Horse 2479 - Wentworth: The Immovable Blue Sapphire

Thanks to the Festival Of The Thirsty Knife of 2018 which saw the 30th Prime Minister of Australia knifed in the back and removed from office, Malcolm Turnbull's subsequent resignation of his seat in parliament has triggered a by-election.
On radio 2GB, Alan Jones went on an almost breathless rant for the entirety of my bus ride from the City to Mosman yesterday, in which he berated the people of the Division Of Wentworth and told them off, saying that unless they voted in the Liberal Party candidate, then the rest of Australia would hate them. If they vote for Dr Kerryn Phelps who is running as an independent then that would be very bad indeed and if they did the unthinkable and vote in either the Green or Labor candidate, then they would be damaging democracy itself despite doing so through the ballot box.
I personally think that either Dr Kerryn Phelps or the Liberal Party candidate David Sharma will be elected and we're probably going to go to the polls in a general election in about March or April next year. Dr Phelps is still broadly speaking a mostly economically rightist candidate and I don't think would join a motion of no confidence in the government despite the wishes of the Australian public who by this stage are royally sick of it all.

This by-election looks very different to by-elections in days of yore. I don't think that I've seen quite the same level of desperation from the Daily Telegraph and The Australian, and talkback radio to quite the same degree before and this is probably because if a Liberal Party candidate doesn't win, then their majority of one on the floor of the House of Representatives is blown wide and the vultures start circling for a vote of no confidence and the threat of an early election. The general sentiment from the media that is obviously cheering for its team, is that team isn't trying hard enough and they have resigned themselves to the loss; as though this wasn't always up to the voters of the electorate anyway.

There is this phenomenon in American politics where the sitting president has either been voted out of office or has already served two terms and is no longer eligible to sit in the next one, called the "lame duck". Lame duck Presidents have the job of handing over the task of the administration of the nation to whoever the next person in the job is. We don't have that in Australia but it has been generally considered that since Malcolm Turnbull was knifed, that Scott Morrison was always on a hiding to nothing. The Morrison Ministry had various people resign their previous cabinet posts before it was assembled and ever since day one, it has kind of looked a bit of a shambles. This also hasn't been helped by their partners in the coalition, the National Party, having something of their own leadership sort of crisis, and ongoing issues such as the Nauru Government kicking out Medicenes Sans Frontiers is making them look even worse.
Despite all of this, the Treasurer Josh Frydenburg has been touting further cuts to company tax for small businesses, which is beginning to look like preelection bribery.

Former Prime Minister John Howard has been in the electorate of Wentworth trying to talk up the Liberal Party, former Liberal Party leader Doctor John Hewson has been trying to talk it down, as has Malcolm Turnbull's own son. Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph and The Australian is reporting about this by-election as though anyone who is disloyal to the Liberal Party is a traitor and should be hurled into the sea.

Apart from people going independent, the Division of Wentworth has never really changed hands since Federation. The worst result for any Liberal candidate was Malcolm Turnbull in 2004 who still 41% of first preferences and was easily driven to a majority in the two-party-preferred result. This is the 8th safest Liberal seat in the country, the richest electorate in the country and contains all 10 of the top 10 private residential property sales in the country.
This is a seat so dripping with blue blood that even stepping down and becoming a Member of Parliament is a distinct pay cut for anyone serious. I can't even imagine what possible universe that this seat would defect to Labor; so the worrying and wretching from the conservative media is just plain alarmist.
What Wentworth represents is like the St Edward's Sapphire which is set into the Imperial State Crown. It was supposedly taken from Edward The Confessor's ring when Edward's body was re-interred at Westminster Abbey in 1163 and the Division of Wentworth is as equally full of old money and prestige to the Liberal Party.
The Division of Wentworth is going nowhere; it certainly won't be turning red in a hurry.

Horse 2478 - The Possible Prime Minister, Member For Nowhere

A client of ours came with a bunch of paperwork so that we could do his 2018 Tax Return and the conversation came around to the by-election for the seat of Wentworth, which he will be voting in on Saturday, thanks to the Festival Of The Thirsty Knife 2018 which brought down former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
He expressed a discontent with politics in Australia and said that four of the last 6 Prime Ministers being knifed, serves to prove that democracy in Australia is broken. I disagreed and made the case that a Prime Minister's tenure ends exactly when they lose the confidence of the public, the party or the parliament and does not even extend one day beyond that; to which he agreed, before again reminding us both that the position of the Prime Minister isn't even found within the constitution at all.
I then posed the seemingly bizarre proposal that even after John Howard lost his own seat of Bennelong in 2007, he could have remained as Prime Minister if the Liberal-National Coalition had won a majority of seats in the 2007 election. After I walked him through my reasoning, he gave me a standing ovation because as a QC and someone who has appeared in the High Court of Australia, he was impressed that I could ask stupid questions of the constitution and arrive at improbale answers that are watertight legally.

John Howard lost his own seat of Bennelong in 2007, when for the first time since 1974, the people decided that they had had enough of him. Bennelong had been held by the Liberal Party since the seat's inception in 1949 and Howard's defeat which saw a 5.5% swing against him personally, was pretty close to the 5.4% swing on a nationwide basis.
Let's pretend though that John Howard lost the seat of Bennelong but the Coalition was returned to power. We'll call it 86 seats to 61 seats, which meant that his seat was the only seat changing hands. How would he remain as Prime Minister?

As I said, the "Prime Minister," is not an official position within the constitution and so as far as the constitution is concerned, it does not exist.
Australia has a Westminster system of parliament and as such, there is no direct election of the executive. Both the United States and France elect a President who then appoints the executive but in Australia and indeed other Westminster parliaments, the executive is appointed from within the governing party or coalition or mish-mash by convention only, with the express appointment of the monarch or their representative, the Governor-General.
Specifically in Australia, this power to make appointments to be ministers of the Crown, is contained within Section 64 of the Constitution:

http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s64.html
The Governor-General may appoint officers to administer such departments of State of the Commonwealth as the Governor-General in Council may establish.
- Section 64, Constitution of Australia Act (1900)

What this means in real terms is that the Prime Minister of the day, who is not even mentioned in the Constitution, is themself an appointment by the Governor-General. The Prime Minister who is in reality head of the Cabinet and minister without portfolio (except when they have a portfolio), will then make suggestions to the Governor-General; who then makes further appointments under Section 64.

However this is not the whole story. The rest of the section goes on to say:

http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s64.html
After the first general election no Minister of State shall hold office for a longer period than three months unless he is or becomes a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.
- Section 64, Constitution of Australia Act (1900)

The implication is that you can have a minister of the Crown (of which the Prime Minister is minister without portfolio) even thought they aren't in parliament.

This was of course blatantly obvious in 1900 when Australia needed to form an opening Parliament before a general election had taken place.  The then Governor-General John Hope, 7th Earl of Hopetoun, appointed Sir William Lyne who was at the time the Premier of New South Wales to be Australia's first Prime Minister because New South Wales and that followed the Canadian convention from 1867 when they formed their first parliament. Lyne however, was previously an anti-federation in stance and so pro-federation politicians including Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin managed to convince Mr Hope that someone who actually believed in the idea of the Commonwealth might be a good candidate to have as head of the executive of the nation.
The next really weird series of events where Section 64 comes into play was with the appointment of John Gorton as Prime Minister.

John McEwen had taken over from Harold Holt after Holt had disappeared off the coast of Portsea in 1967. McEwen's time as Prime Minister was turbulent and eventually the Liberal Party pulled together enough of it's own internal caucus to depose McEwen and install John Gorton as Prime Minister. The thing was, Gorton was a Senator.
As there is no official position within the constitution called the "Prime Minister," there are also no rules that say that they have to come from the House of Representatives. The reason why Prime Ministers come from the House of Representatives by convention is that it is the House of Representatives where the budget comes from.  Gorton resigned his position as Senator for Victoria on 1 February 1968; to contest the seat of Higgins which had been newly vacated thanks to the disappearance of Harold Holt.
Technically from 1st Feb 1968 until the by-election on 24th Feb 1968, John Gorton was Prime Minister of Australia despite not having a seat in parliament; which is only 23 days and well within the time frame of three months as specified in Section 64. This is where the John Howard question gets answered.

If the Coalition had won the 2007 election but Howard lost his own seat, then technically Michael Jeffery could have appointed him as Prime Minister and it still would have been legal provided that Howard then won some by-election in the House of Representatives or was appointed as a Senator; in both cases someone would need to step aside even though they were freshly elected.
There would have been nothing to prevent Senator John Howard from being Prime Minister if another Liberal Senator had stood aside because there is no official position within the constitution called the "Prime Minister".

There might be some particular reason for that course of events which I can not currently forsee in the case of Australia but if Australia was embroiled in some Brexit like negotiations or perhaps another period of total war, then it might justify this kind of course of action. Ultimately the position of Prime Minister which is actually at the call of the Governor-General anyway, is itself a useful piece of legal fiction which is designed to increase stability; which is pretty ironic given that Australia periodically goes through patches of stabbing Prime Ministers in the back, to get rid of them.

