Bigoted Laptop Ban Will Lead to Laptop Radicalisation

ABC News reports that US and UK have announced a ban on electronics and specifically laptops in carry-on luggage from Middle East airports due to fear that terrorists are making bombs  that can be concealed in electronic devices:

On Monday it emerged the US government had been considering the move since it learned of a threat several weeks ago.

US authorities believe there is a threat from plots similar to an incident a year ago in Somalia, where a bomb hidden in a laptop blew a hole in the side of a plane although failed to down it, another source said.

Airlines in other countries such as Australian carrier Qantas are likely to follow suit.

We believe this laptop ban is deeply bigoted and laptopist. Just because some  laptops could conceal explosives and be used to commit terror we shouldn’t ban all laptops.

Tarnishing all laptops with the same brush would just offend peaceful moderate laptops and lead to their radicalisation.

Melbourne’s Offensive Traffic Lights

It is wonderful to see the City of Melbourne finally tackling the really big issues. You may not know it but our traffic lights are turning us into sexist Nazi bigots through unconscious bias.

You see, because the silhouettes of little green and red people on Melbourne’s traffic lights are men, our society is drowning in misogyny and allows wicked patriarchy to flourish.

But fear not…

Pedestrian traffic lights depicting female figures will be installed in Melbourne’s CBD today as a part of a lobby group’s push for gender equality.

Ten female pedestrian figures will be installed on traffic lights at the intersection of Swanston and Flinders streets as part of a VicRoads-approved 12-month trial.

…

“The aim is to move towards one-to-one male and female representation across the state of Victoria.”

…

“Some people [read Nazi bigots] have expressed a little scepticism wondering whether it’s gesture politics rather than having any real substance”…

Minister for Women Fiona Richardson said the use of a woman’s figure on pedestrian crossings would make public space more inclusive of women.

“There are many small — but symbolically significant — ways that women are excluded from public space,” she said in a statement.

But they didn’t think it through because this proposal is incredibly racist towards people who are neither green or red.

It is also ageist. Where is the figure with a Zimmer Frame, I ask?

Not to mention it is rampantly Islamophobic because the traffic lights woman is not wearing a hijab or a burka. And what about gender fluid, neutrois or non-binary traffic lights?

According to Victorian Governor Linda Dessau:

“Some people […read Nazi bigots…] have expressed a little scepticism wondering whether it’s gesture politics rather than having any real substance,”

“But these symbols are a practical and meaningful way to demonstrate that in fact 50 per cent of our population is female and should therefore also be represented at traffic lights.”

No shit, Sherlock? But why are you forgetting the fact that 0.6% of Victorians speak Tagalog at home. Where are their traffic lights?

I also expect to see 35% of Victorian traffic light figures who are overweight or obese. We don’t want to exclude fat people from public places now, do we?

All of this is incredibly funny if it wasn’t so sad. Identity politics poisons everything and no matter how much is done it is never enough as new victim classes are created daily while the list of our imaginary crimes grows forever longer…

Unconscious Bias Keeping Women Down

ABC News Australia is reporting that even though Australia has a whole host of legislation to make it illegal to discriminate against women in a workplace, the evil patriarchy still finds the way to keep the sisters down.

They claim that phenomenon of affinity bias wickedly robs men of their functional faculties and make them make irrational hiring decisions such as appointing a less competent male over a more competent female:

Affinity or similarity bias is where people seek out those who share their backgrounds, group membership, or experiences.

If hiring managers and boards of directors are made up of mostly men who unconsciously engage in such bias, it stands to reason more men than women will continue to be hired and promoted — particularly men who share the same background with current managers.

This only serves to perpetuate the cycle of men outnumbering women in leadership positions.

As usual a suspiciously selective example of such bias is produced:

Men hold the majority of chief executive and chair positions of Australia’s top-200 publicly listed companies.

Boom!! See, the sexism it’s everywhere!!

As if every man who desires to be a CEO can just waltz in become one. Newsflash, ABC! 99.99999% of men are not CEOs either!

Besides, why don’t we ever talk about less glamorous occupations such as plumbing or mining?

What about jobs like nursing or teaching where women are over-represented? Affinity bias? Wicked females keeping the men down? Or is it maybe, just maybe a natural gender-based preference at work?

And why should we focus on just women? How many Australian CEOs are disabled or transsexual or Aboriginal or Somali? A lot less than women I bet, so why should women get all the attention?

Identity politics is poison.

Gillard can butt out

Julia Gillard says that mining companies don’t own the minerals – Australians do. One small problem… they actually do. From WA mining act:

Subject to this Act and to any conditions to which the mining lease is subject, the lessee of a mining lease … owns all minerals lawfully mined from the land under the mining lease.

Secondly the minerals are owned by states, not all Australians. Victorians have no claim on WA minerals by law. One would think a former lawyer should be across such stuff.

If Australians really think they own this stuff they can get shovels and go dig the minerals out themselves, refine them themselves, sell them to Chinese and so on. No problems. I am fine with that. If CFMU boys think it is such a doddle to make huge profits in mining why are they wasting time fighting the miners, they could just run a rival mega profitable business for the benefit of their union. Or… why not nationalise the industry and make this “our ownership” official?

How to cook the goose that lays golden eggs

The tax is not even in yet but it is already working exactly the way I said it would. No government is exempt from the laws of economics any more than they exempt from gravity…

AUSTRALIA’S global share of the capital raised for mining projects has sunk from 21 per cent to 15 per cent since 2008 as other countries such as Russia, India and China attracted tens of billions of dollars in additional funding…

The figures, which were compiled by research firm Intierra and the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, show that the value of capital raisings in Australia increased slightly from $4.3 billion to $4.5bn between 2008 and 2011.

