The latest Ipsos poll for the Fairfax papers is the Coalition’s least bad result of the Scott Morrison prime ministership so far, recording the Labor two-party lead at 53-47, an improvement on the 55-45 blowout the pollster recorded as Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership entered its final week (which was the one poll suggesting a significant weakening in Coalition voting intention in the period up to the spill). Ipsos’ primary vote numbers are still idiosyncratic, with an already over-inflated Greens gaining two points to 15%, while Labor slumps four to 31% and the Coalition gains one to 34%. No conventional leadership ratings that I can see yet, but ratings of the two leaders across a range of eleven attributes finds Morrison scoring better than Bill Shorten on every question other than “has the confidence of his/her party” and “has a firm grasp of social policy”. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1200; more detail presumably to follow.
UPDATE: As related by the Financial Review, the poll has Scott Morrison debuting with 46% approval and 36% disapproval, while Bill Shorten is up three on approval to 44% and down four on disapproval to 48%. Morrison holds a 47-37 lead as preferred prime minister, little different from Turnbull’s 48-36 lead in the last poll.
More than quite good ffs! Streets ahead of any other shit on TV.
Yabba
About half of what Newton did was bat shit crazy (in retrospect).
Jolyon Wagg says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 9:04 pm
For mental calcs 355/113 is a handy approximation to pi It is good to 6 decimal places.
_____________
Three. Use three.
And add on a bit for good luck.
355/113 is about as useful as tits on a bull.
By the time you use that figure, you’d have been far better off pulling out your scientific calculator.
I’ve got my old slide rule from Uni in a draw somewhere, and my father’s. It’s a different draw to that with the flannelette shirts.
Shaun Micaleff, +1. (Netflix beckons…)
re Morrison’s books. One in plain sight is ‘Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict’ by Mitchell G. Bard. It is a propaganda rant by Bard, who for many years produced the weekly ‘newsletter’ put out by The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a lobbying group that advocates pro-Israel policies to the Congress and Executive Branch of the USA government.
Bring on Armageddon. According to Isaac Newton, it occurred 2 years ago.
355/113 we are now getting into approximations to use when writing assembler code on 16 bit processors.
Asha Leu @ #947 Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 – 8:03 pm
When it comes to Clive it is never as you see face value. He has i think another agenda and getting into Parliament is not high on it.
His big, big issue is trying to reopen his Nickel refinery in Townsville. Preferences may be important
Newton realised his understanding of gravity was incomplete. As he put it:
My slide is in the draw with the punch cards. I learnt blue, green ( what a shit of a language) and pink.
Re the earlier discussion on ‘black swan’ events, I’m sure that the Coalition is desperately hoping for one. A terrorist incident, ideally one foiled before it happens, would be ideal. It would be handy for them if the strawberry idiot was non-white and a dedicated adherent to a certain belief system.
Brown Swan events could include industrial strife. Maybe that’s why they’re trying to re-introduce failed “industrial reform” legisation – change the conversation and hopefully provoke strikes, ideally disrupting Christmas. That was always an old standby. Then you have culture war stuff. And no doubt the L/NP – Newscrap Coaltion are trawling through the interwebs to update their dirt files.
Don
I wasn’t seriously putting it forward for mental calcs…that’s why I followed it with a smile emoji.
JW @9:17 – fascinating, I hadn’t seen that before. Isaac Newton realised his theory was incomplete (but it is not ‘wrong’).
And I find it incomprehensible now; but the ICL mainframe we used had 32K of core memory. Now to do out simulations we load our PC up with gigabytes of the stuff and wish we had more.
I think Isaac Newton was a brilliant mathematician first and foremost.
And interesting that he bought into the South Sea Company “bubble”. There was always a story that he sold his stock fearing it would crash, but then bought in again as it went up and up. He apparently definitely held stock in it, but it seems it is unclear whether he got burned in its crash or not.