Horse 2477 - Read The Book Because You Can't Fool Teachers

If this is October then it must be examination season in Australia.  Largely because I live in a post-industrial society and partly because the sorts of people who happen to be the most interesting on social media in my opinion are academics and people who teach for a living (the kinds of people who smash big ideas into smaller chunks in order to fit them through the windows to people's souls and through the small inlet vents on the sides of people's heads), the last quarter of the year on my social media feed is replete with the perennial complaint that students are lazy and don't want to read the course material. I personally don't understand that mentality because I will read things even if they are mind numbingly boring.
The fact that students are lazy is a subset of the more general observation that people are lazy. This is congruous to one of Newton's laws of motion that says that objects are lazy and will keep on doing what they are already doing unless they are acted on by a sufficiently large enough force. Also because students are lazy, they will tend to want to get out of doing the homework and reading the course materials, which in a literature class means reading literature, in a history class means reading history and in a politics class means reading political theory. This also goes for the sciences and maths dependent subjects where you really need to do the grunt work or else be found out really quickly.
I am no longer in formal education but I am still curious enough to want to read the course material. Consequently, through sheer osmosis I have acquired a bunch of information (not necessarily knowledge because let's face it, I know very little about the world) and can do that most useful of skills that students think that they can get away with and that is write a bunch of rubbish and fill out word counts. Of course this is no substitute for actual study but I intend to prove by demonstration, the method by which students who have obviously not read the course materials think that they can get away with it.

The opening section (like the paragraphs above) will start out with some kind of explanatory story because I am aware that if you dear reader, arrive at a piece of writing cold, then you will have nothing to hang it on. The opening story is at best tenuously related to the subject at hand, at second best adjacent and frequently kind of only a bit related so that I have something to shoe horn the rest of the piece into.
Although there have been pieces that are tremendously well researched, the vast majority are not and are so laden with opinion that they almost buckle under the weight of nonsense that they are forced to carry. The last sentence of the opening paragraph is usually either the fluffy strip upon which the rest of the piece is velcroed to, or perhaps the lamp which is where I have stolen the lampshade from. Also quite often, I will want to bury the lede because if you leave those things lying around, someone might trip over and see what's hiding under the skirting covers.

On the subject of research, it is the second paragraph which is where facts and figures are often kept; in order to give a sense of credibility and authority to the piece. If there is no research (and let's face it, there often isn't) then the second section is where all of the nonsense from which the great steaming mound comes from.
A great steaming mound of poop gives off very obvious airs.
It is an absolutely essential skill of a writer to sound authoritative and decisive even if and especially if you have no idea what you are talking about. This is something that news outlets and trashmedia does exceptionally well. If you have an opinion that you want to masquerade as fact, then you need to dress it up in the appropriate clothes. That old proverb that says that you shouldn't put lipstick on a pig is complete nonsense because the pig likes it and besides which, who doesn't like having the flashiest pig in show?
If you are charged with writing about a literary work which you clearly haven't read, then either you had better do an excellent job at synthesizing the Cliff Notes or Spark Notes, or you may as well not bother. Lots of people have engaged in this game thousands of times over and they already know what the art of writing nonsense and rubbish looks like because they too have already done so. The laziest option is simply to have read the material in the first place and then write your several thousand words of rubbish.

If you have made it this far, then you will have usually exhausted all of your facts and figures and you should realise that you are far short of whatever word count target you are aiming for. This is where the art of generating rubbish comes up into its own. People in casual conversation might call this 'crapping on' about stuff but mere crapping on is not going to get the task done. We need some proper weapons grade guff. We need the kind of filler that would be shown in the Tate Modern for the audacity of its rubbishosity. We need the kind of bullshit that is made by a proper artist.
To this end you have more than a few colours in your palette of poop. There is the tortured metaphor which is like a pus filled boil which never runs out. Keep on flogging that dead horse. Make a whip of cords and put it in a Group Three race for dead horses and keep on flogging that dead horse to victory. Put it up for auction at the dead horse sales, where other owners and trainers looking for zombie horses and dead horses will pay inflated prices in case it makes a good stud, and flog it there. There is the rule of three which says that anything sounds convincing if you make three connected statements. Then there is proof by denying the opposite; which a decent artist with a palette of poop should guess, is restating a previous point in the negative and then arguing why it can not possibly be.

The thing that you should eventually realise dear reader is that your lecturers and tutors, your teachers and schoolmasters have themselves been through what you're trying to do before you even thought of and they also have a wealth of experience that they can draw upon, to see your pork barrelling for what it is. What makes you think that you can bluff your way past paid professionals into thinking that your hastily prepared spam dish is actually a steak croquembouche. Of course I've got no idea what that is either and it might sound like it could be real but just try and pass off fried spam at the Cordon Bleu as Steak Croquembouche and see how far that gets you.

The very end of a document should almost always leave you with the conclusion stated and/or should end on a weak joke. It has long been a staple of children's television and even some serious drama (where there is a definite dénouement) that everyone must be laughing as you enter the closing credits. The closing joke is always terrible and if it was made in the real world, it would either be met with groans (or perhaps someone might come at you with the whip that they've been flogging that dead horse with (this is a call back (and this is a third level deviation))).
Of course the most sensible course of action would have been to have just read the book, or the paper, or the source material, in the first place. One of the great advantages of actually bothering to read the thing that you were supposed to have read is that if you read a lot of stuff, you can synthesize a whole bunch of stuff into freshly manufactured guff. To steal from one place is to plagiarise but to steal from many places is to do research. If you combine enough stuff that you've read, you will break the butterfly upon the wheel and your teachers and the people marking your work will be looking for hidden references. That's one of the great things about doing a literature, politics or some other human it is a course which doesn't have an air of authority conferred on it by the use of numbers: provided you can manufacture high quality guff and have read the material, you should be able to do all right but you still won’t be able to hide the fact that you never read the book; so just read the book.

Horse 2476 - I Drove A Supercar And I Liked It

It is something of a trope that whenever any of our clients acquire a new car that they want to brag about, that my boss will invariably refer the conversation to me as I have a liking for the automotive arts. One of the joys of getting a new car if you happen to have a surfeit of shillings is that you can show it off to other enthusiasts. This has meant that I have driven cars that I otherwise would have never have set foot in and the latest of this ilk was an Audi R8.

As someone who pinches pennies so hard that they scream, I neither have the means nor the inclination to buy a low slung sports car. My ideal car is a small hatchback because I like both the smallness and the utility of the thing. During the buying process of our current car, in which we very happily settled on a Mazda 2 my wife and I looked at several vehicles and I ended up with my second favourite choice (I would have preferred a Ford Fiesta), and the offering from the Volkswagen-Audi Group were the uninspiring Polo and the Audi A1 which retailed for twice the sticker price of the Mazda that we got. Consequently, the amount of time that I'd spent if anything built by VAG, was nil; so I had precisely zero experience to comparable the R8 to.

To sit in the R8 is a confused sensation. My expectation before I'd stepped into the car was that because it was a high end sports car, that it would be a spartan affair but nothing could be further from the truth. The R8 is Audi's weapon in GT3 racing and so there is a kind of attempt in the cabin styling to let you know that one of this car's cousins is used in anger, with accents in what appears to be brushed aluminum but the leather seats feel more like the wingbacks at the Cricketers' Arms and as if you need to be holding a copy of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, have a cat sitting in your lap and have a pint of Old Speckled Hen next to you. It is a place to be but totally unlike being in a sports car.
There was a big stupid looking sat-nav/infotainment screen in the centre console; which is common with most new  cars now but at least it wasn't sticking up proud of the dashboard. To be totally honest, I don't want a gazillion options; all I want is an AM/FM/DAB+ radio with an aux plug. I don't need Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/64-bit Cheese Waffle or whatever  else options that they try to sell you because I really don't care.
As for driving it? That's a completely different experience altogether.

The steering wheel is sculpted to look like a full on racing machine but is slightly oversized to remind you of a past that never was. I have no idea if the accelerator is fly by wire or not but the springs give you a very nice sensation to let you know that you are in control of a very powerful machine.
When you do depress the accelerator pedal the red level wants to draw its arc with the sensitivity of a seismograph; which is quite deliberate because sitting behind you is an earthquake generator. If you wanted to commit suicide by snapping your neck, then this would be the car to do it in. Even on a wet road in Sydney, all of the horsies wanted to be unleashed from the 5.2L V10 behind you and they bit the tarmac very effectively thanks to Audi's Quattro four-wheel-drive system.
I lament not having a clutch pedal and I was confused by the 7-speed S-tronic dual clutch gearbox. I grew up in an era when the three gears in the Holden Tri-matic was enough, found that 5 speeds in my Ka was pure joy and where 6 speeds in my Mazda is too many. 7 gears is overkill. I shudder to think what the 10-speed box in a Ford Mustang would be like.

I was really surprised at how responsive this car was. It still felt big and cumbersome like a Falcon and was a little reminiscent of driving an old XB Coupe due to the claustrophobia that not having very much glass behind you induces but the steering was communicative and the car didn't suffer from the same kind of pitchiness that a Toyota 86 gives you. Mostly this is because the car weighs less than the Nissan Skyline R31 that I had; so that means that it isn't fighting the laws of physics.
It is however fighting the laws of common sense. At a price tag of more than $392,000, the Audi R8 is not remotely sensible. Having said that, it is slightly less not remotely sensible than the Lamborghini Hurracan, with which it shares a drivetrain. The chap who let me drive this said that he was tired of driving an eyebleed green Hurracan because of all the looks that he got and that the silver Audi R8 was far more anonymous in traffic. That I think is the point of this car. It is for someone who wants to drive an almost race car on the road but the only thing that they want other people to look at is a couple of red lights disappearing into the distance. Mind you, if I had a lazy 300-odd thousand dollars lying about that I wanted to spend on race car, I'd but an actual race car.

