tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88813402024-03-19T09:05:25.021+11:00Horse - The Blog That Promises Nothing And Delivers Even LessRollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.comBlogger3243125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-13581579301406737112024-03-19T07:17:00.001+11:002024-03-19T09:04:36.330+11:00Horse 3316 - THE PEOPLE v VAPE COMPANIES [2024] - Judgement<p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">THE PEOPLE v VAPE COMPANIES [2024] - Judgement</span></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">The Fake Internet Court of Australia</span></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">H3316/1</span></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>It has come to this fake internet court's attention that vaping is now seen as cool by 'da kidz'. We are also aware that there is a secondary issue which has to do with the wide scale littering of vaping products, which we assume are supposed to be refillable but in practice never are. At least in the olden days when smoking cigarettes was seen as cool, the litter would be a cardboard box as well as miscellaneous filters festooned about the world. A vape device contains magnitudes more plastic than was ever generated by a packet of cigarettes, as well as a battery and the necessary elements to flash boil the syrup inside to generate the vape cloud.</p><p>This is not part of the primary hearing but this court by way of direction hereby orders everyone who does vape, to dispose of their rubbish thoughtfully. Don't be a mucky muk maker, do thing right thing. Chuck it the bin. If you can only be forced to do the right thing by means of the threat of punishment which stands behind the law, then you are a bad member of society and no better than an animal. </p><p>Back to the principle matter at hand, e-cigarettes were originally invented as a quit-smoking aid. This would have been all that they were used for except that some bright spark worked out that by changing the syrup inside the device, they could get e-cigarettes to taste like anything. With some clever marketing in a practically unregulated market, within a few years e-cigarettes magically changed into what we now called 'vapes'.</p><p>Instead of a quit-smoking aid, vapes have turned into a nicotine delivery system in their own right. They have become popular enough and drawn sufficiently enough of their own market, that the ultimate proof that they have become their own thing is that there is vape advertising on Formula One cars. 20 years ago, these 200mph billboards would have advertised traditional cigarettes and it should surprise nobody that many of the various vape brands are owned by exactly the firms which owned the various cigarette brands: such as Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, et cetera.</p><p>This fake internet court makes no moral prescription about whether or not people should vape. The facts are well enough known that vaping causes lung damage, as well as health issues like black lung. This is only to be expected as vaping is yet another particulate delivery system to ones lungs. It is also a reasonably established maxim that people like what they like and are going to do what they like unless regulations and/or the law is so restrictive as to be a barrier to doing it. If people know the dangers and yet keep on wanting to do this anyway, then no direction from a fake internet court is going to change their minds.</p><p><b>These are the facts as this court sees them:</b></p><p>As someone who does not vape but who shares enclosed spaces with people who do, I know that most of the flavours of vapes are fruit based. I personally think that fruit flavours like pineapple, mango, strawberry, et cetera, after they have been sucked into someone's lungs and them blown back out again, all seem to resemble a poor facsimile of rotten fruit. This is not pleasant. </p><p>As I live in the bogan west of Sydney and work in the harbour suburb of Mosman, and commute to work on trains and buses, I think that I must be singularly unique in that in one day I can share a bus with people from both the poorest and the richest suburb of the harbour city. In many respects, the difference between the quality of character of people at the very bottom and the very top of the economic ladder may as well be non-existent. One of the basic premises of economics and indeed most religions is that people are either rationally or irrationally selfish; and I can tell you that the likelihood of someone vaping on the bus in both the very richest and very poorest suburbs, is pretty well identical.</p><p>Vapes on the bus go round and round the air-conditioning system; so a bus ride is often like a smell roulette wheel. In addition to whatever other smells that we get on the bus, the smell of expended vape from someone else's lungs, is just one of legion. What smell are we going to get today? 4711? Pubescent boys' body odour? Rotten pineapple or rotten strawberry vape? Chanel No.5? Lynx Africa? Who knows? Wheel of olfactory, spin, spin, spin. What smell today do we find ourselves in?</p><p>There are two delicious ironies about this. The first delicious irony of this is that it is not delicious. Vaping probably tastes nice as evidenced by the fact that people like to do it. The second delicious irony of this is that it this is not merely a case of an old man yelling at a metaphorical cloud but a case of an old man yelling at a actual cloud. In the twenty-first century we have in some cases returned to the fug and palls of cloud which form inside of public transport. </p><p><b>Final Judgement:</b></p><p>One of the things about smoking is that burning tobacco had a certain smell about it. That smell indicated to the world that the person who was smoking was aware of the risks and did it anyway. There is a sense of daring-do with tobacco smoke. The smell of a Gauloises wrapped inside a Gitanes indicates that a French person is looking down on you. The smell of a Marlboro indicates that person has dreams of punching a bison. The smell of a Lucky Strike indicates nothing other than it's toasted. The smell of putrid pineapple, mouldy kiwifruit, or not quite strawberry, indicates that you have accidentally wandered into a creche during snack time. Tobacco smoke was cool because fire is dangerous; even if it is tiny. However, can someone really said to be cool if they smell like rotten banana, mouldy strawberry, or pine lime?</p><p>This court hereby orders that henceforth, all vaping companies replace their fake fruit flavours with something actually cool and daring. This court suggests that such vape flavours as espresso coffee, southern beans and chili, charred capsicum, schezuan beef, and that most venerable flavour of all, bacon, be used instead. One does not impart any sense of being cool with vape exhalations that smell like someone has vomited an entire ice cream shop into a bus.</p><p>Vape Companies, you are guilty of both conspiracy and deception. You have brought hateration and holleration into this fake internet court and as you have no sensible business by altering the air that we breathe, we order you to desist and stop this egregious pretense. 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? </p><p><b>- ROLLO75 J</b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">(this case will be reported in FILR as H3316/1 - Ed)</span></b></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-240702752971850592024-03-15T07:17:00.001+11:002024-03-15T09:29:40.055+11:00Horse 3315 - The Primaries Are Over And 22 States Needn't Bother Showing Up<p>Just like a packet of the well known epoxy resin Araldite, this post comes in two parts.</p><p><b>Part I:</b></p><p>I watch politics like many people watch sport. There are big football teams in various leagues, a few star players, lots of yelling and shouting from the sidelines, and scores, and swings, and polls, and gains, and losses. There are political pundits and commentators, and even entire television networks who act as de facto cheer squads to make the general public rally behind their preferred football team.</p><p>Most sporting contests at least start with the possibility that there will be some kind of competition but in 2024, the two 'races' to get enough delegates to become the nominees of the big political parties in the United States, are simply non-events and non-contests. As I write this in March of 2024, the presumptive nominees of the big political parties in the United States, are as good as decided; with only the interference of Grimaldi Reaper who walks at 1mph as the possibility that one of the old men will not get to be President in November.</p><p>Following a series of riots at both the Democratic National Convention and to a lesser degree the Republican National Convention in 1968, the big political parties in the United States instead of having party members across the country decide who their nominees for President are, have had what is known as open primaries. This would be as if in Australia, the political parties opened up their pre-selection processes. The primaries are treated as if they were part of the normal democratic process, when in reality they are actually bonkers crazy-making and do not really exist in any other nation; with good reason. Political Parties are private entities and the fact that even allow the general public to have any say at all on their internal decision making process is just accepted in America. </p><p>Before 1972, there were no real open primaries and the only time that the general public got a say was in the General Election; which makes sense as that is what it it. In Australia an election cycle is about six weeks long and that should be true in America but because there are fixed dates and it makes for good television, a lot of words can be breathed out, in a long winded process, where everyone is full of hot air.</p><p>So called 'Super Tuesday' which which massive amounts of delegates are decided across more than half of the states in the union, proved to be one giant snooze fest in 2024. Everyone knew who was going to win and this was so incredibly likely that betting companies weren't taking bets on this. You could get bets against but that really was like money for old rope for betting companies; with any and all outsiders running at worse than 1000:1. Because data is delicious (and in this case dull), here are the important numbers.</p><p>The Democratic Party sends 3,934 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The votes of 1,968 votes are needed to win. As of 14th March 2024, Current President Joseph R Biden has 2,107 bound votes of delegates. That is already 53% of the total number of delegates and already an unassailable lead.</p><p>The Republican Party sends 2,429 delegates (2,272 pledged and 157 unpledged) to the Republican National Convention. The votes of 1,215 votes are needed to win. As of 14th March 2024, Former President Donald J Trump has 1,249 bound votes of delegates. That is already 51% of the total number of delegates and already an unassailable lead.</p><p>The 2024 Presidential Election will come down to Joe Biden as incumbent and Donald Trump as the challenger. What this actually means is that with about 20 million registered voters already having decided the fates of who will appear on the ballot papers in November, it matters not an iota, not a jot, not a tiddle, not a zak, what the voters in 22 states have to say. This is democracy manifest. Someone long forgotten in the mists of political lore once said that "Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line" when talking about respective candidates for the general election. Well this time around, nobody is falling in love or line; instead they are all falling asleep.</p><p>If you are in one of the 22 states yet have to say, then don't bother. The results are already known, your votes count for literally nothing.</p><p><b>Part II:</b></p><p>Having run out of any and all political excitement as far as the ballot goes, all that is left is to scour history to see where this fit into the grand story of American politics and it appears that as with everything else about Donald Trump, this is unusual.</p><p>The last time that an incumbent president ran against a former president in a General Election was all the way back in 1912. In the 1912 Presidential Election, incumbent president William Taft against Theodore Roosevelt. Owing to the way that the Electoral College works, the number of delegates that these two gentlemen got was as follows:</p><p><b><span style="color: red;">Taft - 8</span></b></p><p><b><span style="color: #04ff00;">Roosevelt - 88</span></b></p><p>Back in 1912 there were 531 delegates who were sent to the Electoral College which meant that a candidate needed 266 of them to win. </p><p>So who won?</p><p><b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Woodrow Wilson - 435</span></b></p><p>Wilson winning with 435 delegates looks on the face of it to be a landslide but if you drill down into the data even just a little bit, what reveals itself is the utter stupidity of the American electoral system.</p><p>Taft as the Republican Party candidate got 23.2% of the vote. Roosevelt as his own Progressive Party candidate got 27.4% of the vote. There was also a Socialist Party candidate called Eugene Debs who got 6% of the vote; so he appears as an interesting but irrelevant appendix to this story. Wilson as the Democrat candidate got 41.8% of the votes; which given that states then bound 100% of their delegates to whomever won the state election, meant that as he won 40 of 48 states, he was entitled to 81% of the delegates.</p><p>Here's the problem. A Most Votes wins system coupled with a bound delegate system, meant that Wilson won via unpopular vote in every state, as well as the unpopular vote for the overall vote in the Union. Together Taft and Roosevelt won 50.6% of the vote and given that Roosevelt only formed the Progressive Party after he had lost the nomination process to become Republican Party candidate, then what he did was very effectively split what would have been the Republican Party vote in not quite twain. 50.6% of the vote would have been enough to secure 100% of the delegates.</p><p>This might very well be instructive.</p><p>There is a small but not improbable chance that faced with the choice of either Donald Trump or Joe Biden, that some wedge portion of the electorate who are faced with more gerontocracy, will simply not bother to show up at the polls in November. Some people, especially if they are disgusted at the way that Trump handled his presidency (including sparking an insurrection on Jan 6th 2021) may actively not bother to show up at the polls, or vote for some wingnut in protest because they know their vote is wasted.</p><p>As America runs a Most Votes Wins system, coupled with a bonkers hat-stand Electoral College which also operates on a Most Votes Wins system, then there is reason to quietly sigh in despair as Joe Biden wins the Presidency for a second time; due to securing a landslide of delegates, because the system itself is monumentally stupid. The system invented by Alexander Hamilton, I think purely to install George Washington as a hemi-semi-demi-god-king-President, was fit that and only that purpose. </p><p>The difference between Trump and Roosevelt is that Trump made use of the fact that the Republican Party runs open primaries and he very effectively gamed and subverted the system. Now that he is on the inside, he has sucked all of the oxygen out of the Republican Party. Trump might very well win the Presidency in 2024 again, in the same way that Wilson did in 1912 and he himself did in 2016; by being an unpopular candidate. </p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-78974125358986705792024-03-14T07:17:00.000+11:002024-03-14T08:34:19.661+11:00Horse 3314 - Toyota's First Step To Abandon Selling Cars<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qvh3mD1lPaxFV__-AjXq5mFjOzU18ABX3116G9FwYIN1y4AfdpzSmcpoIZrU5A24C32chLvH6BdpHdH2DABL7tbLKe6lWUlQTV7FODMc3TBTvjV0H1UWJHKrtUZC1GHscfQABdeuW_Madvv3DiB_Ps_QReH1XFgHs1dCZJXBpFEzLeM4Uvcu/s691/image_2024-03-14_083042250.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="435" data-original-width="691" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qvh3mD1lPaxFV__-AjXq5mFjOzU18ABX3116G9FwYIN1y4AfdpzSmcpoIZrU5A24C32chLvH6BdpHdH2DABL7tbLKe6lWUlQTV7FODMc3TBTvjV0H1UWJHKrtUZC1GHscfQABdeuW_Madvv3DiB_Ps_QReH1XFgHs1dCZJXBpFEzLeM4Uvcu/w567-h356/image_2024-03-14_083042250.png" width="567" /></a></div><b>Hybrid Available... hmm... <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTd_73Slj3Q">very interesting... BUT STUPID!</a></b><p></p><p>A very funny thing happened this week...</p><p>As of March 11th, Toyota Australia no longer sell petrol only variants of their motor cars. The announcement which was made last week was swift and in the background to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries having a whinge about not wanting Euro 6 and Japanese fuel economy standards to apply in the Australian market, Toyota made a business decision.</p><p>Up front people like Michaelia Cash and Sussan Ley have been carrying on like shrieking goats (while Peter Dutton slinks off to run a campaign bout nuclear power) and complaining voraciously about how the Albanese Government is dictating what people are going to drive, and this in turn has fed the mewling and puking cacophony of howling morons at Sky News, 2GB and 3AW. Meanwhile, Toyota made its announcement almost silently and nobody took any notice at all. </p><p>As someone whose choices of cars in the past has included the Hyundai Excel X1, Ford Ka Mk I, Peugeot 206, and currently a Mazda 2 DJ, I have crossed shopped the Toyota Yaris (also Echo) on multiple occasions. On every occasion thus far, Yaris has always lost out by virtue of being soulless and lifeless. From what I can gather, Toyota make excellent vehicles and although they can make exciting motor cars, their policy has always been to charge a premium for them and to leave cars that feel no more exciting than an appliance to drive, to whom they consider to be plebs. Pleb money is good enough to sell dross to but not good enough to sell fun to.</p><p>However, with the end of all petrol only orders for Yaris and Corolla, this leaves only their Hybrid and GR Hybrid levels of trim for these cars. Again, the hybrid Yaris by virtue of carrying 195kg in batteries, is permanently like carrying two fat men around forever. Discontinued petrol Yaris weighed 995kg, and Hybrid Yaris weighs 1190kg. Similar kinds of shenanigans occur with the Corolla and it is only with GR Corolla that Toyota bother to hand back any kind of fun at all.</p><p>As of today, the 14th of March 2024, any options to order what used to be the normal Yaris, Corolla, and even the Hilux Work Mate, have all been removed from the Toyota Australia configurator on their website. Orders officially stopped on Monday the 11th but evidently it took a bit of time for Toyota to slowly turn the lights out.</p><p>As of today, the variants from bottom to the top of the range for Yaris and Corolla are:</p><p><b>$36,260 - Yaris Hybrid</b></p><p><b>$52,590 - GR Yaris</b></p><p>and</p><p><b>$40,620 - Corolla Hybrid</b></p><p><b>$62,300 - GR Corolla</b></p><p>Granted that the GR Corolla is a turbocharged and four-wheel-drive car which exceeds the specifications of the utterly mad Group B cars of the WRC in the 1980s and the World Rally spec of the early 2000s but at more than $60,000, it is neither cheap, nor necessarily cheerful. The Yaris at more than $50,000 for its own GR variant, is also not great value for the money. </p><p>At this point I have to question whom exactly Toyota think are going to buy either Yaris or Corolla any more. Is 36 grand for a Yaris even remotely sensible? What about 40 grand for a Corolla? Even if you adjust for inflation, this means that the base model Corolla is now more expensive in real terms than what you used to be able to get a 5.4L Coyote V8 Ford Falcon for. Maybe Toyota actually are pricing these things so that they direct people into buying yawn inducing SUVs and that Yaris and Corolla are essentially penalty pricing these two cars. If we roll back the clock, Corolla at one time managed to work its way all the way up to No.3 on the sales charts behind Commodore and Falcon, but now with Ranger, Hilux, and D-Max taking those place, Corolla actually isn't the volume seller that it used to be. As for GR Yaris and GR Corolla, can they really survive as hot-hatches if the hatch which they come from, dies? </p><p>I write this as someone who likes cars and who likes driving them. However, as someone who works in an office all day long, corralling numbers into grids in tax returns and the like, I do not get to drive many of them. As far as driving the GR Yaris and GR Corolla go, I will likely never drive either. That's fine. I completely understand that by virtue of being soulless and lifeless, Toyota weren't likely to get my money anyway. However, by removing any and all variants of reasonably cheap cars, and practically making the only cars in their lineup worth driving their GR line, what Toyota have done is decided that Pleb money is no longer good enough to sell dross to any more.</p><p>This is fine. We have seen this before.</p><p>Motor manufacturers are businesses which exist for profit. Their sole point is to make money. Once upon a time, motor manufacturers were businesses which would sell motor vehicles to ordinary people. As wages since 1978 have been falling in real terms, and as the share of GDP given to wages has also been falling, and as the number of 'kids' who can actually afford to buy cars has also been falling, the whole market to sell any kind of cheap car to chase Pleb money has also fallen out. Ford decided that it could not be bothered any more and in its last dying gasps, it removed all but the ST-Line from Fiesta, Focus and Mondeo, before giving all of them the knife. Ford no longer sell cars except for Mustang. Toyota are in fact playing exactly the same game here. My suspicion is that Toyota will no longer sell either Yaris or Corolla by mid-2026 and that in their place, Yaris Cross (which already exists) and nothing will replace the two.</p><p>Yet again this is classic behaviour which can be described by the basketball heat map. Why bother trying to go for 2-points when you can shoot from further out to make 3-points, when you only need to hit 2/3rds of the shots? 3 x $20,000 = $60,000 or 2 x $30,000 = $60,000. This is the same result. Or if you shoot for a more premium market then 1 x $60,000 = $60,000. For all of the shrieking of the goats, Toyota's Head Office in Aichi made a business decision which was almost completely divorced from the flavour of the political carry on in Australia. Toyota decided to make goat curry and cook everyone. </p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-36911761263250163652024-03-13T07:17:00.001+11:002024-03-13T08:51:10.979+11:00Horse 3313 - Let's Change The Change In Our Pockets<p> I currently have $2.60 in my wallet.</p><p>$2.35 of this is made up of the following coins: $1 x 1, 50c x 1, 20c x 3, 10c x 1, 5x x3. More astute readers will of course realise that $2.35 is 25 cents short of $2.60 and that is because the last coin that I have is an Australian quarter.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1_T1X-1PMQa0Nu0-K0B64cs2nDCb429DDFNZ4effwneLJjjeh3LG_8EjWyYaQcNpS0HrsKb2lJx7fhsc0XqFbVXRQxV8QiIYeblqke8SMlVxjxItUuSpklwh81lFiQq3QGKelJjoAUoDwzW2zoDkmiPweAMAwgCV_36cBI4KEK4guxq2t3N-U/s600/27.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1_T1X-1PMQa0Nu0-K0B64cs2nDCb429DDFNZ4effwneLJjjeh3LG_8EjWyYaQcNpS0HrsKb2lJx7fhsc0XqFbVXRQxV8QiIYeblqke8SMlVxjxItUuSpklwh81lFiQq3QGKelJjoAUoDwzW2zoDkmiPweAMAwgCV_36cBI4KEK4guxq2t3N-U/w526-h263/27.jpg" width="526" /></a></div><br /><p>In 2017 the introduction of the quarter was in part commemorative and in part experiment to see how far and wide the coins would travel. In truth, they were withdrawn by the public and kept as keepsakes for the most part but the experiment did show that a few people were in fact willing to use them.</p><p>Here's my problem. My problem is not with the fact that I have one coin in my wallet which is unusual but rather that the rest of the coins in my wallet, of which there are eight of them, are not really enough to buy anything useful. Even if you account for shinkflation where the standard 375mL can is disappearing from retail, $2.35 is not enough to buy a 250mL can of Coke at a Colesworth supermarket. Yes, it is possible to buy 2L for less than that but if all you want is a nice refreshing drink and do not need a bladder bursting amount of liquid diabetes gut rot, then you would buy a sensible amount.</p><p>Admittedly I am probably quite rare in that I still prefer to use cash for buying small items; this means that I am probably quite anachronistic in that regard. Even worse, I am one of those wacky people who like to buy fruit by the piece, bread rolls as individual baps, and meat by the slice. Yes, I am in fact quite French in this regard as I assemble my own lunch. Fruit and cold cut meat does not increase in price because you buy small quantities and baps at 55c cost $2.75 per week as opposed buying a whole loaf of sliced bread which now costs $2.70. The fun thing about carrying cash to buy small things is that funds transfer is even faster than EFTPOS, for if I hand you a five dollar note, you are now instantly five dollars richer. The network can't go down and you don't pay a fee to a bank to receive the funds.</p><p>Most of the current set of coins that we use in Australia, the 5, 10, 20 and even the 50 cents, have their ur-prototype in the 1816 shilling in Great Britain. While Australia was still a collection of British colonies, it used British coins. It took 9 years after the enactment of the Commonwealth before Australia got its own coins and even then, the whole entire planchet set was a 1:1 facsimile of British coins. It wasn't until decimal currency that we got out first deviation with the 1 and 2 cents which were different, and the 50 cent coin which sat on the planchet of the half crown.