BARVENNON.COM
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
April 2010.
RUDDITE
Q. What is a Ruddite? A. A right wing Uddite.
The cards are not falling well for the Labour leader.
Look at
what has gone wrong. The boat people scandal. The carbon
trading scheme & Green revolution. The $3 billion Batts
fiasco. The $14 billion Building Education Revolution. The
$40 billion broadband network that we probably don't need and that
luckily hasn't happened.
And now KR wants to take over the hospitals, and he is offering money
around like it's going out of fashion & threatening the states with
a referendum if they won't come to the party. They can't come to
the party, because it appears it will rob them blind of their
GST. But the Ruddite wants a referendum anyhow, because that will
give him a chance to mobilize the people with his vision. Not to
mention the Henry report on Taxes. Wouldn't it be funny if that
increased the GST to 15%? Then that GST he got from the states
would not need any addition from general revenue.
Economist Steve Keen
is walking to Canberra because he lost a bet that the price of housing
would fall.
Interviewed on the ABC he claimed foul. The Government put a huge
new homes grant in place, and made real estate open slather for
overseas buyers. His narrative is that private debt has been
turned into public debt. (That means rich people gambled in
business and lost, so the governments of the world paid out their
bankruptcies and put all that debt onto the shoulders of the poor
people.) Both Steve Keen and George Soros seem to be of the
opinion that the new high government debt is unsustainable.
However it might take five years before the system goes to
pieces. Unless those Germans manage to stop the Greek loan.
Some people think Bush should not have acted to shore up Freddie &
Fanny.
STEVEN HAWKING
For many years I have thought him an oddity, maybe a product of our
cultural cringe about the disadvantaged. His recent announcement
that we should not seek out but rather hide
from and
avoid other spacefaring races is spot on. Such an event could, as
he suggests, signal the end of the human race.
Even if the "looting resources" plot was stolen straight from Independence
Day. Looting Earth's resources is really not a credible
reason for an advanced technology.
GOOGLE DOING GOOD
The latest report of Google is that they are collecting WIFI and MAC
information alongside the street view photos (on which they must blur
faces).
That this information might become available in the public domain is of
concern to those who think that only they (aka the DFOG = Dark Forces
of Government) should have a monopoly on personal information. My
thought is "better that everyone
becomes aware that such information exists and is readily available
than that a few power hungry individuals be the sole owners of that
database."
As for scare stories about privacy. It is often said, only the
guilty fear loss of privacy.
I am not doing anything of which I fear discovery. But it scares me is
that within a few short years the DFOG could have a real time database
of everybody. Some nameless person would be able to type (or
speak) your name into a terminal, and be told for instance that "that
person is at this moment in such and
such an apartment with such a
named person and has been there for X hours." and then provide CCTV
footage of you entering that apartment with your lover/whatever.
The potential ability to blackmail that gives to that controller of the
DFOG scares the shit out of me. At least if that information were
in the public domain, (which is what Google is trying to do) then
social mores would change, and the ability to blackmail would be
greatly reduced.
WORLD ECONOMY
The Greek problem is unsettling investors worldwide. US states
are heavying Latin immigrants. That is bad for US economy.
European states are banning Bourkas. And giving Greeks
gifts. That is bad for the European economy. Greek
unionists are on strike, quite reasonably to my mind, requiring that
their politicians suffer equal pain. Government debt in Europe
and the USA is high and going higher, mainly because legislators used
public money to bail out their banker mates (and just coincidentally, I
suspect, to protect their own investments in bonds etc.)
What do I see in my crystal ball? Ahh. The fog is
clearing. The sheep (aka investment managers) will become calmed.
The stock market will recover. It will even climb slightly until
October.
OOps. What is that I see? Fire and Brimstone? No, the fog
seeps back. The crystal ball darkens. The fates have
not revealed themselves. But October is the time of danger.
Safest is probably under the bed. Or Australian dollars. Or
gold.
Is the answer is to let the big investment houses and dinosaurs go
bust? No more government investments to help bankers?
Regeneration must come from small beginnings. From small
business. Otherwise instability & inflation will
come. And then social unrest.
Henry George
had half the answer.
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