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.
Tom
Yes I remember discussion of that proposal saying pretty much that – expectations changing etc. And for some things like hard drives as people here have been discussing it would imply a massive deflation has happened, which is obviously not the case for basic goods such as bread and milk. The other thing about those people’s (person? – can’t remember the author or authors) argument was they were querying whether to apply it to calculations of things like pensions and unemployment benefits. Which even to a non-economist like myself seemed askew, because the items you would be “bundling up” in your calculations would almost certainly not be the items that your target population was buying.
BJ Jazzkat ️ @jazzkat
14h14 hours ago
.@TheAusInstitute polled #AusPol federal seat of Hume.
Liberal primary vote crashes to 39.7% (down from 53.83 at 2016 election)
47.8% say #NEG should include emissions reduction target.
63.7% support moratorium on building new #coal mines
@simonahac
My first computer was a Vic 20 I think, we could not afford a Commodore 64.
Then my sons started getting second-hand parts and built their own. I used the ones at uni, about 1985. when I did an Intro to Computing which I did as an elective. It was in the Teaching Course. They taught us to write a little program to make on-screen colour bursts go off it the user answered an arithmetic question correctly. I did not really appreciate that I was learning to code well before anyone outside of the IT field.
I have never had to buy a desktop unit as my kids and me just built what I wanted. Laptops are a different kettle of fish of course. But I am probably a bit more IT aware than a lot of may age. And maybe youngsters who have never actually opened up the devices they use.
RR, spot on.
For cars, rising standards – safety and emissions – drove relative cost increases while production costs plummeted. I heard a Toyota person speaking to ATSE a few years ago say that they make about $20 profit on each Corolla sold wholesale.
John Quiggin, I think it was, put forward the idea that social democracy in practice can be used to raise these sorts of quality standards to the benefit of consumers, who are in the large workers, at the expense of capital. The pressure to always improve means that businesses selling durable goods are competing against future, improved versions of themselves, so in order to sell to customers now, they have to keep prices close to costs. Otherwise customers will wait a bit to get the newer better version (at the margin, ceteris paribus etc.).
Going off on a tangent, by this same reasoning we could implicitly tax rental property owners by forcing them to provide dwellings of (increasing) minimum standards, e.g. wrt thermal performance. FWIW, Energy Consumers Australia and a whole flotilla of industry and advocacy bodies are mounting a push for this.
Going off on another tangent related to tangents, I just finished setting an exam in which one question involves using Netwon-Raphson to compute pi, with an embedded Taylor series approximation of the arctangent function. The kids are going to love it.
Diogenes
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-medical-practice-sued-over-death-of-diabetic-boy-20180919-p504r4.html
Aidan’s father Jeff, mother Lily Pan and grandmother Guo Ying Yin have launched legal action against Mr Xiao, as well as the medical centre and its director, former Australian GP of the Year Chin Ven Tan.
LU
When I was doing maths, I remember some of that iterative numerical analysis approach in a computing subject I was doing. And recently quite by chance I came across an article written by my tutor in that subject – and right now I can’t even remember her name – and it was something strange to do with information theory.
One of our children asked me yesterday “Why is there any inflation?” and all I could offer was that some degree of inflation encouraged people to spend money because firstly the value of that money was declining, and likewise the price of goods and services was rising so a “buyers strike” could happen in the case of deflation.
What is the most succinct answer to that question? Any takers? I am off to bed so will await the answers.
The Age joins in: https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/turnbull-lodged-complaint-with-murdoch-over-coverage-in-last-days-of-his-prime-ministership-20180919-p504rd.html
Occam’s Razor says that of course Murdoch and Stokes did what we all saw them do. And then simply resolved to lie about it later.
Not sure how any of that is news, or why any media outlet would take their denials seriously. Well, except for that Murdoch owns most of them, I guess.
Rocket Rocket,
Inflation is basically a tax on cash — the government makes profit when it buys back old, damaged bank notes at face value equal to the inflation that has occurred since those bank notes were originally issued (seignorage). This profit forms part of the dividend that is paid by the Reserve Bank to the Federal Government and reduces the tax it would otherwise have to collect from taxpayers.
A small amount of inflation is good — it encourages people to invest their money or spend it as it will otherwise decline in value, and, as mentioned above, provides a way to tax cash. Too much inflation, however, begins to distort the market.
Deflation is bad, because you can “earn” simply by stuffing your money in your pillowcase or under your floorboards. This reduces the incentive to invest or spend, and the economy will shrink.
With a fiat currency the rate of inflation/deflation can be controlled (or heavily influenced) via monetary policy. Independent reserve banks (like ours) are normally given a target range that they should try to achieve (2-3 percent average over the medium term in the case of Australia). Since monetary policy is an imperfect mechanism it needs to have a bit of a buffer and the range needs to be far enough away from 0 that there’s little risk of deflation.
New thread.