</p><p>Apart from the one and two dollar coins, Australia's coinage is designed for a time which was more than 200 years ago and I think has long outlived its welcome. If coinage has one purpose which is to facilitate basic commerce and it doesn't do that very well, then it seems to me that the best thing to do would be to replace it. I note that Britain already replaced its 5 and 10 pence coins, as well as replacing the 50 pence coin and made all of them smaller. </p><p>The smallest of our coins currently in circulation, the five cent coin, when it was introduced, has roughly the same buying power as $23.39 does today. The 10 cent coin has roughly the same buying power as $46.78 does today. The 10 cent coin was exactly equivalent to the shilling upon conversion to decimal currency in 1966. Bob Cratchitt in "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens which was written in 1840, was paid (what was quite a handsome wage at the time) of fifteen shillings a week. It is interesting that the tradition of putting a sixpence into the Christmas pudding which is roughly contemporary to that, is still like putting the equivalent of about $20 into someone's mouth now. It's not a huge sum of money but it is not insignificant. By the time that Enid Blyton came to write the Noddy books in 1949, Noddy's standard charge for a ride in his little red and yellow car is sixpence; which wasn't much for a big person but still reasonably exciting for a small person.</p><p>As I write this in 2024, five cents which is exactly the same size and equivalent to sixpence, is so pathetically valueless that it actually isn't worth most people's bother to pick up. All three of the five cent coins in my wallet came to be there because I did bother to pick them up; before they jammed the workings of escalators.</p><p>What do you do when a thing doesn't actually do the job it was designed to do? You either throw it away, which is evidently what people already do with five cent coins, or you change the thing so that it does do the job it was designed to do. I prefer the latter. I do not propose that we make the current set of coins smaller but rather, replace all of the silver coloured cupro-nickel coins with the quarter and replace the five dollar note with a coin. This would mean that instead of six coins, there would be only four.</p><p>How would rounding work? Exactly the same way as it does now. Electronic payments are rounded to the cent. In principle they can be rounded to the mil and in practice the only organisations that do round money to the mil and smaller are petrol stations and people doing dividend calculations like BHP who declare dividends to six places after the decimal point. At the other end of the</p><p>All that aside, twelve goes down and thirteen goes up. Thirty-seven goes down and thirty-eight goes up. Sixty-two goes down and sixty-three goes up. Eighty-seven goes down and Eighty-eight goes up. It this sounds hard, then remember that we have already been through this kind of process in 1992 when 1 and 2 cent coins were quite rightly removed. That 2 cent coin had roughly the same buying power as 7 cents does not and that was not enough for it to survive. </p><p>I do not think that there will be the same kinds of objections from charities this time around either. When 1 and 2 cent coins were removed from circulation, there was minor outcry that charities would lose out because people were saving up 1 and 2 cent coins. I do not think that charities want the hassle of collecting tiny change as it is now; much less object to it being gone. </p><p>Moreover I do not think that there would be much, if any, objection from the general public either. The people who currently do not use cash have no reason to object and the people who carry cash would I think, be more happy in carrying more useful cash. I find it slightly weird that the change in our pockets which was designed for use 208 years ago, still persists. Using the very long historical rate of inflation of 4% since the founding of the City of Rome in 1 Ab Urbe Condita (753BC), then even the Farthing had more buying power than the biggest coin which I would propose ($5). Part of the reason why we are now a semi-cashless society is that the uselessness of cash to do its only purpose, makes it hard to use. <b>We can make it better.</b></p><p><br /></p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-34656249301874555252024-03-12T07:17:00.002+11:002024-03-12T08:31:47.438+11:00Horse 3312 - NASCAR's Golden Problem<p>Week in and week out, whenever there is a snooze-fest of a NASCAR race, there is a section which always blames a lack of horsepower and/or the aero package that the car ran for that particular race. The problem is that if you map the fan survey which is regularly run by The Athletic Auto's correspondant Jeff Gluck and his totally officially unofficial scientifically unscientific question of <i>"Was Such-And-Such a good race?"</i> then what you find is that whether or not something was a good race has no mapping whatsoever to the amount of horsepower, the particular aero package that weekend, the size of the speedway, whether it was a superspeedway, short-track, or road course; in fact as far as I can make out, there is near enough no correlation with anything to determine if a given race will be good or not.</p><p>In a series like NASCAR, where the teams are very much bound inside a tightly controlled box by the rule book, any advantage that anyone can find comes at a premium. However, it all appears to be chasing down the very edges of performance such as manipulating 1% items of aero, which is why Joey Logano tried driving with a webbed glove to block out window drag, or why Joe Gibbs Racing put down 30 layers of tape underneath the livery wrap.</p><p>The thing that nobody can address is that a NASCAR Cup car is very wide for the length. They are very hefty hecka-chonks that just don't rotate through any of the three axes of rotation all that well. While this means that they are stable, it also means that they don't pitch much and don't turn through corners all that well.</p><p>Speaking as someone who can only manipulate numbers and who can not actually perform the experiment, my suspicion is that the ideal ratio of Wheelbase to Width, is the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is (1+√5)/2, which is about 1.618033. A lot longer than this and cars will not turn very well hence why dragsters are long and skinny, and a lot shorter than this and paradoxically cars also do not turn very well due to the fact that turning a car is essentially operating a lever through the yaw axis.</p><p>In terms of what horsepower and the aero package actually do when it comes to how good the racing is, the reason why I think that they are most irrelevant is that even with a 1000 horsepower car, that power is still only being applied linearly and at best is only going to break the mechanical grip of tyres on the road. The aero package which is designed to suck a car to the track, only really applies vectored suck forced downwards relative to the axis of pitch in the car.</p><p>When it comes to what makes racing 'good' or not, then I suspect that the overriding aspect of a car's basic geometry by means of the axis of yaw, is in fact the single most critical aspect. Cars that are twitchy, are mostly twitchy through the yaw axis and while the three axes of pitch, roll and yaw all come into play when driving a car but only yaw is important when it comes to turning a vehicle through a corner. Granted that pitch and roll will affect the ability of the wheels to attach themselves to the road surface but how well a car turns through a corner, is the subject of loads and loads of dark arts which apart from camber, castor, toe, rubber compound, et cetera, is mostly determined by yaw. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTf3BkH0YkAK6_w8C3OUf87qMPvxlTZUXpu1Tm46PaxZoJof45LLjQxYsaL_j7tAOdGg0bZ2pGf1YtRp5lON3KWEj48VDQdQRZEytzZTkqufLFzsw0Fe8uq8UUn3UrTB2yvy2X3wY03XVidb68rcACC-zaBDesYRJx1bAerI44GIw8lLgBpLnP/s4252/Gen8WW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1822" data-original-width="4252" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTf3BkH0YkAK6_w8C3OUf87qMPvxlTZUXpu1Tm46PaxZoJof45LLjQxYsaL_j7tAOdGg0bZ2pGf1YtRp5lON3KWEj48VDQdQRZEytzZTkqufLFzsw0Fe8uq8UUn3UrTB2yvy2X3wY03XVidb68rcACC-zaBDesYRJx1bAerI44GIw8lLgBpLnP/w632-h270/Gen8WW.jpg" width="632" /></a></div><br /><p>A NASCAR Cup Car which has had the base dimensions baked in ever since the 1981 season has the following dimensions.</p><p>NASCAR Cup Car: Wheelbase/Width.</p><p>110.0' / 78.6' = 1.399</p><p>A W/W ratio of only 1.399 is actually stubbier than my wee ickle Mazda 2 DJ. What this means is that a NASCAR Cup Car is a hefty chonky boi, which doesn't turn particularly well; which is expressed in the fact that they aren't exactly the fastest thing around road courses and street circuits.</p><p>So what's the solution?</p><p>The obvious thing that I can think of is simply to make the cars narrower. The closest that you can get to the Golden Ratio is 66 inches wide but that might look a bit silly. Seeing as the Ford Falcon from 1960-2016 was within a quarter percent of 110.0 inches by 72 inches, then that seems to me to be about right. A 72 inch wide car is like about the upper limit as that gives you a W/W radio of 1.52. </p><p>The second obvious thing that I can think of is to make the tyres narrower. A NASCAR Cup Car sits on tyres that are 365mm wide. A V8Supercar tyre, which is a tyre for a similar application but which turns far more easily, is only 280mm wide. That's roughly a whole palm width wide. While that doesn't seem like a lot, rotating a wider tyre through its own axis of yaw is also harder than rotating a narrower tyre through its own axis of yaw; in addition to rotating the whole car.</p><p>The third thing that I would do is to increase the ride height relative to the road. This would also help to remove some of the mechanical grip by removing a lot of the vectored suck force which happens because a big thing is clearing the air away. </p><p>By doing all of this, lap speeds would blow out and get worse but the cars would be far more nervous than they are currently. If the aim is to actually provide good racing, then making the cars more directionally unstable and making them dance more is surely the way to go. However, in making the cars more directionally unstable I would give back part of what I took away.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO7tZo2ch-8_vXCGJkRuouATUIMPr_Ct7inVVgCoHwnwcR2b6jXDkDVkhV7vhbL5qBdPvYBN77wL44IZSVFQtVR-Dq6qtFP7wU6GuWAtIxfJEAO0ptq80GZD6MMgkNW9ZM2mSrQUrD4hZLzKo3O0ztNhHBoyaCsYDNPea5PdNwXVTRASk-34ll/s764/Gen8fins.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="764" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO7tZo2ch-8_vXCGJkRuouATUIMPr_Ct7inVVgCoHwnwcR2b6jXDkDVkhV7vhbL5qBdPvYBN77wL44IZSVFQtVR-Dq6qtFP7wU6GuWAtIxfJEAO0ptq80GZD6MMgkNW9ZM2mSrQUrD4hZLzKo3O0ztNhHBoyaCsYDNPea5PdNwXVTRASk-34ll/w573-h199/Gen8fins.jpg" width="573" /></a></div><p>When Chrysler shut down its missile division in 1968, it found that it had a bunch of engineers left over. Rather than waste them, it immediately employed them to attack the problem of going motor racing the Superspeedways. The result was the Dodge Charger Daytona and the Plymouth Road Runner. Both of these cars had almost comically large fins which provided directional stability and kept them pointed in a straight line. </p><p>Of course the idea of putting fins on a racecar had been known about since the 1930s. In the 1950s Jaguar made use of the existence of a driver in an open cockpit and put a giant fin behind the driver on their D-Type. Even though the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hour Race was marred with tragedy and Mercedes-Benz withdrew their cars, they were still being pushed by the Jaguars all the way. When in 1956 Mercedes-Benz didn't show up, Jaguar D-Types basically had no competition. </p><p>Practically every car with any kind of aerodynamic attachment has end plates on the ends of their wings and modern Le Mans prototypes still have fins. Even NASCAR Gen-1 cars for a while had fins by default and it is reported that cars like the 1959 Plymouth Fury where the fins were quite pronounced, were pleasant to drive. If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else, then I'd think about putting big fins on the back of NASCAR Cup cars again. I'd also likely use the same kind of generic body from which the second division Xfinity series cars could come from and where Truck series trucks would come from. </p><p>I have seen enough races over the years to know that when you have drivers pushing and bumping each other, that no human however superhuman they think that they are, can possibly understand or react to forces that they can not see. Quite often small taps, especially caused when a pusher is pushing a pusher, result in the car at the front of the train wiggling, then the driver trying to correct and overcorrect the steering; then in the space of microseconds, we have ten to twenty cars torn up for no good reason at all. At 200mph at car is moving at more than 293 feet per second. By putting big fins on the back, at least there'd be a tendency for the cars to want to continue to travel straight and true; which given the current aero kits which want to pull a car downwards, does not happen. Remember, forces are vectored; which means that they have both magnitude and direction.</p><p>And I think that fins look cool.</p><div><br /></div>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-20046169631366313782024-03-08T07:17:00.002+11:002024-03-08T07:17:00.130+11:00Horse 3311 - Green And Gold Crossed The Thin Blue Line<p><a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/matildas-star-sam-kerr-allegedly-called-police-officer-a-stupid-white-bastard-after-cops-called-to-taxi-fare-dispute/news-story/5838b58a84545d37023ba2e35079bf20">https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/matildas-star-sam-kerr-allegedly-called-police-officer-a-stupid-white-bastard-after-cops-called-to-taxi-fare-dispute/news-story/5838b58a84545d37023ba2e35079bf20</a></p><p><b><i>More details have emerged about what Matilda's star Sam Kerr allegedly uttered to a police officer, which led to her racial harassment charge. </i></b></p><p><b><i>Police will allege the 30-year-old called an officer "a stupid white bastard" after cops were called to break up a dispute over a taxi fare in Twickenham last year, The Sun has revealed. </i></b></p><p><b><i>It has been claimed Kerr was sick while she was in the taxi after a night out with friends on January 30, 2023. </i></b></p><p><b><i>Kerr has been charged with intentionally causing racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to the male PC under section 31(1)(b) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.</i></b></p><p><b><i>She entered a plea of not guilty to the offence when she appeared via videolink in Kingston Crown Court in the United Kingdom on Monday. </i></b></p><p><b><i>Kerr, who sported a t-shirt and black jacket for her virtual court appearance, had only confirmed her name and plea of not guilty during the hearing. </i></b></p><p><b><i>Judge Judith Elaine Coello indicated Kerr's defence would be that she did not intend to cause alarm, harassment or distress to the police officer, and that her behaviour was not racially motivated, The Sun reported. </i></b></p><p><b>- Sky News Australia, 7th Mar 2024</b></p><p>Oh dear.</p><p>Discrimination cases generally, have a pretty high standard of proof which needs to be crossed over. Racial discrimination cases in particular, take that standard of proof and apply a very particular set of conditions over the top of it. Generally speaking, these kind of cases have two elements. Firstly there is the question of whether or not a reasonable person was likely to be offended. Secondly there is the question of what kind of material tort resulted from the alleged event of discrimination. </p><p>From what I can determine, as it specifically relates to this case, and from what little information which we've been told, this case will hinge upon what constitutes 'mere abuse' and whether or not The Man On The Clapham Omnibus is likely to be offended.</p><p>If the Metropolitan Police are to allege that Sam Kerr called the Police Constable a "stupid white bastard", then that will be a question of to what degree that a police officer can be offended and whether or not this constitutes racial discrimination.</p><p>If it is just the word "bastard" then the likelihood of a police officer being genuinely offended is small. If this was in Australia, then this would be a non-event. In fact there is quite a famous story when during the Bodyline Test Cricket series, Douglas Jardine complained to the Australian Test Captain Vic Richardson, who is reported to have opened the door to the dressing room accompanied with Jardine and asked the question:</p><p><b><i>"OK, which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?"</i></b></p><p>I personally do not believe that "bastard" is the word that was used in this context, and that the media is using scare quotes to hide actual words used; which might have genuinely caused offence.</p><p>However it is the qualifiers which have been used at the beginning of this abusive epithet which is where this case might actual draw its venom from. "Stupid" might very well be just an intensive modifier and therefore not material to the case. The thing that really might what lies as the heart of the case, is Kerr's use of the word "White". </p><p>Is a White person materially likely to be offended if they were called "White"? Remember, the law not only has to be seen to meter out equal justice, it has to actually do so. If this had been someone racially abusing a black police officer, then the law can not act differently. </p><p>I can almost guarantee that the Metropolitan Police have the incident on a body camera affixed upon the person of the police officer in question. I can also almost guarantee that the Metropolitan Police would not have taken this to the Police Prosecution Service unless they thought that this was a watertight case. I am 98% sure that the police have Sam Kerr bang to right on this. There is likely absolutely no fault with the legal materiel of this case.</p><p><a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/37/section/31">https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/37/section/31</a></p><p><b><i>31 - Racially or religiously aggravated public order offences.</i></b></p><p><b><i>(1) A person is guilty of an offence under this section if he commits—</i></b></p><p><b><i>(b) an offence under section 4A of that Act (intentional harassment, alarm or distress)</i></b></p><p><b>- Section 31, Crime and Disorder Act 1998</b></p><p>And:</p><p><a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64">https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64</a></p><p><b>4A - Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.</b></p><p><b><i>(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—</i></b></p><p><b><i>(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or</i></b></p><p><b><i>(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.</i></b></p><p><b>- Section 4A, Public Order Act 1986</b></p><p>Was there an offence under Section 31?</p><p>Can the police demonstrate that there was intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress?</p><p>Because almost certainly, if video and audio exists of the incident, then Section 4A(1a) and (1b) are a simple matter of fact. </p><p>What I want to know is what the Metropolitan Police hope to achieve by bringing forth this case to court. If this involved a black player from the Premier League, would the Metropolitan Police still have brought the case to court? What kind of other political flavours are going on under the surface? Is the Police Constable in question a member of the National Front or the BNP? To what degree is this statutory revenge because this can be used as a highly publicised case? Remember, the 1980s and the 'sus laws' still linger on in people's memories.</p><p>This case has already gained political traction in right-wing media outlets like GB News, OAN, Fox News, and Sky News Australia. Likely it will also gain political traction across Europe as well. I imagine that there is quite a lot of dog whistling going on, as Britain sleepwalks to the right and as sections of the media quietly goose step towards cultural fascism. If that was the intent of the Police Constable in question and the underlying culture of the Metropolitan Police Service, then this is an open goal for them. </p><p>There is of course a tension which exists in progressive politics which simply does not exist on the authoritarian right. An inconsistency like this debases progressive politics because although we want to lecture society on how we have zero tolerance for racism, it is still hypocrisy to dismiss it and laugh it off jovially it it happens to occur against white people.</p><p>The manner in which people dismiss this out of hand, precisely because due to the fact the recipient of the alleged abuse was a white man reinforces the notion in young white men in particular, that they are the enemy of progressive politics. It does not help that among some sections of progressive politics white men are the designated enemy of progressive politics. This in turn, which drives an imagination of the victimisation of white men (despite all evidence to the contrary) actually does help to drive extremism.</p><p>If what I suspect is true and that the Metropolitan Police have a watertight case, then this is pretty open and shut. It still doesn't detract from the fact Kerr was trying to use someone's race as a slur. She was being racist.</p><p>You can't sugar coat it.</p><p>It was a racist slur.</p><p>Actions have consequences.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-5500723074611867712024-03-07T07:17:00.001+11:002024-03-07T07:17:00.150+11:00Horse 3310 - Where Were You When You Were Us? Who Are You Now You're Not Us? <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="471" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iV5U5jTJjpg" width="566" youtube-src-id="iV5U5jTJjpg"></iframe></div><br />AFC Wimbledon 1 - Milton Keynes Dons 0<p></p><p>Curtis 90' + 4'</p><p>Four minutes into extra time, Ronan Curtis scored a stoppage-time winner which in the scheme of League Two, merely puts a temporary dent in the hops of MK Dons' automatic promotion hopes. In the grand scheme of English Football though, this was more than just a goal and a win in the fourth tier of English Football.</p><p>This was proof that the game always did belong to the people and that it always will do. This was proof that money can not buy some things. Money does not buy tradition. Money does not buy class. Money does not buy history. Money does not buy community.</p><p>To put this in perspective, here is a potted history of the last 40 years:</p><p><b>May 1983: </b>Wimbledon are Fourth Division Champions and are promoted to the Third Division.</p><p><b>May 1984: </b>Wimbledon are Third Division Champions and are promoted to the Second Division.</p><p><b>May 1986:</b> Wimbledon come 3rd in the Second Division and are promoted to the First Division.</p><p><b>May 1988:</b> Wimbledon win the FA Cup Final 1-0 against newly crowned league champions, Liverpool.</p><p><b>May 1991:</b> After the publication of the Taylor Report (following the Bradford, Heysel, and Hillsborough disasters) which following recommended all-seater grounds for top-flight clubs, Wimbledon left Plough Lane after 79 years to groundshare with neighbours Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park.</p><p><b>May 1997: </b>Wimbledon chairman Sam Hammam sold the club to two Norwegian businessmen, Kjell Inge Røkke and Bjørn Rune Gjelste; who intended to bulldoze Plough Lane and turn it into a supermarket site.</p><p><b>Aug 2001:</b> The new chairman, Charles Koppel, announced that Wimbledon intended to relocate to Milton Keynes. The English FA refused the move.</p><p><b>May 2002:</b> A Independent Commission appointed by the English FA approves the relocation of the club to Milton Keynes.</p><p><b>Feb 2002:</b> The English FA declared that it was "not in the wider interests of football" to have a club based in Wimbledon</p><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120205212904/http://www.wisa.org.uk/cgi/l/files/20020530_fa.pdf">https://web.archive.org/web/20120205212904/http://www.wisa.org.uk/cgi/l/files/20020530_fa.pdf</a></p><p><b>Aug 2003: </b>"Wimbledon" plays its first matches at the National Hockey Stadium in Milton Keynes.</p><p><b>Jun 2004: </b>The name of the club plying its trade at Milton Keynes changed its to reflect it's relocation.</p><p>The rest of the story of AFC Wimbledon, which is a new club for the fans, , and owned by the fans is long and complicated of itself but the relevant parts here are:</p><p><b>Nov 2020:</b> AFC Wimbledon play their first game at the new Plough Lane </p><p><b>Mar 2024:</b> Ronan Curtis scores a 94th minute winner as Wimbledon record their first-ever win at Plough Lane against the club from Milton Keynes.</p><p>The match itself, played out in fading sunshine on a still crisp spring afternoon in Southwest London, has a two minute highlight reel and really that's all that there was. This was two sides playing relatively neutral football, who were both being cancelled out in the centre of the pitch; both shifting between 4-4-2 and 4-5-1, with not enough presence up front to make use of any firepower. As almost a neutral, watching this match for me was like watching two boxers with one glove tied behind their backs. Curtis's goal which came as the last actions of extra time, was the brightest spark of the whole match.