I felt a little sad after driving this car. I knew deep down that this probably will be the most expensive car that I will ever get to drive in my lifetime and the fastest that I got to drive it at was a pathetic 100km/h. This is a car which is designed to burn down the autobahn and not for pootling about in the suburbs of Sydney. Maybe you could use it at Eastern Creek but apart from that, I don't see how you could use this car properly without PC Plod having lots of very stern words with you. The argument for driving an Audi A1 makes so much more sense to me; as does a Volkswagen Polo but that car is so uninspiring it isn't funny. Ironically, driving an Audi R8 makes me appreciate my wee ickle Mazda 2 a lot more and given the choice on an Audi R8 or nineteen Mazda 2s, I think I'd have the latter.

Horse 2475 - We Don't Really Care About Horse Racing Except For That One Time When We Do - or - Alan Jones Bullying Women Memorial Trophy

Thanks to the incredible publicity generated by veteran radio presenter Alan Jones and the horrible bullying by him of the Premier and the Director of the Opera House Trust, there is a horse race on today which has a name which I don't care about and will instead refer to as the "Alan Jones Bullying Women Memorial Trophy". I have no idea where the Alan Jones Bullying Women Memorial Trophy is being held; nor do I know over what distance; nor do I know what time it begins; nor do I care to find out any of these things.
Everything about this whole incident perfectly embodies the city of Sydney perfectly. The Sydney Opera House came in more than eleven times over budget, was finished more than fifteen years after the initial expected completion date, and was ultimately paid for with the institution of the Sydney Opera House Lottery. Complaining about projecting gambling advertisements on a thing which was overly expensive and late and doesn't do the job that it was intended to do and which was paid for with gambling revenues, seems strangely fitting to me. It is especially weird that most of the people complaining about adverts being projected onto the side of the Sydney Opera House, usually can not watch things inside said building because the price of tickets is too much.
What I do know is that by the end of today, the Alan Jones Bullying Women Memorial Trophy will have been won by some Dobbin, Nellie, Billy, Silver, Tonto, or Trigger, and by Monday morning, nobody will give it a second thought ever again.

I don't know who dreamt up the Alan Jones Bullying Women Memorial Trophy but I can tell you that they absolutely definitely came Sydney. This is a city which has less culture than a pot of yoghurt and where the people who work in big blue glass towers who have no qualms charging fees to dead people for financial advice, think it's perfectly acceptable to try and buy some degree of prestige that apparently comes from a horse race. Of course Macquarie Street is more than willing to allow such a thing it means that they get their cut from gambling revenues. New South Wales is the world's champion when it comes to extracting the money that would have been used to put food on people's tables, and throwing it into the hands of licenced  one armed bandits.

It also speaks volumes about Sydney as a city because the theory is that you can get prestige by just buying it. The first few editions of the Olympic Games were so terrible that by 1904 it was being considered to be abandoned, the FIFA World Cup was just another football tournament until the earthquakes in Chile in 1962 galvanised the world's support and it got a superstar in Pelé, and the Superbowl was only wildly successful from the get go because of the immense animosity between the two confederations.

Australians don't really care about horse racing. The only reason that the Melbourne Cup has the mystique and aura that it does is because back in 1930 when everyone was really sad because they'd lost their jobs (it was the Great Depression), a horse called Phar Lap won the race and he happened to be the favourite, so a lot of people won a little bit. People who have migrated to Australia might remember who won the Melbourne Cup in the year that they arrived but beyond that, nobody really cares that much.

The truth is that most Australians honestly couldn't care about horse racing except for that one Tuesday in November when suddenly everyone in the country becomes an expert on the fillies for one afternoon and even then because there's the vague possibility that your office might give you free beer and wine. I consider it a win on the Melbourne Cup if I happen to get free sandwiches from the office next door.
The truth is that most Australians who do want to throw their bread money down the toilet, are more likely to do it at the local RSL club or increasingly at online sports betting websites because they can now bet on football matches. If there's one thing that Australians do love, its having a punt on the footy before they look at too many adverts for VB, Carlton Draught, Sportsbet, Bet 365, Ladbrokes, Bundaberg Rum, and Jim Beam, before engaging in a spot of domestic violence (which by the way actually does spike immediately after footy matches and especially after the Grand Final).

More generally I really don't see horse racing as serving any other purpose apart from gambling. I suppose that there is a lot of skill in breeding, training, and riding horses, but I can't think what other purpose it's for. I realise  that I am being incredibly hypocritical because I like motor racing which is an even greater waste of money and the only real things to be won are bragging rights but that's more in the spirit of what sport is.

Horse 2474 - As Slow As A Wet Weekday In Sydney

For the last decade and a half, I have worked in the North Shore/Northern Beaches suburb of Mosman. The Insanic Kingdom of Mosman which is local government area that contains just one suburb refuses to join either North Sydney Council or Manly Council and is very proud of itself. It also retains the names of two intersections that remind you of a long since removed piece of infrastructure; namely the tram network. Both Mosman Junction and Spit Junction are named for tram junctions that no longer exist and in the case of Spit Junction, the name moved from the tram junction to what used to be called Trafalgar Square, which is no longer a square.
From Balmoral Beach, trams would pass along Military Road and then through both Mosman Junction and Spit Junction, through Cremorne Junction and finally through North Sydney and down Miller Street and would cross a viaduct to put the trams on what now are lanes 7 and 8 of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Those things were torn out by the NSW State Government in the 1950s and 60s and I as a commuter rue that decision more than half a century later.
In place of the tram network, we got Sydney's first open air cathedral to the motor car, the Warringah Expressway, and although I use it ten times a week, I think that I would have preferred a better public transport solution like a proper underground railway which would have taken traffic off the roads entirely. As it is, it is what it is, and evermore shall be so.


Even in the 1920s when the Sydney Harbour Bridge was being built, the value of houses was far higher than the western suburbs of Sydney. When the Bridge was finished, this opened up the North Shore but the value of houses still remained higher. The problem was that the Sydney Harbour Bridge sat on a national highway which meant that that traffic went straight through the middle of North Sydney. Eventually the people with the most money had had enough and were able to lobby the NSW State Government to fix their traffic woes rather than those of people living in the western suburbs.
During the 1950s and 1960s while the NSW State Government was busy tearing out all of the trams, building expressways looked like the way of the future as though there was never going to be any other tomorrow than what sci-fi writers of the day predicted. Unlike Canberra though, which had always been designed for the motor car, Sydney was not anything like a remotely planned city and just kind of happened; so trying to install any piece of infrastructure, let alone a multi-lane expressway, meant that something had to go and that thing which had to go was lots of people's houses.
It wiped out something in the order of about sixteen thousand houses, which at first sounds implausible until you realise that at its widest point there are 12 lanes of traffic and it runs from Milsons Point all the way to Cammeray as a mostly unorganised behemoth. It absolutely pales in comparison to The San Diego Expressway as that runs through southern Los Angeles but it was easily the widest piece of road in Australia when it opened and I think has only very recently been overtaken by the M1 in Brisbane.
The really idiotic thing is that instead of connecting traffic from the Harbour Bridge back up to the Pacific Highway, for a long time as sections scraped away at more houses while the expressway was under construction, it dumped traffic into random suburbs on the North Shore like Cammeray or Willoughby. In its current configuration which finally connects it up to the M2, it still looks like an unplanned kind of mess; which is exactly keeping in character with Sydney generally.

The train which I get from the western suburbs of Sydney to the city is nothing short of world class. Sydney is probably unique in having double deck suburban rail cars and apart from crowds at three city stations, the system is for the most part, a relatively calm way to travel.
From Town Hall Station I change for an M30 bus, or from Wynyard Station I change for a B1 bus; both of which hook under the Western Distributor and onto the southern approach to the Bridge but I could catch a train across to Milson’s Point and North Sydney and travel across the Bridge in complete calm.
In contrast, the Warringah Expressway is a twice daily snarling mess of red lights and tailbacks. It is officially speed limited to 80km/h which is fine northbound but seems like a cruel hoax southbound as traffic crawls along.

From the Harbour Bridge, the road falls before again climbing the hill to the top at Falcon Street. The Warringah Expressway on the short section that I travel on is very schizophrenic, with northbound traffic being very very different to southbound traffic. Northbound traffic becomes more orderly as cars find a way to exist the thing but southbound it is just a process of adding more and more traffic into only a few lanes. Going northbound, everyone is very polite to one another but heading southbound is an entirely different matter.
There are no tolls on northbound traffic across the Sydney Harbour Bridge but there are tolls on southbound traffic and this has a measurable sorting effect. The traffic heading southbound is actually made up of more expensive cars and this also means that there is a greater sense of self importance and self-entitlement in the drivers of those cars. The number of traffic accidents heading northbound is not quite 50% smaller than southbound and the biggest reason for accidents when you have traffic which all heads in the same direction, is people pulling in front of someone else without looking. This is further compounded by the fact that Lane 7 on the Bridge is a dedicated bus lane and people will pull out in front of buses without looking.
The thing about a bus that makes this particularly worrisome is that a bus is a big thing and basic physics should tell you that because big things are made of more stuff, they are harder to stop. A big thing that is harder to stop when faced with a car which has pulled out in front of it, can not defeat the laws of physics and so there are simply more accidents as a result.

Had NSW Surveyor-Generals John Bradfield’s original plan of a rail line up through the Northern Beaches been built and had the tram lines not been ripped out by short sighted governments of old, then the Warringah Expressway would not need to exist. The reason that it needs to exist now is because the Warringah Expressway exists and it’s too late to unbootstrap it. It’s an okay part of Sydney’s infrastructure I suppose but I would not have suggested as a design solution.

Horse 2473 - The SCOTUS Appointment System Is Utterly Terrible Because The US Constitution Is Bad

The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh as Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is one of the biggest horrorshows that I have seen in American politics. Not even the appointment of Neil Gorsuch back in April of last year caused anything like the ruckus which Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing has caused.
Of course this is actually somewhat by design of the Republican Party who deliberately refused to hear any confirmation hearings for anyone following the death of Antonin Scalia and US politics being the way that it is now, has been a perpetual revenge scorched earth festival ever since the end of the Nixon administration.

