The pond is delighted that the Caterist continues to delight in these troubled times. Not many cared for the creature feature with Uncle Elon, apart from debating the best creature, but many chortled away with the Caterist. He really does manage to make the average brick seem a little less thick than his scribbles ...
No such luck today, with the entertainment factor taking a deep dive ... (almost as deep as the entertainment factor in that UK nuke sub saga, premised on so many absurdities that the pond doesn't know where to begin, though the role that a Brexited Rish! plays in the world might be a good place).
While the Caterist is good for at least a chuckle, it's hard to get much beyond a constrained Cheshire cat smirk when it comes to Dame Groan, and the smirk soon fades...and that's why she's been relegated to the bottom of the page. How many whines and groans about pesky, difficult furriners can a possum endure?
Meanwhile, the EXCLUSIVE of the day was the lesser member of the Kelly gang, a certain Joe, channeling whining miners and emerging with plenty of ectoplasm, while elsewhere at the top of the digital edition, the reptiles could go full whale-killing wind terror machines yet again ...
And Jimbo was on hand to do real estate in a way that would make the Nine papers proud ...
Meanwhile, below the fold, the true terror began to unfold ...
The pond decided to ease in to the day slowly ... apart from the steadfast groaning, wailing and keening, it was clearly a day for the second eleven, and so the lizard Oz editorialist had to be wheeled in to fill up the gaps ...
The first one was a gimme ... because suddenly the lizard Oz was all in favour of visionary change ...
It's the whole routine about the briar patch.
First off, the lizard Oz editorialist simply refuses to acknowledge the deep and abiding love that everybody feels for talking tampons, and this tampon in particular.
Your average tampon tends to be on the quiet side but King Chuck can be relied on for a right royal waffle, and William's huge appeal makes him a certain winner in any pub contest to find the dullest man on earth.
And we know where the reptiles would stand should their urging come to pass ... alongside Captain Spud, as celebrated by Moir ...
So all the reptiles are doing are helping him with his resolutions.
The nose have it - though an open, shouty mouth should always be beneath it - so it's truly whimsical for the reptiles to offer up this briar patch solution ...
The pond realises that the lizard Oz columnists must look forward to their next topic, the rage machine must be fed, but they wanted a talking tampon, and they got one, so shut up already ...
Next up the lizard Oz editorialist helpfully summarised the latest reptile campaign designed around the rag's congenital climate science denialism ...
These days the reptiles rarely couch it as any form of denialism, the talk is always of "energy" ... and they go at it with the enthusiasm of an energiser bunny, but without a battery please ...
The funny thing is that the reptiles routinely accuse those brethren in the climate science religion of catastrophism ... yet when it comes to dear, sweet, innocent, virginal Oz coal, the reptile talk is always of gloomy, pitch-black disaster.
Meanwhile, hasn't the weather been splendid, if a tad odd, quirky and moist ...
And after that brace of celebratory Goldings, it was back to the lizard Oz editorialist ...
As for the planet? Apparently that exists in another universe ...
Enough already, time for the pond to lodge another complaint with the reptile management.
With the bromancer on an extended break, it seems the reptiles and so the pond must make do with second stringers of the Monsieur Dupont kind ...
The pond never thought it would be back to the good old days of talking about an axis of weevils ... the pond thought that was just a rusting wreck, occasionally visited by reptiles to pay homage and due obedience to their liege lord ...
But here we are, straight from Monsieur Bridge ...
Throughout the piece, the shattered remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department featured stock snaps, because who doesn't like snaps of Adolf and Tojo and the burning bush, SBS and Mark Felton included ...
With that triptych out of the way, what was left was very thin gruel ...
A mention of barking mad fundamentalist theocratic states, and no mention of the obvious one, even though real estate is obviously of interest to the reptiles?
Then it was back for some more word salad ...
Yes, yes, the war with China, but really how can we bung on a do when Generalfeldmarschall bromancer, der Armstuhl
Stubengelehrter division, is on holydays? Australia's entire defence strategy hinges on his organisational skills, and yet he seems to think that he can take a break ... and leave us all with Monsieur Dupont, rabbiting away ...
At this point the pond should play fair with Moir and show his full cartoon, because if 2023 was the calm before the storm, then the pond doesn't know the meaning of calm, especially if you happened to be trying to live in Ukraine or Gaza ...
And so at last the pond came to Dame Groan emitting an almighty groan, but traversing turf the pond is heartily sick of ...