</p><p>The two sides have met before on a number of occasions. The two sides have even met this season. This particular match was not about getting one up over the club who used to be you before it was stolen away but something deeper.</p><p>Wimbledon FC, that is the club with a century of tradition and which held aloft the FA Cup after beating Liverpool in the Cup Final, once upon a time played at a ground further up Plough Lane. AFC Wimbledon, that is the club which was born out of the ashes of the supporters base of the old club, and became a club for the fans and by the fans, only very recently moved back to Plough Lane after playing out of other club's grounds. This is the final chapter in the story of the club coming home and to win at home against the club who used to be you before it was stolen away, is special.</p><p>This is not merely a geographical rivalry like Arsenal and Tottenham, or City and United in Manchester. This is as bitter a rivalry as Liverpool and Everton would have been in the 1890s, after the former was formed after the then new owner bought the ground and then had to buy 12 players to put in that new ground. In every respect, what the new owners of Wimbledon FC did, in taking a club and ripping it out of the community where it had been for more than a century and moving it 135 miles away, is magnitudes more horrible, heinous, and horrid, and far worse hateration and holleration.</p><p>Herein lies the reason why this goal and this 1-0 result is more important than any other mere derby result and possibly more important than a cup final. AFC Wimbledon is not just a phoenix club that rose from the ashes of a previous club which went into administration and bankruptcy but had to be built anew after people with money stole a club away. This 1-0 result is the club owned by and for the fans, demonstrating that you can never buy the heart and soul of the game.</p><p>1-0 in a club owned by the fans, in a ground owned by the fans; against the franchise currently plying its trade elsewhere because people with money had no regard for the fans, is the demonstration that community matters more than many billions of pounds. </p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-24631361773493895962024-03-06T07:17:00.003+11:002024-03-06T09:26:59.406+11:00Horse 3309 - THE PEOPLE v THE CHIZZA [2024] - Judgement<p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">The Fake Internet Court of Australia</span></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">THE PEOPLE v THE CHIZZA [2024] - Judgement</span></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">H3309/1</span></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></p><p><b><i>"Great Judge Rollo,</i></b></p><p><b><i>Make a ruling on whether or not The Chizza from KFC should exist. I think it's dumb and is pointless and needs to **** right off and never come back."</i></b></p><p><b>- Kyle18, 2nd Mar 2024.</b></p><p>It has come to the attention of this court that KFC has invented a thing called "The Chizza" and this week, I was sent a message on a motorsport forum of all things, to make a ruling on Kentucky Fried Chicken's apparently new invention. Firstly I am flattered to be called "Great Judge" because that helps to solidify the inherent silliness and seriousness The Fake Internet Court of Australia. This court is in a unique position in that it simultaneously asserts that it is both definitive, irrelevant, and igororable.</p><p>This fake internet court has been asked in the past to rule on whether or not pineapple belongs on a pizza (no, it doesn't), whether or not banana belongs on a pizza (no, it doesn't), and what the best pizza actually is (it is pepperoni and red onion). This court claims to therefore be qualified in this realm to answer this kind of question. The point of order contained in this application is whether or not The Chizza needs to exist. Before we can get to that point of order, we need to know what a Chizza is.</p><p>These then are the facts as the court sees them:</p><p>The Chizza appears to be no more than a flattish piece of chicken which is fried in the fast-food chain's signature batter of 11 herbs and spices, topped with pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese and pepperoni slices.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidcsmYPoWd0VB0XujYcc-l3xY10fisUJPYhRsX1Cu2n_blQUH3pmV36Jj9-WkY3TbECqUeIaz9lhnJ6yUvNVJCa89cdQwnHg-lhYWH_91tEjUg7MmHz7Z4VfsxoLoDxOmj-E97SKdvVYfYIrrgzIWsIgn6B0Y0t7GDxpwfDtNXo1_tJcoTjqZy/s600/Chizza2024.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="600" height="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidcsmYPoWd0VB0XujYcc-l3xY10fisUJPYhRsX1Cu2n_blQUH3pmV36Jj9-WkY3TbECqUeIaz9lhnJ6yUvNVJCa89cdQwnHg-lhYWH_91tEjUg7MmHz7Z4VfsxoLoDxOmj-E97SKdvVYfYIrrgzIWsIgn6B0Y0t7GDxpwfDtNXo1_tJcoTjqZy/w621-h386/Chizza2024.png" width="621" /></a></div><p>The 'what' of this case is pretty easy to establish. The 'why' of this case, became the subject of a Washington Post article:</p><p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2024/02/27/kfc-chizza-review-chicken-pizza/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2024/02/27/kfc-chizza-review-chicken-pizza/</a></p><p><b><i>KFC’s Chizza is a chicken-pizza mashup with one looming question: Why?</i></b></p><p><b>- Emily Heil, Washington Post, 27th Feb 2024.</b></p><p>The article is quite reasonable in trying to attack both of the questions of 'what' and 'why'; so it doesn't need much in the way of discovery by this court. Let's not beat about the bush and attempt to call a 'spade' a 'square headed digging and hauling hand tool'; let's call this out for what it is. KFC have just invented a chicken parmi with a proprietary name.</p><p>Before judgement is pronounced, this court would like to thank our learned friends and esteemed colleagues, Hen Solo acting as counsel for The People and Marsha Mellow who acted as counsel for the defence.</p><p>With these known facts, the court is more than adequately armed to be able to make judgement.</p><p><b>Final Judgement:</b></p><p>Anyone who has been to an Ari in Australia or New Zealand in the past 50 years knows exactly what a chicken parmi is. We all know that a chicken parmi is an act of magic where you take a big chicken nugget and with the addition of sauce and cheese, are able to charge $18 for it. All that KFC have done here is made a slightly fancier chicken parmi and added it to their menu.</p><p>Maybe this is novel and new to an American audience but as someone who has been to many Aris, the fact that KFC has done this looks so blatantly obvious that it should have already been a fait accompli.</p><p>The art of putting things on top of other things is not new; nor is the art of putting food on top of other kinds of food. A long long time ago, in a land called 'the 90s', a pie shop on my way home from school sold a 'pizza meat pie'; which was the same idea as a Shepherds' Pie but with a layer of pizza on top instead of potato. This was brilliant. When the pie shop closed forever, all that was left was the idea, the memory, and the hope, that one day someone would reinvent pizza meat pie. Nobody has but chicken parmi is a very fine substitute. </p><p>It is the opinion of this court that The Chizza despite its ridiculous name, is inherently a brilliant idea. If as the Washington Post suggests, that The Chizza is disappointing, then that's fine as well and should be expected. What do you seriously expect from a fast-food chain which has disinterested teenagers working behind the counter? In some respects this court applauds poor customer service and quality because that equates to something being cheap. </p><p>If the Chizza ever comes to Australia then the name is already perfect. People have no problem in calling a proprietary object a weird name. KFC have sold a burger in the past called a 'Zinger'; so the name 'Chizza' doesn't seem at all out of place. Where this name excels is that it sounds like the nickname that you might give to someone called Charles, or who has the surname of Cheesman. If this was sold by KFC in Penrith, or Spotswood, immediately after closing time for pubs in the area, it is very easy to imagine a lot of drunk bogans yelling "Chizza!" at 1am in the morning. The fact that said bogans might have been kicked out of Panthers, where they could have already gotten an $18 chicken parmi, is a lesson in dramatic irony.</p><p>To answer the general point of order of whether or not the Chizza needs to exist. Probably nothing needs to exist but walking back from the concept of<i> causa sui</i> to the less absolute position of 'should' as opposed to 'need', then The Chizza is not a thing that does exist and should not. I am unlikely to ever come across a Chizza in person (because the truth is that even though I live within walking distance of a KFC, I have never been to that KFC); so it seems churlish to rule against it. The whole idea of proprietary parmi is likely inevitable and unless it actually is disgusting, this fake internet court is uninclined to rule against it.</p><p>Judgement is hereby made in favour of the continued existence of The Chizza, with absolute unqualified ambivalence towards it. In the words of Icona Pop as used in the KFC adverts "I don't care." That is all.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">- ROLLO75 J</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">(this case will be reported in FILR as H3309/1 - Ed)</span></b></p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-79743686677279119962024-03-02T22:49:00.006+11:002024-03-02T22:49:51.584+11:00Horse 3308 - Dunkley By-Election: Labor Retain<p><a href="https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-29778-210.htm">https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-29778-210.htm</a></p><p><b>31,532 - BELYEA, Jodie (ALP)</b></p><p><b>29,877 - CONROY, Nathan<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>(Lib)</b></p><p><b>4,997 - BRESKIN, Alex (Grn)</b></p><p>As I write this, the results for the by-election in the division of Dunkley, look very much like the Labor Party will retain the seat; with Jodie Belyea winning 41.02% of the primary vote, versus former Mayor of Frankston Nathan Conroy with 38.87% of the primary vote. This by-election was not the result of a member resigning but by the death of sitting Labor member Peta Murphy who had been battling breast cancer for 13 years. So unlike other elections where the previous member was unpopular and/or left in disgrace, this by-election was held in a fairly neutral environment. </p><p>Jodie Belyea winning 41.02% of the primary vote, which is a swing of 0.05% to Labor is so slight as to be statistically unimportant. It is so small that the by-election actually tells us nothing about Labor's chances of retaining government in 2025. I personally think that there will be an early budget in March; with the election taking place on or about the 17th of May 2025; which would be an ordinary House and Half-Senate election.</p><p>Nathan Conroy was in fact a fairly popular Mayor for Frankston; which meant that he could and did run a pretty positive campaign. However, if you had been watching Sky News, reading either The Age or The Herald-Sun, then you would be forgiven for thinking that this would be an absolute walkover for him. The obvious question is 'what went wrong?' and the answer is 'nothing really'.</p><p>Except:</p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/sussanley/status/1763060889765515496">https://twitter.com/sussanley/status/1763060889765515496</a></p><p><b><i>If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.</i></b></p><p><b><i>If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.</i></b></p><p><b><i>Send Labor a message.</i></b></p><p><b>- Sussan Ley, 29th Feb 2024, 15:37pm (on X)</b></p><p>Sussan Ley, the Member for Farrer and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, decided to turn this into a racist dog whistle campaign. Trying to stoke the fires of irrational fear by blaming "foreign criminals" when we all know that she really means 'black people' but is too craven to bring her actual racism into the light, is quite frankly despicable.</p><p>There probably will be a lot of commentary about 'who really won' the by-election as though this were some gnostic set of runes that nobody can read but the thing about a an election is that it is really ridiculously easy to determine who won. We have the numbers. The person with the most votes after all the instant run-offs, that is the person with more than 50% plus 1 of the votes has won the election. You don't need to clutch pearls, look at bird entrails, read tea leaves or wave burning leaves over your head - the person 'who really won' the election is the person who WON the election.</p><p>However in dissecting why the Liberal Party lost the seat when their candidate was actually quite affable and seems like a nice chap, then this moment at thirteen minutes to four in the afternoon, which is time enough for news bulletins to pick up their sound bites, the exact moment that the Liberal Party lost the seat.</p><p>At this point, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, made her intentions clear that she intended to court the racist vote for her own political ends, and rather than mere blaming the Labour Party for this or that, turned this into a 'wink wink nudge nudge black people' moment. Sussan Ley as an openly racist knave, tried to dog-whistle and the people of Dunkley responded by telling her party where to go.</p><p>If you drill down into the numbers as they stand, the Labor Party retained its primary vote. The Liberal Party can try and pretend that it has had a successful campaign but all that they have in fact done, is pick up votes from the absence of Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the United Australia Party. I do not know how you can pretend that a 6.82% gain is a success when the corresponding loss of 7.70% is from parties who weren't even running. What that actually says is that 0.88% of the population or 709 people, would rather vote for an empty chair than you.</p><p>If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is that trying to use American advisors and American strategies to push American-style misinformation in an Australian context, is a road which puts you on a hiding to nothing. Yes, there was a time and a place when demonising asylum seekers and blaming immigrants for the woes of the country did work but that was back in 2001. American advisors which suggest that a winning political strategy which involves energising their base, is in the third decade of the twenty-first strategy, a losing one. </p><p>The take-aways from this election are that the Labor Party has gone nowhere because boring government is good government. The Liberal Party only increased its primary vote because the further-right-wing sections of the political spectrum fielded zero candidates. The Greens having lost 4% of the vote are going AWOL in the public imagination. And weirdly, the fact that we have an Animal Justice, a Libertarian, and a Victorian Socialist who together polled 5.48% of the vote would suggest that the fringes of the electorate are fracturing.</p><p>Curiously, I suspect that Ms Ley is either delusional, drunk, or just openly lying to the Australian people:</p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/sussanley/status/1763882241892270580">https://twitter.com/sussanley/status/1763882241892270580</a></p><p><b><i>The people of Dunkley have sent Anthony Albanese a strong message and it's not ‘Happy Birthday’, it's 'do something about the cost of living crisis.’ A swing of this size at the next election would see us win 11 seats from Labor. This is a terrible result for the Prime Minister.</i></b></p><p><b>- Sussan Ley, 2nd Mar 2024, 20:01pm (on X)</b></p><p>I actually do have a spreadsheet and can calculate this. </p><p>Ms Ley is in fact correct, a swing of this size at the next election would see the coalition win 11 seats at the next election. By my reckoning, they would increase from 55 to 66 seats. Also, a swing of this size at the next election would see Labor pick up two seats, taking them from 77 to 79. The Greens would lose 3, Centre Alliance would lose their only seat, and there would be 7 independents.</p><p>I still fail to see how retaining a seat is a "terrible result for the Prime Minister". Perhaps someone can explain that to me.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-80121236005989084772024-03-02T07:17:00.003+11:002024-03-02T09:18:33.837+11:00Horse 3307 - It's About The Wind, Yo<p>On Tuesday, following the race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, NASCAR made the announcement that both Ryan Preece and Noah Gragson had been penalised 35 points for "non-conforming air deflectors" on the rooves of their cars.</p><p>On Friday before the race, NASCAR confiscated the offending parts and made Stewart-Haas Racing fit new parts to the cars; then watched SHR very very closely.</p><p>The 35 point penalty means that both Ryan Preece and Noah Gragson go into the third race of the season without any points.</p><p>The question which I was asked is my most favourite question in the world... "Why?". Why would you do that if you know that you are possibly going to be picked up for it? Because this is sport and everyone who is not currently seeking an advantage should immediately seek to do so, and given that this is motor racing where everyone is cheating all of the time if they can get away with it and/or invent solutions not yet covered by the rules, then this kind of thing is as expected as the sun rising in the morning.</p><p>This particular infringement is a classic physics question and at its heart is entirely to do with fluid dynamics and how air flows around an object and how you can control that air flow. Air, water, fluid, traffic, crowds, electricity, politics, moods: these are all things that flow and where resistance can be controlled.</p><p>An object which is moving through the air creates wind resistance which is variable depending on how slippery the object is through the air (drag coefficient), as well as the surface area being presented to the wind, as well as the relative air speed, and the pressure of the air (or water, or other medium). Very obviously, a dart or torpedo shaped object with a pointy end is going to pierce the air more easily than a brick. Also reasonably obviously, an object which is not moving but which has air moving around it, is also going to create wind resistance; which is true for a building, or a person in a storm with an umbrella, or when MY HAND IS A DOLPHIN!<b>¹</b></p><p>Stewart-Haas Racing were pinged for unauthorised roof rails at Atlanta Motor Speedway and while NASCAR has not specified what the infringement was, given that every team is likely to be cheating all the time in some way because they want to gain even the smallest advantage, it is reasonable to suggest that SHR was trying to chase a very wee bit of speed by affecting the wind resistance due to the spill which comes off of the roof rails at speeds of 190mph.</p><p>The roof rails exist in principle, so that when a car is turned sideways, they create turbulence over the car because a sideways car and the attached air flow is a bad analogue of an aircraft wing. If this was a purely clean object designed to create laminar flow of air over it, then that produces a high pressure area above and behind it, which induces a suck pull force which is lift. It seems almost absurd that a 4000 pound thing can be lifted into the air but flying and flipping motor cars is a thing which does happen and is unwanted; as opposed to a thing weighing many many tons which you do want to fly inside of<b>²</b>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiE1FHWsCkFxKG1h1Zu_1rSeGWICSO1dO4LlqFYTSZytYPMEbPUMY786aGm2GjEdLoskWKy_J13v8P2YYGpPpZCO6a6BPftG-T9GQqXlJrlF_OsC6gkdFQ9TVPxQlajCgNCWaTK8Xx7QdzROdWOvxI6-fQs-KXVh-vIPeuCNX_-gPmaKmrMhnW/s976/RoofRailParts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="625" data-original-width="976" height="387" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiE1FHWsCkFxKG1h1Zu_1rSeGWICSO1dO4LlqFYTSZytYPMEbPUMY786aGm2GjEdLoskWKy_J13v8P2YYGpPpZCO6a6BPftG-T9GQqXlJrlF_OsC6gkdFQ9TVPxQlajCgNCWaTK8Xx7QdzROdWOvxI6-fQs-KXVh-vIPeuCNX_-gPmaKmrMhnW/w604-h387/RoofRailParts.jpg" width="604" /></a></div><br /><p>My suspicion is that SHR have altered parts A and D in some way, to affect the swirl patterns coming off of the roof rails as they pass through the air. Again, a thing moving through the air creates wind resistance but there is also wind resistance caused by the attached air presenting itself as an area of turbulence in the wake of the object. I have no idea what the actual effective area of that attached air flow is but that leading edge of those roof rails creates a force of about 0.1 of a Newton (at 180mph); which of itself is small but is enough to affect the shape of the air behind it.</p><p>Most big passenger aircraft which have cruising speeds of about 500mph, have little turn ups on their wing tips. When wind resistance is drag and drag is inefficient, then drag costs money. The objective of an airline is to create profits by not spending money. Those wee little turn ups on the ends of the wings, help to shape and minimise the size of the cone shaped swirling vortices which spill off the ends of the wings. The objective of an race car is to create speed. When wind resistance is drag and drag is inefficient, then drag costs speed<b>³</b>.</p><p>The distance between first and third place in that same race was 0.003 seconds; which at the instantaneous velocity of 177mph worked out to be about nine inches. Nine inches multiplied by 200 laps is 150 feet; and if you are conceding 150 feet to the opposition, then it is absolutely worth the effort to chase down 0.003 of a second per lap. Stewart-Haas Racing literally are trying to control the distance between coming first and being an also ran. </p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">¹From that same race, Joey Logano was fined $10,000 fine for modification of a driving glove. His left glove had webbing added between the thumb and forefinger. Again, this is about controlling air flow by putting your hand out of the window to create MY HAND IS A DOLPHIN! out of the side of the car. That also creates vortices and affects air flow.</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">²except when the doors fall off. </span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">³A NASCAR Cup car also has roof flaps which blow open when a car is facing backwards. These act as automatic air brakes; which present all kinds of air resistance and turbulence. </span></b></p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-28385787528092986242024-02-29T07:17:00.001+11:002024-02-29T08:40:54.736+11:00Horse 3306 - February 30th<p><b>I hate today. Boo!</b></p><p>Today is the 29th of February, which is the 60th day of the year. Of itself that shouldn't be a problem but the fact that this is a extra-calculic day, in a month which three-quarters of the time only has 28 days, is maddening to me.</p><p>The Gregorian Calendar, with its corrections for leap years, and then uncorrections from leap years at the end of the century, and then uncorrections for uncorrections for leap years at the end of every fourth century, is a bodge on a bodge on a bodge. Why do we persist with this? Because although it is apparently easy to change from Imperial to Metric, of from PAL to Digital, changing the abstract fabric of the calendar is too hard. Predictably when England came late to the party in 1752, there were riots. </p><p>It is one thing to complain about a thing but most of the time if you want to justify the complaint, you had better have a better fix for the same problem. As usual, I have a fix and it is a good fix.</p><p>There are very close to 365¼ days in the year. However, as humans do not want to mark the year to that degree of exactitude, then the idea of 365 days in a year is practically sensible. Since we also want to overlay smaller divisions of months and weeks, we find that 12 divisions does not work properly and neither does 7.</p><p>The answer therefore is to use that principle of arithmetic called the 'common multiple' and lo and behold we have a common multiple of 7 and 4 which is dangerously close to 365. </p><p>364 = 7 multiplied by 52</p><p>364 = 4 multiplied by 91</p><p>And because multiplication is commutative and 52 is a multiple of 4, each of those four subdivisions divides into 13 sets of 7.</p><p>The very very obvious solution for the calendar, which retains months and weeks, is thus:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-fGJvXzI5w6sk2GSxX30oIR15-6cjK8gxl0UKYq1FAJ65F0WoVW4fYprsMNcq9lSCcH6N6OWn3UqqJJVW5c_1HWFBTetHHNgnWCtsyImE4C8ndcktHArCzklMk6qMPG9D8_sKNP4q8EJEiqJcLPW327A2SB7qQCLepKJ8AyjPuIIkQz70-IoM/s520/CAL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="463" data-original-width="520" height="495" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-fGJvXzI5w6sk2GSxX30oIR15-6cjK8gxl0UKYq1FAJ65F0WoVW4fYprsMNcq9lSCcH6N6OWn3UqqJJVW5c_1HWFBTetHHNgnWCtsyImE4C8ndcktHArCzklMk6qMPG9D8_sKNP4q8EJEiqJcLPW327A2SB7qQCLepKJ8AyjPuIIkQz70-IoM/w556-h495/CAL.jpg" width="556" /></a></div><p>In every quarter there are 91 days. The first two months of the quarter both have 30 days and the last month of the quarter has 31; which acts as a reminder that the quarter has ended. </p><p>You will also notice that at the bottom right hand corner of this table there is one Bonus Day which isn't part of any month or week. Functionally it would be part of December but as nothing ever gets done on New Year's Eve, then this is almost moot. All the rules for leap years would be applied by adding another extra-calculic Bonus Day after that</p><p>Since this solution solves the problem of weeks not matching up with the year, and since it also has the bonus of creating four identical quarters, then this would be a perpetual calendar. </p><p>For those critics who would say that this mucks with the nature of the abstract fabric of the calendar, may I remind you that calendar reform has happened before and the most visible evidence of this is that the October Revolution in Russia is celebrated in November because the Russian Orthodox Church was even later to the party than the Church Of England, and 14 days were added to the calendar and not 11.