The basic problem is that the doctrine of separation of powers and checks and balances of the U.S. Government by keeping the three branches apart, in no way shape or form separates the political machines to install people into the various poisitons of the three branches of  the U.S. Government and when you have all the levers in the hands of the same operators, there are no checks and balances in reality.

Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the US Constitution provides that:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii
He (the President) shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.
- Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the US Constitution (1788)

The relevant bits of Section 2 have long been argued out but the qualifier of two-thirds of the Senate which is required to make treaties does not apply when appointing officers and judges and only a simple majority of Senators is needed. Since January 3 of 2017, the Republican Party has had 51 Senators on floor; which means that President Donald Trump has had more or less unfettered power to appoint people to the positions of officers and judges and hasn't had to face any intereference. The 115th United States Congress has basically acted like a rubber stamp.
I think that this is a terrible way to run government and in my not very well paid opinion, stems for the fact that the US Constitution is itself, awful.

The impression that I get from reading all 85 of the Federalist Papers is that John Jay was too sick to provide much by way of input, that James Madison is more concerned with the mechanics of the thing, and that Hamilton just really likes to write stuff. Hamilton writes like he's perpetually had twenty cups of coffee that day; which might in fact be true considering the cultural aversion to tea in the years immediately following the War Of Independence.

Hamilton makes it abundantly clear of the principles which he thinks that the new republic should be guided by but because he is a lawyer and not an engineer, he is too close to the law to realise that he is designing a system. That system when fully realised, is the result of a mashtun of compromises, which all look like they have as much vision to look at Washington as king in everything but name and parliament which has legislative power and nothing else. The so called separation of powers seems like a brilliant idea except for the fact that as soon as Washington leaves, the whole shebang immediately devolves into factionalism and the beginning of party machinery which effectively renders those separation of powers as a game that needs to be played. Washington warns of this in his farewell address, Adams is an ineffectual nincompoop who should have remained a lawyer and by 1800, which is just the fourth presidential election cycle, Jefferson, Adams, Burr and Hamilton are all playing politics, silly pants, nasty games, and in the case of Hamilton and Burr, actually pointing real non-metaphorical guns at each other.

Even so, Hamilton is a victim of the times and circumstances in which he finds himself and so as the principal architect of the new governmental system, he effectively wrote the instrument to put Washington in power and then gave what appears to be zero thought to the consequences. It is worth remembering that Washington was elected to be the first President and was unopposed for two whole cycles. The Constitution was from the outset, viewed as so incredibly flawed, faulty, and incompetent as a document, that 16 of 55 delegates wouldn't even sign off on it. I suspect that it is as a result of this walkout, the idea of the consent of two-thirds of the Senate arises because it just looks super convenient that 39 of 55 delegates who signed off on the document is just 2 over the bare minimum standard.

Let's start with those election cycles. An American President is installed for four years at a time. Up until 1945 that wasn't limited but by convention everyone only ran for two because presumably they followed Washington's example. When FDR came along and the world was thrown into the Second World War because the first one wasn't good enough, that convention was ignored.
The problem with four year terms is that four years is an eternity in politics. If you don't believe me then just think about what can happen between editions of the Olympic Games which are also held on a four year cycle. In between the Seoul Olympics of 1988 and the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, the Iron Curtain came down, both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union ceased to exist and were succeeded by the various constituent countries as independent entities, and where there was once two Germanys there was now only one. Whilst it is true that other jurisdictions can have leaders that last for multiple terms which spill beyond a decade, that usually happens because of either stable politics or stable despotism. The United States has managed to create the impossible by combining both of these into a single office which might have been acceptable in 1789 when the US Constitution was adopted and they had George Washington in mind as a kind of benevolent yet doddery leader, but was hopelessly incompetent to deal with politics that had organized itself with proper political machinery.

The office of the President contains both the executive branch of government vested in a single person and the office of the commander in chief also vested in that same single person. I don't know how that can lead to anything other than political disaster except through the fact that the position is so powerful that the hope is that the individual who occupies the position is somehow magically benevolent and good spirited; therein lies the inherent problem.
When you have the executive vested in a single person you had better hope that they are benevolent and competent because if they are not, then bad governance follows. I just don't think that hope in an individual, especially when the motive which drives people to want to acquire power is to wield it, is the basis of any sane let alone good government. The whole idea of checks and balances sounds fine as a piece of rhetoric but in practice, it's as flimsy as a house make from tissue paper.

If you feed back the idea that you have a less than perfectly competent and benevolent leader who is also the commander in chief to things like governmental budgets, then you end up in ludicrous and ridiculous places. The Cold War was one of those instances where you had two superpowers locked in a really strange geopolitical dance where I think that the only thing that held back that incompetence and unbenevolence  was the threat of mutually assured destruction. There were no genuine checks and balances to speak of because if you are engaged in a war, either hot or cold, nobody is going to withhold budgets for the weapons of war.
Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex in his farewell address, which says that even the commander in chief and the person in whom the executive of the nation is vested, was powerless to halt the tide of the creep of the military, and black and dark budgets. Kennedy who followed only did marginally better and was able to redirect part of the budget to the most visible make work scheme that he could think of. Yes, it cost twenty billion dollars to put twelve clowns on the moon but what it saved was the lives of possibly more than three billion people.

Not only do you have four year terms for which a President has been installed, it has been proven that getting rid of one is practically impossible except via the ballot box. It seems that the most effective way to remove a sitting President before a term is out, is death (and in a peculiarly American case, death by gunshot). Buchanan, Johnson, Harding, Nixon, Clinton and Trump, all would have either been removed by the parliamentary caucus if they'd been in a Westminster System, or in the case of Trump, never appointed in the first place.
It seems to me that a system which prides itself on having checks and balances was deliberately set up to be willfully blind in this regard from the outset.

To tell the truth, I like the mechanism of the Congress. Australia learned about the idea of equal representation of the states from the US Senate, the practice of appointing members from both sides of the political divide on various committees in the House and Senate is fundamentally a good idea, and the fact that the system is slow means that legislation which fundamentally alters things is not passed unless one party controls all the levers of power, which means to say that they already have the delegated democratic approval of the people to do so.
What is idiotic is the method of election of members.

Both the House and Senate have first past the post voting for single member districts. The latter of those results in a tendency towards two party politics as per Duverger's Law and the former merely reinforces that by ensuring that smaller groups never get elected. There are occasionally independents elected but the idea of a minor party will never hold much sway.
Australia solves this with Proportional Representation in the Senate and New Zealand and Germany both make use of a Mixed Member Proportional Representation System, so Germany's Bundestag has a host of different voices speaking into the parliament. In America, those voices have to join the existing party machines and that means that there is a distinct lack of transparency in the voting intentions of members generally.

The thing that her really been on display with the Senate confirmation hearing for Kavenaugh is that the lie that there actually is a separation of powers, exists. Appointments for the Supreme Court are made by the President on the advise and consent of the Senate. Judges up and down the country of the United States are already political appointments and in many cases by popular vote, the President is elected by the Electoral College and the Senate is made up of elected officials. The suggestion that you get a truly separate separation of powers is ludicrous in the light that every link in the chain except for the actual pick of Supreme Court judges is already political.
Second to that, one of the bigger reasons why people that they claim to have voted for Trump in 2016 was because they wanted to pick the Supreme Court judges by proxy. It also follows that one of the drivers of people to the polls in November is to elect Senators who will not give consent to a Trump nomination for the Supreme Court.

I don't think for a second think that Australia is a perfect democracy because if I was like Hamilton in 1788 and writing day and night like a mad thing, I would have built the lower house to also have proportional representation in multi member districts and I also like the rhythm of the slightly longer electoral cycles but the truth is that we had the benefit of another 110 years of looking at how constitutions functioned in practice before we set off on our own experiment of democracy. The one thing that Australia absolutely learned and this very much shows up in the fact that the Father Of Federation Henry Parkes was a lawyer just like Alexander Hamilton, is that the Supreme Court and indeed every court in the land should be separate entirely from the machinations of political wheels. We do not vote for judges in Australia, judges are not appointed by parliament, and they certainly do not need the approval of the parliament ever.

Judges in Australia are appointed by the bench itself and what this means is that they have a natural tendency to be nominally culturally conservative. Also, because the Australian Constitution merely spells out the rules under which the parliament operates, it means that judges in Australia do not have a power which Supreme Court judges have in the United States:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/5/137
It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret the rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Court must decide on the operation of each.
- Marbury v. Madison SCOTUS, 24th Feb 1803

Whilst it is true that case law is indeed is a set of past rulings by courts which are then to cited as precedent, that's different in principle to the ruling in Marbury v. Madison where the court held for itself that it gets to decide what the law IS. That's incredibly dangerous. That's also an incredible amount of power and power that in no way should be allocated by political machinery.
This is why the Republican Party deliberately refused to hear any confirmation hearings for anyone following the death of Antonin Scalia and this is why the future appointment of any Justices to the Supreme Court will always be a horrorshow. It is a badly designed system and one which is so utterly terrible that it has been copied by precisely zero other countries.

Horse 2472 - The Art Of The Incompetent Deal

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-26/trump-said-to-plan-trade-talks-with-japan-that-will-include-cars
U.S. President Donald Trump reached an agreement with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to open trade talks between the two nations.
Abe resisted for almost two years the push to start bilateral trade talks with its second-largest trading partner, but Trump’s threatened auto tariffs forced him to reconsider. The two countries have agreed that sanctions on auto exports won’t be applied while the talks take place, Abe told reporters.
The U.S. wants to expand access for its automobile exports to encourage more production and jobs in America. In agricultural goods, Japan won’t offer better conditions than already exist in its other trade agreements, according to a joint statement by the two nations. 
- Bloomberg, 26th Sep 2018.

