From: TimC on
On 2010-08-12, Noddy (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
>
> "Clocky" <notgonn(a)happen.com> wrote in message
> news:4c641e5e$0$11126$c3e8da3(a)news.astraweb.com...
>
>> Our local primary school is finally getting proper classrooms in place of
>> the demountables that were placed as a temporary solution about a decade
>> ago and I'm pretty happy about that.
>
> I'm sure there's been some good has come out of it, but for every good story
> there seems to be ten tales of woe. Like the school who had 27 hot water
> heating units fitted to their change rooms that had three showers :)

Cite please? I mean, not in a Andrew bolt column like this one:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_how_rudd_blows_your_billions

Did you mean 17 hot water supplies? At Koondrook-Barham club? You
may be interested that the Herald Shun misreprented the facts as
usual.

Listen to this interview (15 minutes into the audio file provided),
where the president of the football club reveals that the Shun appear
to have either invented numbers, or gotten the (false) numbers off
someone else and have attributed them to him in their front page
story:

http://blogs.abc.net.au/victoria/2010/03/indian-toddler-case-concerns-football-president-slams-herald-sun-insulation-scheme-flawed-and-sby-in.html?site=melbourne&program=melbourne_mornings

The club has 6 football sides, 8 netball sides, umpires for each game, and
on a typical saturday, gets 160-200 uses out of the showers, according to
the president. The old heaters, all 4 of them, naturally ran out very
early in the day. And it was for 15 showers, not 4.

Note there was no retraction in the Shun (don't want to let facts get in
the way of a good story).

>> The pink-batt scheme was good in principle but they fucked up the
>> implementation, they should have rolled it out over a longer period and
>> made sure that the installers were existing, reputable people. They left
>> the gate open for shonks, that's where they fucked up.
>
> How they fucked it up is irrelevant. The point is that they fucked it up,
> and it became a *huge* mess that lead to the deaths of some people and a
> number of houses destroyed by fire.
>
> It was an *appalling* episode in government bungling.

I would say it was a failure to estimate the malice involved in the
typical shonkster. There's a fuckload of greedy idiots out there.
They weren't accounted for properly. Pity we can't assume that
everyone's not an arsehole.



--
TimC
I'm all for computer dating, but I wouldn't want one to marry my sister. --unk
From: TimC on
On 2010-08-12, Doug Jewell (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
> For that matter, if things did go belly up into a full-blown
> recession and we hit 10% unemployment, it would have been
> cheaper to pay the unemployed $35k/year for 2 years, than
> the Labor stimulus. Such spending would have still had an
> equivalent stimulus effect anyway.
> What labor did was waste. Pure and simple.

2 problems. No government could give $35K/year to unemployed people,
because conservative rant radio would have a field day about all of
that lower class welfare. Takes away from the available pool of money
to give as middle and upper class welfare. Can't have that. Piers
Ackerman, Lawsie and Bolty would have a heart attack and die! And the
voters who listen to those gateways of pubic opinion would miss their
their regular fix and be sad, and would have to go out and vote to get
rid of the party in question.

2nd problem is that the 35000*0.05*20e6=35 billion dollars you're
allocating to said welfare[1] is about the same amount of money the
government spent on the stimulus, from memory (16 billion for the
schools, a few billion for the pink batts installed by dodgy
con-artists, and a few other smaller measures). Where the deficit
comes in, is the reduced taxation taken on the smaller amount of
economic activity that has been happening during the recession. Your
plan would have not changed this. Unemployed people do not produce
anything that can be taxed (not until we have a carbon tax and start
taxing farts). So the difference between the 2 "plans" is one keeps
the people employed and doing nominally useful and productive things
(like running banks. Ok, don't laugh. Economically "useful"
perhaps), and in the other plan, they would be sitting on their arses.


[1] Assuming you only want to give it to the extra 5% of unemployed,
not including the original 5% of people that are always unemployed
regardless of the prevailing economic conditions; double it to 70
billion if you want to include those dregs of society in the payment
too.


--
TimC
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
From: Doug Jewell on
TimC wrote:
> On 2010-08-12, Doug Jewell (aka Bruce)
> was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
>> For that matter, if things did go belly up into a full-blown
>> recession and we hit 10% unemployment, it would have been
>> cheaper to pay the unemployed $35k/year for 2 years, than
>> the Labor stimulus. Such spending would have still had an
>> equivalent stimulus effect anyway.
>> What labor did was waste. Pure and simple.
>
> 2 problems. No government could give $35K/year to unemployed people,
> because conservative rant radio would have a field day about all of
> that lower class welfare. Takes away from the available pool of money
> to give as middle and upper class welfare. Can't have that. Piers
> Ackerman, Lawsie and Bolty would have a heart attack and die! And the
> voters who listen to those gateways of pubic opinion would miss their
> their regular fix and be sad, and would have to go out and vote to get
> rid of the party in question.
>
> 2nd problem is that the 35000*0.05*20e6=35 billion dollars you're
> allocating to said welfare[1] is about the same amount of money the
> government spent on the stimulus, from memory (16 billion for the
> schools, a few billion for the pink batts installed by dodgy
> con-artists, and a few other smaller measures). Where the deficit
> comes in, is the reduced taxation taken on the smaller amount of
> economic activity that has been happening during the recession. Your
> plan would have not changed this. Unemployed people do not produce
> anything that can be taxed (not until we have a carbon tax and start
> taxing farts). So the difference between the 2 "plans" is one keeps
> the people employed and doing nominally useful and productive things
> (like running banks. Ok, don't laugh. Economically "useful"
> perhaps), and in the other plan, they would be sitting on their arses.
>
>
> [1] Assuming you only want to give it to the extra 5% of unemployed,
> not including the original 5% of people that are always unemployed
> regardless of the prevailing economic conditions; double it to 70
> billion if you want to include those dregs of society in the payment
> too.

Of course doing that type of payment would be problem bound.
I wasn't suggesting they should actually have done it - I
was making the point of how much money they spent to achieve
not a lot. Perhaps to reword the statement - it cost more
than $70k for every job saved.

Reality is, the way the stimulus was handled has merely dug
a hole for the future. If things get really pear-shaped in
the future, we've got no money left to pull through. If
things get rosy in the future, we won't be able to reap the
full benefits because we'll be hamstrung by the huge debt.
--
What is the difference between a duck?
From: Jason James on

"Doug Jewell" <ask(a)and.maybe.ill.tell.you> wrote in message
news:qLWdnfbloeWC1vjRnZ2dnUVZ_jCdnZ2d(a)westnet.com.au>

> Reality is, the way the stimulus was handled has merely dug a hole for the
> future. If things get really pear-shaped in the future, we've got no money
> left to pull through. If things get rosy in the future, we won't be able
> to reap the full benefits because we'll be hamstrung by the huge debt.

Yeah, but,..we all got $900 odd smackers,..in terms of tax we pay, that is a
mere fraction. OTOH, the bungled infrastructure projects were a turkey-shoot
waste of money.

Jason