</p><p>Granted that 2/7ths of the population will perpetually win as their birthday always falls on a weekend, while 5/7ths of the population loses because theirs do not, but seeing as this is really a minor concern and people will hold parties on the weekend anyway, although it matters a non-zero amount it is still not critical. As Easter is defined as a Sunday and based upon the moon which is no respecter of the calendar, that does not change. As a bonus, Christmas is now always on a Sunday; which ought to make the church happy. </p><p>The beauty of this calendar is that as it begins on January 1 (or even April, July, or October 1), it can simply be adopted at the beginning of the year (or quarter). We lose no days. As it also retains the extra-calculic corrections and uncorrections, it never has to be adjusted once adopted. </p><p>As it is, the accounting package that I use has a 20 month calendar with 40 days per month. This is so that you can process journal entries without disturbing any monthly figures. 40/20/2024 is already a valid date; which means that the idea of February 30th, or May 35th is not a foreign thing to me.</p><p>Today should be February 30th. The current calendar is bonkers hat-stand crazy making. </p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-78345208789388706712024-02-22T07:17:00.006+11:002024-02-22T07:17:00.133+11:00Horse 3305 - Private Education Is A Veblen Good, So Why Must We As Taxpayers Pay For It?<p><a href="https://www.heraldsun.com.au/victoria-education/student-background-the-big-difference-between-private-and-public-school-results/news-story/35f531679417cb03def4b571913b6035">https://www.heraldsun.com.au/victoria-education/student-background-the-big-difference-between-private-and-public-school-results/news-story/35f531679417cb03def4b571913b6035</a></p><p><b><i>Despite some charging almost $50,000 a year, a new study has found that education at private schools is nothing special in comparison to government and independent schools.</i></b></p><p><b>- Herald Sun, 9th Feb 2024</b></p><p>This isn't the first time that 'a new study' has found that education at private schools is not any better at delivering educational excellence and results than public education.</p><p><a href="https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13384-021-00498-w">https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13384-021-00498-w</a></p><p><b><i>No differences were evident after controlling for socioeconomic status and prior NAPLAN achievement. Using longitudinal modelling, we also found no sector differences in the rate of growth for reading and numeracy between Year 3 and Year 9. Results indicate that already higher achieving students are more likely to attend private schools, but private school attendance does not alter academic trajectories, thus undermining conceptions of private schools adding value to student outcomes.</i></b></p><p><b>- The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc, 2nd Mar 2021</b></p><p>Okay, so maybe this is a recent phenomenon...</p><p><a href="https://www.theage.com.au/education/fourth-study-this-year-confirms-private-schools-no-better-than-public-20141110-11jlgn.html">https://www.theage.com.au/education/fourth-study-this-year-confirms-private-schools-no-better-than-public-20141110-11jlgn.html</a></p><p><b><i>The fourth study this year has found Australian private schools produce no better results than public schools, when students' socio-economic backgrounds are taken into account.</i></b></p><p><b><i>Stéphane Mahuteau and Kostas Mavromaras, academics at the National Institute for Labour Studies at Flinders University, conducted the latest study, which found a strong and positive association between the socio-economic status of a student and their test scores. The core result of the paper is that, after controlling for a number of school and student characteristics, "school quality does not depend directly on the sector of the school". The main determinant of the higher raw test scores observed in private schools is the higher socio-economic status (SES) of students attending private schools, the report found.</i></b></p><p><b>- The Age, 10 Nov 2014</b></p><p>...no, it isn't.</p><p>I shan't bore you with repeated studies which happen again and again, which prove exactly the same thing because the further that we go back into the past, the less relevance they have to modern schooling. Suffice to say that in looking through newspaper archives, I have found roughly the same thing being reported roughly once ever three years going back all the way until 1974. That's fifty years of telling us exactly the same thing; namely that private education despite its expense, provides no actual educational benefit to the children who go there.</p><p>There is an old adage which says that 'Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result'. When it comes to education in Australia not only do we have multiple studies which prove that private schools do not provide better educational outcomes but we also have decent modelling which demonstrates that private schools don't actually save taxpayers any money either:</p><p><a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/03/16/myth-busted--private-schools-don-t-save-taxpayers--dollars.html">https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/03/16/myth-busted--private-schools-don-t-save-taxpayers--dollars.html</a></p><p><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rnn0w1nWYreOMRSsDfzt4n8KXHaGbw2h/view">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rnn0w1nWYreOMRSsDfzt4n8KXHaGbw2h/view</a></p><p>Given all of this, why do we do it? Why do we as a nation deliberately choose to spend public monies on private schooling, which is by nature exclusionary, when it produces no educational benefit and actually has negative financial benefit? Because politics is a demand driven system and parents demand that they get to send their kids to private schools which are subsidised by the taxpayer. If this was any sane commercial market, it would be quite rightly seen as open corruption and there would be a Royal Commission into it. </p><p>The question then is, what do parents get out of private education? As private schools still charge private fees, parents obviously think that they derive some kind of benefit because as at least semi-rational beings, they want something to show for their many dollarpounds that they have parted with. If it is not better educational outcomes then they must be buying something else while claiming that they have the moral right to demand that we the good and fair people of the Commonwealth pay a second time when we already are obligated to provide public education.</p><p>What I think is going on, after having worked in legal and legal adjacent workplaces such as the law courts and an accounting firm, is that what parents are actually buying when it comes to private schooling for their children is in fact a Veblen good.</p><p>American economist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 work "The Theory of the Leisure Class" noted that there were certain kinds of goods such as artwork, jewellery, watches, yachts, and the relatively new fangled invention of the motor car, actually had an increase in demand as the price went up. These things were purchased because the person who bought them, perceived an increase in displayed status. Quite literally these goods were 'status symbols' and the term that Veblen used to describe them was 'conspicuous consumption'. The whole class of goods in turn would eventually be come to be known as Veblen Goods as a result of his work.</p><p>The weird thing about Veblen goods is that they appear to violate the basic law of demand, which states that quantity demanded has an inverse relationship with price. That is, that as the price goes up, people want less. Imagine a Mars bar. If they are $2, you might only want 1. If they are $1, you can have 2. If they go up to $2.30, you might not want any. Veblen goods don't do that. If the price goes up, people actually want more of them. These are not normal things. In fact, Veblen likened the purchase and display of things for conspicuous consumption to that of the tail feathers of a peacock. These things were bought precisely because there was an emotional appeal of their exclusivity; which the majority of the population simply would not or could not purchase.</p><p>Human beings are otherwise semi-rational electro-mechanical meatbags who economics assumes are looking to maximise their happiness and/or utility with the things that they purchase. Veblen goods are less about satisfying raw utility and more about maximise people's happiness. In making someone more exclusive and important, the purchase of a Veblen good actually makes them believe that they have purchased something of high quality that is out of reach for others. In turn, they then believe this is worth the premium they pay.</p><p>Generally speaking, when a particular good or service has a higher price, consumers will assume it to be of better quality; including when that is untrue and simply not the case. As I have demonstrated a repeated interest in motor cars, then my prime example of this is BMW; which has a reputation for pushing out technology way too early and being notably unreliable. Likewise, people generall perceive that the Toyota Hilux is of better quality than the GWM Cannon; even though maintenance costs prove this to be untrue.</p><p>The exclusivity of Veblen goods is also useful because if something is perceived as difficult to purchase or expensive, and the majority of the population will not or cannot purchase them, then this might actually increase its attraction to those for whom status is important, because it is now even farther out of reach for the average consumer.</p><p>The thing about private schools is that precisely because they charge fees, this acts as a barrier to entry. School fees actively keep out those students whose parents can not afford to pay. Granted that there are occasionally a few scholarships and other conditions where some parents are exempted from paying either entirely or partially, but these are not the majority. Scholarships for private schools are generally only awarded to students on academic grounds where the presence of the student actively bolsters the school's academic standings in official reporting, or those legacy cases where a school might have been started as a ministry of a church and there are still some vestigial appendages which exist.</p><p>Private schools can and will eject a student for poor academic performance. Private schools can and will eject a student for behavioural reasons. This means that these students are placed back into the hands of the public school system; which also has the added benefit of bolstering a private school's academic standings in official reporting. </p><p>It is true that some parents will buy private schooling for their children because of some perceived advantage in behaviour of the students. It is true that some parents will buy private schooling for their children because of some perceived advantage in extra-curricular activities such as a music program, a sports program, or other non-core program. However, there is not an insignificant proportion of parents buy private schooling for their children because of the imparted economic signal that going to a private school provides. A Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is an advantage when that child who is now 17, 18, or even 19 and 20, applies for a job. A Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is an advantage in professions like law, finance, banking, and other managerial positions. That Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is undeniably an economic signal that the person who has it, is not riff-raff.</p><p>Remember, Thorstein Veblen wrote about 'conspicuous consumption' of goods because the person who bought them, perceived an increase in displayed status. A 'status symbol' is not just an abstract concept but a physical embodiment that the person who has it, has been approved (or approved themselves) as having acquired status. Purchasing a Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is the purchase of status for one's child.</p><p>The moral question which practically nobody wants to answer because they have to confront the fact that this is ugly, is why the general public should be forced to subsidise the purchase of what amounts to status symbols and economic symbols for the privileged few? Moreover why should be forced to subsidise the purchase of what amounts to status symbols and economic symbols for the privileged few when those same privileged few have rejected public education, which the general public is already obligated to provide?</p><p>I find it utterly maddening that the excuse of 'choice' is used as a cudgel to beat the general public with, in order to justify perpetuating the public subsidy of a Veblen good. Admittedly it is very good business to show favoritism to rich people and look down on poor people but the commonwealth is not a business but a commonwealth. What is the point of a nation? Suppose there was someone in very expensive clothes and with valuable gold rings on his fingers, and at the same moment someone else comes in who is poor and dressed in threadbare clothes. If make a lot of fuss over the rich person and give them the best seat in the house but say to the poor man, "You can stand over there if you like or else sit on the floor" then this just looks like sycophancy. Why do we need to do this as nation when all it results in is further social stratification? </p><p><b><i>"The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale. The members of the leisure class planning events and parties does not actually help anyone in the long run. What results from this behavior, is a society characterized by the waste of time and money."</i></b></p><p><b>- Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)</b></p><p>Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result... why do we do it? Moreover why must we pay for a thing when as a society, it benefits a few at the expense of the least well off?</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-32905761185585366262024-02-21T07:17:00.000+11:002024-02-21T08:32:50.438+11:00Horse 3304 - An Open Letter To Toyota, re: XV80 Camry<p>Dear Toyota,</p><p>As little as a decade ago you were the car company which did all things for all people. As such, the Camry and Corolla went to No2 and No3 on the sales charts, only behind the Holden Commodore which by that stage already had its death warrant signed off on, by Treasurer Joe Hockey. You also made the Yaris, which as the smaller car was excellent.</p><p>Then when the SUVification of all things happened, you once again decided to become the car company which did all things for all people. As such, the Hilux and RAV4 went to No2 and No3 on the sales charts, only behind the Ford Ranger. However, you continued to make both the Camry and Corolla because in doing all things for all people you correctly realised that a lot of people still want a normal hatchback because they are inherently useful and excellent, and some people still want a family sedan because despite and in spite of them being boring in a lot of cases, boring is beautiful and people want to carry around their most precious cargo in the world in a car which is competent at doing the job. Boring but excellent: that could have been and should have been Toyota's motto for the past 60 years. In doing all things for all people you decided that being cool was impossible.</p><p>Recently though, you have decided that being the car company which did all things for all people is a rubbish idea. I note that you too have abandoned the bottom end of the market, as the COVID-19 pandemic gave all of the car makers licence to charge 33% more for everything. Yaris is now a $30K motor car and Corolla is now beyond the reach of the people, whom you no longer need to care about. </p><p>Weirdly, the Camry has remained at about the same kinds of price level that it always sat at; presumably because although you have realised that <i>'da kidz'</i> are no longer paid wages and no longer have money, there are a few mums and dads who still want a sedan instead of an SUV. To this end, I note that you have unveiled the next generation of the Camry, the XV80. </p><p><b>I have concerns.</b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6J0sgqHpvsx3fq4i36tlU0DEqIJkl6wjFODwnzjSX08e471kmJdIp3x-AdJiKgQQabLnFJM4V26B8l9tdL2d3OGEzy2rcnCrXr-g7MUny5U53fayDOhquJdwbTdEjCJKJ82edvjIArDz1mFgU0-98Ul663GuHnAYsAa_MeBc4g5ffBvcfmKi/s702/XV80Camry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="362" data-original-width="702" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6J0sgqHpvsx3fq4i36tlU0DEqIJkl6wjFODwnzjSX08e471kmJdIp3x-AdJiKgQQabLnFJM4V26B8l9tdL2d3OGEzy2rcnCrXr-g7MUny5U53fayDOhquJdwbTdEjCJKJ82edvjIArDz1mFgU0-98Ul663GuHnAYsAa_MeBc4g5ffBvcfmKi/w623-h321/XV80Camry.jpg" width="623" /></a></div><p>My specific concern with the XV80 Camry is that that although it looks like it is cool. It is not.</p><p>Why not?</p><p><b>Why isn't it cool?</b></p><p>Look, I totally get that Toyotas generally are built for people who want appliances and not fun things buy why tease us like this? I have driven the GR Corolla and while it is fine, its 3-cylinder engine makes it feel like it is a sensible warm hatch, when it pretends to be bonkers. Why isn't it bonkers? I like bonkers. Why can't we have bonkers? Likewise, the XV80 Camry looks like it is the kind of car which should be in knife fights in carparks but the only knife fight that it is ever going to get engaged in is when that knife is used to cut birthday cake.</p><p>Traditionally the Camry is driven by sad old gits who are the kinds people people who after they have a crash and have gone to hell, would still be oblivious to the world around them and will not realise that they have crashed. Traditionally, Camry is for people who have given up on life. That's okay. You are allowed to make a boring thing well. My concern is that XV80 Camry looks like it is for people who have not given up on life. XV80 Camry looks it should be cool but it is writing cheques that it can not cash. And who is writing cheques these days anyway? Camry drivers.</p><p>As is my want, I played about with the Toyota Configurator and it seems that Camry Dents and Tissue Boxes come standard. Why is this? </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDxA2nkw2jWpvvqfhm4CvF2-AVN4RkxD7QvIN6WmmEBVE25w60qj1YxbJuCxUfP8eZ9QYkp55ykOEz3TJUcDzhA9GfXzZkLi6JPoxhZA3_8XYTzIwY_0SLUl2NihKNPN1xvRx8VU7sYh8RG6eLjrm8MLrAVZurimQgBSbPnhbXtg51tWSA0dcB/s947/ToyotaConfig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="947" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDxA2nkw2jWpvvqfhm4CvF2-AVN4RkxD7QvIN6WmmEBVE25w60qj1YxbJuCxUfP8eZ9QYkp55ykOEz3TJUcDzhA9GfXzZkLi6JPoxhZA3_8XYTzIwY_0SLUl2NihKNPN1xvRx8VU7sYh8RG6eLjrm8MLrAVZurimQgBSbPnhbXtg51tWSA0dcB/w579-h470/ToyotaConfig.jpg" width="579" /></a></div><p>What really makes is sad is that I know that the 2UR 5-Litre V8 will fit in the XV80 Camry because it already does fit in the Lexus IS500F which is exactly the same monocoque under the panels and light clusters. Both the Camry and the Lexus IS500F are built upon the Toyota New Global Architecture platform. This means that you could drop the 5L V8 in the Camry and pitch it for $35,000 and steal Mustang's lunch but you don't. Why is that?</p><p>I believe that it was the great department store proprietor Nunya Bisniss while in conversation with Anne Nonymoos in 18X5 who said "Give the people want they want and they will come". In Australia, Ford gave the people a V8 Falcon and ruled the roost from 1967-1997; Holden gave the people the V8 Commodore and ruled the roost from 1997-2016. Since then, both of them and you, have all picked up sticks, closed the factories and all have decided not to give the people what they want. Did any of us change what we want? No. The only reason why everyone is now driving a Blodpanzer Brodozer or a Nomoto Kinderbox is because they can't get a family car with a big engine any more. The formula is simple. Get a family car; with the biggest, horkiest, borkiest, engine that you can spork in there.</p><p>SS Commodore was cool. XR8 Falcon was cool. The Coyote V8 Mustang when it isn't out murdering pedestrians is cool. As you Toyota are along with Mazda the only automaker who look like they are even prepared to make a family sedan any more, you have practically an open goal here. You've seen how it is done. You've seen how absurdly successfully the strategy was because even now, the price of a used V8 Commodore or Falcon is skyrocketing as people can not get what they want any more. You even already have all of the necessary bits to make a V8 Camry and with a stroke, single handedly rule the roost. So why not? You've also come so tantalisingly close too.</p><p>The GR Yaris looks like it should be fun, except that the kinds of people who that car is meant to be for, simply can't afford it. GR Yaris is everything that AE86 wanted to be. GR Yaris actually could deliver tofu on precarious mountain roads on the wrong side of 200km/h. he GR Corolla also looks like it should be fun, except that it just isn't. GR Corolla is trying to play a magic trick where you want us to think that it is cool but underneath is likely CH-R. The GT-86 despite my objection that this is actually a modern Celica, is a genuinely fun car except that that's a Subaru boxer up front. That's not really your handiwork. It is still excellent nevertheless.</p><p>XV80 Camry, which allegedly races in NASCAR (it doesn't really, those are bespoke cars with stickers on), arrived in 'Murica and defied all expectations by looking like the coolest family sedan of the 2020s. The problem is, that although it looks cool, and we know that the 2UR 5-Litre V8 will fit in it, you won't put it in there? Why not?</p><p>We want bonkers. We want grumbly rumbles. GIVE US NEW THINGS TO FEEL!</p><p>Love,</p><p>Rollo</p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">PS:</span></b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">I have subsquently learned that the XV80 Camry is not going to be sold in Australia. There is an outside possibility that we will be getting the Toyota Crown; which is yet another boring SUV. Yawn. Crick. Ho. Hum.</span></b></p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-21068439616134186562024-02-20T07:17:00.000+11:002024-02-20T16:51:29.363+11:00Horse 3303 - Train good; Car bad; Plane worse<p>The world is complex. Humans are small. Humans are small things in a complex world. This means that in order to make sense of the world, humans have a need to classify everything and put things into groups. Statistically the number of beans which exist before you have a pile of beans, is in most people's eyes, about 23. Beyond that number, individual beans cease to exist. This is also true for class sizes of children as the optimal size for the number of kids in a class is 24. </p><p>On a podcast that I like to listen to, one of the things that has by now fallen into trope is the statements: Train good; Car bad; Plane worse. Now you could just rank all of the various kinds of transport on a scale of best to worst but in this case I like the idea of an alignment chart better. The classic alignment chart which came from role-play games is inadvertently a useful tool for assigning an extra dimension to things. In that respect it is a bit like the political compass which maps state authoritarianism vs individual liberty at right angles to state ownership vs private ownership.</p><p>On the vertical axis is what you would expect from Good at the top to Evil as the bottom. In the middle is a Neural position. On the horizontal axis is a scale from Predictable or Lawful on the left to Chaotic on the right. In the middle is a Neural position. When combined, these form a 3 x 3 grid; which can describe literally anything and anyone in the world. Dudley Do-Right and Rojer Ramjet are Lawful Good. Muffin Heeler is Chaotic Neutral. Dr Claw is Lawful Evil. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpGfNPP5JTKgzrW8BMFJBcVaWlccLix0mEJ3QuX2ZrlPbq9j106afG7KXNpJLltlnTG34S_NQtt_Gk1zR8QYOcA19x5OTF-zgjBCtFb41nknWIjjdsFvq8vw4p00y05oI58hStNUozbH6zVg7St4q2KFbBu0-APxOpFSC9R9nJ0IvgNkrIcODL/s1024/Alignment.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="819" data-original-width="1024" height="495" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpGfNPP5JTKgzrW8BMFJBcVaWlccLix0mEJ3QuX2ZrlPbq9j106afG7KXNpJLltlnTG34S_NQtt_Gk1zR8QYOcA19x5OTF-zgjBCtFb41nknWIjjdsFvq8vw4p00y05oI58hStNUozbH6zVg7St4q2KFbBu0-APxOpFSC9R9nJ0IvgNkrIcODL/w619-h495/Alignment.jpg" width="619" /></a></div><p><b>Lawful Good - Passenger Trains. </b></p><p>A train is such that no matter where you lay the tracks, that is where they go. Apart from scheduling and maybe signal failure, passenger trains are as close as you can get to a Lawful Good position. Trains literally can not go where they are not supposed to be unless something catastrophic happens. </p><p>Passenger Trains are a curious thing in that they were once the public display of wealth by very rich barons. The Railway Barons in an effort to display their wealth to the public, built great cathedrals to the train. Passenger Train service though, eventually became the domain of governments as a public good; transforming them from pure profit extraction machines for the rich and powerful, to more of an omnibus device which was for, by, and with everyone. When it became obvious that moving people across continents was faster by aeroplane, then governments began to step in, and it is curious that the fastest and best trains are almost always owned by government. Trains became for, by, and with the people.