After reading James Comey's book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, I am convinced more than ever that the 45th President of the United States is unfit for the office, by virtue of the material changes that Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution made; namely his Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office. It is my opinion that although Trump has been elected to the office, he is unfit to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office due to reasons of complete incompetence.
This is the worst administration of my lifetime and I suspect probably either the second, third or fourth worst ever, if you consider the examples of Warren G. Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal, Richard Nixon and the Watergate affair, but not worse than James Buchanan whose complete failure to address the issues of slavery and the secession of the southern states, snapped the nation in half.
Trump seems more concerned with photo ops than actually making policy; this was obvious on his trip to see Kim Jong-Un, when nothing material was achieved; with his visits to the UN; and his ongoing dispute with NAFTA.

I find Abe's dealings with Trump on the subject of automobile tariffs to be both shrewd and dare I say sneaky because it is easy to deal with someone who has no idea what they're doing. Abe, who previously held the office of Prime Minister from 2006-2007, has on this run held the position since 2012; he seems to be somewhat popular.
If anything, Abe and Abenomics seems to hold that Japan will be more competitive if it engages in more free trade; hence Japan's wishes to push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a wish to pull back the influence of Japan's agricultural co-operatives. By the same token, Abe realises that by opening up trade, he will be able to find bigger markets for Japan's automotive products; and as any decent economist should know, there is usually better terms of trade for elaborately transformed manufactures than simple ones.

The thing I find utterly baffling with Trump wanting to talk to Japan about opening markets for its automobile exports and the secondary objective of trying to encourage more production and jobs in America, is that it assumes that America is selling something that Japan wants to buy. I just don't think that there's any real world evidence for that.
The real problem in trying to gauge what the Japanese Domestic Market wants for itself as opposed to the headline acts that it proclaims is that as an outsider I don't even know where to begin to look. The big three motor manufacturers of Japan are Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, and their websites have stuff that I've never even seen before. As a baka gaijin looking inwards, all I can see are a host of Weird Japanese Things (WJT) and I don't know how they onto the regular boring world of Japanese traffic.
It was my experience as a tourist that there were a bunch of small cars, some of which were on roads in the rest of the world and some of which weren't, a lot of kei cars which take advantage of taxation regulations for cars under 660cc and only a very select few cars which were the sports cars and halo cars. The idea of an SUV like you see on roads in America or Australia, simply wasn't viable because of the problem of parking said vehicle when not in use and the price of petrol which wasn't exorbitant but it wasn't conducive to these things either.

In Australia, if you ignore the Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux which have more or less supplanted the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon, then the cars which are the most popular are the Toyota Corolla, the Mazda 3 and Hyundai i30. These things are significantly smaller than the volume sellers in the United States which are now the Ford F-150, Toyota Camry, and Chevrolet Silverado. Ford is starting to sell more cars like the Ford Edge and both Ford and GM have made plans to abandon the sedan and hatchback class entirely by 2022 in favour of SUVs and pickup trucks. The cars that American automakers primarily want to build are for America and if they're already bigger than the traffic on Australian roads, what possible hope do they have in Japan?
It probably goes without saying that the big SUVs that America wants to sell in America have no market whatsoever in Japan and that makes Trump's declaration all the more ludicrous. When the big three automakers in America voluntarily move away from building hatchbacks and sedans, in favour of SUVs then unless they intend to start building the equivalent of WJTs, then they have no hope at all.

I suppose that a company like Ford might be able to sell the Fiesta in Japan and will be freed to do so in future because Ford and Mazda have gone through a divorce and so the noncompeting product clauses in their agreements probably no longer apply however, the Fiesta is not built in the United States and will cease to be sold there in future. Likewise, General Motors could possibly sell the Spark/Sonic/Barinas in Japan but they aren't made in the United States either.
At any rate, the Fiesta and Sonic which are currently sold in the United States are built to a somewhat lower price point than what would be sold in Japan. The Mazda Demio/2 DJ which I own is a Hofu built car which is primarily a JDM car and then sold in right hand drive markets; and it has the most comprehensive list of kit for a car that I have ever owned and it is the base model. Granted that a car like the Nissan March can be deoptioned to a very Spartan list of kit but even an austerity spec March is still very nice indeed.

I'm afraid that I need this explained to me as though I were a child because there's something fundamental that I simply don't understand. It's all very good trying to open up new markets but if you have nothing to sell, then what's the point? It could just very well be that my initial assessment that Trump's complete incompetence is so much on display here is correct and that as a sane person I am actually overqualified to understand because right now, I don't get it at all.

Colt 2471.1 - The Whole Thing from ABC to XYZ

15th Feb 2018.
Emma Albericie wrote a piece for the ABC News website which stated that there isn't a compelling case for corporate tax cuts when 20% of the ASX200 don't actually pay company tax in the first place and modelling suggests that even if there was a tax cut, they wouldn't pass that money on to their staff in the form of higher wages either.

16th Feb 2018.
After complaints from the then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, ABC News removed the analysis piece about the government’s proposed corporate tax cuts, by Ms Albericie.

16th Feb 2018.
It was found out that the then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, complained to ABC Chairman Milne.

10th Apr 2018.
The letter from the Prime Minister's Office  to the ABC, was released to the Senate. The letter claimed that Ms Alberici sought to “ignore or undermine anyone who disagrees with her" and that “Alberici has a habit of including comments from and interviewing only people who agree with her”.

Unknown:
Justin Milne rang Michelle Guthrie after meeting Turnbull to say the PM "hates” Andrew Probyn and “you have to shoot him”. If she refused, Milne allegedly told Guthrie she was “putting the future of the ABC at risk” and risking “half a billion" in funding for Jetstream

Also unknown:
ABC chairman Justin Milne sent former managing director Michelle Guthrie an email telling her to "get rid of" chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici.

Also unknown:
Guthrie refused to do his bidding.

13th Sep 2018.
Ms Guthrie was asked to resign, on the day after attending Parliament's Midwinter Ball with ABC chairman Justin Milne and refused. This apprently prompted the board to sack her.

24th Sep 2018.
ABC chairman Justin Milne sacks Michelle Guthrie as Managing Director of the ABC.

Probably 24th Sep 2018.
Guthrie leaks to The Australian? Unknown but the most likely scenario.

24th Sep 2018.
The Australian is the first to publish the news that Michelle Guthrie had been sacked as ABC MD; before any other media outlet.

24th Sep 2018.
Chris Kenny complains on Sky News that the ABC is dysfunctional. Chris Kenny as the Associate Editor of  Australian is the most likely person who received the leak from inside the ABC or Ms Guthrie.

26th Sep 2018.
ABC Staff meet to condemn Milne's actions and call for his sacking. They vote unanimously on the motion to be put to the board.

27th Sep 2018.
Communications Minister Mitch Fifield declines to back Mr Milne, when asked if the chairman should remain in the role, suggesting he should consider his position. The Minister says that he has always respected the ABC’s independence and has never sought to involve himself in staffing matters. “I have only ever raised with the ABC matters in relation to facts in reporting. I’ve done so on half a dozen occasions.”

27th Sep 2018.
The ABC board asks Justin Milne to step aside while the inquiry is going on. The view of the board is that he can not continue as Chair while he was being investigated.

27th Sep 2018.
@leighsales - 11:48am
I just finished an extensive interview with Justin Milne in which he announces his resignation as ABC Chairman.  Don't miss #abc730 tonight.

Horse 2471 - The Most Amazing Unmemorable Holiday Ever

Would you take the most amazing holiday of your life, for a month all expenses paid, if at the end of it all traces of it were erased from your memory?

In the latest episode of a podcast that I like listening to, this question was posed among a bunch of other hypothetical questions. I like this question because I had a fundamentally different response to it than either of the hosts did. I think that my answer to this is grounded in both the idea of perception and what I think a holiday is supposed to do.

Firstly, I have no idea what the most amazing holiday of my life would look like. I think that by definition it would be so amazing that current me can not conceive of it. I imagine that it would probably involve something part way dangerous, where every possible level of endorphin, oxytocin, and other feel good hedonistic chemical would be turned up to ridiculous levels.
 I mean, there are things that given unlimited amounts of money that I would like to do, such as flood the world with ridiculous amounts of money to build water and sewerage lines, mass literacy programs, and electricity because those three things have in my not very well paid opinion been the biggest drivers of people's happiness and well-being in practical terms, in the history of the world. I would also like to own a multi-trillion dollar motor company and everything that that would entail but that's another issue and not achievable in a month.
As for what the question of what the most amazing holiday actually is, I have no idea.

To answer the second part of the question though and the implications of not being able to remember what the most amazing holiday is, needs me to look at something of the nature of existence.
As a small being who is composed of roughly 150 pounds of food for lions and vultures, with a resident ghost attached somehow (mind, body, soul and spirit, is a complex question), I only perceive the world as a series of linear progressive moments. I have a memory which retains useful and not useful things from the past and I have absolutely no way of detecting anything other than the present. All that exists as far as I perceive, is now. The past has ceased to be and the future hasn't yet arrived. There might be all kinds of really neat theories about why the flow of time appears to be linear and in only one direction but in practical terms, they don't really matter. The only thing that is now is now.
Rationally speaking, going on the most amazing holiday of my life would be the most amazing holiday of my life and I would jump at the chance to be that kind to my future self who would be in the now on the most amazing holiday of my life. I see virtually no down side to this at all.

