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AusGAF 3.0 - Double the price, region locked and refused classification

evlcookie said:
The current tax free break is 6k or something right? I wish i could calculate how much i would save with the new break of 18k. I guess a little bit but nothing to get excited for.
Just substitute it into the tax bracket. Means another $12,000 you aren't taxed on if you are in the next bracket. If you are on 50k+ then it won't make a difference of course.
 

Dead Man

Member
reptilescorpio said:
They tend to screw the people who are saving loads of money (or wasting loads of money) as even I have been able to provide for myself, my partner and my child on less than $30,000 last year. If I was earning 50k a year I would almost consider myself rich (as long as I don't move to a capital city of course). The calculation is all guesswork on the cost of living rise though. It will depend on your provider, your usage, whether or not the idea of a carbon tax will lead to you turning off un-used electronics, etc.
Yeah, you are still better off financially having no kids... it's just frustrating when every time they focus on people with kids and leave people without out in the cold. Before long it WILL be better financially to have kids. I'm not really complaining... well, yes I am, but not really with much enthusiasm :)
 
Dead Man said:
Yeah, you are still better off financially having no kids... it's just frustrating when every time they focus on people with kids and leave people without out in the cold. Before long it WILL be better financially to have kids. I'm not really complaining... well, yes I am, but not really with much enthusiasm :)
Having a child does give you access to benefits but at the same time the costs involved in HAVING that child are still much higher than not. Well, we never got maternity/paternity leave or any of that which would have been a huuuuuuge help. Having our son takes my fiancee out of the working equation which hurts. Basically we can't save or buy many luxury items. Means I now drink water and only eat big meals, wait for games to be $20 and go out with mates once every few months. Maybe if child care wasn't so overburdened we could get our son in and my partner could work but that is at least 6-18 months away. Maybe the new job will end up giving me a pay rise soon too.

Edit: I will add that I was VERY surprised (and relieved) to be told of the support parents are given. At the time I thought my life was over and I would have to go work in the mines or something to make ends meet so thankfully the system is in place to help us out of our bind until some employer realises how awesome I am and gives me a high paying job.
 

Dead Man

Member
reptilescorpio said:
Having a child does give you access to benefits but at the same time the costs involved in HAVING that child are still much higher than not. Well, we never got maternity/paternity leave or any of that which would have been a huuuuuuge help. Having our son takes my fiancee out of the working equation which hurts. Basically we can't save or buy many luxury items. Means I now drink water and only eat big meals, wait for games to be $20 and go out with mates once every few months. Maybe if child care wasn't so overburdened we could get our son in and my partner could work but that is at least 6-18 months away. Maybe the new job will end up giving me a pay rise soon too.
Yeah, true enough, hope you get some more monies!
 

Omikron

Member
reptilescorpio said:
Having a child does give you access to benefits but at the same time the costs involved in HAVING that child are still much higher than not. Well, we never got maternity/paternity leave or any of that which would have been a huuuuuuge help. Having our son takes my fiancee out of the working equation which hurts. Basically we can't save or buy many luxury items. Means I now drink water and only eat big meals, wait for games to be $20 and go out with mates once every few months. Maybe if child care wasn't so overburdened we could get our son in and my partner could work but that is at least 6-18 months away. Maybe the new job will end up giving me a pay rise soon too.

I am not complaining at all about our financial situation as we are incredibly fortunate to the point having the wife out of work as long as she wants is compeltely viable (not that I think she would, she would go a bit batty without some adult contact lol). The number of benefits are incredibly high, currently we are getting ~$500 a fortnight in paternity payments from the government which is incredibly helpful and much better than the old baby bonus.

But to counter that, our medical expenses for the last financial year were something in the realms of 11-12k. :p
 
Omi said:
I am not complaining at all about our financial situation as we are incredibly fortunate to the point having the wife out of work as long as she wants is compeltely viable (not that I think she would, she would go a bit batty without some adult contact lol). The number of benefits are incredibly high, currently we are getting ~$500 a fortnight in paternity payments from the government which is incredibly helpful and much better than the old baby bonus.

But to counter that, our medical expenses for the last financial year were something in the realms of 11-12k. :p
Bolded for truth. My fiancée is desperate to get back tutoring at TAFE but nowhere is accepting 9 month old boys.
Thankfully our son has only been sick twice, as since he has come along I seemed to be a LOT more prone to sickness after rarely ever being crook. Gastro was not fun. I suppose keeping him out of day care will also hold back the germ infection too for a while.
Not to mention child birth. Fuck me that was traumatic. Hard to believe in a God who would design a process like THAT.
 