</p><p><b>Chaotic Good - Horse</b></p><p>What can you logically say about the Horse as a form of transport? Horse as animal? Okay. Horse as dinner? Delicious. Horse as racing device? Exploited. Horse as transport? Variable.</p><p>Horses are relatively high-strung animals, which is odd considering that they are quite big. Some horses are quite placid, some horses are nervous, some horses are nasty, some horses are lovely. A horse as a beast of burden which is pulling a cart or a wagon is likely to be reasonably calm most of the time but if something spooks it, then who knows what kind of fresh insanity has been unleashed. IN my part of the world, we have the tale of the wife of the Governor of New South Wales, who for whatever reason was riding on a Horse back from Parramatta to Government House when the Horse got spooked by something, reared up, and she was thrown from hit; wherein she was dashed against a tree and later found dead due to blunt force trauma. </p><p>As a cereal/hay/carrot/pumpkin powered mode of transport, Horses produce an awful amount of poop. As a beast of burden which is asked to pull a cart or a wagon, they do not have as much horsepower as even a relatively small motor car. As a beast of burden which is asked to pull a carriage, they are left behind in the dust by any motor car which can do 20km/h, 30km/h, and 40km/h, all day long.</p><p>Horse is romantic but unpredictable. Horse is simultaneously friendly and unfriendly and fast and slow.</p><p><b>Chaotic Evil - Pickup Trucks and Pickup Trucks With Guns On Them.</b></p><p>Pickup Trucks should be a useful tool with which to do business. They might have been that if they weren't then bought by Cosplay Cowboys who never ever let their Pickup Trucks get dirty, and with which they never ever do a day's business with them. Some of these Pickup Trucks have been bought by the kind of people who would have bought Falcons and Commodores but have found that this is a tax deductible way to do hoonery.</p><p>An average tradie in a genuine work vehicle, is obvious that they are in fact going to work because they practically display the tools of the trade for all the world to see (or else keep them in lock boxes) but your standard urban cosplay cowbow with a Pickup Truck in 97% of cases (I checked the NSW Revenue Office's data) is owned by a business; which means that we subsidise them through taxation write-offs. They then repay us in the general community by driving like A-grade knaves and self-entitled jackdaws.</p><p><b>Lawful Evil - Plane</b></p><p>Aeroplanes as a form of transport are genuinely awesome, as the amount of awe that they generate is immense. The amount of shock and awe that they generate when it all goes horribly wrong, when rivets fall off, or when doors fall off, or when engines fall off, or when they crash into each other on the runway, or if they crash into buildings, is also immense. The very visible awe generated by flying aeroplanes into buildings, was enough to alter the course of the opening decade of the twenty-first century and the outlay of $2,400,000,000,000. </p><p>From the fact that passengers are openly segregated by class, to the fact that they are forced to signal where they are from by nationality, in addition to being bombed out of their brains due to combinations of jet lag and/or being stuck at a place for tens of house, the whole experience as a passenger is capitalism writ large. The aeroplane is a transport technology that actively reminds you that the people to whom you pay rent to, are in fact better people and despite the fact that they actually do less work and don't actually provide anything meaningful to society, they somehow deserve better stuff. Money speaks for money; the devil for his own. </p><p><b>Lawful Neutral - Bus</b></p><p>Omnibus comes from the Latin "omnibus" which means "for, by, and with, everyone"; which is actually an excellent way to describe the omnibus. Buses' number plates in New South Wales mostly start with MO for "Motor Omnibus", which is distinct from HO "Horse Bus" and SO "Steam Bus"; which I find interesting is that the electric buses which are now on the road also carry MO plates.</p><p>A bus as a device which is for, by, and with the people, occupies a smaller space than a train yet actually contributes to traffic by being one cell amidst a flowing river of them. As a bus occupies a smaller space than a train it also means that the worst of humanity, which includes rudeness, vomiting and the expulsion of other bodily fluids, can and does sometimes happen on a bus. The "Night Bus" or "NightRide" manages to compact the worst of humanity into a small space immediately after the imbibing of many fermented vegetable products and in addition to when the temperature has dropped into single digits.</p><p>Most of the time though, a bus is a neutral space which is not evil but not explicitly good. A bus service is a good thing to have but due to the nature of being delivered way out into the suburbs, often the stops are just a pole with a sign attached. The actual funness of a bus journey is mostly determined by the quality of the scenery it travels through. </p><p><b>Neutral Good - Tram</b></p><p>I like trams. As a piece of infrastructure that move around a lot of people, trams are better than a bus and funner than a bus. As light rail vehicles they can be made to travel together with regular traffic, or via dedicated paths. Trams and their routes integrate themselves into the cultural overlay of the community far more readily than a bus does. People take a bus out of necessity but people will take a tram out of a sense of fun.</p><p>It was the tram by virtue of needing tracks to drive down and the fact that cars and horse carts and bicycles had skinny little wheels at the time, that gave us the Hook Turn. I find it a little crazy given that the flag of Hookturnistan is so iconic, that it hasn't made its way to being either the default or away kit of some Melbourne sporting team. I also find it odd given that the rules actually work so well, that we haven't yet adopted it in Sydney.</p><p><b>Chaotic Neutral - Car</b></p><p>The car is arguably the most ubiquitous piece of transport there is. As a piece of individual transport, they are just about the most individual mechanised transport of all. However that individual comes with both individual freedom as well as the root problem of the human condition that everyone without exception is individually selfish.</p><p>Isn't it funny that on a road posted with a speed limit of 60, that someone doing 55 is a moron and someone doing 70 is an idiot? However, if it is you or I doing 55 or 70, suddenly we demand that everyone else treats us nicely because we need to be careful or concentrate, or move out of the way because we are in a hurry.</p><p>A car allows someone to do the mundane things like going to work, going grocery shopping, or carting the family around to various activities; it also allows someone to do fun things like going on massive road trips, going to sport or to see family, or even a means to itself when all you want to do is drive. When everyone decides to do roughly the same thing at the same time, then all of those pieces of individual freedom are welded together to form the negative externality of traffic. Isn't it funny that on a road with lots and lots of cars all doing 15, that you and they are traffic and a hinderance and I am just going about my business? </p><p>The fact that there are motor accidents and pedestrians occasionally being struck down, is testament to the fact that it didn't take very long for the street to turn from a place where people moved, to one where they were excluded. The word 'pedestrian' only exists in opposition to the car and the weird thing is that we are mostly fine with sacrificing the occasional person to these modern Molochs because individual freedom is the thing we have decided is what we value more than life itself.</p><p><b>Neutral Evil - Truck</b></p><p>Big trucks are one of the pillars of the economy. They are the conveyors of all the stuff there is to buy; which includes your dinner. Be it semi trailers that do heavy haulage, or the road trains which carry commodities, or the rigid lorries that take packaged goods to the grocery store, without trucks everyone comes to a stand still.</p><p>Trucks are a necessary evil in a civilised society. Granted that there are a few select people who are in awe of the bigness of the vehicles and there are some people who are drawn to become truck drivers because they like the fun that comes from being in control of such a big thing, but they are rarely fun for the drivers and even less fun for everyone else on the roads. Trucks are a necessary evil because work is a necessary evil. Work is heat and heat is work and work is a curse, and all the heat in the universe is going to cool down because that's entropy. </p><p>Having said that, the standard of driving from truck drivers is simply amazing. I have no idea how these people are able to calculate physical space and have such spatial awareness that they can swing a big thing through traffic and often through spaces that never look like an 18-wheel box trailer will fit; buit they do with exceptional regularity. This isn't chaos but some kind of orchestrated waltz to an unheard tune.</p><p><b>True Neutral - Bicycle</b></p><p>Chaos? Yes. Just think about teenagers doing mad skids in the shopping centre, or doing jumps through a creek bed, or setting up ramps and bumps to jump off of. If you are between the ages of about 7 and 16, then a bicycle is almost licence to go out and commit unqualified chaos. If you want to chuck rocks at sign, ride over a full milk carton just to see it explode open and splash, or use it to make a quick getaway after doing ding-dong-dash, then the bicycle is the ultimate tool of choice.</p><p>Order? Yes. Think about the thousands of people who ride to work in the Netherlands, or China, or the few people who ride to work in my fair city. What of the kids who ride to school who are too young to drive? Sport? Yes. We have velodrome racing, BMX racing, mountain biking, long distance racing like Le Tour or the Giro. Work? Yes. We have couriers who can zip around the spaces inside the city where cars can not go. Litter? Yes. My city has rental bike services which nobody really uses but helpfully throw into the harbour.</p><p>The bicycle is true neutral because it occupies every other square; sometimes multiple squares at the same time.</p><p><b>Lawful Good - Passenger Trains</b></p><p><b>Lawful Good - Ferry</b></p><p><b>Neutral Good - Tram</b></p><p><b>Neutral Good - Running</b></p><p><b>Chaotic Good - Horse</b></p><p><b>Chaotic Good - Sailing Ship</b></p><p><b>Lawful Neutral - Bus</b></p><p><b>Lawful Neutral - Goods Trains</b></p><p><b>True Neutral - Bicycle</b></p><p><b>Chaotic Neutral - Car</b></p><p><b>Chaotic Neutral - Boat</b></p><p><b>Lawful Evil - Plane</b></p><p><b>Lawful Evil - Container Ships</b></p><p><b>Lawful Evil - Oil Tranker Ships</b></p><p><b>Lawful Evil - Private Yacht</b></p><p><b>Neutral Evil - Truck</b></p><p><b>Chaotic Evil - Pickup Trucks</b></p><p><b>Chaotic Evil - Pickup Trucks With Guns On Them</b></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-80188771857306296422024-02-19T07:17:00.001+11:002024-02-19T08:27:15.259+11:00Horse 3302 - Football Is About Space Management<p><a href="https://twitter.com/COMEONSYDNEY/status/1758772134875369681">https://twitter.com/COMEONSYDNEY/status/1758772134875369681</a></p><p><b><i>Someone needs to write a few hundred words about this Sydney CB pairing. Is it years of playing together? Is it a better press? Some other change? Is it the complete group across the back?? I’m pretty happy with it for its short life so far.</i></b></p><p><b>- Come On Sydney, via Twitter, 18th Mar 2023</b></p><p>Very yes.</p><p>Someone needs to write a few hundred words about this; so here it goes.</p><p>People watching football tend to be subconsciously aware that what they are watching is not one game but two. The materiel of football is 22 players, green grass, and a football. That statement will tell you that 21 players do not have the ball at any given moment in time; this is where the second game reveals itself. The first game is an object manipulation game which involves kicking a football. The second game is a space management game.</p><p>Given my suspicion that free-will ultimately does not exist, I have a corollary that every game is also ultimately solvable. When the rules and materiel are highly limited, such as in tic-tac-toe, this becomes evident. For games like chess, where the rules are more complex and the materiel is fixed, it is possible to show by brute force that the game is solvable but not prove it mathematically. For games involving electro-mechanical meatbags with soul/spirit operating systems, it is way way way harder to show. I think that basketball is possibly the most obvious game to show that we have to show that highly complex games have a tendency to solvability, as evidenced by the fact that basketball is now dominated by 3-point shots. Football however, with more materiel and even more space to play in, is likely solvable but not by the electro-mechanical meatbags with soul/spirit operating systems who play it.</p><p>Given that the second game of football is a space management game, then the question posed by this tweet is acutely sensible. Why does the centre-back pairing of Girdwood-Reich and Matthews work so well? Again, this is about space management.</p><p>Australian football has for about the past 20 years, been slowly moving away from 4-4-2 as the default formation to 5-3-2. 4-4-2 can either be played as a flat-back 4, or a diamond 4 with the centre two staggered or even playing in front of each other. The reason why 4-4-2 fell out of favour across Europe, is that Real Madrid and Barcelona sides in an effort to not concede goals but still wanting to press forward, kind of defaulted to 5-3-2 with a flat-back 4 with that extra player in the centre of the back line either playing forwards or backwards of that line; to plug the hole at the centre of the park.</p><p>5-3-2 though, is not new. 5-3-2 is actually just a modern variation on the so called W-M "Magic Magyars" sides of the early 1950s; which very nearly won the 1954 World Cup with the great Ferenc Puskás as one of the two point players at the top of the front M. W-M gets its name by connecting the dots of the player formations and perhaps it should rightly be called 2-3-3-2.</p><p>5-3-2 retains that from M but flattens that back W in the hope to retain the advantage of a defensive sliding push of the back-4 in a 4-4-2 but with that extra player. The problem is that teams need absolute superstars up front to be able to overcome the inherent attacking deficit now being imposed on the formation by stacking that back line.</p><p>Australian football by virtue of it being relatively small and with potential superstars never playing the game thanks to Australia having two kinds of Rugby and Australian Rules football being played at professional level, must make do with what it has. If a team in Australia actually does get a superstar then they rebuild the formation accordingly but a lot of the time that simply does not happen. Sydney FC currently has no real obvious superstar. So what do they do about it? Committing 5 to the back while defensively sound, means a lack of firepower up front. </p><p>Sydney FC's answer at the moment is to play a hybrid system. The team which was sent out against Adelaide United at the weekend for instance, set out with neither 4-4-2 but 4-3-2-1. 4-3-2-1 in defence assumes that the back 4 will be plugged by the not-quite defensive line of 3 in front of them playing almost as a zig-zag in front of them for a collective back-7. Pushing forwards, 4-3-2-1 breaks back into 4-3-3.</p><p>You can see this philosophy with the team sheet notation submitted to the match official before the match:</p><p><b>B: Courtney-Perkins, Girdwood-Reich, Mathews, Grant.</b></p><p>Perhaps more correctly that team sheet notation should read:</p><p><b>LB Courtney-Perkins, <i>LCB </i>Girdwood-Reich, <i>RCB </i>Mathews, RB Grant.</b></p><p>Note how I have deliberately not labelled Girdwood-Reich and Mathews as SW and CB. In the match neither of them reverted to those positions. Neither of them played as Stopper or Sweeper and neither of then played as a proper Centre-Back. Why? Because they didn't need to. In defence, the 3 in front slid back to plug the space in between the flat-back 4. </p><p>This also shows in the match stats too. Javi Lopez scored for Adelaide in the 94th minute when Sydney was 2-nil up and any hope of Adelaide stealing a point had long since fizzled out of the game. Even then, this still wasn't a lapse in defensive judgment but a piece of attacking brilliance on the part of Lopez.</p><p>Adelaide's underlying stats for that one goal are:</p><p><b>Shots - 14</b></p><p><b>Shots on Target - 3</b></p><p>14 shots doesn't really tell the story that as Adelaide got more desperate, they set up more and more attacks. However as it was a hot night, a humid night, and one where had this been a horse race would have been described as 'heavy' and not 'firm', those attacks from Adelaide were mostly feeble. </p><p>It is the one unpopular stat that really tells the story here:</p><p><b>Balls through - 0</b></p><p>"Balls through" is a stat which fell out of favour in the early 90s because in a perfect game, it should come in as 0. Balls through is that measure of the number of deliveries pushed or sent forward to some player in a nominally unmarked position and into space behind the defence. This was a more popular stat when Route 1 football and just thumping the ball up the pitch was more popular but that style of play fell out of favour. Today, anything other than 0 for 'Balls through' indicates a critical defensive failure. The fact that Sydney FC kept and maintained this, says is that Sydney's back-four really did put in a lot of work and were rewarded for it. However the stat doesn't tell you what kind of work was put in.</p><p>Girdwood-Reich and Mathews playing as Left Centre-Back and Right Centre-Back, by virtue of not playing as Stopper, Sweeper, or as a proper Centre-Back, both played right on that imaginary line which defines the back of the back four. Between them they could control the available space behind them by pushing the entire back-four up as a line, or by sliding it back in defence. The whole point of why a team wants a sole Stopper or Centre-Back is to appoint one player as the general manager of space at the back. Remember, that second game of football is a space management game. Really Courtney-Perkins on the left and Grant on the right, had nothing to do with the management of space and their job was to shut down anything on the wings.</p><p>Together, Girdwood-Reich and Mathews played as a pair; which because neither of them are markedly better than the other, meant that they played the role general manager of space at the back, together. Actually playing together, without ego, without the responsibility of having space management rest on one player, meant that that push forward and sliding back of the defence was more fluid. Courtney-Perkins and Grant played their part well but Girdwood-Reich and Mathews played their part excellently; together.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-90575816181568036792024-02-15T07:17:00.001+11:002024-02-15T14:03:56.831+11:00Horse 3301 - No, Henry Ford Did Not Pay His Workers More Because He Was "Generous"<p>On a motorsport forum which I am on, the claim was made yet again that minimum wage laws should be abolished and that capitalism will always sort out what is fair because "the market is more moral than the government". Firstly, I have no idea why an amoral mechanism that allots things that are sold on the basis of prices and volumes is "more moral" than anything. Secondly, I have no idea why an amoral mechanism that allots things can be "more moral" than the application of law, when literally everyone participating in the market is selfish.</p><p>I find it even stranger that the claim is made that "the market is more moral than the government" when talking about minimum wage laws, when the person making that claim lives in the United States. The United States as a nation was started as a result of the chain-reaction of events that started with the legal case Somerset v Stewart (1772) that held that Englishmen could not be held as chattel goods, consternation in the American colonies, punitive taxation that resulted, then a war to throw off that punitive taxation. The United States as a result of fighting a war, kept the right to retain slavery. </p><p>Slavery is always done for profit. Slavery when viewed through the lens of capitalism also follows the same rules as other markets for labour. Of course if you can pay workers literally nothing, it is going to be profitable for the person in possession of control of that labour. Modern internships where people work for nothing and gain "experience" is also highly profitable for the person in possession of control of that labour; the reason why it is tolerated is because of voluntary contracts.</p><p>The truth is that labout has always had to fight for every concession ever made; this extends even back to the Roman Republic. It wasn't really until the modern industrial age, when the idea of combinations and unionism had to rise against factory owners who owned big machinery, that large scale industrial bargaining took place. Capitalism never sorts out what is fair because the premise that "the market is more moral than the government" is absurd. </p><p>The classic example which is always put forward at this point (and was put forward here, yet again) is the now famous tale that Henry Ford increased the wages of the assembly line workers at his factories from $2.25/day to $5.00/day to make sure that his workers could afford to buy Ford cars. This is a lovely tale which is used to suggest that minimum wage laws should be abolished and/or that capitalism is somehow lovely and moral. However any examination of what actually happened reveals that the story while containing small iotas of truth, is mostly rat viscera.</p><p>The assertion that assembly line workers at his factories from $2.25/day to $5.00/day is in fact factually wrong. That $5/day payment was really only made as a set of bonuses if the factory happened to meet the appointed quota set for it. Even if you accept that lie as a truth, that $5/day payment still happened to come with conditions and caveats anyway.</p><p>The ugly and unspoken truth is that Henry Ford made workers who were recent immigrants, attend lessons on how to be American and American values. Beyond military training, I honestly can not think of any modern American workforce that would be even willing to accept that kind of indoctrination and paternalism; in exchange for a 122% increase in wages. I have no idea what those "American values" were but if they were anything like Henry's, they were also anti-Semitic. As an aside, Henry Ford did receive awards from none other than Adolf Hitler himself because they saw eye to eye on the treatment of Jewish people and Ford kept the factories in Germany open, right through the establishment of the Third Reich and including the duration of the war.</p><p>Setting morality aside (because if were going to start with a faulty premise, we may as well ignore it), the most damning thing about putting forward the example of Henry Ford and his workers is that the pure maths simply doesn't support the premise.</p><p>There are 52 weeks in the year, and 5 days per week. 52 x 5 = 260 days</p><p>There were 14,000 workers in Ford's factories at the end of 1914. </p><p>Just the rise in daily wages from $2.25 to $5 is:</p><p>260 x 14,000 x $2.75 = <b>$10,010,000</b></p><p>However, we have a problem.</p><p>The price of a Model T in 1913 was $550.</p><p>The price of a Model T in 1914 was $550.</p><p>If all 14,000 workers bought a car in 1914, at $550, then the revenue collected from selling Ford cars to Ford employees is:</p><p>14,000 x $550 = <b>$7,700,000</b></p><p>It doesn't take an idiot to work out that paying about $10m in wages so that they can buy $7.7m worth of product is not great at increasing company profits. It is however, an excellent way to lose $3m. Besides which, there is simply no guarantee that once you place $715 per year into the hands of your workers, that every single one of them will then buy your product at retail rates.</p><p>The real reason why Henry Ford more than doubled the wages at his factories, was because the turnover rate was appalling, and he undertook a time and motion study to work out what level of wages were needed to avoid staff turnover. By cutting staff turnover, Ford could retain his workers. By cutting staff turnover, he could reduce training time of the labour force. Yes, in a few select circumstances, raising wages can reduce total labour costs but the suggestion that this was somehow moral or at all to do with creating a workforce that could afford to buy the products, is more rat viscera.</p><p>To reiterate that, the <i>real</i> reason why Henry Ford more than doubled the wages at his factories had to do with increasing production due to marginal improvements in productivity and massive reductions in staff turnover. </p><p>Here then, is the real underlying reason why Ford increased the wages of his workers. </p><p>Ford car production in 1913: 170,000</p><p>Ford car production in 1914: 202,000</p><p>The price of a Model T in 1913 was $550.</p><p>The price of a Model T in 1914 was $550.</p><p>This means that the value of the sales increase was worth $550 x (202,000 - 170,000) = <b>$17,600,000</b></p><p>The other really obvious thing which is immediately forgotten if the example of Henry Ford is brought up when talking about minimum wage laws, is that the case of Henry Ford and his workers has exactly nothing to do with minimum wage laws. The first minimum wage law in the United States didn't exist until the National Industry Recovery Act in 1933 under President Roosevelt; even then the minimum wage was set at 25c/hr. That works out to be $2.00/hr and wages at Ford's factories in 1913 before the famous increase were already $2.25/hr.