The objection raised on the podcast is that when you got back, that because you would retain no memory of it then it would cease to have any value. This question also doesn't address whether or not it is just me who can not remember the holiday or in fact everyone who was on it but I'm going to assume that the rules are the same for everyone and that as far as all of our memories are concerned, it would be like pressing the delete key.
Does it necessarily hold that if you do not remember something, that that thing ceases to have any value to you? I don't think so. I suspect that the regenerative effects of being on holiday would confer some kind of future benefit. Let's assume that it doesn't do that either. Let's assume that after a month; literally nothing changes for you except that you are a month older. Then what? If this is true and literally nothing changes for you, I can still see some value on going on the most amazing holiday of your lifetime and I think that my reasoning is wrong.

If you are on such a holiday, then there's practically zero consequence except possibly dying. I don't see this in principle as being any different to being asleep and dreaming. There probably are practical benefits to dreaming but let's assume that there aren't, would it still be worth it? Absolutely.
By definition you are on the most amazing holiday of your lifetime; which means that while you are on it, you are still living in the now. As the thing is happening, you would be deriving immense pleasure in the moment. That has to be better than what happens the majority of the time when boring things happen and you don't remember them or worse, bad things happen and you do remember them.
As I thought about this, my thoughts were turned to Linda in Aldous Huxley's book "Brave New World"; where she has come out of the wilderness and wants to be on a permanent Soma drug induced holiday. That seems really weird and strange to me but it's kind of the ultimate form of palliative care through the dark side of the looking-glass. I wonder if the net effect of being on the most amazing but literally unmemorable holiday would be like that. I also wonder if that's what being on heroin is like in the moment. By the way kids, don't do heroin - Not even if you are a late nineteenth century consulting detective.

Maybe I am just too dim to see the downsides of going on the most amazing holiday of your life if it was all erased from your memory. Sure, you wouldn’t be able to remember it but is that that much of a loss? I don’t like the idea that we are who we are because of the collection of memories that we possess because that has really troubling implications for both the very young who don’t have many memories and somebody with dementia who has problems unlocking them. This question seems to be more of a pragmatic one which is best answered on its own merits.
All things considered, my answer would be “yes” because if nothing else I would be getting a free holiday and in the moment it would be fun.

Horse 2470 - Why I Don't Post Many Pictures To Facebook

Someone recently asked me why I don't post very many pictures on Facebook. This would have been unthinkable in the not too distant past but the question is certainly worth asking in an always online and switched on world. I guess that it somehow seemed strange to them that I didn't have or want a smart phone and that it was really weird that I didn't feel the need to photograph all of the important moments of my life. Mind you, I find it strange to think that just a quarter of a century ago, most people didn't even know what the internet was; ten years ago the big platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook were all just wee ickle noobs in the internet world and now they are worth billions and trillions of dollars; so this impulse to photograph the world and share those photographs had no outlet.

There are children today who don't know a world that never had continuous all the time connectedness and the internet itself doesn't even exist outside of social media for many people. I mean they could go outside the ecosystems of their chosen apps but they do not. I must admit that I personally have retreated back towards the old media of newspapers and radio for my primary sources of news because the news that is dished out on social media is generally far too shallow for me to brood over. I suppose that I have to admit that as the number of years in front of me is almost certainly fewer than the number of years I've seen, that I am old. The world is moving on and I no longer fit the future. Although having said that, I didn't really fit the past either. I have long suspected that I actually belong either London or New York City in the 1920s.

That isn't to say that I don't understand the internet and social media. I think my problem is that I understand it only too well. The whole point of Twitter and Facebook is to keep you scrolling; the whole point of YouTube is to show you another video so that you will see yet another advert.
Once upon a time, media companies made radio and then television programs and tried to keep people in front of the magic boxes in their front parlour by making content that people might like to see and hear. Long form television has been kind of replaced or added to by Netflix, Hulu, Stan, or a bunch of other streaming services. In contrast, YouTube has made forays into that by democratising content creation and Facebook and Twitter are kind of repositories for short content.

A platform like Twitter by its nature is similar to the announcement boards at an airport. In an airport, planes arrive and take off and the announcements go through a regular cycle of initial broadcast, a few calls and then usually when the plane takes off, that particular set of announcements disappears forever. As far as Twitter is concerned, a hashtag works like a flight number and it is only when something terrible happens that the people in the airport get mad. A hashtag such as #AusPol is like a regularly scheduled flight, like say QF5 which will reappear on the boards with reliable regularity.
Journalists very quickly realized the value of Twitter and it is telling that I've now seen several elections play out in real time on Twitter and the knifing of several Prime Ministers. Twitter is the perfect vehicle for the political cycle, it is the perfect vehicle for the news cycle, and this is the reason why the 45th President of the United States makes such an excellent use of the platform. Granted that his administrative skills are non-existent and this makes for a bad Presidency but on this front, he understands how and why the platform works the way it does.
The thing about Twitter that people who enjoy using (like me) realise pretty quickly is that the outrage of a thing being bad goes away. From the outset, news outlets saw the value in the platform and that Twitter fit very nicely with the news cycle. The normal maximum period of time that a thing is an issue on Twitter is usually no more than a few days. Within a few hours of the event ending, the currency of that event and hence the frequency of hashtags being called on the departure boards of Twitter, dies a natural death.

Facebook feels vastly different and even feels like a vastly different space from when it began. I can't say that I am a very good Facebook user.
Only recently, I have been pulled back into the ecosystem of Facebook because it has disabled the old third party mechanisms which enabled me to remain outside of it. I find things like Facebook and Instagram problematic (even though I don't use and have never used the latter) because of the intersection of curation, narcissism and popularity, and I am not sure what that is doing to people's brains.
It seems to me that Facebook and Instagram are kind of the repositories of a very specific section of people's lives. There is a constant stream of people looking happy and the impression which is given out is that everyone else is living fantastic lives but you are not. Of course it stands to reason that people are only going to post pictures of their holidays, or how proud they are of their children, or of their nights out, amazing breakfasts. From what I have heard, Instagram is even worse with people staging photographs and this can only lead to a plastic impression of the world.
People don't post the rolling mundaneness of their lives to Facebook or Instagram. People don't generally post about their troubles, their sadness, and their frustrations; for fear of being shot down or worse, being ignored. In a world where it is perceived that everyone else is living the best life that they can, if you are not, it is very easy to be pulled into your own personal funk because compared to everyone else; you look to yourself like a colossal failure.

The reason why I don't post a lot of photographs on Facebook is because my life doesn't tend to produce those moments terribly often. I don't go on holiday all that often and when I do, I am on holiday and prefer to be on holiday. I don't have children and so photographs of the birthday parties, sports days, school achievements, or cute baby moments, are incredibly difficult to take, nay impossible (even though the idea of photographs of non-existent children sounds like a brilliant idea for a Nordic Noir crime series).
According to the unwritten rules and criteria which Facebook and Instagram put forward, my life by the metric of popularity, likes, grams (I don't know what the cool kids say on Instagram) is a colossal failure; so for me to post photographs of the rolling mundanity is also a colossal waste of time.
To be fair, I don't really care either; because as this post demonstrates (and indeed the not quite two and a half thousand posts over twenty years), I would rather take in the world at the speed of text.
My brain has been spending the last thirty odd years wiring itself up to draw its dopamine from different sources; primarily the written word and the radio. I am probably the most happy most of the time when I am either reading something, writing something, or listening to something while doing something else. Sweeping the house on a Saturday morning while listening to the NPR Politics Podcast repeatedly presses my happiness buttons but that's not exactly worthy of posting photographs on Facebook for. I could take a photograph of a dustpan and brush under the couch but that seems like a colossal waste of time, see above.

So then... people of Facebook. Here is a picture.

It's not of a night out because they are few and far between, it's not of a holiday or a fantastic breakfast, and it isn't even of my children because I don't have any. Instead, this is a photograph of the majesty of the mundane. I cross this road ten times a week to add from my way to work, and it illustrates perfectly why I don't post very many pictures to Facebook.
This picture can not convey the glorious smells of wattle, barbecuing meat, garlic, tyres on fire and bushfire which are all dancing around in the air. This picture can not convey the kind of perfectly warm yet breezy evenings that exist in springtime in Sydney. This picture can not convey the cacophony of rainbow lorikeets and galahs that are having a turf war in the park close by. This picture can not convey that strange sense of ennui, sadness, tiredness, joy, which are all running through my mind at the same time, demanding to be felt but yet finding no human point of connection to attach to. This picture can not convey my wonder at the discreet wavelengths of light which are put out by sodium filament street lamps and the kind of tobacco stained jaundice that haunts the view because of them.

I don't post pictures to Facebook very often because pictures never do anything justice. I don't believe that a picture paints a thousand words because I know what kind of pictures a thousand words paint. Pictures are like trying to make me suck on a lollipop when what I really want is a nice Rogan josh. Pictures are even more of a blunt instrument than words are and words are already like trying to stitch a seam on a pant leg with a cricket bat (it's obvious that I have no idea what I'm doing with either).
I don't post very many pictures on Facebook because I already keep a blog and write and have done since before there was a Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Most people only want to look at the pretty pictures though; which is fine. I am not you. My brain does not fit here. My brain wants to live in the land of a thousand words.