The pond is all for a smaller country, a smaller planet, and so on and so forth, but this unrelenting, unceasing groaning and whining about pesky, difficult, uppity furriners week in, week out, is tedious beyond measure ... and so has reduced the Groaning to a specialist interest, where only devout cultists will take the time required to delve into the latest regurgitation...
The most the pond can contribute to the discussion is yet another observation regarding the astonishing decline of the lizard Oz graphics department ...
That off the shelf graphic seems to be a particular favourite of The Conversation, though it's pleasing to note that public housing in Gympie is on par with Dame Groan ...
What else? Well the pond can promise an infallible Pope to those who can make it to the bitter end ...
At this point the reptiles started to throw in images as a distraction, but they were no use at all ...
... because the pond was left with two undiluted gobbets of tedium to go ...
Look, the pond could make a half-hearted joke about Dame Groan being employed in a semi-skilled, routine job regurgitating the usual, and endlessly repeating herself, in a way that could be easily handled by an AI bot, force fed hundreds of her columns and encouraged to come up with a facsimile, but why bother?
Why extend the agony more than necessary? With just one final gobbet to endure, the pond can arrive at that promised infallible Pope ...
Does anyone still pay attention to the old duck, quacking away in her usual way?
Does anybody care about the bees buzzing in this particular part of the reptile hive mind? Perhaps white nationalists do, apparently it's a very big thing in Texas, and in Rish!'s little England ...
But the pond has read this sort of groaning way too many times now, and it's become unalloyed tedium, which is why the pond is happy to reach for a cheery infallible Pope ...
Sheesh, that's meant to be cheery? Shoot the pond now ...and carry on genociding in Gaza ...
"...the role that a Brexited Rish! plays in the world might..." I'm beginning to think that there's much in common between Rish! and SloMo.
ReplyDelete"Meanwhile, below the fold, the true terror began to unfold ..." Yeah, but why does good old Sydney versus Melbourne and James Kirby appear in both places ? Was that just normal reptile muckupery or was it a scheme to promote just one 'special' reptile ?
ReplyDeleteMonsiuer Dupont: Sandie Shaw was besotted way back in 1969
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiZxhaa87jQ
Reading this Mon. Dupont will not make anyone realise any kind of paradise so, unlike Sandie, I think I will go home.
Sloan: “The immediate effect of immigration is to dilute the capital stock, which has a negative effect on productivity.”
ReplyDeleteTypical of Judith Sloan to write about the workforce as capital stock, like people are cattle or goods. If one is increasing the number of workers via immigration then one is not diluting the workforce, but expanding it. If there is a bigger workforce, then it may push wages down, but that is what Sloan usually advocates: less costs for business.
Certain businesses have been rather good at gaming the system and not paying taxes as well as fleecing their workers of super, wages and other entitlements, but Sloan’s detective skills are focused on temporary visa holders only.
Of course, Sloan’s real gripe is that she doesn’t want governments spending any more money dealing with congestion or improving public facilities like schools, hospitals, utilities and social amenities. Remember, it’s her money!
Our Dame groans away, in her version of groundhog day. She disputes Brendan Rynne’s claim to see higher productivity from migration, with ‘there is little rigorous Australian research to back the claim.’ As a sometime member of the Commission on Productivity she should be fully aware that there is little rigorous Australian research that tells us much of anything about what promotes productivity. That Commission, until recently, was better known for also groaning that what they chose to measure as productivity was declining, and that somebody should do something about it. Its reports seldom offered even the simplest advice on what actions might increase the index of what they were measuring.
DeleteThen to her mention of ‘diluting the capital stock’. Not a common term for her - perhaps we have a new year resolution from the dear Dame to try to splice some new phrases into the template. She tells us that this “capital shallowing effect can be offset by investment. The sad reality is, absent the mining sector, this investment has failed to materialise in Australia.” That took her dangerously close to having to comment on recent patterns of investment, which would make her day uncomfortable, so - getting right back to immigration.
What she is unlikely ever to discuss is the recent period when the Reserve Bank made money virtually free to ‘financial institutions’, so that private enterprise could deliver on its claims that it is the source of all that we need to consume to make our lives fulfilling, and show that, as a nation, we are productive.
What happened to that money? Yes, a goodly slug of it went into housing - but for people with the existing asset backing to enter into ‘investment’ housing - existing buildings. Existing buildings were favoured because ‘investors’ needed new assets within the week, not in 18 months, which is about how long a new build could take. The simple arithmetic (as readily explained by the ‘advisor’ in the bank branch of your choice) was that financing on a couple percent for a few years could see capital gains, on paper, of 30+%. After those few years, the bank had a welded-on client for when the interest rate rose, but the client had enhanced equity.