I'm sorry to break up the Tax talk but I have an important subject that I would like to talk about.

Philosophical question of the day: In Gremlins, when does it stop being after midnight?
 
Planet_JASE said:
Philosophical question of the day: In Gremlins, when does it stop being after midnight?
Dawn. Or 6am or so.

Also The Hottest 100 list is pretty good even if Powderfinger have too many albums up too high. Plus Temper Trap and Tame Impala? Wouldn't have them top 20 material.

Karnivool at 30 though. Nice taste Australia, you are still in my good books.
 
roosters93 said:
Powderfinger has the greatest Australian album of all time? Yeah, no.
The top 5 albums are all really good Australian albums, but best ever? Nope. I still can't believe the Saints were so low. And was Radio Birdman even in the list?

I do really appreciate that the early Living End, Grinspoon and (especially) Silverchair charted so much higher than their new, shit, stuff. Well played Australian on the front.
 

TwiztidElf

Member
Wow. If you believe you will be better off overall or that the climate will get better at all from this, you're delusional.
Some crazy delusional kids in Aus GAF.
 

Jintor

Member
FallbackPants said:
But that's horrible. The Greens are a political party with a defined agenda. News is a media company that is supposed to be able to tell a balanced and unbiased story.

It's the Murdoch press, they're the very definition of defamatory, biased bullshit

Wow. If you believe you will be better off overall or that the climate will get better at all from this, you're delusional.
Some crazy delusional kids in Aus GAF.

Reasoning or gtfo

I don't know much about climate politics but I'm disinclined on principle to trust News Ltd or the Liberals.
 

Omikron

Member
TwiztidElf said:
Wow. If you believe you will be better off overall or that the climate will get better at all from this, you're delusional.
Some crazy delusional kids in Aus GAF.

Thats right, we are children if we disagree with you opinion.
 
TwiztidElf said:
Wow. If you believe you will be better off overall or that the climate will get better at all from this, you're delusional.
Some crazy delusional kids in Aus GAF.

Are you always such a condescending asshole? How about you provide some valid reasoning so that we can look at the facts and have a discussion?
 

Dead Man

Member
Sutton Dagger said:
Are you always such a condescending asshole? How about you provide some valid reasoning so that we can look at the facts and have a discussion?
Yes, he's always been an arsehole, haven't seen him post in a while though.
 

elfinke

Member
TwiztidElf said:
Wow. If you believe you will be better off overall or that the climate will get better at all from this, you're delusional.
Some crazy delusional kids in Aus GAF.

Thanks Barnaby-lite, your ab-sailing comments have added an awful lot to this debate, you're not a sideshow distraction at all.
 

Scrow

Still Tagged Accordingly
Salazar said:
Grill'd chips are pretty badass.
Grill'd is the best franchise food company going around right now. They could drop their prices a bit, but the quality of the food is right up there.
 

legend166

Member
I don't understand the tax. At all. None of it makes any sense.

Firstly - it won't actually have any effect. Basically everyone has said this (as in, all the climate scientists and whatnot), but then just seem to ignore it. Australia is not a big enough emitter that a 5% reduction in our carbon emissions will do a single thing. So the big hope is by us acting, it will compel other countries (mainly the US and China) to act. Anyone who follows US politics knows what an absolute pipe dream that is. The Republicans would practically tear down the White House if Obama proposed a carbon tax right now. It's simply not going to happen until they fix their economy, which will be who knows when.

And China is like an unstoppable freight train who definitely won't do anything that could stunt their own growth.

So it's going to do nothing on a global level. But even on a local level, how is it going to have an effect? It's essentially a sin tax. At the core, it's no different to a tax on cigarettes and alcohol. You identify something negative in society, and act to set the price artificially high through taxes to try and effect people's behaviour - in this case, try and get people to switch to cleaner energy. But if you turn around and immediately offer compensation for higher prices, you're stripping away that incentive for behavioural change. If you walk into the store and see they've raised the price of cigarettes $10, you might think twice of continuing to smoke. But in this case it's like seeing they've raised the price $10, but there's a guy outside giving away $10 notes to anyone who's just purchased a packet of cigarettes.

And I think it's incredibly naive for the government to think this will have no effect on the price of petrol. They'll take any excuse to put the price up.

The whole thing is bizarre. I would have just rather we continued to put big investments into cleaner energy solutions.
 

elfinke

Member
legend166 said:
Plus, more damn tax cuts for families.

When will the lonely, single nerd get his due?

Oh gawd, how I wish for there to be a tax/penalty for every time a politician uses the words 'family' or '<verb> families' as a catch-all phrase to try and engender support with Sydney's inner west and the public at large.