</p><p>Citing Henry Ford and his factories as an example that minimum wage laws should be abolished is simply nonsensical. Worse than that, it conveniently sidesteps the issue that given the chance, there are employers who would pay as little as possible (including nothing) if they can get away with it. Furthermore, it actually says something about the character of the person who wants to make the claim that workers do not deserve their wages. Minimum wage laws because people do get exploited. Minimum wage laws exist because people are treated badly. Minimum wage laws, along with laws to do with things like fire escapes, working hours, needing breaks, protective equipment in dangerous conditions, working with chemicals, only exist because people had to fight for dignity and in some cases people died. Granted that government often is as corrupt and as shifty as private enterprise but you would hope that government at least has the pretense of being accountable to the people. Private enterprise is not and does not have to be.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-44823940107795308712024-02-12T07:17:00.003+11:002024-02-12T07:17:00.148+11:00Horse 3300 - We Can't Have Nice Trains Because Nobody Wants To Pay For Them<p>A client of ours who had recently come back from a trip to France, made two comments within quick succession where you could say that one has begat the other. In the first instance she complained that France has lovely high-speed trains and that the government should step out of the way and let private enterprise build them here. In the second instance, she complained about having to pay "all this tax" despite the fact that a great deal of her income is taxed at the rate of 0% because of the superannuation rules; which means her effective tax rate is in fact lower than mine.</p><p>I do not know if you want to take the philosophical argument that taxation allows government spending, or that government spending happens and that taxation retires the debt which exists by virtue of the government having already spent the money (I do not care if you are Hayekian, Keyneisan, Friedmanish, or an MMT bro') but it seems to me that if private enterprise wanted to build high-speed rail in Australia that they would have bent the arm of government to do so, and given the fact that we now have toll-roads swiss-cheesing their way left, right, and criss-cross across Sydney, that government would have been happy to throw many billions of dollarpounds at them in order to do so. We have not high-speed rail in Australia because there is no political will to do so. We have not high-speed rail in Australia because there is no commericial enterprise which either has the ability to raise that kind of capital nor that sees the commerical benefits in building it. At best we have commerical freight rail which wants to freeload off of public-built rails, some highly effective suburban rail in the major cities, and mostly anaemic not-very-high-speed rail in Australia.</p><p>Let's be honest, transportation in Australia has always been a hilariously stupid joke, told by second-rate business people, to a third-rate electorate, resulting in fourth-rate infrastructure. We don't have high-speed rail to speak of. We don't really have anything resembling world-class motorways. We have a few airports which are all owned by merchant banking corporations. The vehicles which we run over those pieces of infrastructure are also the result of a hilariously stupid joke. Although we have a few custom coach builders who build buses, some trains and assemble trams, we have no automotive industry to speak of. We can't even build our own ships and/or submarines despite living on an island.</p><p>We are not allowed to have a lovely high-speed train network, not because government needs to step out of the way and let private enterprise built them here but rather, that government has been deliberately made mostly derelict and private enterprise simply refuses to build what is not profitable for them. Actually, this can be said with every single piece of major wide-scale infrastructure in Australia, where physical connections were necessary; be it road, rail, gas, electric, water, sewerage, telephony, internet, et cetera, that the only reason that any private enterprise has any of these things at all is because governments of the past built them and the current tories who now own them, have inherited them them after paying cents in the dollar (if that) for them.</p><p>Elsewhere in the world, other nations are obviously better at us than this. The TGV, or Train de Grand Vitesse, came about after the oil crisis of the 1970s and France set about building itself a high-speed rail network with the intent of future-proofing itself against other oil crises. SNCF is a government owned and operated rail company. France is pretty sharp when it comes to state owned companies, and it speaks volumes that the largest electricity provider in the UK is EDF which is Electricite Direct France. Even before Brexit, tory governments in Britain brexited the British Government from Britain.</p><p>As I write this in 2024, we mark the 60th anniversary of the Shinkansen in Japan. Generation-0 or Zero-ken, was built in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; which were held as a way for Japan to show that it had reentered the civilised world after making an empire for itself, then losing the empire and symbolically being punished with two nuclear weapons dropped on it. In 1964, Zero-ken had regular operational speeds which touched 210km/h. To the best of my knowledge Australia has had exactly one train reach 210km/h and that was in Queensland and on a specific test run. I know not of any other train in Australia to ever go above 200km/h.</p><p>The obvious argument why Australia can not have high speed rail is that Australia is big. That bigness is an impediment to even bothering to try; so we don't. The problem with this argument is that Japan now has a high speed rail network which is vast and extensive, and long, and built over mountainous terrain, and built in a country prone to earthquakes. The actual reason why Australia can not have high speed rail is incompetence and stupidity. I note that the big nations across the Anglosphere all suffer from this impediment. Canada has no high speed rail to speak of. The United States is beholden to the motor car. Australia is just whatever our big brothers say we are.</p><p>The weird thing is that some Australians have seen nice trains. We know what nice trains are. I live in a city with double-deck suburban rail cars; which gunzels might not like but I think are pretty excellent. Even here in Sydney, when the electric train network was properly opened in 1926, it wasn't until 1988 that all the lines were fully electrified. Nevertheless and despite the fact that the way found for most of the railways in my fair city is now getting on for a hundred plus years old, the trains that we do have are nice.</p><p>Paradoxically it is people like this client of ours who thinks that the government should step out of the way and let private enterprise build nice trains here who through the ballot box, perpetually ensures that that will never be the case. These people are NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard) who object to YIMBYs (Yes, In My BackYard) while the PIMBYs (Please, In My BackYard) get to sit in traffic because railways aren't built. Meanwhile, they get to go on lovely holidays which are mostly funded by tax free incomes and still complain about having to pay "all this tax", where they will then ride on nice trains which other nations have deemed it a good idea to pay "all this tax" to have.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-79886458025770659682024-02-08T07:17:00.004+11:002024-02-08T08:34:27.120+11:00Horse 3299 - Trump Asserts That He Is More Than A King... And Fails<p><a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-not-immune-prosecution-2020-election-case-federal-appeals-court-rules">https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-not-immune-prosecution-2020-election-case-federal-appeals-court-rules</a></p><p><b><i>Former President Trump is not immune from prosecution in the 2020 federal election case, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.</i></b></p><p><b><i>The U.S. Court of Appeals - D.C. Circuit considered Trump’s claim of presidential immunity from prosecution for his actions in office, including his alleged role in trying to overturn his 2020 election loss, ultimately saying it was "unpersuaded by his argument" and ruled a case against him can proceed.</i></b></p><p><b>- Fox News, 6th Feb 2024</b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Good.</span></b></p><p>I think that the idea that the actions of a President of the United States are immune from prosecution or that the President somehow enjoys immunity from prosecution from what they have done while they were in the White House, is quite frankly absurd.</p><p>Fox News is correct to point out that the question of whether or not former presidents can be prosecuted after they have left office remains untested at law, but not only because the courts haven't had to test this before and also they morally shouldn't have to. I note that Fox News remains silent on that issue. If you have a President who has done something so awful that they demand immunity from prosecution, then this pretty much tacitly admits that they are an awful person who should never be allowed to step back into the office. Of course we have been here before. Warren G Harding immediately after the Teapot Dome Scandal, avoided prosecution by helpfully dying. Richard M Nixon immediately after the Watergate Scandal, avoided prosecution by being awarded a Presidential Pardon by Gerald Ford; because Nixon knew that he was as guilty as the day is long but didn't want the scandal to drag through the courts for years. Donald J Trump in his mind, needs to demand immunity from prosecution because unlike Harding or Nixon, neither dying or admitting that he was guilty is desirable to him. </p><p>I also find the statement put out the 2024 Trump Presidential Campaign spokesperson, as spurious as the original assertion that a former President should enjoy immunity from prosecution for what they have done while in office:</p><p><i>"If immunity is not granted to a President, every future President who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party. Without complete immunity, a President of the United States would not be able to properly function!</i></p><p><i>Deranged Jack Smith’s prosecution of President Trump for his Presidential, official acts is unconstitutional under the doctrine of Presidential Immunity and the Separation of Powers. Prosecuting a President for official acts violates the Constitution and threatens the bedrock of our Republic. President Trump respectfully disagrees with the DC Circuit’s decision and will appeal it in order to safeguard the Presidency and the Constitution."</i></p><p>- Steven Cheung, 2024 Trump Campaign spokesperson, 6th Feb 2024.</p><p>There are multiple things wrong with this statement. That first sentence is actually an admission that politics in the United States is so toxic, that immediate indictment is seen as a viable option. The second problem here is that that "the doctrine of Presidential Immunity" is not actually an established thing and merely stating that it is, does not make it so. The third problem is that the courts' prosecution of someone for what they have done, is an explicit exercise of the courts' function and purpose; and therefore is an active demonstration of the Separation of Powers. The fourth problem is that Mr Cheung thinks that he can tie a magical ribbon of "official acts" around what a President does and this somehow makes them untouchable. What rot! To that assertion, what exactly is "the bedrock of our Republic" if this is true? </p><p>Furthermore, I find the tone and judgment released by the United States District Court for DC to be very very measured and understated:</p><p><a href="https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/1AC5A0E7090A350785258ABB0052D942/$file/23-3228-2039001.pdf">https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/1AC5A0E7090A350785258ABB0052D942/$file/23-3228-2039001.pdf</a></p><p><i>We have balanced former President Trump’s asserted interests in executive immunity against the vital public interests that favor allowing this prosecution to proceed. We conclude that “concerns of public policy, especially as illuminated by our history and the structure of our government” compel the rejection of his claim of immunity in this case. See Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. at 747–48. We also have considered his contention that he is entitled to categorical immunity from criminal liability for any assertedly “official” action that he took as President — a contention that is unsupported by precedent, history or the text and structure of the Constitution. Finally, we are unpersuaded by his argument that this prosecution is barred by “double jeopardy principles.” Accordingly, the order of the district court is AFFIRMED</i></p><p>- United States v Donald J Trump, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, 6th Feb 2024 (No. 23-3228)</p><p>Let us consider that precedent and history of the text, or rather, what went on before it ever existed. Remember, the United States of America was the first nation to actually lay out the terms and conditions of the formation of the nation, and the replaceable rule set for making rules, by means of Constitution. I have no doubt that this was done due to reasons of mass suspiciousness amongst the various several states, and that the form of a written Constitution was used because that was the instrument which incorporated companies at law. It was business people who agitated for the war of Independence and they would have been very familiar with this form. From inception, the United States has been a buzzing nest of wasps which threatens to kill itself at the slightest provocation.</p><p>The second President of the United States, John Adams, in an effort to distance himself of the cult of personality which had surrounded his predecessor George Washington, famously stated that the United States was "a nation of laws". Part of the problem that Adam faced was that the Constitution itself, in both an effort to tear down the parliamentary system of government which was in Westminster, and partly because Alexander Hamilton wanted to make Washington a king in everything but name, made the office of the President absurdly powerful. Even so, the United States in the process of independence, still inherited that great corpus of existing case law from England and the United Kingdom; and there already was a massively massive case which had been tested and tried.</p><p>At the end of the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell appointed the High Court at Westminster Hall to indict, charge, try and test Charles I on charges of tyranny and treason. Charles I was brought to trial on 20th January 1649, and the case caused so much controversy that there had to be a temporary wooden partition to keep the baying public out. Metal railings topped with sharpened spikes were installed and armed guards with pistols and swords stationed on the doors. Just like Mr Trump, the King challenged the court's authority and its right to try him and even though he appeared four times, the legal exchanges mostly followed the same form; with the King asserting that he was immune from prospection and even that the taking of a King to trial was illegitimate.</p><p>What makes R v Charles (1649) interesting is that the King who was on trial actually owned both the parliament and the court at law. What also makes R v Charles (1649) interesting is that the King quite rightly asserted that he had the right to trial by a properly constituted court acting on the basis of established law. The judges of the court also quite rightly had the right to call the King to account, even though they asserted that he was a tyrant who shed the blood of his own people in the Civil War. The fact both sides both wanted a trial by a properly constituted court acting on the basis of established law, is arguably one of the central and most crucial principles by which the law operates.</p><p>R v Charles (1649) quite rightly proved that R (that is The Crown) and Charles, were seperate people at law. Not only is the King not the Crown but the King is capable of being tried and tested. The King as individual, acts as temporary agent for The Crown which is corporation sole. The Crown actually owns itself. The Crown is an indivisible person, which is legally separate and distinct from the King. </p><p>Admittedly, the court would ultimately find Charles I guilty of tyranny and treason, and the High Court proclaimed a death sentence 27th January 1649; with the axe falling on 31st January 1649. There may have been zero doubt about the outcome of the case beforehand but even the trial of a King still demonstrates that not even a King is immune from prosecution from what they have done while they were on the throne. Charles I was found guilty; he could be brought to trial; he was not immune from prosecution.</p><p>Had Trump been successful in United States v Donald J Trump (2024), then it would have been established that the office of a President is more than a King. If there is anything which "threatens the bedrock of our Republic" then surely that would be it. Elevating the office of the President to more than a King even makes a mockery of the imagined fantasy of the Declaration of Independence. No, seriously, read through that and you will find that practically everything laid against King George III was simply untrue. Actually, if Trump had been successful in United States v Donald J Trump (2024) then does that mean that the Declaration of Independence itself is invalid because you can not lay charges on a King?</p><p>Had this been me sitting on the court, I would have been far more blunt and named Mr Trump as a knave, a bounder and a cad, a liar, a cheat, and a fool. Of course a former President is not above the law. Of course a former President is not entitled to and should not enjoy immunity from prosecution from what they have done while they were in the White House. The assertion that a former President is entitled to and should enjoy immunity from prosecution for the period that they were in office, is stupid.</p><p><b>Aside:</b></p><p>There's also an problem of internal logic with this. Trump can not simultaneously claim that the actions of a President are immune from the law while at the exact same time claim that what Biden is doing to him is illegal. If we accept the lie that Biden has done anything to Trump (the courts and the DoJ are not actually Biden), then Trump is essentially arguing that Biden's actions are above the law anyway. This is so much of a layered onion of nonsense and jacknuttery that it defies any kind of sensible analysis. It is much better just to put the onion back on the shelf and let it rot.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-66417326821547630522024-02-03T16:40:00.003+11:002024-02-03T16:40:26.895+11:00Horse 3298 - Kakosynaisthima - Element I - Boredom<p>Sixteen months ago, I embarked upon a series of posts on the subject of Eudaimonia. That is the Aristotlean idea of a "good spirit" and what Aristotle thoiugh was the highest end of human existence. Element I - Truth, can be found here:</p><p><a href="https://rollo75.blogspot.com/2022/09/horse-3062-eudaimonia-element-i-truth.html">https://rollo75.blogspot.com/2022/09/horse-3062-eudaimonia-element-i-truth.html</a></p><p>While it is good and proper to explore the best of humanity, the truth is that we simply do not live in a kosmos which it is even possible to live like this all the time. You do not have to believe the tenants of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hindusim, Buddhism, Taoism, Baha'i or even concepts which are not religious like economics, politics, behavioural science, et cetera, to realised that humanity is either selfish, broken, flawed, or just plain nasty and cruel. Some writers and philosophers such as Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, or Friedrich Nietzsche, seem to think that selfishness is actually either rational and/or necessary in the kosmos.</p><p>I do not think that von Mises, Rand, or Nietzsche, provide anything useful in actually dealing with the problems of the human condition, nor do I think that selfishness is a thing which is good for the kosmos. However there are elements within the kosmos which are Not Great™ which are still worth interrogating to see if there is any useful telos to them. Also as before, I am going to name my terms; since I think that that is a useful starting place.</p><p>To this end, I shall borrow Plato's term συναισθημα, or synaisthima, meaning emotion. In Plato's "The Symposium", which has the framing device of what I think is a lot of drinky-drunky people chatting semi-rubbish and making speeches at a banquet. A synaisthima is a mental activity resulting from diverse simultaneous physical stimuli. It is the effect of stimulating the senses through an outside agent (that is not of something like stomach ache) of a person.</p><p>However people live far more interior lives than just chatting rubbish at the war table. Real people who live in a busted kosmos have to live with things that are Not Great™ which come from inside. To that end, I like the word κακός, kakos; which means "bad" or "evil".</p><p>Put them together and you get...</p><p><i>κακόσυναισθημα - Kakosynaisthima, from:</i></p><p><i>κακός - kakos, meaning bad or evil</i></p><p><i>συναισθημα - synaisthima, meaning emotion</i></p><p>Speaking as someone who works in an accountancy firm and as someone who has read a lot of economics, my view of the kosmos is very much viewed through the lens of trying to find the value of things. Value is one of those concepts which seems intuitively obvious but upon even the barest of inspections, vanishes below the surface of the ocean like a proverbial sea monster. I think that the best method of approaching a description of what Value is, is to think about that other economic concept of Opportunity Cost; which is what you have forgone in order to get this current thing. Herein lies the atomic basis of practically all of economics. Even a dollarpound is just the token system which acts as a set of counters which measures Opportunity Cost in discrete units.</p><p>However, when it comes to the nebulous problem of trying to work out the value of things that can not be bought or sold, our sea monster once again disappears. Opportunity Cost is handy because it tackles the problem of what one would have given up in order to get something but of itself it doesn't describe that almost subatomic problem of human nature; that is, that humans are semi-rational electro-mechanical meatbags, with some thinking muscles, and some kind of spirit/software which drives them. As semi-rational electro-mechanical meatbags, humans have some basic needs in order to remain alive, and beyond that a range of wants which can be unlimited.</p><p>I think that this point that we can take it as moot that religion, psychology, economics, politics, and even theatre, have in various ways described the irrational part of a human being, which is that part of the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos. It is only a very small leap to go from "I", to "I need", and "I want". "I want" itself, is actually itself one of the drivers which ultimately arrives at the Opportunity Cost of something. Yes, "I want" is probably not much more than a sophisticated version of "yummy, yummy, yummy" versus "not yummy" and so I probably can leave that part of the equation alone, but what of the other side? </p><p>Once again I return to the problem of Value. Is there any Value in the things that are "not yummy" of the kosmos? Moreover, do they have anything to teach us? What happens if those wants can not be fulfilled? A semi-rational electro-mechanical meatbag can yell and kick and scream about it but that's not exactly productive. </p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Synaisthima - Element I - Boredom.</span></b></p><p>The fact that you are reading this on a computer of some sort and the fact that I am writing this on a computer of some sort, is evidence of the fact that we live a long way in the future. I think that it's really difficult to forget the world that my great-grandparents were born into in 1874, looks very little like world of today but very similar to the world of the same period in the other direction, in 1724. In that 150 years, the arrival of mass literacy, radio, television, and the internet, has meant that the very thing of Boredom itself, can be scraped away at an instant. Perhaps one of the objects of the plan to put the world in your hand, was to try and banish Boredom to the pages, and then digital archives, and then deleted.</p><p>Certainly the killer of Boredom is Distraction. Distraction is lovely. Distraction is a "yummy, yummy, yummy" sweetie. The "I want" here can be more than adequately sated by instantly gratifying the "I want" of entertainment. There is so much Distraction available to us, that Boredom as a thing may as well be functionally eliminated. Boredom is one of the very few things which previously thought unsatisfiable, can now be sated. The "not yummy" of Boredom can be pacified.