OK - with virtually free money on offer, a government might have tightened rules on housing as investment - but that debate was settled two elections back, with regular broadsides from the Flagship, so no regular writer on ‘economics’ is going to give it any recognition now.
Oh, and the rest of the cheap money that was not used to paper the walls of existing ‘investment’ houses, was taken up by other arms of private enterprise - for big firms to acquire irritating competitors, who believed that myth about competition promoting better ways of doing things. We also saw a sustained run of corporations concentrating their capital stock - by buying in their own shares. Again, for very little cost in interest payments, an established company could increase the price of remaining shares, which made the shareholders happy, while senior management, whose bonuses were geared to share price, were even happier.
But our Dame cannot spare a groan for how the myths of what private enterprise claims to do for us kinda go out of focus when there is free money around, and to heck with productivity.
Australian "research" into what promotes productivity, Chad ? No, no, the reptile world is all about words: if you've got the word (and she has), then the meaning, properties, measurements etc are of no interest or concern whatsoever to any reptile.
DeleteIncrease the index ? That's not in her (or the Prod Com's) job description and never will be. Nor is calculating the index; only commenting (just the words) that the index isn't what it should be.
I've come to the conclusion though, that both Shorten (back then) and Albanese (now) both keep making the same mistake: expecting Aussie voters to be basically informed and sensible (as they never have been) and the Coalition to be at least minimally honourable (which they never have been - 9 years of Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison).
Incidentally, as far as I can grasp, the nearest to a common definition of 'productivity' seems to be "total GDP divided by total population".
GB - in other places, Elton Mayo is identified as an Australian who made useful contributions to theories of management. Not so much the 'Hawthorne Effect', which seems to have triggered endless disputation, but little inclination to test the hypotheses with better-structured trials; but for his observations on the way teams that assembled naturally (not designed by 'managers') could improve - or reduce - productivity in their tasks.
DeleteMy brief connection with Elton Mayo was back in 1974 and then entirely limited to a passing reference to the western electric Hawthorne plant - though I did gather that he wasn't just a 'one-hit wonder'. But I guess that if humanity had waited for 'managers' to organise everything, we still wouldn't have invented writing yet.
DeleteThough of course anybody with a serious hobby is ipso fact a 'self manager' and some achieve quite prodigious 'productivity' in that state. However, the 'natural state' as I understand it, is for a form of rotating management: in any group of people, self selected or not, the role of management shifts with the circumstances: at any given point, the person with most experience and/or skill in the current activity takes over a de facto 'manager' role for the group, thus achieving the group's best productivity level at all stages.
"...somebody should do something about it". Ah yes, the well known 'aorta' belief as in 'aorta do something about it'.
Delete"Does anyone still pay attention to the old duck, quacking away in her usual way?" Yeah, she does go on and on and on, doesn't she. But she does have at least a small point: it would be really good if the immigrant numbers were more in line with our capacity to absorb - you know, houses, shops, schools, hospitals, libraries, roads, railways, tramways, water and (renewable) electricity supply etc. All of that boring old stuff.
ReplyDeleteToday's Mr Ed Part I: "...the passing of Queen [Betty II] would be an appropriate time to make the transition to having an Australian citizen as the nation's head of state." But hey, it's only 75 years (from January 1949) since the title "Australian citizen" came into existence. We might yet decide we preferred being British subjects and want to go back to those heady days. Wouldn't have to buy nuclear powered subs then, since we'd already have them. And a Navy, too.
ReplyDeleteThe particularly pallid quality of Reptile writing just now sent me to John Stuart Mill’s
ReplyDelete‘Autobiography’, of his time in the office of the Examiner of India Correspondence, where he started at age 17. While generally happy with the appointment, and the relatively easy demands on him, he summarised his experience there with -
‘Writing for the press, cannot be recommended as a permanent resource to any one qualified to accomplish anything in the higher departments of literature or thought: not only on account of the uncertainty of this means of livelihood, especially if the writer has a conscience, and will not consent to serve any opinions except his own; but also because the writings by which one can live, are not the writings which themselves live, and are never those in which the writer does his best.”
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ReplyDeleteVery wise, Merc; you never know when a loose comment might turn upon you.
DeleteThat one most certainly did, GB!
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