Especially families earning $150,000 or more but are 'struggling'. GTFO.
 

Omikron

Member
legend166 said:
And China is like an unstoppable freight train who definitely won't do anything that could stunt their own growth.

Sorry to pick one point out of your argument, but China are moving a huge % of their total energy production to renewable sources.
 

legend166

Member
Omi said:
Sorry to pick one point out of your argument, but China are moving a huge % of their total energy production to renewable sources.

I literally had typed out (except those renewable sources they are building, but that's not slowing growth) and then deleted it.

Their emissions are still growing at a big rate.
 
legend166 said:
I don't understand the tax. At all. None of it makes any sense.

Firstly - it won't actually have any effect. Basically everyone has said this (as in, all the climate scientists and whatnot), but then just seem to ignore it. Australia is not a big enough emitter that a 5% reduction in our carbon emissions will do a single thing. So the big hope is by us acting, it will compel other countries (mainly the US and China) to act. Anyone who follows US politics knows what an absolute pipe dream that is. The Republicans would practically tear down the White House if Obama proposed a carbon tax right now. It's simply not going to happen until they fix their economy, which will be who knows when.

And China is like an unstoppable freight train who definitely won't do anything that could stunt their own growth.

So it's going to do nothing on a global level. But even on a local level, how is it going to have an effect? It's essentially a sin tax. At the core, it's no different to a tax on cigarettes and alcohol. You identify something negative in society, and act to set the price artificially high through taxes to try and effect people's behaviour - in this case, try and get people to switch to cleaner energy. But if you turn around and immediately offer compensation for higher prices, you're stripping away that incentive for behavioural change. If you walk into the store and see they've raised the price of cigarettes $10, you might think twice of continuing to smoke. But in this case it's like seeing they've raised the price $10, but there's a guy outside giving away $10 notes to anyone who's just purchased a packet of cigarettes.

And I think it's incredibly naive for the government to think this will have no effect on the price of petrol. They'll take any excuse to put the price up.

The whole thing is bizarre. I would have just rather we continued to put big investments into cleaner energy solutions.
China is already moving towards a carbon tax. While they probably won't officially have one they already have what it called a 'shadow' carbon tax. Essentially an unofficial tax. So even they are moving towards it. http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/mcneilCarbonTax.html

Secondly, assuming a carbon tax does promote innovation by polluters or renewable energy, then it's giving another, potentially far more important industry a leg up. Even if climate change isn't real (which is it) fossil fuels are finite. So developing a renewable energy industry in Australia could put the country at a great position going forward. In economics it's called first movers advantage
 

Ventron

Member
Jintor said:
Reasoning or gtfo

I don't know much about climate politics but I'm disinclined on principle to trust News Ltd or the Liberals.

I've been trying to look into this for myself.

Here's what raised my eyebrows. I'll leave aside the fact that this tax targets only CO2. The Garnaut Report outlined its no-mitigation scenario:
http://www.freehills.com.au/4084.aspx
In this scenario, the world does not attempt to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions. Modelled consequences include a best-estimate increase in global temperature relative to 1990 levels of 5.1°C by 2100 and 8.3°C by 2200, with impacts on human civilisation and most ecosystems that are ‘likely to be catastrophic’.

This seemed a bit much to me, so I went to SSMI which can measure world temperature through satellite microwave sensors, and got this:
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/graphics/tlt/plots/rss_ts_channel_tlt_global_land_and_sea_v03_3.png
Mirror:
JiE57.png


We've had two decades, so that's around 0.3 degrees of warming. For Garnaut's prediction to come true, under no-mitigation, the average rate of warming would have to at least triple, immediately. I haven't seen any measurements or models that suggests that climate can make those sorts of shifts, nor can it shift in any way in the next 90 years to make up for lost time.

In fact, from the year 2000 the trend seems essentially flat. Here's a graph from Wikipedia showing emissions levels:
Global_Carbon_Emission_by_Type.png

So we've had about 6 decades of meaningful emissions. We haven't slowed our emissions since 2000 (they've actually increased markedly since the China boom started), so if the correlation has completely stopped for at least 1 decade, when you only have 5 decades of correlation, that is significant.

(If you're wondering about the spike in 1998, I looked it up and apparently it was caused by a big El Nino).
 

Fredescu

Member
Ventron said:
In fact, from the year 2000 the trend seems essentially flat.
I have no idea about whether Garnaut's claims are accurate either, but this statement is pretty false too. If you look at the peaks after 98, the first peak is unprecedented prior to 98, and it is then bested 5 times in the decade. Certainly a trend upwards, I'm not sure how you're mistaking that for flat.

