20 years, then Hamilton could have easily done this in a semi-professional capacity. 

Turning our attention to The Bard of Avon, we can do a similar word count to find out what he wrote. Again, the PDF of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare which I am working with, contains too many words.

There are 884,647 words in the document.

When we consider that the entire corpus of Shakespeare was written between 1589 and 1613, that gives us a 24 year period.

884,647 / 24 =  36,860 words per year.

Now, I already know that at my slower rate of writing, which has consistently been 154 essays per year and at 1503 words per essay, that gives us 231,462 words per year. When you consider that I do not do this in a professional capacity and that Shakespeare's job literally depended upon him writing plays to be produced and tickets sold, then my output at a rate which is 6 times as fast, makes Shakespeare's entire body of work not only possible but very easily so.

I have written more than five times the number of words that Shakespeare did, in a non-professional capacity and in a timeframe which is four years shorter. Could Shakespeare have written all of those plays and sonnets, at a rate of less than 20% as fast as rank amateur? Very yes.

Also, when you consider that something like National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) encourages people to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, at the rate of 1667 words per day, then someone beavering away could have written the entire works of Shakespeare in a year and a half. This is not just in the realm of possibility, but probably an actuality for professional writers and novelists. Think about "War And Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo, and "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, and you find large works of more than half a million words; which are all more than 50% of Shakespeare's entire output in 24 years.'

Shakespeare absolutely could have written all 

¹Rob Words - Shakespeare:  https://youtu.be/z_UtRe9DgvE?si=Va1TZNkhfUvwhbw2

²Non-Stop - Hamilton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPgE7PNzXag

Horse 3413 - Flying The Flag Of Pain

 "Today, I am content, and that is enough."

- via Twitter, 29th Oct 2024, (name withheld)

On a few occasions I have seen Mosman Municipal Council accidentally fly the Australian Flag upside-down. Now this council/suburb being right on the harbour and with a naval presence, should be well aware that when a flag is flown upside-down, it either means that the ship has been abandoned and may be claimed, or that the ship is in distress and requires assistance. Likewise, when I see people protesting with the Australian Red Ensign which is upside-down, part of me wants to assume that they either have been abandoned and may be claimed, or that they are in distress and require assistance. Likely the latter.

Flags are useful and proper at communicating something in a hurry and from a distance but humans, which are ridiculously complex and nuanced beings, and so much bigger on the inside than the outside, often can not communicate something in a hurry, much less even adequately. What do you do about the whole realm of things like emotion, which can't really be communicated with words, can't really be communicated with tone, and can't really be communicated with expression? How do you communicate that which at times can not be described, much less transmitted to someone else?

What also doesn't help, is that essentially, we are all living in the fortress of our minds; with nobody else ever truly seeing the kosmos as we do. This isn't just a case of eternal parallax but genuine cosmic loneliness, where the entire of the universe must always be observed from a unique perspective. Granted, we can share experiences, participate in community and communion, and feel and do all those things like love, hate, joy, ennui, pain, worry, boredom, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Flying atop the keep in the fortress of our minds are the occasional flags of those things that we feel and do, but even then, those flags do a bad job of communicating the uncommunicable; which means that the fortress of our minds is also an inescapable prison.

The ironic thing about all of this is that I write all of this as someone who can observe emotions but not necessarily express or even feel them. Through a combination of genetics, the kind of household I grew up in, and the unrelenting fact that I have mismatched chromosomes as the base source code in every single cell in my body, I have a highly limited emotional colour palette. Happy, Sad, Angry, Ennui - I have at worst a CGA emotional card and maybe at best an EGA emotional card. I do not have VGA with 16 colours, I do not have Super VGA with 256 colours, and I certainly do not have 16 and 24 bit cards. 

I am one of those people in the population (mostly men) for whom any and all emotions simply cease to exist once they have been nailed down. For many people, especially men, the whole project of going to therapy, as it is currently conceived, is  completely useless. If I have a problem, then I want it fixed. Asking me how I feel about something, or to walk through the emotions, does nothing when I simply never felt them or never had the emotional toolkit to describe them in the first place.