Horse 2469 - Savage Strawberries and 'Tater Terrorism

As an Australian Australian who lives in Australia, I am pretty used to living in country where everything is actively trying to kill you.
Where I live in Western Sydney, we have the Sydney Funnel Web Spider which has a neurotoxin that will kill you, we have the Redback spider which hangs out in people's toilets, under stairs and in garages, which will also kill you; and we have Brown Snakes in Sydney which are also trying to kill you.
In Western Australia the town of Wittenoom had to be abandoned because the blue asbestos which they were mining out of the ground was trying to kill people, we have sharks and crocodiles that will try to kill you, we have kangaroos and emus which are idiots and have no idea about road sense and so will jump out in front of your car, which will kill you, and we have the wombat which has a muscley cartilaginous bum which if they trap your head between it and a hard object, it will kill you.
We have snakes, spiders, animals, murder birds like the emu and cassowary, and even the very dirt itself, all trying to kill you and as such Australians are all hard as nails.

But now there is a new terror in Australia; a terror so hideous, so heinous, so incredibly dastardly that I am at pains to even mention it. It is so unbelievable that if it hadn't made its way all over the newspapers and televisions of this wide brown land, nobody would have believed it. I am of course talking about... fruit.
Sometime last week, someone found a needle in a strawberry at a supermarket and someone else found a needle in an apple. Admittedly this is probably just an isolated incident where either a disgruntled employee wanted to get back at their old employer, or maybe some teenage brat thought that this was funny because teenagers don't have fully developed brains but it could be something more sinister.

What happens if this is terrorism?
Where does this end? Are we now going to find knives in our apples? Do we have to worry about Queenslanders and watch out for sawnoff shotguns in our bananas? How about samurai swords and katanas in satsumas? I think that you could just about hide a Husqvarna chainsaw inside a pumpkin. I hear that that fruit fly exclusion zone as you head into Victoria is actually because they are still worried about war breaking out between the states and explosive devices being smuggled in, hidden in cherries. I wouldn't be surprised if we lost the Emu War in the 1930s because they'd been stockpiling three-ohs and disguising them in cucumbers. Cassowaries have been hiding out in the cane fields with maxim guns and have been filling Mangoes up with Novichok nerve agent.
What if this is all a dastardly plot by the Chinese Government to stop us from buying oranges and lemons so that we'll all get scurvy and they can just walk in and steal our stuff? I think that we should watch out for Toyota Hiluxes in Bunnings car parks in case people from ISIS show up, buy a bunch of relatively cheap hardware and then go to Coles. That's not just an eggplant but an eggplant that's hiding a hand grenade.

What if the most sinister threat of all is actually from grannies? I don't know about you but it used to be about baby pictures and pictures of Minions with vaguely amusing captions but now grannies are going into online sewing groups on Facebook, being radicalised online, wanting to do some hard core embroidery and accidentally leaving one needle in one strawberry somewhere in the country.
After all it's grannies who sit on Facebook all day long, liking your photos. It's all a cover so that they can secretly go out at night and conduct missions for MI6, ASIO and the FBI. It is always the ones who you least expect who cause the most damage and who do you suspect less than Mrs Murphy of 37 Pleasant Crescent as she walks through Coles, trying to decide if she wants to put peaches or pears in her fruit pie.

Paris had its attacks in the Bataclan district, London had the 7/7 attacks, New York had the twin towers destroyed on 9/11 but Australia hasn't really had any particularly notable terrorism incidents unless you include the Lindt Café shooting which was declared a terrorist incident so that the insurance company could get out of paying as much, the Hilton Hotel bombing in the rubbish bin in the late 1970s and of course the Emu War.
If you want to make Australians sit upon and take notice, not even locking children up on tropical glulags is enough to make them care. Not even having evil robots at Centrelink sending out letters to other grannies is enough to tear us away from our $22 Avocado Toasts in the morning. We're not even phased all that much by the Knife Festival which takes out Prime Ministers more regularly than the Olympics, or the head of the ABC, unless there's a Four Corners special and a Noir drama series five years after the event. No, if you want to send the Commonwealth Of Australia into six kinds of madness, running around from side to side like brainless sheep, put one needle in a strawberry and then have Karl Stefanovic do some joke piece on Today, about it.

Horse 2468 - Daylight Savings Time Will Mean That I Get An Extra Hour's Sleep

This isn't some rant about how daylight savings time is bad because although that's a long established trope of which I could very easily riff upon, I have probably made those jokes before. Go back through the archive of Septembers past¹ and you'll probably see this kind of thing. The fact is that I like long daylight tails in the evening because it means that Day/Night Cricket happens in the summer, that the A-League can be played late in the evening. Daylight Savings is demonstrably useful.
This blog post employs another long established trope; that of proof of a seemingly stupid proposition.

I have two cats. Two cats is the correct number of cats to have. One cat gets lonely and three cats is the beginning of crazy cat lady territory. Two cats is the correct number of cats to have and the number of the counting shall be two; five is right out. Our older cat, Purranna, is probably nine years old and as far as cats go, is old enough to claim a cat pension. Our younger cat, Micah, is only about seven months old; so hasn't arrived at cat punk teenagerdom yet. I am convinced that Micah's life motto is "Enjoy Everything!" The exclamation point is 100% necessary.

- Look at the Kitty picture! :D

Micah was probably born in February, so this means that he has lived through an autumn and a winter. As he has not lived through a summer, the idea that the length of days gets longer, both in the evening and the morning, is not part of his lived experience and probably would have never entered his child cat mind anyway. Ever since the winter solstice back in June, the days have been getting longer and now that we have just passed the Spring Equinox, the rate of change is massive and indeed because the length of days follows a sinusoidal equation, the rate of change of the length of days is instantaneously the greatest, right bang on the Equinox.
If these are the given inputs into a cat's mind that has never lived through a summer, and probably isn't old enough to understand the concept that the length of day is variable, then those things are probably not relevant to his interests. Not only does he not know that the length of day changes, he does not care that the length of day changes, and does not care that he does not know and doesn't care that he might need to know.
I do care though.

My alarm is set for 05:47am. In the middle of winter, 05:47am is before sunrise. The first thing that I do in the morning after I wake up is feed the cats their breakfast. Purranna has a collective memory of about 3000 mornings; so she is well aware that she will get fed after the alarm goes of at 05:47am. Micah on the other hand has not. If the beginning of daylight comes through the window, then he is awake and as far as he is concerned (and he is very concerned), when he is awake, then it must obviously be time to eat.
The alarm is not relevant to his interests. My sleep is not relevant to his interests. When daylight comes through the window, a cat whose motto is "Enjoy Everything!" and who is only operating on pure id (ego and superego do not wake up until much later), only has one relevant interest and that is to be fed now.
As someone who has never lived through a summer and who doesn't understand or care that sunrise is getting earlier, Micah gets really annoyed that we also have not woken up with the sun. The thing that is relevant to his interests when the sun rises and is immediately applicable to his life motto of "Enjoy Everything!" is to be fed there and then. The fact that people don't wake up until 05:47am is irrelevant and even if it was, would be in direct conflict with his life motto; so he has a whinge.
We have now passed into that time of year when sunrise is before 05:47am, which means that I am now consistently woken up by the sounds of a small cat demanding to know why the world isn't directly conforming to his interests immediately.

Daylight Savings Time borrows that first hour of daylight and then saves it until the end of the day. Immediately, the clock time for sunrise is pushed back an hour and since Micah neither knows or cares about clocks, it means that his effective wake up time as far as I'm concerned is an hour later. When Daylight Savings Time does start in October, my wake up time will revert back to 05:47am instead of whatever time is going on inside a small cat's mind².

Given enough summers and winters and the fact that in time Micah will be an older cat, I'm pretty sure that this issue will go away... or maybe it won't. His life motto is "Enjoy Everything!" and as far as I can tell, everything which doesn't enable him to do that, including me being asleep in the morning, must be railed against.

Do not go gentle into that good morning
Young age does burn and rave at opening of day;
Rage, rage against the coming of the light... and against those who will not feed you immediately.

¹The Ghost of Septembers Past is mentioned in Charles Dickens' non specific seasonal story about Fred Scrooge, the President of the Melbourne Demons Football Club; who is visited by two of the usual ghosts but not the ghost of September Future because ghosts know that the D's aren't likely to win a Rules Grand Final any time soon.
²This is probably subject to several iterations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. It is uncertain what goes on inside a cat's mind and if you were to observe it, it would still be uncertain.

Horse 2467 - ...ex In the City

A client of mine who is "so Jewish that he circumsised his gefilte fish", wants to start a podcast about financing startup companies, which is also the "most Jewish thing for a podcast that he could think of". He intends to call it "Keks In The City"; which if anyone else suggested it, would be really racist.
This led me down a series of mental alleys and passages, that eventually took me to Stupid Town.

Bex In The City - a podcast about an aspirin–phenacetin–caffeine compound analgesic. The 1960's housewife's drug of choice... before they discovered Smirnoff.

Mex In The City - a podcast about trying to find decent Mexican food.

Pyrex In The City - a podcast about Minnesotan Hotdish.

Rex In The City - a podcast about a giant dinosaur who is trying to fit in with modern society.

Rex In The City - a podcast about a bulldog who has a law degree and is in private practice.

Rex In The City - a podcast about a dinosaur and a dog who has a law degree, who drive around in their hotted up Subaru Impreza.

Dex In The City - a podcast about the midnight runners and their attempts to get their first single "Dance Stance" heard on the radio.

Chex In The City - a podcast about the history of negotiable financial instruments.

Lex In The City - a podcast about a Batman villain.

Lex In The City - a podcast about driving slowly in a Japanese luxury car.

Lex In The City - a podcast about a Batman villain driving slowly in a Japanese luxury car.

Shrex In The City - a podcast about a giant ogre who has inadvertently found himself in the modern world.

Tex In The City - a podcast about how everything is bigger in the Lone Star state.