If he truly owned 22,000 Pounds of stock in 1722, this would supposedly be the equivalent of anything between 3 and 500 million Pounds today. I think it depends on historical measures of inflation, and also purchasing power.
Steve777
Newton’s theory may not be wrong, but Einsteins General Relativity is a better theory that can account for a much wider range of phenomena, including gravity waves, the existence of which was confirmed by Earth based detection quite recently.
frednk says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 9:25 pm
And I find it incomprehensible now; but the ICL mainframe we used had 32K of core memory. Now to do out simulations we load our PC up with as gigabytes of the stuff and wish we had more.
_________________
My first computer was a Fat Mac, 512 KB. No hard disk, just floppies. Around 1985.
I realised pretty quickly that I needed a hard drive. I bought an apple brand you-beaut 20 MB hard drive for $1000, I bought an Apple brand because I wanted reliability – I wanted it to last!
I bought a new computer every three years, as the old ones could not cope with the new programs coming out.
That seems to have slowed down a lot recently. My latest Battlestar Gallactica 27 inch mac is five years old and still going strong.
frednk
Someone I know told me recently they purchased a 1GB hard drive for their work I think in 1988 for $60,000.
So I suppose a propos of that stuff about inflation and purchasing power, that is an example of relative ‘deflation’ caused by technology changing purchasing power. though I am probably using all the wrong economic terms.
Rocket Rocket says:
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 9:32 pm
frednk
Someone I know told me recently they purchased a 1GB hard drive for their work I think in 1988 for $60,000.
So I suppose a propos of that stuff about inflation and purchasing power, that is an example of relative ‘deflation’ caused by technology changing purchasing power. though I am probably using all the wrong economic terms.
___________
That sounds about right.
But I have found that when you do buy a new desktop computer, it always costs around $3000 for the features and hard disk and RAM you want.
What I am having trouble coming to terms with is the huge increase in the cost of iPhones. The latest have astronomical prices.
I’ve got a 5S and it works great.
The Bogan PM: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/politics/federal/i-stopped-these-boats-books-and-balls-inside-the-office-of-prime-minister-scott-morrison-20180919-p504p5.html
In particular, that ‘boat’ sculpture is real, although I always believed it.
And while I’m being a snob, I regard the current manifestations of Pentacostalism as Christianity for people who don’t like thinking too hard.
It doesn’t seem that long ago students were marvelling at my USB with 2G capacity, which set me back over $20 – now you basically get something like that in a cornflakes packet.
frednk @ #2713 Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 – 9:25 pm
When I did Chem Eng at Sydney Uni, 1962-65, we had an IBM 1460, with a whopping 16k of RAM, fed by paper tape, and producing paper tape output. No screen. A golfball typewriter for entering machine instructions. Fortran 4H was our programming language.
It ‘booted’ from a bootstrap, which was a loop of linen tape, which hung from a coathanger stuck into the ceiling tiles. As in, pulled itself up by its own bootstrap.
I wrote a simulation of BHP’s Wallsend coal washery to run on it, and an interactive program to design heat exchangers.
I have a 4 terabyte USB fyi, think you can get up to 6 or 8 these days.
Missed much of the party today but are we any wiser as to who from the alp leaked the verbatim transcript of the tpp deliberations?
Somebody from the left I’m guessing.
POLICE have arrested a young boy who admitted to inserting needles into strawberries as part of an apparent prank.
New South Wales Acting Assistant Police Commissioner Stuart Smith would not release further details but said the child had been caught in recent days.
“Obviously in the last few days we found a young person has admitted to a prank, including putting needles in strawberries, and he’ll be dealt with under the youth cautioning system,” he said.
The behaviour could be “called a prank”, he said, but warned that any copycat cases would be dealt with harshly.
..I remember dutifully following my then boyfriend down to the computer at Melbourne Uni. He had had to book time on it days in advance. He fed the cardboard cards in for about five minutes, then realised he’d prepared one wrongly, and thus the program wouldn’t work. So back we went…
My own first desktop was a Sirius, purchased in 1981.
