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open24hours posted:So do rich people. I think we're well past the era when the analogy was actually applicable to consumer goods. Everyone buys the same mass produced crap these days, and rich people aren't getting any extra value when they buy Louis Vuitton bags. Clothing maybe, but think about things like cars, furniture, housing and most appliances.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:05
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open24hours posted:So do rich people. I think we're well past the era when the analogy was actually applicable to consumer goods. Everyone buys the same mass produced crap these days, and rich people aren't getting any extra value when they buy Louis Vuitton bags. This is pretty wrong when you're discerning enough to buy footwear based on their quality. I sure as gently caress know where my shoes are made, that they're made by people who aren't being exploited and that I can expect them to last several years.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:06
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open24hours posted:So do rich people. I think we're well past the era when the analogy was actually applicable to consumer goods. Everyone buys the same mass produced crap these days, and rich people aren't getting any extra value when they buy Louis Vuitton bags. I think it applies more to larger things, like whitegoods or furniture or other fittings in a home. People stuck eternally renting don't get as much choice or opportunity to invest in quality, even if their income is otherwise decent enough to save up for one really nice thing at a time.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:09
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Lizard Combatant posted:Clothing maybe, but think about things like cars, furniture, housing and most appliances. I'm still not entirely sure. OK a couch that costs $10k might last you 50 years instead of 10, but that's still more expensive than five $1k couches. The kinds of things that rich people buy seem to be all about brand and posturing rather than quality. [EDIT: It probably still works when you compare the poor to the middle class though]
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Apr 17, 2015 06:10
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open24hours posted:So do rich people. I think we're well past the era when the analogy was actually applicable to consumer goods. Everyone buys the same mass produced crap these days, and rich people aren't getting any extra value when they buy Louis Vuitton bags. The idea holds firm in consumer goods and services, absolutely. I have had a pair of dress shoes I've owned for ten years, quality leather does not fall apart. In many cases, yes, the markup is purely for the label and its made in the same factory as the stuff in target, but if you do your research you quickly find that there's a big difference in quality and durability in a pair of Allen Edmonds than there is from those 90% plastic Julius Marlowes that are 'on special' at Myers. Reconstituted (retread) tyres are a terrific example. They cost half as much, last a quarter as long! (Also may put your car into a ditch). See also: car batteries, light bulbs, cheap kitchen appliances from china, those terrible old DVD players that you would get from the supermarket where the laser would burn out after 3 months, etc etc. Anything that needs to endure wear and tear falls under this rule. EDIT: I remember, back around ten years ago, going around to garage sales looking for old dvd players we needed for some dumb little art project. I roll up to this one guys house and he has like 6, at first I assume he's nicked them, but he says they are all broken. Every last one was one of those no name supermarket brands. He got mad when I offered him 20$, said he had spent well over 250$ on them collectively. hiddenmovement fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Apr 17, 2015 |
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Apr 17, 2015 06:14
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Well how about this example - we've got this lovely vanity in our bathroom that's half made of loving particle board. If we owned this place instead of renting it, we might very well decide it's totally worth shelling out good money to get a really flash one instead, that not only looks nicer but is easier to keep clean and maintain, and doesn't have all those potential health hazards of formaldehyde or whatever poo poo they put in loving particle board. We have enough saved up we could buy something nice and consider that worth it. But not if it's not even our drat house. So that money's just going to sit around for years in savings towards a home deposit instead, while we hope that housing prices crash sometime before the sea levels rise up enough to drown this whole cuntinent. There might not be as many direct examples of a random thing off the shelf these days like there is in the Boots story, but there's still a lot of opportunities for getting better quality of life on a similar budget IF you have the privilege of stability and access to the real estate market.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:21
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A vanity isn't the same thing as boots though. A new vanity might be nicer and make you feel better, but it's not going to save you money in the long or short term.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:26
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Kim Jong ill posted:This is pretty wrong when you're discerning enough to buy footwear based on their quality. I sure as gently caress know where my shoes are made, that they're made by people who aren't being exploited and that I can expect them to last several years. For sure.. I just bought a pair of RM Williams boots which cost me a fuckload compared to the Dunlop Volleys I normally wear. From all reports the RMs should last 10-15 years if you look after them.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:28
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I remember buying a pair of Dr Martens in the 90s that lasted ~8 years. Bought a new pair a couple of years ago and the leather started cracking within months. Found out they moved most of their manufacturing offshore to China while increasing their prices.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:29
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I will bet real money that when the GST gets raised it will be accompanied by cutting stamp duty.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:34
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QUACKTASTIC posted:I remember buying a pair of Dr Martens in the 90s that lasted ~8 years. They do still have a made in England line, but I'd recommend Solovair. They made the original DMs anyway and haven't flushed their working class credentials down the toilet.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:35
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Mr Chips posted:Replace stamp duty with an land value tax. like rates?