However, I can look at other people and observe that they do in fact feel things, deeply; and in thousands upon thousands of shades which simply do not exist for me. This is to be expected. I am also red/green colour blind, so I already know that people see the world with more colours than I do. That's fine. 

What's even funner and compounds this even further, is that other people's heads are black boxes. It is simply impossible to look at someone else and know what they are thinking. Even worse, if someone is sitting with an emotion that is barely contained by language,  then it is more impossible to look at someone else and know what they are thinking. Even more worse, if they are thinking abstract thoughts, that is thoughts that don't even have language, then it is more more impossible to look at someone else and know what they are thinking. If you have something which is impossible, doubly impossible, and even triply impossible to know, then how are you expected to make any kind of informed thesis about what is going on inside another person.

Perhaps my only insight into how someone else feels emotionally, is my own hopeless analogue. After being hit by a car in January of 2022, and then having surgery to insert screws and plates in my leg and arm, I have been left with a constant pain in my left shoulder. At best I can describe it as being stabbed by a pin but a whole line of them; constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ceasing. The fun thing is that even that doesn't actually describe what this feels like. The funner thing is that I don't even know if it is real or not; because it could be just the damaged nerve endings constantly firing off and sending messages. If I can't properly describe the pain that I feel in my shoulder or even know if it is real or not, then what hope do I have in understanding anyone else's pain, which appears on a spectrum of knowledge which is triply impossible to actually understand?

And yet even with a highly limited emotional colour palette, operating in EGA, I still know that pain however it is metered, is unpleasant. If it is physical, emotional, or whatever, pain is like the blinking warning light indicating that something has gone wrong, or that some system requires urgent attention. 

The thing about pain is that it demands to be felt. The almost hilarious thing is that is all that it does. It demands and it demands and it demands and it demands and it demands. Yet here I am, forced to listen to the demands of an author with no words, the bruised apprentice of a teacher who offers no useful lessons at all, in a place where the light and darkness converge, and to be quite frank I will be damned if I sit and watch pain get what it demands. I can not entertain the demands of a tyrant. If I only have four colours in the palette, then I will fight pain with anger and either internally ridicule it or ignore it. As the owner of my emotions, I choose the terms and the conditions.

As someone with only a limited emotional colour palette, operating in EGA, that either means that I am simply unable to even experience the kinds of pain that other people do, or that I have resilience operating as some kind of patch or firmware to deal with the very obvious hardware inadequacy. Perhaps like Androcles, the famed idiot and slave from the Roman folk take (and for whom George Bernard Shaw wrote the stage play), I am able to survive even the threat of a lion because I am simply incapable of feeling the fear/pain which would have left me terrified. If about 20% of the population can and will experience depression in their lives, the unspoken opposite for whom everything is seemingly hunky-dory all the time are the 10%-20% of the population who never experience serious depression in their lives and likely can not even do so.

When I see other people experience pain, I know that I am never going to actually feel what they feel. Despite what people might say, there are no true empaths. At best an empath can synthesise the emotions of someone else and feel those but that's still very much like The Treachery Of Images, where 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' rings true. Empathy is a synthesis and Sympathy is still only worry and sorry for someone else. To the people lost and lonely, hurting and in pain, inside the fortress of their mind, this is of no help at all. 

Hoist the flags. The wind will blow, the flags will be unfurled. This too will pass. The bells will ring inside your mind. The night will end. The sun will shine on you again. Platitudes are stupid.

Horse 3412 - The UK's Inheritance Tax Is Stupid

 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36014533

The Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced a series of changes to the inheritance tax rules which she said will raise £2bn a year.

Relatively few people actually pay the tax, but many think they will - either owing to its complexity or because they aspire to be suitably wealthy to end up paying.