</p><p>If Boredom is therefore a temporary state which can be made to go away reasonably easily now, then what is the "not yummy" going on here? That part of the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos, as part of the spirit/software has that "I want" for constant input that it likes. Boredom usually arrives when that input doesn't currently meet the irrational part of a human being; which may include tedium, a current sense of emptiness while anticipating something else, repetition of task, repetition of thought, or being pushed to do the "not yummy" thing.</p><p>Perhaps the most classic example of someone appearing to be bored, is the child who without having any specific thing to do is spooked at that same prospect. The complaint about being bored in this case is not so much an inability to invent their own pastime but a semi-weaponised demand for someone else to provide that gratification of the "I want" of entertainment. </p><p>There is likely an overlap of the same kinds of people who appear to be bored without having any specific thing to do and those people who when tasked with a thing to do, shirk at the sudden responsibility. The child who objects to having to do sums at school, the apprentice who would rather not change that gas fitting, and the person in the office now tasked with doing that grunt work, would all rather be doing something else "yummy" and not the "not yummy" thing in front of them. </p><p>I should at this point make the distinction between boredom and ennui, as well as boredom and that quiet stillness which happens in a place when people can transcend the here and how and float off into the liminal kosmos of daydreaming. I have heard this space called "the Nothing Box"; which comes about with the suggestion that men in particular with think about something in discrete boxes, open that box and think about nothing else. "The Nothing Box" is a box which actually contains nothing in particular and when visited, is different to a place of boredom in that opening the nothing box is actually a place of rest, recovery, and a place which one is free to roam around inside of.</p><p>What is actually inside the nothing box? There is space; vast amounts of space. If you leave that child without having any specific thing to do, and allow them to be bored without giving them that gratification of the "I want" of entertainment, then they are forced to invent their own. A mind that has been left with space and time to do nothing other than invent its own silent and invisible space in the kosmos, will eventually be forced to pull the nothing box off of the shelf and start to pull things out of it. I have heard it said that of a cigar box guitar, which is a guitar built of the lowest quality of technology and usually very badly made, that the box actually contains many many songs and that the player just has to pull them out. If you leave a mind without having any specific thing to do in the world, then it will be forced to eventually imagine and create a world for itself.</p><p>I can not speak for anyone else but I possess a mind which just constantly wants to play with everything. I can not speak for anyone else but I find the idea of meditation intellectually interesting but actually pointless in action for me. If you leave me by myself with nothing but blank cloth to work with, then I will be goofing off in a world of my own invention. I think that I would be one of the few people mentioned in nineteenth and twentieth century texts, who were placed into solitary confinement as a punishment, who come out the other side having suffered almost nothing as a result. I think of the story of the lady who went into an underground cave with no contact with the outside world save for a text terminal upon which she could let some scientists know that she was okay; and what happened for her while she had no outside stimuli, was a kind of slowing down of time and weirdly a negation of boredom as she invented a cast of characters.</p><p>Likewise, when I get to the railway station in the mornings, I typically have about seven minutes before the train arrives. At my end of the train station platform, I see the same cast of characters every day. Bruce is the mechanic who works at Mazda in Parramatta, who has a wife and two kids and cars that are laid up in his backyard; which he will get around to 'eventually'. Beatrice is the short lady with the Saturn Hat who has three cats and who produces prize-winning tulips. Xi is the student who is studying to become a doctor; not because he wants to but because he is trying to make his parents happy. Julia works in an office which she hates and is counting down the days when she can triumphantly quit and walk out which will embarass her boss. I have no idea what the actual names of these people are, apart from the mechanic who works at a Mazda dealership, I have no idea what they actually do. However within those seven minutes I have been left to run around inside of, I have created a world. Indeed the answer to that classic question posed to prose writers, song writers, comedy writers et cetera, of where they get their ideas from, actually has a simple answer. Ideas come from inside the nothing box.</p><p>For many people, the act of meditation is quite rewarding. I have heard of many stories where through the art of meditation, people achieve states of heightened peace and comfort. Perhaps this is just a lack of understanding on my part and maybe it does take deliberate action on the part of people to find their own Nothing Box, to find that place of rest and recovery. However all of this looks like semantics of sorts. Meditation involves a deliberate removal of stimuli in order to achieve a desired state. The person involved in the process of meditation is still actively engaged in something. Boredom is not a state which people necessarily try to cultivate. </p><p>With nothing but the passage of time to play with, and with the constraints of no material to work with, Boredom is the vast infinite canvas upon which a mind without having any specific thing to do, will eventually paint upon. It is interesting that in the twenty-first century, when people can scrape away Boredom at an instant, that people will readily choose to do so. The desire to fill up available space with the "yummy, yummy, yummy" sweetie of Distraction is likely so attractive for people because when people are left to themselves, they have no material to work with, and that prospect might very well be terrifying.</p><p>Left with nothing else, the only person inside my internal monologue, left inside the life of my interior, is me; and I can't get myself to go away. I can understand that that could very well be terrifying for someone who left in that situation, turns their own metaphorical knives inwards. With no outside targets, a mind with no material to work with and which is bent on hurting itself, can be both a prison and an torture device. There is a very good reason why prisons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used solitary confinement as a punishment. That is effectively a metaphorical extra gaol, within extra gaol, within a gaol. </p><p>I think that this is what people find to utterly terrifying. Boredom is essentially a call of the void, with the infinite horror of a space in time which unless filled with internal play, meditation, an appreciation for the kosmos, religion, or distraction, is an inescapable solitary confinement inside one's self. At some point, people have to come face to face with themselves. Perhaps the most stark reason why people do not like being vulnerable in front of other people is that you might not like me, and this is all I have; however when that is turned inwards, what then? If boredom as a thing is "not yummy", has a purpose, then it seems to me that it is a space for the self to decide if it likes itself, to play games with itself, to open the nothing box, to find that place of rest and comfort, to find one's place in the kosmos, and to stare full face into infinite horror of the void.</p><p>If being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t, which is an uncomfortable feeling, then what do we do about it? This is what I can not answer for you. The problem with boredom is that while it tells us something is wrong, it does not tell us what to do about it. Ultimately the bad thing about boredom, as with everything else in this short series is that nobody can help us to navigate through it and finding useful, productive, healthy, sensible ways through boredom is still up to us.</p><div><br /></div>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-54064334584484482392024-01-26T12:12:00.002+11:002024-01-26T12:27:29.048+11:00Horse 3297 - Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team - LEONARD BERNSTEIN<p><a href="https://www.visacashapprb.com/team-launch/">https://www.visacashapprb.com/team-launch/</a></p><p><a href="https://www.visacashapprb.com/team-launch/pdf/Visa%20and%20Red%20Bull%20Formula%20One%20Teams%20Announce%20Global%20Partnership.pdf">https://www.visacashapprb.com/team-launch/pdf/Visa%20and%20Red%20Bull%20Formula%20One%20Teams%20Announce%20Global%20Partnership.pdf</a></p><p><b><i>San Francisco, Faenza and Milton Keynes, UK· The Formula One grid is charging into the 2024 season with a new look and new support. Today, Red Bull Fl Teams and Visa (NYSE: V) announced an unprecedented multi-year agreement where Visa will become the first global partner of both Red Bull Fl teams, bringing a new look team to the Fl grid in the form of Visa Cash App RB, formerly Scuderia AlphaTauri.</i></b></p><p><b>- Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team, 24th Jan 2024.</b></p><p>What?</p><p>What?!</p><p>WHAT?!</p><p><b>WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN.</b></p><p>It is not impossible for sporting clubs and teams to be named after the companies with own them. Bayer 04 Leverkusen Fußball GmbH or Bayer Leverkusen, was founded in 1904 by employees of the German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG. Likewise, a headline sponsor claiming the naming rights of a Formula One team goes back to at least 1968 when John Player & Sons Ltd. bought the naming rights and the livery rights for Team Lotus; thus from 1968 onwards Team Lotus was officially named Gold Leaf Team Lotus or JPS Lotus. In 1986, Toleman Motorsport was bought by Luciano, Giuliana, Gilberto and Carlo Benetton, who owned the fashion company Benetton Group SpA. They formally changed the name from Toleman Motorsport to Benetton Formula Lt, or simply Benetton, and the team has been passed from hand to hand many times since. The idea that a team can change its name is not new at all.</p><p>For the 2024 season, the team name iterations are for all current teams are broadly...</p><p>Ferrari</p><p>McLaren</p><p>Williams</p><p>Haas</p><p>(these four have changed sponsor alignment names but never actually the name of the team)</p><p>Stewart -> Jaguar -> Red Bull (3)</p><p>BAR -> Honda -> Brawn -> Mercedes-Benz (4)</p><p>Sauber -> BMW -> Sauber -> Alfa Romeo -> Sauber (5)</p><p>Toleman -> Benetton -> Renault -> Lotus -> Renault -> Alpine (5)</p><p>Jordan -> Midland -> Spyker -> Force India -> Racing Point -> Aston Martin (3)</p><p>This team has been rebranded surprisingly few times...</p><p>Minardi -> Toro Rosso -> Alpha Tauri -> Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team (4)</p><p>What?</p><p>What?!</p><p>WHAT?!</p><p><b>WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN.</b></p><p>Somehow I feel that Red Bull GMBH of Austria has decided that by making their second team as hard as possible to pronounce, that they will put it into the mouths of the broadcasters for longer. That sounds like a good idea in principle but in practice, that's never going to happen. Broadcasters will shorten this in some way; even if the car is simply called a Visa. </p><p>At least when Gold Leaf Lotus bought the naming rights to Colin Chapman's team in 1968, they arrived at a name which was relatively easy to work with. Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team is not. VCARFOT is not any better. What's worse is that a single letter "V" also would have been a better choice than this. You know what would have been better than Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team? <b>Anything!</b></p><p>Lance Stroll saw nothing wrong with renaming "Racing Point", "Aston Martin". Sauber rented out their name to "Alfa Romeo" for a while and this year they have reverted to Sauber; even if the official team team is something silly like Kick Sauber or whatever it is. Renaming Jaguar "Red Bull" or renaming Toleman "Benetton" were both pretty blunt but the truth is, that we eventually got used to them. Sauber have shown that they can rename themselves BMW or Alfa Romeo and then revert back to Sauber and it is fine. On that note, what would have been wrong with just Minardi? Formula One is just as much about the traditions and deep lore of the sport as any other sport. Twenty years later, the team from Faenza is still working out of that same place. </p><p>Eventually whatever you name a thing becomes normal, however weird. When I was in high school one of the running gags was that if a teacher ever asked for a team name in some instant jokey class competition for something, or maybe even in a sports competition, one of about a dozen of us across several classes would invariably call the team the "Alexander Graham Bell Memorial Team". This was not because we happened to like the inventor or the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, but because as 12 and 13 year old kids in Year 7, making a teacher say something stupid was hilarious. If you repeat a joke later, then it becomes a call-back. If you repeat a joke often enough, it becomes a running gag. If you repeat a joke for five or six years, then it becomes part of the fabric and furniture.</p><p>That is what the Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team sounds like to me. It sounds like the idea of a bunch of 12 and 13 year old kids in Year 7, who have been let loose to name a thing and they have done so badly. I have no doubt that Gold Leaf Team Lotus sounded weird when it was fist said but it eventually became part of the furniture. People still called the team "Lotus" though. In Australia the Marlboro Holden Dealer Team was usually shortened to the MHDT or even just HDT if that was necessary. When it came to putting the Alexander Graham Bell Memorial Team onto an electronic scoreboard in an indoor cricket centre, it was shortened to AGBMT. Probably VCARFOT might appear in the top left hand graphic during a Formula One broadcast but to impose that boat anchor around the neck of the poor commentator is simply daft.</p><p>A sport like NASCAR which has liveries changing from week to week in a kaleidoscope of colour, thinks nothing of weird team names for a week. Even then though, the commentary team will still refer to their cars as just the number such as "the 3" or "the 22". It doesn't matter how much "Go Bowling", or "Fed Ex Ground", or "Corvette Parts" have paid either. The ultimate statement that you can name a team anything and paint the car in any colour, is still brought back to a sensible centre with a pragmatic naming scheme. Unless the Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team changes their name to something at least sayable by normal people, then they too are in danger of being called "the 3" or "the 22".</p><p>Weird team names such as Life, Eurobrun, or Fondmetal, as well as three-letter-acronym abominations like AGS, ATS, and BAR, have all existed in the past. They were all reasonably acceptable because people could at least say them. The Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team is not really a Formula One Team name as it is a line from Bob Dylan's "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGxjIBEZvx0">Subterranean Homesick Blues</a>" and even that would make for a better team name. </p><p>I think that if anyone does manage to say Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team in a broadcast then it should be immediately followed by "LEONARD BERNSTEIN" because it's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.</p><p>Aside:</p><p>Is it any weirder than <a href="https://legacymotorclub.com">Lizardy Motorcycle Club</a>? I don't think so.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-56546159971661476032024-01-25T07:17:00.001+11:002024-01-25T07:17:00.275+11:00Horse 3296 - I Rank Mustards<p>On the first proper day back in the office for 2024, a client of ours who arrived bright and early in the morning, said that he had been shopping at the Aldi on the other side of Military Road and was excited that he had made a purchase of something that he had never had before - Hot English Mustard.</p><p>You can generally guarantee, since I am a connoisseur of the mundane and boring, that if a discussion happens about something dull, I want in. Yes, history might have a few great heroes but it is the great middling millions who actually make history happen. Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Hatshepsut, and Churchill, all would have never done anything great without the ordinary people of the nation working behind them. Likewise, I think that if you really want to know what a place is like when you go travelling, then you need to visit the supermarket, go for a bus or train ride, and make an extra effort to listen to local radio and TV. </p><p>Mustard is a thing which is glorious in mundanity. This is why, having a serious and dull discussion about mustard is so wonderful. Who cares about mustard? Well, it turns out that everyone does.</p><p>Since everyone does care about mustard (and don't pretend that you do not), then I have compiled the objective list of mustards from the bottom to the top. If you don't like then list, then complain about it. Prove my premise that everyone cares about mustard. This is exactly why it is the things which don't matter at all actually matter the most. </p><p><b>12 - Honey Mustard</b></p><p>This makes the list at number 12 because although it is tasty, it really serves no purpose. Honey Mustard exists to be different because it can be. Other better combinations exist such as Dijonnaise. Honey Mustard is the thing that fancy cafes have when they want to charge double digit dollars for a sandwich. Everything that Honey Mustard does can either be done by regular Mustard and Honey (for less money) or other condiments.</p><p><b>11 - Heinz Mild Mustard</b></p><p>Heinz Corporation is wildly successful because it tries to be all things to all people. Heinz Mild Mustard also tries to be all things to all people but it ends up being nothing to everyone. This is at 11 because I think that it is literally impossible to form any kind of opinion about it. Heinz Mild Mustard exists. It is definitely a thing in the world. </p><p><b>10 - Colonel Mustard</b></p><p>Every list which ranks different kinds of Mustard is incomplete without the army officer in the the board game Cluedo. As Cluedo was invented in 1943, then Colonel Mustard was likely an officer from the First World War. As Cluedo is a timeless board game, Colonel Mustard is periodically updated. In the 2016 edition of the game, it is suggested that Mr Boddy is blackmailing him over alleged treason and war profiteering.</p><p>In all iterations, he has a moustache and a "here, here, and here" stick (okay, I have no idea what that stick is for other than pointing here, here, and here). He is always a shady character, usually a misogynist and/or womaniser, and occasionally a lovable rogue who happened to be caught with the battalion's petty cash. He did it, one sixth of the time, and with one sixth of the weapons.</p><p><b>9 - Yellow Mustard</b></p><p>This is you all purpose generic mustard. It might be texturally interesting. It might have vinegary hints. It might have hints of horseradish. It is often coloured with Yellow Tartrazine (E102), which has been banned in several countries even though no data exists to suggest that it causes cancer.</p><p><b>8 - American Mustard </b></p><p>American Mustard is different to Yellow Mustard in that it actually has a taste and that taste is American. Both Heinz and French's make classic American Mustards, which pair perfectly with hot dogs. Hot dogs may be eaten with both tomato ketchup and American Mustard. American Mustard is the only mustard that comes with the sound track of fighter jets, gunfire, various people yelling -isms, and waving Betsy Ross' banner in all directions.</p><p>Heinz American Mustard has no colours and no artificial flavours and is better than French's Mustard in all cases.</p><p><b>7 - Grey Mustard</b></p><p>Now I know that technically Yellow Mustard and Grey Mustard are likely to be the same thing but Grey Mustard is the one with less colour and more grit. Grey Mustard is the one most likely to settle out in the jar and needs to be remixed. Grey Mustard also comes with an air of exotica for free; including in those places where it is made. There is no inherent reason why Grey Poupon should be objectively better than any other mustard, other than saying the words "Grey Poupon" is fun. </p><p><b>6 - Dijon Mustard </b></p><p>As we shall see later, French Mustard is generally pretty good. Dijon Mustard somehow takes French Mustard and dials it back. Dijon Mustard is better than normal common mustards but only by a small margin. The interesting thing about Dijon Mustard is that it replaces the vinegar usually used in prepared mustards with verjuice, which is the acidic juice of unripe grapes.</p><p><b>5 - Pat Mustard</b></p><p>In the episode "Speed 3" of Father Ted (S3 E3), Mrs. Doyle repeatedly alleged that was low on milk and kept on using lots in Ted's tea so Pat Mustard who was the Milkman would come more often.</p><p>Later in the episode, Father Ted and Father Dougal are judging a cute baby competition by looking at photographs when they notice that many of them look suspiciously similar to Pat Mustard. Ted suspects that Pat had fathered several children across Craggy Island and when he eventually shows the photographs to Mr. Fox who is Pat Mustard's employer, Mr. Fox fires Pat and Dougal takes his place.</p><p>To exact revenge, Pat places a bomb on the milk float and telephones Ted telling him that if Dougal were to drive over 4 miles an hour, then the bomb will be armed, and if he goes under 4 miles an hour, it will explode and kill him.</p><p>Pat Mustard is one of the few actual genuine villains of the series who by the end of the episode has racked up attempted murder, terrorism, illegal use of explosives as crimes and mass adultery as sins.</p><p><b>4 - Wholegrain Mustard </b></p><p>Wholegrain Mustard is basically Yellow or Grey Mustard but with grainy bits in. What's not to love here? This is similar in spirit to Crunchy Peanut Butter; which is Peanut Butter but with bits in. Wholegrain Mustard is more mustard per mustard than other mustard. In the world of mustard where more is more, then more mustard per mustard is objectively better. </p><p><b>3 - French Mustard</b></p><p>All mustards are good but this is the first on the list which aspired to greatness and actually achieved it. French Mustard is not actually French in origin but was invented by Colman's in 1936.</p><p><b>2 - English Mustard</b></p><p>Whatever was great about French Mustard, is amplified with English Mustard. English Mustard provides that heat and bite which is excellent when paired with roast beef, silverside, or spiced pork. English Mustard uses both yellow and brown seeds and is stronger because it has a relatively low acidic content.</p><p><b>1 - Hot English Mustard</b></p><p>Whatever was great about French Mustard, is amplified with English Mustard, and then amplified again with Hot English Mustard. I am truly happy when I have fire snorting out of my nose, when my eyes are crying, and when I have keeled over on the floor because of the heat. Hot English Mustard, Gojujang, Wasabi, and Chili Kebab Sauce are the four superheroes of the condiment world. </p><p><br /></p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-54444671641763033272024-01-24T07:17:00.000+11:002024-01-24T07:17:00.320+11:00Horse 3295 - The Iowa Caucuses By The Numbers<p>The 2024 Election season has begun in the United States in earnest, with the carrying on of the Iowa Caucuses. Now the fact that this happened on Monday 15th, is an indication that although Horse is not the fastest breaking news service, it is one of the more careful. This then is not exactly new news but old news or perhaps to be more precise olds.</p><p>For reference, since the "Do Your Own Research" brigade don't actually believe when you do provide any kind of facts which run counter to their weird kind of insane narrative, I have taken all statistics from the Iowa State Government's own website.</p><p><a href="https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/voterreg/regstat.html">https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/voterreg/regstat.html</a></p><p><b>2,083,979</b> - This is the number of registered voters in Iowa.</p><p>I found this to be interesting. In the 2020 Census, there were 3,190,369 people in Iowa and of those 2,192,686 were over the age of 18. This means that there are at least 108,707 people missing from the electoral rolls and if we use the 2020 figures as static, then 4.9% of people who were over the age of 18 were not on the electoral roll. Usually when you talk about statistical deviance which would be then deem the survey as unreliable, the margin of error is about 2%. This is already more than double that.</p><p>It is safe to say that in Iowa, a full 1 in 20 people are disenfranchised, either because they do not know how to engage with the political system or refuse to out of hand. If 1 in 20 people died because of a pandemic, then that would be usually deemed to be unacceptable and measures would be taken to prevent this but given that the United States from 5th July 1776 has repeatedly confirmed that it abjectly does not hold the truths to be self evident, has repeatedly proven that all men are not created equal, that unalienable Rights are indeed alienable, and that Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are really only available for the few, then disenfranchising people before you even begin seems to be completely expected.