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Apr 17, 2015 06:35
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QUACKTASTIC posted:I remember buying a pair of Dr Martens in the 90s that lasted ~8 years. It's not the manufacturing, it's the materials. They use this thing called 'grain corrected leather' which is a nice way of saying there's a thin layer of leather underneath a large pile of various polymer and wood based materials. It's a real scam, because 95% of people look at the good shoe made by an actual cobbler using kangaroo leather by some 150 year old tannery and can't figure out why it's 3x more than this cool shiny shoe sold over the road. 'What kind of sucker would pay that much? Ha!' and then they waddle over the road to Novo shoes for the 3rd time in a year.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:37
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open24hours posted:A vanity isn't the same thing as boots though. A new vanity might be nicer and make you feel better, but it's not going to save you money in the long or short term. That stuff about making you feel better is an important part of the story, though. Even if the price of boots was set a bit different so Vimes ended up spending exactly as much on several pairs of poo poo boots as a rich person spent on their one pair of nice boots by the time they needed a repair, he still has a worse outcome - he's spent all that time wearing lovely boots instead and getting wet feet. It doesn't matter what particular type of product we're talking about, or if it's an everyday thing or not. The point to the whole parable is, if you have reserves of capital to draw on, or the privilege and opportunity to make any kind of financial or business decisions that a poor person is simply ineligible to make, you can reap better rewards. And in the long term, once you've gotten over that up-front cost, it can often work out that you aren't even spending all that much more than the poorer person. In some cases, you can even end up spending less. This becomes especially true when it comes to more direct financial things like loans. Here in Australia, I think the examples of quality of life from how you can fit out your home are especially relevant, since even Australians who earn a decent wage otherwise can still be shut out from our insanely overpriced market.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:38
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Gough Suppressant posted:like rates? council rates are a fee for services, aren't they? Or just raise the LVT to a level where is can fund all local govt operations too, and get rid of rates.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:39
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Mr Chips posted:Replace stamp duty with an land value tax.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:41
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Bifauxnen posted:That stuff about making you feel better is an important part of the story, though. Even if the price of boots was set a bit different so Vimes ended up spending exactly as much on several pairs of poo poo boots as a rich person spent on their one pair of nice boots by the time they needed a repair, he still has a worse outcome - he's spent all that time wearing lovely boots instead and getting wet feet. Another thing we have not mentioned is that when you have to keep replacing cheap poo poo, you have to keep going to the shops to replace it. This takes time and money as well. Wouldn't it be nice NOT to have to spend your Saturday morning wandering around some lovely shopping center trying not to get ripped off?
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Apr 17, 2015 06:41
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Yeah, it's one of the things that keeps popping up in every tax review. I pinch most of my ideas from the Henry Reveiw, TBH
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Apr 17, 2015 06:41
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Bifauxnen posted:That stuff about making you feel better is an important part of the story, though. Even if the price of boots was set a bit different so Vimes ended up spending exactly as much on several pairs of poo poo boots as a rich person spent on their one pair of nice boots by the time they needed a repair, he still has a worse outcome - he's spent all that time wearing lovely boots instead and getting wet feet. Bifauxnen posted:It doesn't matter what particular type of product we're talking about, or if it's an everyday thing or not. The point to the whole parable is, if you have reserves of capital to draw on, or the privilege and opportunity to make any kind of financial or business decisions that a poor person is simply ineligible to make, you can reap better rewards. And in the long term, once you've gotten over that up-front cost, it can often work out that you aren't even spending all that much more than the poorer person. In some cases, you can even end up spending less. This becomes especially true when it comes to more direct financial things like loans. The point of the post wasn't to say that the rich don't enjoy significant advantages over the poor, just that quality of consumer goods, even cheap ones, has increased dramatically and there isn't really a linear relationship between cost and quality anymore.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:44
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Mr Chips posted:council rates are a fee for services, aren't they? it's sort of a hybrid. At least in Victoria. The council forms a budget estimate, looks at gross property value within its bounds, then works out the rates it needs to levy to acheive the income necessary.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:45
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Kim Jong ill posted:They do still have a made in England line, but I'd recommend Solovair. They made the original DMs anyway and haven't flushed their working class credentials down the toilet. These look very nice, cheers.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:46