Inheritance tax is charged at 40% on the property, possessions and money, external of somebody who has died, above a £325,000 threshold.

- BBC News, 30th Oct 2024

Let's put this on the record, Inheritance Tax is stupid.

It must be said that The Sceptred Isle, that little jewel set into the sea, as a fortress to defend against war and infection, does have some completely bonkers mental hatstand laws. Even though there are Select Committees who look into the drafting of laws, the fact that the House of Lords is unelected and has people who are very much self-interested to maintain the status quo, and the House of Commons has literally no oversight whatsoever that might have curbed it taxation laws, those bonkers mental hatstand laws have bonkers mental hatstand consequences.

One of those consequences is that when it comes to Estates and Inheritances, the laws which are only ever designed to affect the very wealthy, affect people who have run into wealth suddenly, and including circumstances where merely inheriting something doesn't even mean that that new found wealth is realised. 

Perhaps the most egregious outworking of completely bonkers mental hatstand laws having bonkers mental hatstand consequences, is when someone dies and leaves their family the farm. By nature, a farm is a going concern which employs the real estate upon which it sits as the means of productive output. The United Kingdom with its arcane taxation law, hasn't yet quite grasped the fact that a farm, which might very well be a going concern and which might have been in the same family for several hundreds of years, might run at very thin margins, and the imposition of an Inheritance Tax which only happens because someone had the audacity to die, could be enough to shatter the farm as a business. 

His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) currently extracts an inheritance tax on the value of an estate when it is passed from one person to another through that unavoidable practice of death. The tax is 40% upon every pound in excess of the value of the estate of £325,000. This sounds reasonable in theory until you realise that in many cases the estate which is being inherited is either a house which someone is currently living or have been hoping to live in or worse, the estate is a family business like a farm or a small manufactory. Especially in the case of a farm, which might already be running close to the edge in terms of profitability, the death of someone causes the inheritance tax to be triggered on a going concern; which the farm as a business might not be able to absorb.

It doesn't take a gammaminus semi-moron to realise that the current inheritance tax system in the UK, is monumentally stupid. Even Blind Freddy can see that the imposition of a tax on the going concern of a farm, or the physical object of a house, where no real profitable action has warranted it, is nothing more than a cruel and cynical exercise in knavery. This is where my little Commonwealth of Australia, which follows in the Westminster tradition of law, is yet again better at some aspect of how the law is written and should be learnt from and copied.

The two biggest principles in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 in Australia are found in Sections 6 and 8 of the Act. Firstly, income isn't income until it is income. This sounds like such a basic ontological statement because it is. A thing isn't a thing until it's a thing. Secondly, deductions must relate to the income. If someone decides to go to school, say a hairdresser decides that they have chronic fear of hair and want to become a lumberjack, then learning that new trade is not related but if a lumberjack decides to take a chainsaw course to improve their skills, then that is related.

Those principles were actually right at the heart of the beginning of the Capital Gains Tax legislation debates in Australia in 1985, and they are quite instructive. Generally speaking, most people are not actually in the business of inheriting property from their parents and other family. Having a parent die and then leaving you the farm in a will, is not exactly something which is reproducible; at most it can happen twice. So then, the Capital Gains Tax legislation assumes from the outset that inheritance which is not a reliable source of income, is not necessarily income. We have no direct inheritance tax. 

Upon someone's death, they must complete a tax return. Their estate which is then a going entity also completes tax returns for the period in which it exists; if necessary it might pay tax upon a capital gain if it makes one but in the event when property is transferred from someone to someone else and no consideration has been made, then there isn't really any income to speak of and what we have is a Capital Gains Tax event.

We do not actually have a Capital Gains Tax in Australia. What we actually have is a Tax on Capital Gains; which is keeping in the Section 6 ontological principle that income isn't income until it is income. So what happens?