</p><p><b>718,901</b> - This is the number of registered Republican voters in Iowa.</p><p>One of the consequences of having two very very big political machines in the United States, is that they are so very very big that they very very much are able to control public policy by diktat. In 1968, The Democratic Party which had been the party of Kennedy and Johnson, now found that the ongoing war in Vietnam was so abhorrent to the electorate at large, that the Democratic Party's National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, became the site of antiwar protesters. These protesters were then brutally attacked by the Police and the whole thing descended into riots. After the smoke cleared and the DNC got on conventioning, the then Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine were nominated for President and Vice President, respectively.</p><p>This left such a scar on the machinery of politics in the United States that both machines decided to hold more open primaries; so what we have now is a bad fix to a problem. The whole voting machinery now requires voters to register for one side or the other, or some hitherto unelectable party. </p><p><b>109,214</b> - This is the number of registered Republican voters who bothered to show up at the caucuses in Iowa.</p><p>In Iowa, in January, it is cold. As I write this, it is 5:40PM Sydney time and 12:40AM in Iowa. It is also -19°C in Des Moines.</p><p>It is little wonder that if you have to go out in temperatures which do not even exist in my country, that only 15% of people can actually be bothered. Quite frankly with such an environmental barrier to voting, I am amazed that a hundred thousand people actually left their homes for this. The caucuses are not a simple matter of putting a chit in a ballot box but involve going to a big hall and running around the room and forming clumps by way of support for a candidate. </p><p><b>56,260</b> - This is the number of registered Republican voters who caucused for Donald Trump in Iowa.</p><p>These are the people who braved actual freezing conditions, to go and stand in a room, to show support for Donald Trump in Iowa. Maybe these Iowans are particularly enthused at the idea of a second Trump Presidency, or maybe they like the idea of going to a big hall and running around the room and forming clumps as a means of free exercise instead of a gym membership to stop from freezing to death.</p><p>So then, what do we get after all of this?</p><p><b>51.51%</b> - This is the percentage of actual caucused votes for Donald Trump in Iowa.</p><p>This is the headline number which the various media companies with trumpet from the rooftops as if Donald Trump was having a Roman Triumph. However the really scary and sad truth is the following number.</p><p><b>2.6%</b> - This is the percentage of registered voters who caucused for Donald Trump in Iowa.</p><p>This is insanity. </p><p>In terms of actual popularity, then Donald Trump is statistically less popular than either missing from the electoral rolls, or refusing to register. </p><p>I live in a country where it is the duty of every elector to vote at each election; which means that voting is compulsory. Also, as we have preferential voting, then every single one of the candidates who could have appeared in these caucuses, for not just both sides but all sides, could actually appear on the same ballot paper. This would mechanically negate the need for the existence of the primaries entirely. </p><p>Having someone endorsed as the prime nominee for anything with only 2.6% of the electorate is hardly democracy. If there was any proof that the United States' voting system was utterly stupid at every step of the process then this is it.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-47401403180582927512024-01-23T07:17:00.002+11:002024-01-23T07:17:00.154+11:00Horse 3294 - Hey Hey, Ho Ho. Ita Buttrose Has Got To Go!<p>I have heard rumours coming from inside the corporation that Ita Buttrose will at some point in 2024, resign as head of the ABC. What I suspect has happened under her quite tory tenure is that the ABC has been pruned of many things which are vital to it, and then has let other things deliberately wither. Furthermore given that she was picked by a Prime Minister who although probably didn't break the law, was certainly corrupt enough to break its conventions, her unsaid remit (as far as we know) has been one of deliberate degradation of the ABC.</p><p>The thing is that we should have expected this. Ms Buttrose came from a wildly successful career in magazines, including being captain of the ship at the Australian Women's Weekly, before retiring to become a mildly lovable elder stateswoman. This would have been fine except that running the ABC is absolutely not like running a business and putting a demonstratively tory leader in charge, has proven that Ms Buttrose knows keenly the price of everything but the value of nothing and certainly not the value of the ABC.</p><p>I will suggest that the ABC as an independent broadcaster, which is owned in commonwealth by us the people of the Commonwealth of Australia, can and does have a responsibility to hold the Government of the day to account. For this reason the ABC has been consistently attacked during its 90 years by both Labor, and UAP and Liberal Governments (functionally there has never really been a Federal Country/National Government). However, taking a stance of being merely anti-government and in the current case, clearly partisan, is bad for the corporation (which is the reason why Ms Buttrose was picked by PM Morrison to run it). </p><p>The ABC is an important thing for the Commonwealth of Australia to have, as the commercial media in this country, have backed away from doing actual journalism. Reporting the news with a half-hour bulletin is one thing but the commercial media in this country really does shy away from doing any kind of objective long form journalism. I note that tonight, which is an ordinary night of the week, there is no long form journalism on any of the channels from 7West, Nine Ent Co, Network Ten, or even SBS. Sky News Australia and ABC News 24 are dedicated news channels but even then, Sky News is a passing parade of sycophantic right-wing apparatchiks whose job it is to repeat the current company message of the day until the people who are watching believe it.</p><p>I think that the head of the ABC needs to be someone not necessarily with perception and insight but who believes that the corporation should still be there for its bicentennial in 2132. </p><p>The last four years have been particularly bad for journalism in Australia. The number of actual journalists on the ground who go out and collect the news has been decimated. Journalists do not for the most part attend council meetings, or even sit in parliament buildings as much; which means that they do not report on the goings on of government because they physically can not (because they do not exist to do so). The height of the pandemic proved this keenly, where we had a special kind of rollingly boring and yet critical pandemonium, where nobody really knew what was going on but and the press packs were tiny. You can now see the end effect of this in print media, where the number of pages produced by News Corp and Nine Ent Co is padded out by sporked press releases from various business and government departments, and where the columnists who actually do write longer pieces are almost always legacy employees.</p><p>Radio fares not much better. Long gone are the days when trains were full of people reading newspapers but even when people are in their cars, at least where I live in Sydney, there really only are three radio stations which have any real news content at all. These are ABC Radio National, ABC News Radio, and 2GB which is a Nine Ent Co station. 2GB is a kind of Sky News Lite, where hosts could very well easily rotate between Sky News and 2GB and nobody would be any the wiser.</p><p>To someone in want of sinking a nail, every tool is a hammer. Likewise when it comes to journalism, everything is that wee ickle section. News is News. Politics is politics. Finance is finance. Sport is sport. However, to deny that news or sport or finance is not political, is to deny reality. Finance is a competitive sport where there are losers and mostly those losers are the great general public. </p><p>I do not like the immediacy of reportage inside the Canberra Bubbles as though it was sport but the people who don't like democracy do. If you can reduce the news to just what is going on here and now with no context, then this is excellent at giving people the illusion that they are informed when in reality they are not. Yes it is important but there are many other areas outside the Bubble.</p><p>The real irony in the twenty-first century is that although the news cycle has sped up, media space has expanded to infinity because of both the internet and multi-channel services on digital media, that actual journalistic ability has shrunk. There is a flurry of activity when someone in power resigns and then the resulting speculation of who is going to replace them, but when it comes to the actual decisions being made and why they are happening, we get almost nothing. </p><p>The inherent problem with news is that both the news itself and the messages coming from government and business are often completely incoherent. With skeleton staffs to try and makes sense of the floating detritus of events that have happened but aren't quite of themselves actual news, we the general public are very much let down. This is excellent for the people in power, not just in government but also in business because they can act with impunity, safe in the knowledge that nobody can hold them to account because nobody knows what's going on. There is more to the news than simply running around and saying what is happening at this exact minute in time. In fact, in many ways that isn't that vital because the next minute something else is happening, and what we should have all learned from the pandemic and even tracking back well into last decade, is that a slightly longer view on the problems facing the nation is actually what is important. How soon is now? I might be the son and the heir of nothing in particular but even I need a slightly wider brief as an informed responsible citizen to know what's going on.</p><p>This last point is why I hope Ita Buttrose either resigns or is fired. It is increasingly obvious that she works not for the betterment of the ABC as a vital public asset, nor the pursuit of journalism as a vital public need. The axing of a central political journalism department and the personal removal o journalists on the say so of outside interested parties who do not like to hear the truth, is bad for both the ABC and democracy in general. I have tiptoed around three serious issues here but it seems that breaking events may force me to tip my hand.</p><p>On Monday, the union members who are staff at the ABC, passed a 125-3 no confidence motion in David Anderson as their Managing Director. The ABC Board meets today, and I think that given that various WhatsApp messages and emails, that the wider board has no other ethical choice sack this knave and then formally apologise to every single Australian for their editorial decisions and business actions which have followed (including the sacking of some journalists) in recent weeks in relation to Palestine and genocide.</p><p>Now that I think about it, the fact that the staff at the ABC, have sent strong and unequivocal message to their management, is necessary. As the ABC is a valuable public asset, then having it run by incompetent, racist and fully-captured leaders, is unacceptable if not unconscionable. Having the staff say to p David Anderson they have no confidence in him, is not a far step away from the staff themselves saying that they they have no confidence in the ABC. It is absolutely essential that the people who live in a democracy have an actually fair and balanced media.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-40774722253490899172024-01-22T07:17:00.004+11:002024-01-22T07:17:00.269+11:00Horse 3293 - Alarmed But Not Surprised. Wide Cars Are Not Wide?!<p>While looking through the VFACTS data for the calendar year of 2023 from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, I was both alarmed but not suprised that no traditional passenger car was in the Top 10 of sales in Australia. This means that no hatchback, no sedan, no wagon, no coupe, and no convertible features in the top ten at all. This is a far cry from even 20 years ago when all of the top 10 was sedans, wagon and hatches.</p><p>This means that the SUVification of the motor industry is practically complete; aided and abetted by taxation policy as of those sales, a full 93% of them were with ABNs; which means that most new cars in Australia are written off for taxation purposes. This in my opinion is a massive massive rort; especially when you consider that we don't even have a car industry in Australia to speak of. The car industry in Australia is functionally a labour aid program; for South-East Asia.</p><p>As data is beautiful and with my hackles, heckles, feckles, and schmeckles well and truly up, I got curious and drilled down into the data set. What I found is surprising and perhaps shows my patriotic prejudice and nostalgia for a world that has been and gone; where we actually used to make stuff in this country. I think that the darkest day in Australia's automotive history was 10th December 2013, which was the day that Treasurer Joe Hockey yelled at the motor industry to go away forever and threatened to remove the subsidy, and by the end of the week Ford, Holden and Toyota all promised to do exactly that.</p><p>Now that we live in 2023, in this Brave New World where we don't pay Australians to make stuff but do give tax breaks so that people can buy foreign made things, I am sad that what made this country a little bit special is never ever coming back. Be that as it may, one of the points of data that I was particularly interested in interrogating, was the width of new vehicles being sold. I suspected that the SUVification of everything meant that we were getting wider and fatter "cars" but the data actually tells a different story.</p><p>I shan't bore you with details of sales figures but please note that they were essential in nailing down answers here. I will point out that I only looked at the Top 10 of sales; so there is very much room for error in my answers. </p><p><b>2023:</b></p><p>For the year 2023, the Top 4 vehicles sold in Australia were as follows; included is their width for the most common variant sold. </p><p><b>Ford Ranger T6 - 1850mm</b></p><p><b>Toyota HiLux AN130 - 1750mm</b></p><p><b>Isuzu D-Max RG - 1870mm</b></p><p><b>Toyota Rav4 XA70 - 1855mm</b></p><p>The average width of the Top 10 vehicles sold in Australia in 2023 was 1831mm, and the average weight of the Top 10 vehicles sold in Australia was 1834kg.</p><p>The fact that the Top 3 vehicles in Australia that were sold are all "utes" but with almost pretend tray beds, is testament to the fact that after Joe Hockey yelled at the motor industry to go away and the motor industry actually did go away, that the bogans who were cashed up, basically bought Grosspanzer Brodozers because they couldn't buy pretend Hoonmobiles any more. Also of note is that the average of a new car buyer, increased by about 16 years; which means to say that new cars are still being bought mostly by Baby Boomers and the older part of Gen-Z because literally everyone else have never been paid enough in wages and therefore can not and do not buy new cars to anywhere the same degree.</p><p><b>2003:</b></p><p>For the year 2023, the Top 4 vehicles sold in Australia were as follows; included is their width for the most common variant sold. </p><p><b>Ford Falcon BA - 1863mm</b></p><p><b>Holden Commodore VX - 1842mm</b></p><p><b>Toyota Camry XV30 - 1816mm</b></p><p><b>Holden Astra G - 1425mm</b></p><p>The average width of the Top 10 vehicles sold in Australia 2003 was 1789mm, and the average weight of the Top 10 vehicles sold in Australia was 1772kg.</p><p>In 2003 the average new car buyer was either a Baby Boomer or someone from Gen-X who wanted a family car. They both had been priced out of the market for a V8 for the most part but could still pretend and show their allegiance to their red and blue corners by buying a family six. Toyota came third as it worked out that there was an entire market for people who wanted an appliance and didn't particularly care about performance. Camrys have almost always been soulless vehicles which are traded out by people at the first major sign of trouble or even before then; which creates a sense of false reliability from people who then do minimal or no maintenance on them.</p><p><b>1983:</b></p><p>For the year 1983 the Top 4 vehicles sold in Australia were as follows; included is their width for the most common variant sold. </p><p><b>Ford Falcon XE - 1861mm</b></p><p><b>Holden Commodore VH - 1722mm</b></p><p><b>Holden Camira JB - 1668mm</b></p><p><b>Nissan Bluebird U11 - 1690mm</b></p><p>The average width of the Top 10 vehicles sold in Australia 1983 was 1769mm, and the average weight of the Top 10 vehicles sold in Australia was 1452kg.</p><p>What is perhaps the most stark change in data here is not that cars became wider, because in 40 years the average width of a vehicle only increased in width by 62mm (two and a half inches in the old money), but that they increased in weight by 382kg.</p><p>That increase in weight from 1983 to 2003 is almost entirely explained by the Commodore increasing in size because it was getting pasted by the Falcon in sales figures, and then from 2003 to 2023 because 'cars' devolved from unibody construction to truck on frame as the combination of falling wages and taxation benefits shifted the demographics of the market. The Camry which is really the only direct analogue here after the SUVification of everything was practically the same weight as the current Rav4. The Ford Falcon which only increased in width from 1983 to 2003 actually hides in plain sight a really strange truth that the 2016 Falcon sat atop a platform which underwent evolution of 56 years and didn't really change markedly at all.</p><p> Now all of this is good and proper but the reason for my curiousness is quite quite selfish. I live in a relatively quiet set of streets, which were laid put in the 1960s. Traffic has to dodge its way down relatively narrow streets which were built for 1960s cars and not the Brodozers of 2023. What I am suprised about is that when you are facing down one of these things in a wee little car, you are expected to move over because the big cosplay cowboy in the two-tonne thing coming the other way sure isn't going to.</p><p>A width of only 62mm in 40 years is less than the width of my palm. I genuinely did not expect this. What did change is that that thing coming down the street is on average a whole 382kg heavier and this has nothing to do with increases in safety requirements as passenger cars were already pretty good in 2003. What is different is that these Pretend Cowboy Trucks are 463mm taller; which is a whole foot and a half in imperial. </p><p>Things on the road today are not really wider and fatter but taller and denser. That might in fact be an object lesson and parable to explain the general public, who do not buy hatchbacks, sedans, wagons, coupes, and convertibles any more. I am alarmed but not surprised.</p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8881340.post-70182104309605903702024-01-20T07:17:00.000+11:002024-01-20T08:57:39.023+11:00Horse 3292 - Ticket. Say it. Show it. Thank you. NO! TOO HARD?!<p>Speaking as someone who has worked as both a court recorder and then in a forensic accounting firm for more than two decades, I may have picked up a few things by sheer osmosis. Even I as not even a simple country lawyer, have to ask the question if Alina Habba paid any attention at all in Law School? Judge Lewis Kaplan in the trial of E. Jean Carroll v. Donald Trump (aka Carroll II) has had to keep on reminding Ms. Habba about such procedures as "Evidence 101".</p><p>By way of background, author E. Jean Carroll has filed to cases against Donald Trump, relating to Ms Carroll's accusation from mid-2019 that that he sexually assaulted her in early 1996. Of course Mr. Trump denied any and all accusations and in his usual pattern of behaviour, accused her of lying. This then prompting Ms. Carroll to pursue legal action; resulting in her bringing a defamation case against Donald Trump, and to try to sue him for damages.</p><p>She won that case and in November 2022, Ms. Carroll filed a second claim, which renewed her claim of defamation and added a claim of battery per the Adult Survivors Act, which allows sexual-assault victims to file civil law claims after the statutes of limitations have expired in the State of New York. That case filed in 2023, further found Trump liable for defamation because of his 2019 statements and returned on Tuesday this week to determine on how much Trump further owes Ms. Carroll in additional damages.</p><p>At work, we have watched this case play out as though we were watching an ongoing soap opera. Somehow I think that Mr. Trump cares not an iota about what the outcome is because any publicity is good publicity; this case was absolutely perfectly timed with the Iowa Caucuses for the Republican Party nomination; where Trump won 20 of the 40 delegates. It doesn't matter if some people hate you as long as they keep on saying your name; because that can and does equate to votes.</p><p>Over the course of this case though and with many of Mr. Trump's former legal team either ending up in prison, or refusing to touch further cases, he has had to find new legal counsel and his defense lawyer Alina Habba, appears to be working for gratis; perhaps hoping that the notoriety will gain her further business. However, the truth on show for all the world to see is that she doesn't appear to be very good and Judge Lewis Kaplan is less than impressed. In this circus, Judge Kaplan is quite fed-up with the carry-on of Mr. Trump's legal team, and has repeatedly complained and made statements about their conduct.</p><p>If this wasn't already a defamation case, then maybe Ms. Habba might very well be liable for libel herself, when she asked Ms. Carroll if she "makes a good amount of money from her Substack"; and Judge Kaplan wasn't have that either. Those famous words of "immaterial, irrelevant, and incompetent" came out and Judge Kaplan made the almost unbelievable outburst that Ms. Habba has no idea how to introduce evidence in court. Perhaps to add another layer of silliness in this clown show, Judge Kaplan has had to resort to spoon feeding Ms. Habba procedural information in the same way you that I imagine that you would help a law school student in a mock trial. Again, I do not know what actually happens in law school and for me this is a bit like looking at a black box to guess what the inputs were by looking at the output.</p><p>Again, I am not a lawyer and so I am very much talking out of turn but it seems to me as an observer that the procedure for submitting evidence in court is as simple as:</p><p><b>- Ticket.</b></p><p><b>- Say it.</b></p><p><b>- Show it.</b></p><p><b>- Thank you.</b></p><p>Submitting things into evidence aught to be at bare minimum, the stock and trade of a solicitor or barrister at court. I should think that a basic competency of a lawyer, is knowing the rules of how that particular court operates. Ms. Habba seems to be woefully inadequate. I suppose that if your only solace is to find a lawyer who is working for gratis, then you get what you pay for.</p><p>For argument's sake, suppose that my client has been charged with the murders of two men, Buquet and Piangi, and has been made to appear before the court by Public Prosecutor's Office. In the Case of The People v. P.Hantom then my regime for submitting evidence would be as follows:</p><p><b>1 - Get the Evidence Ticketed.</b></p><p>If it pleases the court, I would like to submit No.665 into evidence.</p><p><b>2- Offer a brief description of the item in question.</b></p><p>No.665, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a papier-mâché musical box in the shape of a barrel-organ. Attached, the figure of a monkey in persian robes, playing the cymbals. This item, discovered in the vaults of the theatre, still in working order.</p><p><b>3 - Offer the item in question for examination.</b></p><p>I would like to ask my learned colleagues (as well as the witness/expert) to look at this papier-mâché musical box in the shape of a barrel-organ, to familiarise themselves with it, for future reference.</p><p><b>4 - Thank the court.</b></p><p>If it pleases the court, I would like to offer No.665 into evidence. Its relevance and importance shall be explained later. At this point court is free to ask questions about the item but not necessarily about its relevance and importance as that will be explained during some logical point in the procedings. </p><p>I have been witness in court to many rather dull procedural hearings in which evidence is submitted for ticketing and nothing else. Usually this procedure happens in call over hearings, and/or in specific discovery hearings so that the other side can either get copies of the relevant documents or if the pieces of evidence are physical, that they then get a decent chance to look and make notes. Ms. Habba seems blissfully unaware of how courts work; this is not helped by her client who is intent on using the courtroom as a stage from which to prove how much the system is against him. I will admit that it is a new strategy to prove how much the system is against him through blithering incompetence. </p>Rollohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09857022259613895393noreply@blogger.com0