With printer and software, it cost me $11,100. A new Holden was $7,900. Lease cost was $330 per month.
A description from http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=210
The Victor 9000 / Sirius S1 was conceived by Chuck Peddle who also designed the first Commodore PETs. This machine was quite innovative and superior in almost all ways to the original IBM PC. It met a certain success in Europe/Australia as the IBM PC was not yet available there, whereas the Sirius S1 (european name of the Victor 9000) was.
The mechanical keyboard is very complete and has its own 8035 cpu. (it had 14 programmable function keys) The 12” monochrome monitor is equiped with an anti-relflection filter and can be adjusted horizontally and vertically. Contrast and luminosity are controlled directly from the keyboard. The computer can display text ranging from 80 x 25 to 132 x 50. But the best feature is the high resolution reaching 800 x 400 pixels! The IBM PC was 320×200, exactly 1/5th the resolution.
The Victor 9000 is equiped with a Codec which can sample and replay sounds in telephone quality. There are two V24 / RS232 ports and one parallel connector which can also be used as an IEEE-488 interface (to connect measurement instruments for example). There is also an optional light-pen, which is in fact a touch pen using resistive mesh on the CRT.
The two 5.25″ disk-drives are double-sided and offered 1.2 Mb each. Compare with IBM single floppy, capacity 360kb.
The Victor 9000 was perhaps best known for how it was able to achieve such high density on it’s floppy disks. It used variable speed disk drives; there were 9 different speeds used. As the drive head moved outward the speed would increase. It was really neat to hear the speed change as the drive head moved.
The Victor 9000 could run with MS-DOS or CP/M 86. Many languages were available: Basic 86, C-Basic, Cobol, CIS-Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, PL1, PLM, etc.; as well as some software: Wordstar, Spellstar, Mailmerge, Multiplan, Micromodeller.
Yabba
The Lunar Module computer had 16k RAM I think. Lack of “grunt” made you very efficient in writing programs!
I loved the scene in the film “Hidden Figures” where one of the (human) ‘computers’ takes the FORTRAN book out of the Langley library.
Sorry for being rude to you earlier zoomster. I didn’t realise you were a lady. apologies.
Mad as hell was very, very good.
don
The first real computer I owned was a colored bubble iMac in about 1999 I think – I used it for most of my personal work until 2014! It still works but is a bit temperamental about starting up.
And I have a refurbished 5c which is just fine – and pretty amazing in the context of the old iMac, let alone considering the card-reading computers I started on at Uni.
Newtons Laws of Motion still hold precisely.
You just have to be mindfull of what a straight line actually means 🙂
So the “young person admitted to a prank” will now be locked up for 15 years
Overreach backfires
Separation covenants exist for a purpose
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_VIP
My first real computer.
The 1802 processor it is based on is brilliant. Orthoganal instruction set based on 16 registers. Very RISC-ish. And still in use in high reliability space and military applications.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802
Probably of limited interest here but in case anyone is interested:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2018/09/hobart-city-council-elections-candidate.html
Hobart City Council Candidate Guide and Preview
“So the “young person admitted to a prank” will now be locked up for 15 years
Overreach backfires
Separation covenants exist for a purpose”
The offender will be dealt with under young offenders programs. He won’t go to jail for 15 years, but the point still stands. Politicians, especially on the right, like to grandstand about his tough they are. I get the impression that many would replace the judicial system with panels of tabloid columnists and talkback hosts, maybe with a baying mob to confirm the sentence “crucify him! Crucify him”.
As far as politicians are concerned, the justice system should be set and forget. They should do their jobs and let the courts get on with theirs.
nath @ #2727 Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 – 10:11 pm
Sexism!