But in the same period, the value of capital raisings rose strongly in Africa (up 26 per cent), Canada (up 31 per cent), South America (up 59 per cent) and the rest of the world (up 78 per cent)…

AMEC national policy manager Graham Short said the data proved federal and state governments had to recognise Australia must become more competitive in attracting investment…

“We have extreme concerns with things like the mining tax and carbon tax.”

It’s not going to happen until we vote the most economically illiterate government of modern times out of the office.

If windmills were so good, combustion engines would’ve never taken off

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide. 

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now…

In a wish to be seen as modern, (politicians) will embrace all manner of fashionable causes. When this sets in — groupthink grips political parties, and the media therefore decide there is no debate — the gravest of errors can take root. The subsidising of useless wind turbines was born of a deep intellectual error, one incubated by failure to challenge conventional wisdom.

It is precisely this consensus-worshipping, heretic-hunting environment where the greatest errors can be made. There are some 3,500 wind turbines in Britain, with hundreds more under construction. It would be a shame for them all to be dismantled. The biggest one should remain, like a crane on an abandoned quay, for future generations to marvel at. They will never be an efficient way to generate power. But there can be no better monument to the folly of mankind.

We are all rich now!

Gee… I honestly didn’t see that one coming. Cutting the “welfare for the wealthy” means everybody pays more:

HEALTH insurance premiums will jump by an average 5.06 per cent, or about $150 a year for typical family cover and even more for high earners, who also face losing all or part of the health fund rebate this year.
Premiums for families on high incomes could rise by more than $200 a year, and singles by more than $100 a year, once the new provisions for means testing of the rebate kick in. Premiums will rise from April 1.

Thank you ALP!

And thank you for this too:

ELECTRICITY generators have warned that they face a cashflow crunch of hundreds of millions of dollars to buy carbon tax permits as the latest greenhouse gas emissions figures suggest almost $4 billion of the $7.7bn to be raised in the first year of the policy will come from power companies…

The companies told The Australian yesterday they would try to recoup the cost through higher electricity prices, but because prices are set by bids in the national electricity market, they are uncertain how much they will be able to recover.

And this:

VIRGIN Australia says its domestic ticket prices will rise by as much as $6 per flight due to the federal government’s carbon pricing scheme.

Here are a couple of campaign slogans Julia may want to use:

ALP – Dedicated to lowering your standard of living!

ALP – Driving your prices higher!

ALP – Moving your prices forward!

ALP – Make Prosperity History!

Links via Andrew Bolt

Calculus for ALP members

I said it once and I will say it again. Why are ALP types so hopelessly bad at math? via Andrew Bolt:

Reader K, a chartered accountant, writes:

I note Health Minister Tanya Plibersek is claiming the ALP’s Health Insurance Reforms stop people earning $50K subsidising the health insurance of people earning $250K.

You might be interested to know that a person earning $50K pa pays $5,400 pa including Medicare levy. A person earning $250K pa pays $89,800 pa including Medicare levy. That’s 16.6 times more tax despite only earning 5 times as much income.

Does Tanya Plibersek seriously think people earning $250K spend 16.6 times more time in hospitals? Indeed on a related topic does she think $250K people have 16.6 times more children being educated by the Government? The suggestion that someone who has paid $89,800 in tax might at best get about $1500 back in a rebate for health insurance is some how bludging off the person paying only $5,400 is so utterly preposterous that one wonders how absurdly innumerate Plibersek is to have arrived at this conclusion.

Struggling to count our money

Some brilliant news for the workers in a struggling industry:

GM Holden has agreed to an extraordinary wage deal that will lift the income of 4000 employees by up to 22 per cent by 2014, despite the carmaker seeking a taxpayer-funded assistance package from the Gillard government. In a deal hailed by union leaders as “spectacular”, workers will receive a “guaranteed” 18.3 per cent increase over the next three years, with some workers to receive up to 22.3 per cent.

Even better:

The Australian has obtained full details of the agreement, which the union said contained no productivity trade-offs… Federal Liberal MP Jamie Briggs yesterday questioned pay rises previously awarded to Holden employees, saying recent enterprise agreements did not appear to be delivering productivity and efficiency gains. Mr Briggs said if taxpayers are “handing over large wads of cash”, they would expect that companies receiving support would make improvements to their operations.

This is absolutely shameful. In a modern Australian context, or should I say in ALP/union Orwellian double-speak, a “struggling industry” means an industry that rewards its unproductive workers with money extorted from the taxpayer. Furthermore it feels entitled to reward its workforce over and above of what the taxpaying suckers can expect themselves.

This a brilliant new economy that Gillard government is building.

Aussies are backward!!!

Aussies are always a few years behind times:

The European Union is for the first time clearly questioning whether it should press ahead with long-term plans to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if other countries don’t follow suit, in what could herald a significant policy shift for a region that has been at the forefront of advocating action to combat climate change. The document is unambiguous about the risks if Europe acts alone. “It has to be seen clearly that there are risks associated to unilateral EU action,” the commission says in its draft. “There is a trade-off between climate-change policies and competitiveness. Europe cannot act alone in an effort to achieve global decarbonization,” the paper says.

Meanwhile…

Japan is reconsidering plans to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 25% by 2020 due to a rethinking of its energy future, and the country is worried that it is spending too much on carbon-credit programs, a senior government official said on Wednesday. “Japan’s wealth has been draining out” due to buying carbon credits from East European countries and China, Mr. Nobutani said.  METI estimates Japan has paid as much as ¥800 billion ($10.4 billion) to buy 400 million metric tons of carbon credits.

But ALP says it will be all sweet and the Treasury has models that prove that the logic, reason and reality are wrong!

via Andrew Bolt