To simplify this to the point of discussion, upon the death and transfer of a thing, the value is taken up at the date it was transferred. In the case of shares, debentures, and tradable securities, then the market value at the date of transfer is a known and reliable take up rate. As for things like real property where the thing itself might not have been realised, then there is almost always some kind of valuation report before the dispersal and final divestment of the estate. This means that we also have a known and reliable take up value. There are then CGT Rollover provisions which mean that the thing being inherited by the new person, although it might have triggered a CGT Event by virtue of having changed hands (even if one of those hands was dead) still does not constitute income. Income is only income when the thing is finally realised; using the take-up value when the last CGT Event happened; and then is taxed at the usual marginal rates for person/company/trust/SMSF et cetera.

Conceivably a farm could have passed from Jack, to Jack Junior, to Bubbah Jack, to Little Bubbah Jack, and still not have been sold. A farm which remains in the family, remains in the family and if there is never a sale, there is no income upon which income tax can be laid. Income isn't income until it is income; so when that farm is finally sold, that sale would be income and the relevant CGT Event would be looked at.

Very clearly this is a far more sensible system, because it follows the basic ontological principle that income isn't income until it is income. And as the rules were invented in 1985, things which were bought back before 1985 are treated as being exempt from Capital Gains Tax but as that is almost forty years ago, the number of those things is dwindling.  

The other massive provision which the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 in Australia has but the UK tax system does not, is that one's principle place of residence, that is where someone lives, is also exempt from Capital Gains Tax. This would have two massive effects on British taxation law if it were to be implemented. Firstly, it would mean that someone selling their house quite apart from inheritance provisions, would never incur a tax on capital gain. Secondly, as small family owned farms almost always have a farm house or homestead, then as that farm is also one's principle place of residence, then it would also never incur a tax on capital gain as it is also exempt from Capital Gains Tax.

The reason why these kind of things aren't implanted as part of British taxation law is that law generally and taxation law especially is glacial when it comes to change. This is mostly because the people who are most affected by changes in taxation in a pure raw numbers monetary sense, usually also have the greatest lobbying power with Members of Parliament. Money talks; sometimes it yells. Richer people usually have schemes and plans worked out to avoid tax, and while tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance and using the legal means to do so is not. People who have eked out an advantage for themselves are highly unlikely to want to change the legislation; even if some other system also benefits them. Law is stickier than people assume that it is. 

John Bull, if you're listening, take some advice from Billy Brown from Sydney Town. You may have exiled us here for stealing sheep and handkerchiefs but in the time that we've been allowed to have a country for ourselves, not only did we improve how the Westminster System works, and how voting works, and how the franchise works before you, but we also improved Capital Tax legislation. 

Horse 3411 - The Badness Of The US Constitution - 25A, 26A, 27A

Amendment XXV.

SECTION 1

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

-

The motions to move on what become 25A began almost immediately after President Kennedy's head exploded due to gun shots from the grassy knoll, the book depository, the car behind, the car in front, and because of the CIA, the FBI, the Mob, the Mafia, a Mad Man, and his own security detail. Every conspiracy theory is true at the same time; President Kennedy was shot over 9000 times.

25A S1 is completely redundant as the text of Art II, S1 already provided that the office should devolve on the Vice President in the case of Removal, Death, Resignation, or Inability of the President. Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President while on an aeroplane as per the existing legislation and so I have literally no idea why the Republican opposition thought it necessary to change it; much less have an amendment passed with words to exactly the same effect as what already existed. 

SECTION 2

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

- 

Although, Art II, S1 already provided that the President "shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States," in the 176 years which followed, even though literally every SCOTUS assumed and upheld that office of the Vice President fell under the realm of Art II, S1, the Republican opposition thought it necessary to have an amendment passed to clarify what was already in existence.

The utter stupidity of this is that Kennedy was the fourth President to be assassinated and the eighth President to die in office; so it's not like the Vice President assuming the office of the President, as the original 1789 text had assumed, was a novel idea.

SECTION 3

Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

-

Again, I have no idea why this ever needed to be said. 25A is magnificent in its glorious redundancy. 