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Watching Dr Karl Kruszelnicki’s TED Talk-style video spruiking the Intergenerational Report is an exercise in enduring secondhand humiliation. Dr Karl, a man most Australians know for his groundbreaking work on the origins of belly button fluff, has now publicly disavowed the report, claiming he wasn’t aware of its partisan political nature or lack of focus on climate change. It’s tough to make a call about who has come out of this situation looking worse. Is it Dr Karl, who took money to explain the purpose of an economic document he wasn’t qualified to analyse and now says he hadn’t even read in full? Or is it the federal government, which has demonstrated a stunning lack of respect for the electorate by hanging Dr Karl out to dry, and failing to respond to his criticisms? Either way, and whatever Dr Karl’s rationalisations after the fact, he was the perfect choice to “sell” the report to the electorate. He is trusted to communicate simple and indisputable scientific explanations for everyday conundrums: Why does lightning strike the same place twice? What’s more hygenic, paper towels or hand dryers? Are cooked mussels safe only if they are open? So if you want to frame a particular set of unfair economic propositions as an incontestable “fact” on the same level as “bacteria cause body odour”, who better to use as a salesman than Dr Karl, Australia’s respected Everyday Science Dad? Portraying brutal inequalities as natural, scientific and indisputable has been a winning strategy for rightwing ideologues, because by doing so there’s no need for them to justify the effect of their politics on the poor. If Dr Karl hadn’t belatedly come to his senses that approach might have worked as intended, despite the flaws of the IGR having been thoroughly dissected. Greg Jericho called it a “farrago of idiocy,” noting that its conclusions follow from arbitrary assumptions about future tax rates. Lenore Taylor noted that the challenge wasn’t nearly as scary as Hockey made out. Stephen Koukoulas said to ignore the scaremongering, that the budget would likely be in a favourable state over the next decade and that future predictions were more “rubbery”. And writing in the Monthly, economist Richard Denniss characterised the IGR as a dishonest attempt to scare Australians into accepting a conservative agenda of low tax and poor services. “If we wanted to have some of the world’s best health, education and public transport systems, we could,” he wrote. “The IGR doesn’t show that we are broke. It shows that if we want to keep cutting taxes we will have to cut spending.” This has been the government’s consistent approach to policy communication: rather than presenting its agenda as the best option among many, it fabricates external crises that create the illusion of necessity. Its program then appears to be the only sensible response, and anyone who suggests a different approach is leading the country to ruin. Joe Hockey’s “budget emergency,” which he has admitted doesn’t exist, was used to justify the necessity of austerity policies that would have had disastrous consequences for the most vulnerable were they not (mostly) held up in parliament. The consequences of Australia’s ageing population are presented as another such bogeyman. In a pre-2013 election address to the Institute of Public Affairs, Hockey laid out the consequences of demographic change: I believe that this will involve some resetting of the national mindset on the role of government ... Addressing the ongoing fiscal crises will involve the winding back of universal access to payments and entitlements from the state. This will require the redefining of the concept of mutual obligation and the reinvigoration of a culture of self reliance. So, it turns out, the “tough choices” politicians are forced to make by the realities of the IGR happen to be the ones we know they’ve wanted to make all along. There’s another contradiction here. Why does the IGR, meant to be an “impartial” or at least rigorous evidence-based document from Treasury, need to be sold to the public by a professional communicator and an advertising agency? Since when does research performed by non-partisan public servants require any other authority to establish its integrity? Surely the debate over the IGR should be over the consequences of its findings, rather than the integrity of the report itself. In his retraction, and especially by admitting he wasn’t given the opportunity to scrutinise the report properly before promoting it, Dr Karl inadvertently shown that the constraints this government puts itself under are those it chooses for itself. By selectively portraying itself as hamstrung by factors beyond its control, as Denniss wrote in the Monthly, Hockey et al shut down alternative views without having to honestly argue against them. But Dr Karl’s stuff up, far from being a spur to own up to this approach, is already being spun as having proved the government’s central contention about spending. As Chris Kenny wrote on Thursday, the mistake of hiring Dr Karl in the first place was “a classic case of how governments never spend other people’s money as wisely as individuals and the private sector spend theirs, the multi-million dollar campaign (we don’t know the exact cost) was fronted by a trenchant government critic”. “Better to save taxpayers the cost of the campaign and just spruik the importance of the report yourselves — you know, like politicians used to do, by advocating and prosecuting arguments,” Kenny continued, somehow missing the point that Hockey needed the IGR to be seen as neutral and not owned by his government in order to claim its authority for his “reforms”. Dr Karl’s conscience has clearly compelled him to front the public and admit he had no idea what he was talking about, and he’s pledged to donate his fee to needy schools. He made an understandable mistake in assuming a report from Treasury might not be so partisan. Dr Karl should be cut some slack for having owned up to “not realising the nature of the beast that I was involved with”. After all, as the whole scandal shows, the IGR does really belong to the government, and so do its assumptions. So if Hockey and his government consider its findings (and the consequences that flow from them) to be as natural and non-negotiable as the burps, farts and earwax that make up Dr Karl’s oeuvre, then they need to make that case. Want to say austerity is as natural as belly button fluff? Then hire Dr Karl http://gu.com/p/47hg4
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Apr 17, 2015 06:47
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Bifauxnen posted:This becomes especially true when it comes to more direct financial things like loans. What's that? You can afford a 20% deposit? Oh, well, let me wave that mortgage insurance for you, saving you tens of thousands of dollars a year.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:47
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katlington posted:
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Apr 17, 2015 06:58
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Kim Jong ill posted:Not only is this not illegal, it's incredibly common. I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion? I was pretty sure that in order to be a lecturer (not a tutor, demonstrator etc) for an undergraduate subject you needed a postgraduate qualification. Here for example where it specifically calls out needing postgrad study.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:08
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My gf buys Kmart $4 sweatshop shoes for work every two months even though I keep telling her to just buy one decent pair.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:12
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bowmore posted:My gf buys Kmart $4 sweatshop shoes for work every two months even though I keep telling her to just buy one decent pair. Time to show her the romance of a Net Present Value calculation.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:14
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True story Dr. Karl walked past me today when I was eating lunch at Ralph's. Did I demonstrate ideological impurity by not murdering him?