The person behind the user handle “alias” wishes to advise that Alias is going to walk the Camino de Santiago for several months, and then spend time in a cave a la the late great Leonard Cohen. He may not be back for some time.
Puffy:
[‘I’ve have never read Dawkins.’]
If you’ve you never read him, how could you comment thereof?
Hola Bludgers
I have been busy so am trying to catch up.
The following SMH article is absolutely shitful. Just when you thought that MSM journalism was at rock bottom a true flog comes along and proves you wrong.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-are-all-at-sea-describing-captain-cook-with-a-rank-he-never-had-20180920-p5053j.html
Fuck. Me.
In the 18th and 19th century a “post captain” was an official “captain”. The notion that “captain” referrred to some higher rank – one that reflected the command of a larger ship is just bullshit.
The “post” in “Post Captain” simply reflects that the holder of the the rank of “captain” was “posted” in the navy Gazette.
That is not to say that there wasn’t a degree of ambiguity about commissioned ranks in the Royal Navy in the 18th century, but that ambiguity relates to the rank of Commander and also in relation to the temporary rank of Commodore.
Traditionally, going back to antiquity, any commissioned officer in the Royal Navy that commanded a vessel as least as large as a sloop was entitled to be referred to as a Captain whilst in command on board that vessel.
By the time of Cook’s first vessel the phrase “commander” had unofficially started to be used, and by the time of the American Revolution it seems that the phrase “Master and Commander” was in usage, especially for those officers who commanded vessels that were obviously large enough to be called ships butt were rated below 20 main guns. At some point, and this seems to be unclear when it was, such officers were referred to as Captains, even when not on board the ships they commanded. However, these officers remained officially on the Lieutenants list in the Navy Gazette.
BUT at some point – and again the date seems unclear, but probably between the end of the American revolution and the beginning of the war against revolutionary France in 1793 the Lord Commissioners of the Commiteee executing the Office of Lord High Admiral considered it appropriate to establish an official Commanders List in the Navy Gazette. Such officers were commonaly referred to as Masters and Commanders, signifying that they commanded ships but ones small enough to require that they also fulfill the role of sailing Master as well as ships Captain (although ironically it seems that the ships that these officers did actually command during the wars against France between 1993 and 1815 usually had a sailing master, lol). Further they were referred to by the honorific of Captain onshore, even when they were between commands.
Cook’s Royal Navy Career is quite unusual. He was a successful merchant captain (called Master) when he was effectively head hunted to join the RN in his late 20s because of his expertise in navigation and cartography. There is a myth that he started off as a simple sailor – The only evidence of which is the fact that he was first entered onto the ship’s log as an able seaman. The significance of the fact that he received his Warrant as a Masters Mate a month later is usually overlooked. In truth he joined a ship that was tasked with specialist and largely secret survey work as part of the Seven Years War as the special assistant to THE navigation sailing master of the age. Because there was period for the Admiralty to issue the relevant warrant Cook was simply entered as an able seaman until the paperwork was sorted, but he was always a senior NCO: A ‘Masters Mate’ was a Senior warrant officer, ranking only below the Sailing Master himself, the Purser and the Surgeon in the ships company.
At the end of the Seven Years War Cook had been promoted to the Warrant rank of Sailing Master – a person who had passed his examination for commission as a lieutenant but had chosen to be not commissioned, rather to pursue what was quite a specialist and niche calling. Many Sailing Masters often ended up in post Navy employment as a merchant master and with their Royal Navy pedigree could look to secure appointment with either the East India Company or similar – veritable licences to print money.
It seemed that by the end of the Seven Years War Cook elected not to be commissioned but was rather setting himself up to return to the Merchant service, but events unexpectedly took a different turn – he was commissioned as a Lieutenant upon being selected for the joint Admiralty-Royal Society expedition and was entitled to the honorific as ‘Lieutenant in Command’ when ashore and ‘Captain’ when aboard the Endeavour. By the time of his second voyage he had acquired the honorific of Master. When he was made Post before his third voyage he had actually achieved the highest merit based promotion possible – simply put: if he lived long enough his name would creep ever high on the Captains list in the Navy Gazette until finally he attained the rank of Admiral by virtue of seniority alone. Of course, getting speared in Hawaii put paid to that.
All that I have posted are ascertainable facts. The ‘journalist’ who wrote this crappy article should – like Admiral Byng- be taken out and shot dead on the quarter deck!
‘Great work, Emma X’: bombshell text
Alberici
12:00amDEBORAH CORNWALL
A text from new ABC acting chair Kirstin Ferguson to reporter Emma Alberici threatens to derail the relationship with Canberra.
Headline in Oz.
In addition to objectively verifiable skills, effective political leadership involves intangible qualities of charisma and presentation that induce large numbers of people to trust and respect that person.
But the good news for Bill Shorten is that he can learn from some of the most charismatic leaders in history.
See this video for a demonstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtEHJlW3G8o