SECTION 4

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

-

Imaginations of machinations of things that never existed but could do, led people to arrive at the edge case of an edge case that the Vice President could invent reasons and grounds that the President should be removed from office; likely in the grounds of insanity, or disability, or other infirmity. Remember, this generation of politicians probably had lingering memories of the fears that they had had while Roosevelt was President (he did eventually die in office), or of of the fears that they had had while Eisenhower was President (because of periods of sickness and where it was generally assumed that Nixon would run the administration). Now that Kennedy had died, those fears ran rampant and legislators chased at shadows.

What's really crazy about 25A and especially 25A S4, is that if there was going to be a conspiracy to remove the President on the grounds of some invented insanity, or disability, or other infirmity, then it specifies in writing what the terms of that conspiracy are. In other words "we don't care that there is a conspiracy, just as long as it is a legally compliant one".

Without 25A, if such a conspiracy to remove the President existed, then a reasonable challenge which would have likely been drawn up by the Congress would have been passed to SCOTUS for them to make a ruling. As it is, 25A imagines the edge case of an edge case and it is so magnificent in its glorious ridiculousness that the imagined reasons which prompted its passage are unlikely to ever occur.

And here's the problem, precisely because 25A specifies the terms of the process to remove the President, it has given rise to imaginations to do so upon its grounds.

During the second term of Reagan, there were increasing fears about his mental capacity; which would turn out to be proven much much later when it was revealed that he eventually would suffer from Alzheimer's Disease. Likewise during the term of Trump, 25A was brought up again as a suggestion that he should be removed on the grounds of insanity. Likewise during the term of Biden, there have been repeated calls for his removal from office due to mental incapacitation. When he announced that he would not be pursuing a second term and Vice President Kamala Harris would be running for President, there were calls almost immediately in the right-wing trashmedia for Biden to be removed in the grounds of 25A.

Now that Mr Trump has been elected as the 47th President, he will in fact be marginally older than Joe Biden when he was elected as President. Depending on Mr Trump's how mental faculties progess over the next four years, 25A could very well be up for discussion again.

Amendment XXVI.

SECTION 1

The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

-

There are three really insane points of note with 26A.

One: 26A was passed during the Vietnam War; which meant that there were young men who had been conscripted into the army to fight a war on foreign soil, and still did not have the right to vote. Think about that for a second. The United States can and did force people to carry a gun and fight people in foreign lands, and at the same time did not trust them enough to give them the right to buy cigarettes, buy alcohol, or have the right to vote to object to it. Surely this is a leftover of the strange Puritanical bent which founded the colonies on the east coast in the 1620's; where Puritans hated fun but lived the idea of persecuting people who didn't conform to their ways. 

Two: 26A amended 14A S2. This is an amendment to an amendment. How bad was the original legislation that it had two be amended twice? Very. 

Three: Even though 26A is an amendment to an amendment, it still doesn't explicitly confer the right to vote on the American People. The latest battleground to deny the franchise to Americans, for no other reason than outright knavery, is over Voter ID laws. Since the United States abjectly refuses to grant the right to vote as an explicit right, this nutwittery is going to keep on happening again and again and again.

SECTION 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

- 

Every time I see this, I want to bang my head on a coffee table and pass out. Seriously. What the unholy jinkies is wrong with you?

Amendment XXVII.

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

-

In principle, 27A should have been obvious. There is a very real present and dangerous conflict of interest that places those in charge of the purse strings of the nation, with the right to alter how much the purse of the nation pays them in remuneration. Of course politicians who have access, shouldn't be given unfettered grant to stick both hands into the cookie jar. 

Here's the weird thing, it was obvious. The very real present and dangerous conflict of interest was so obvious that 27A was originally proposed on 25th Sep 1789. It wasn't ratified until the 7th of May, 1992. With 203 years having passed from proposal to ratification, that does at least give hope to the Equal Rights Amendment which has been sitting in limbo since 1923.