Fex In The City - a podcast about Irish swear words.

Trex In The City - a podcast about walking around and seeing what you find.

Pex In The City - a podcast about gym franchising.

Flex In The City - a podcast about the installation and repair of air conditioning ducts.

Tex Mex In The City - a podcast about the westernization of various dishes from Mexico.

Hardiflex In The City - a podcast about building materials which are suitable for building a garage out of, in 1986.

Nex In The City - a podcast about giraffes.

Chex In The City - a podcast about the search for one very particular kind of breakfast cereal.

Hex In The City - a podcast about witches and spells that they have placed upon various bits of real estate.

Hex In The City - a podcast about using allen keys.

Horse 2466 - Three Easy Pieces

Spicy Skittles¹
If someone mixes Skittles in with a bowl full of M&M's, then that person is a monster and you should shun them. Shun them. You should banish them to Room 101. However, if someone mixes Spicy Skittles in with a bowl full of M&M's, then you should have them committed to one of those places where they can wear a special jacket that allows them to hug themselves all day long.
Actually, if you find someone who has a bowl of Spicy Skittles, then at very least you should question their sanity if it is the second packet that they have bought. Buying the first packet because of curiosity is acceptable because humans are curious but buying the second packet after they already bought a first one, is madness.
Sour lollies  have been around since way before I was a kid. Hot lollies like Warheads have also been around for a long time as well. Those lollies  are already substandard; so mucking around with them is fine. I even got used to weird chili chicken flavoured lollipops that my in-laws sent from America. There is a special kind of insanity to those. However, Spicy Skittles are messing with the forces of nature.
There's nothing inherently wrong with them and yet, that's precisely what is wrong with them. They are spicy enough that if you weren't expecting it you would be surprised but they aren't spicy enough to make you keel over and writhe around on the floor in pain. They appear to be made for people in their old age, who normally aren't eating lollies in the first place; that does my head in.

Pie-Tops²
I have no idea if this was a thing from a commercial that went away and came back or if it was film related but a client of ours walked into our office with an officially branded pair of Pizza Hut Pie-Tops this week.
Put simply, they are shoes that kind of look a bit like Chuck Taylor All-stars, with WiFi enabled connection to your smart phone, so that when you press a button on the side in a very deliberate and particular manner, they order pizza. Your shoes order pizza. I don't know what strange future I have accidentally entered but I need this in my life.
Pizza is in my not very well paid or thought through opinion, the king of all sandwiches. Pizza is an elaborate open sandwich that just happens to be baked. I love sandwiches. I love toasted sandwiches and my sandwich press gets used on a semi regular basis. Having a pair of shoes where you can press a button and it orders pizza, combines a gloriously stupid invention with the reward of having pizza at the end. I do care how dumb this is. I care because pizza ordering shoes are an invention which nobody needs, to solve a problem that wasn't really there, to give you pizza which is delicious. Yes, yes, yes!

Is This A Peace Treaty?³
The two presidents of the two Koreas, Kim and Moon, from the north and the south, met in Pyongyang on Wednesday and signed off on further outcomes resulting from the Panmunjom Declaration of April this year. Some of the articles included North Korea shutting down a missile installation, further moves towards the full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, more details of what peace looks like, and infrastructure announcements including road and rail.
You'll find this buried deep into the pages of The Australian, in the "world" section of the Sydney Morning Herald, and it didn't even get a mention in the Daily Telegraph; so if you've been following the printed press in Australia, you might have missed it. It did find reportage on both the ABC and SBS and on ABC News Radio but I have no idea about the rest of television news.
What I want to know is if the 45th President of the United States tweets a twoosh on Twitter, then the media goes into a blind flap but if you have possibly the most significant news story of the decade, which might have formally ended the Korean War (I haven't yet read though the details) then why is this not front and centre across all the news media? If this actually is the formal end to a war which was started 70 years ago and the two leaders are looking at ways to formally establish a peaceful normality, then this is properly excellent.
They're also talking about sending a unified team to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, which is incidental but if this plays out similarly to the way in which the two Germanys reunified, then 2024 might not actually be symbolic but a matter of fact; that would also be excellent.

¹Why is this a thing? - http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2017/05/25/starburst-and-skittles-get-spicy-with-sweet-heat-flavors.html 

²Why is this a thing? - http://fortune.com/2018/03/05/pizza-huts-pie-tops/

³Why hasn't this been a thing sooner? - http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201809/19/WS5b9f7565a31033b4f4656808.html

Horse 2465 - This Is Not A 2019 Everest; So Stop Saying It Is, Ford.

With Holden suffering their worst sales months since 1948, Ford is loudly crowing about the fact that their Mustang is outselling the Commodore. I find this to be quite tone deaf on the part of Ford because apart from two months when the Mustang was still a new model in Australia, the Mustang has never again been able to outsell the now discontinued Falcon. I suspect though that Ford don't want to crow all that loudly about that.
When Commodore and Falcon basically exited stage left from the top of the sales charts, that space was filled by the Toyota Corolla, Toyota Hilux, Mazda 3, and Hyundai i30, and Ford having decided that they'd again like to play at the top end of the charts, woke up from their stupor and have been pitching the T6 Ranger T6 in their ad campaigns. Again the irony is that Ford Australia developed and engineered the T6 Ranger and were then immediately refused permission to build it in Australia because Ford loves the profits that Australia sends to Detroit but is just like all the rest of the motor companies now in that they don't love Australians enough to employ them to build stuff. Ford's latest ad campaigns look even more tone deaf and I've now seen on telly, in print, and online, adverts touting the 2019 Ranger.

Today's date (and this is something which would appear on the blackboard of a kindergarten classroom) is the 19th of September 2018. 2018. 2018. 2018?! What Ford are trying to push on us is the absolutely idiotic practice of the Model Year, which I suppose is justified in their eyes as Ford Motor Company can't see beyond the city environs of Detroit and their Profit and Loss statements.
Out here in the real world where physical stuff exists and actual real life happens, the whole concept of a Model Year is "a bunch of stuff¹" in the words of Joe Biden.

The whole idea of a Model Year from what I can determine, came about because of Alfred P Sloan at General Motors. At some point in the 1920s, he hit upon the idea of marketing cars as fashion items in the hope that the hoi polloi would replace their cars in the same manner as the fashion cycle happened. This would have been a lovely idea in the 1920s where the rich in America were turning over obscene amounts of money in a hurry and there was no way that it couldn't last forever... except... except...
When the stock market crashed like a 1920s Cadillac doing 125mph with 1920s brakes, it slammed into the wall of destiny and everyone was really really sad for a very long time; starting the Great Depression, which wasn't all that great for anyone at all. It especially wasn't great for the motor companies and for a period of time while the world was plunged into another World War, the motor companies basically put their model lineups on hold as they too were drafted into the war effort.
It wasn't really until after the Second World War that new designs started appearing again and in the meantime they had practically halted. A 1948 Ford looks pretty much like a 1941 Ford. Armed with a revitalised economy and a growing middle class, the motor companies now found that they could cycle through new models without doing anything except changing the grills and lights on a regular basis and the idea of a yearly model cycle and a Model Year was reborn.
The thing that I find really really infuriating about the idea of a Model Year, is that the Model Year bears absolutely no relation to the calendar year. In some cases where a new model is built alongside an older one, they might both share the same Model Year; also if a particular model debuts at different times around the world, the same Model Year might last as long as 34 months. What kind of buck-wild nonsense is this?

There is already a perfectly good system for designating between different models and even sub-models of the same car and considering this is Australia and we've been using the system for the past seventy years, there's no need to be foisting this rubbish on us. That system is the already extent Model Code.

Every Australian kid worth their automotive GT stripes should be able to recite the following:
XK, XL, XM, XP, XR, XT, XW, XY, XA, XB, XC, XD, XE, XF, XG (ute), XH (ute), XN (Nissan Ute), EA, EB, ED, EF, EL, AU, BA, BF, FG, FGX.
That series of letter codes is the complete run of Ford Falcons from 1960 to close in 2016. The Model Code tells you succinctly which one is which and is precise.

Across other manufacturers Model Codes are also useful. Proper car nerds should be able to tell what AE86, FD, EP3, FN2, R32, DC5 and KC are just by the code. They will also be able to tell you what the subtle difference between an AE85 and AE86 are as well².
For cars where the Model Code isn't used, the Generation Number is also useful. Fiesta Mk4 through to Fiesta Mk7 all sit on the same platform, the 3rd Gen Mustang is the Fox body car, an Impala 10 is the one that shouldn't exist because it should have properly been VF Commodore, and Ford Fusion 2 is Mondeo Mk4.
Technically this is a Ford Everest Mk3, which has been derived from the T6 Ranger. Ford if they were sensible would have given us the Model Code as the designation because the Model Year is not only deceptive, I'm going to say that it is a straight up lie.

Cars that are sold in Australia are by law fitted with a compliance plate. That compliance plate contains all sorts of neat details like the VIN and Gross Vehicle Mass but the one thing that renders the whole concept of a Model Year as a complete lie is the build date. The build date is the thing that tells you when it left the factory and I can tell you that unless Ford have secretly gained access to time travel, there is no way in nine kinds of Hades that that compliance plate will read anything other than 2018 by virtue of the fact that the car already exists.

This is not a 2019 car. Don't say it is when it's not. Stop lying, Ford, for Ford's sake. Unless of course you want to enter a brave new world; in which case, welcome to the year AF110 - 110 Anno Ford, in the year of Ford, Amen.

¹This is a bunch of stuff - https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=iyvchE8EI6E
²Just by looking at it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgrF1n3yKNY