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Apr 17, 2015 07:17
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hooman posted:I was pretty sure that in order to be a lecturer (not a tutor, demonstrator etc) for an undergraduate subject you needed a postgraduate qualification. Yeah that's at best a recommendation on behalf of the university, not a legal requirement. We have several lecturers in our school that don't have graduate degrees. Hell one of them is so highly sought after he was just poached by another uni in the state.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:19
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xPanda posted:True story Dr. Karl walked past me today when I was eating lunch at Ralph's. Did I demonstrate ideological impurity by not murdering him? If you are of the sort that believe a person's actions define them, I think his repenting of his naive judgment should give him a free pass for now.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:20
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bowmore posted:My gf buys Kmart $4 sweatshop shoes for work every two months even though I keep telling her to just buy one decent pair. Does she work bar? All the acids and other poo poo that make their way onto your shoes when you work bar tend to ruin even good shoes p quick
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Apr 17, 2015 07:20
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Kim Jong ill posted:Yeah that's at best a recommendation on behalf of the university, not a legal requirement. We have several lecturers in our school that don't have graduate degrees. Hell one of them is so highly sought after he was just poached by another uni in the state. Huh, for some reason I thought it was a requirement of whatever certification board or something that students had to be taught by someone with a higher qualification than their own but seems I am wrong. 
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Apr 17, 2015 07:20
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hooman posted:Huh, for some reason I thought it was a requirement of whatever certification board or something that students had to be taught by someone with a higher qualification than their own but seems I am wrong. The aforementioned highly sought after lecturer has consistently taken topics that the academics suck at teaching and completely turned therm around. A postgraduate degree is in no way a certification that someone is capable of effectively teaching and vice versa.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:24
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Since shoechat is still going, does anyone know of a good brand of leather free shoes?
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Apr 17, 2015 07:26
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QUACKTASTIC posted:I don't get it It's just Labor dorks masturbating https://www.facebook.com/Greensdoingthings
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Apr 17, 2015 07:27
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Senor Tron posted:Since shoechat is still going, does anyone know of a good brand of leather free shoes? Are you after just no-leather, or no animal products at all?
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Apr 17, 2015 07:27
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Good thing coal is the future. http://www.afr.com/business/agl-to-close-coalfired-plants-by-2050-20150417-1mn684
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Apr 17, 2015 07:33
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Kim Jong ill posted:The aforementioned highly sought after lecturer has consistently taken topics that the academics suck at teaching and completely turned therm around. A postgraduate degree is in no way a certification that someone is capable of effectively teaching and vice versa. I never thought nor said qualification was related to aptitude, I thought it was a requirement and was one of the reasons I'd never considered teaching at a university. I didn't mean to impugn your good teacher 
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Apr 17, 2015 07:42
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Kim Jong ill posted:The aforementioned highly sought after lecturer has consistently taken topics that the academics suck at teaching and completely turned therm around. A postgraduate degree is in no way a certification that someone is capable of effectively teaching and vice versa. You can spot lecturers that have to do it as part of university requirements and would rather be doing their own research from a mile away. I'm all for lecturers who have an interest in the act of conveying the subject material, rather than being considered authorities in a field because of their qualifications. I'd rather read the research material from the person who can't (or doesn't want to) present to undergraduates to back up what a competent lecturer is presenting. But that would require universities being willing to spend money on undergrads, and I haven't seen any flying pigs lately.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:51
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I think McDonalds university is less concerned with profit than every other Aussie university
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Apr 17, 2015 08:00
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