Observer @ #2731 Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 – 10:20 pm
Nah. He’ll be dealt with under whatever the law was at the time of his offence. Surely the Australian legal system won’t allow him (or anyone) to be retrospectively punished under laws that haven’t even gotten past ‘thought-bubble’ stage yet.
They only increased the maximum penalty from ten to fifteen years. The minimum is still zero and that’s what the kid will get.
Stokes rejects ABC: I didn’t plot to oust PM
10:38pmDarren Davidson
Kerry Stokes has rejected a report claiming Malcolm Turnbull was rolled due to interference from him and Rupert Murdoch.
Of course its in The Australian.
Kevin Bonham
Thanks for that – and I enjoyed your “Note for Candidates” at the bottom. Very clear and very fair.
Steve777
And while I’m being a snob, I regard the current manifestations of Pentacostalism as Christianity for people who don’t like thinking too hard.
The bare storyline is generally so improbable in the first place that the Pentecostal embellishments only serve to make the deeply implausible dramatically spectacular, as if exaggeration can conceal the magic tricks.
Really…no one who applies their reasoning to the narrative is going to subscribe to it. The literalist version is no more or less fantastical than the abridged version.
So I suppose a propos of that stuff about inflation and purchasing power, that is an example of relative ‘deflation’ caused by technology changing purchasing power. though I am probably using all the wrong economic terms.
That was pretty good 🙂
For mass production with economies of scale and competitive pressures, price tend towards input costs.
See: textiles, passenger cars, durable goods, silicon chips and solar cells. Li-ion batteries are on their way there.
The vetting the states do for Australian of the Year is abysmal. So many turn out to be crooks, fakes, hopeless self-promoters etc etc.
“An Australian of the Year finalist who ran two charities spent more than $750,000 of their money on herself and her family, NSW’s Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC) has found.”
On computers and other matters of progress –
Here’s Elon with an update on his Big Fucking Rocket, and his goal of turning Earthlings into a multi-planet species, followed by an introduction to the Japanese squillionaire Yusaku Maezawa who for an undisclosed sum has come forward to buy all the seats on BFR’s first trip around the moon.
Cop this:
https://outline.com/7EFh8W (afr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV2TLnMfoYo&feature=youtu.be
In 1992 a 20GB pack of mainframe storage cost $200k. That did hold all of a large departments finance and accounts system though.
The way Elon’s been tracking lately, I think there’s a 50/50 chance that all of those passengers die horribly. He makes good batteries, but he’s not someone I’d trust to keep me alive in space for a week.
Libertarian Unionist
I remember reading something about this where the author(s?) were saying that inflation in the Western world had been over-estimated because of effects like this. For example the included features on a basic Falcon wagon were about the same as the features on the absolute top-of-the-line version from ten years before. So comparing the price increase in the basic models over that ten year gap was not really comparing ‘apples with apples’ and the truer comparison would perhaps be the top-of-the-line earlier one with the basic later one.
Diogenes
The vetting the states do for Australian of the Year is abysmal. So many turn out to be crooks, fakes, hopeless self-promoters etc etc.
They often retrospectively strip people of various awards. I have heard it argued that instead they should keep them, as it demonstrates to the organization how hopeless their vetting procedures are, and thus how meaningless the process can be.
A few famous recent knighthood strippings come to mind.
Musk misses most of his production targets by a few years so he will probably be bankrupt before the vanity project happens, saving many lives.
RR
They’d have to take back quite a few Nobel Prizes as well.
https://www.pollbludger.net/2018/09/16/ipsos-53-47-labor-5/comment-page-55/#comment-2922112
I disagree with the author(s) you paraphrase. Cascading of features doesn`t really justify claims that inflation is actually lower because people`s expectations and in many cases needs have not remained static. Someone buying a top of the line version car would not be buying the same social value of car 10 years later by buying a basic car as the features would have declined in social value, many of the safety features cascaded down would now be compulsory on all models and new top of the line features have come out in the meantime.