It's also a fair bit less dramatic looking than NASAs own data:

Fig.A2.gif


A bunch more: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
 

Ventron

Member
Fredescu said:
If you look at the peaks after 98, the first peak is unprecedented prior to 98, and it is then bested 5 times in the decade. Certainly a trend upwards, I'm not sure how you're mistaking that for flat.

The troughs grow too. This is why the trend since 2000 is flat. If it isn't flat, it's certainly far, far less than before.

And it's less dramatic looking than NASA's because your graph spans over more than a century and because your Y axis spans a smaller range. There definitely was warming earlier in the 20th century. Looking carefully, our graphs seem to match, except your graph is missing the massive trough in 2011 seen in mine. Does your X axis indicate when the year starts or ends? I couldn't find it on the NASA website.

EDIT: I will also note, your graph's Y axis only spans 1 degree, so over the past century we've had less than 1 degree of warming.
 

Madrical

Banned
FallbackPants said:
The top 5 albums are all really good Australian albums, but best ever? Nope. I still can't believe the Saints were so low. And was Radio Birdman even in the list?

I do really appreciate that the early Living End, Grinspoon and (especially) Silverchair charted so much higher than their new, shit, stuff. Well played Australian on the front.
Loved reading the comments after each top 20 album on the website, people are so close minded and don't realise that their opinion isn't necessarily the popular one. Then there's the indie kids who complain that the music in the list is 'crap' and then list a bunch of bands no one has heard of and whinge that they're 10x better. Sigh.
 

Mistle

Member
The Living End making #4 is well deserved, and they couldn't have asked for better timing considering they have an album coming out in 2 weeks.
 

Fredescu

Member
Ventron said:
The troughs grow too. This is why the trend since 2000 is flat. If it isn't flat, it's certainly far, far less than before.
The lows are much higher than in the past, and the troughs don't grow. Also, the trend line is the same gradient throughout.

Ventron said:
Looking carefully, our graphs seem to match, except your graph is missing the massive trough in 2011 seen in mine. Does your X axis indicate when the year starts or ends? I couldn't find it on the NASA website.
A massive trough in 2011 is certainly interesting since we've only had half of 2011. Is your graph predicting the future? The NASA graph is marked as an annual mean, which I assume is why 2011 isn't marked. It hasn't happened yet.
 

Ventron

Member
Fredescu said:
The lows are much higher than in the past, and the troughs don't grow. Also, the trend line is the same gradient throughout.


A massive trough in 2011 is certainly interesting since we've only had half of 2011. Is your graph predicting the future? The NASA graph is marked as an annual mean, which I assume is why 2011 isn't marked. It hasn't happened yet.

My graph's X axis is when the year starts, not ends.
 

Fredescu

Member
Ventron said:
EDIT: I will also note, your graph's Y axis only spans 1 degree, so over the past century we've had less than 1 degree of warming.
I'm not arguing specific amounts, I agree that Garnaut's 5.1 degrees by 2100 seems to be at the extremely high end of the predictions. The statement that the 00 decade was flat is false though, which I guess we're agreed to now.
 
Ventron said:
EDIT: I will also note, your graph's Y axis only spans 1 degree, so over the past century we've had less than 1 degree of warming.

Sure but it's a non linear growth pattern. It may have only gone up a degree but it's going up more and more rapidly as time passes
 

Ventron

Member
Fredescu said:
The statement that the 00 decade was flat is false though, which I guess we're agreed to now.

No, the 00 decade does have a flat trend thanks to its troughs.

FallbackPants said:
Sure but it's a non linear growth pattern. It may have only gone up a degree but it's going up more and more rapidly as time passes

If the current trend of 0.14 Kelvin per decade is kept, then the expected warming this century would be 1.4 degrees. I'll grant you that keeping a trend constant over that time is unlikely to happen, but the trend seems to be going downwards.
 

Fredescu

Member
Ventron said:
No, the 00 decade does have a flat trend thanks to its troughs.
Ah, specific to that decade. Fair enough, that might be true. I'm not sure that a trend line with so little data would be much use. If the argument is that, because such a trend line might look flat, and emissions have increased, and therefore emissions are having no effect, what's the deal with the 00 temperatures being almost universally record breakers?

From your same source:

ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/graphics/tlt/plots/sorted_yearly_global_anomalies.png
ZD4hc.png



To anyone else, there's a pretty easy to read guide to all these arguments here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-Scientific-Guide-to-Global-Warming-Skepticism.html
 
Ventron said:
No, the 00 decade does have a flat trend thanks to its troughs.



If the current trend of 0.14 Kelvin per decade is kept, then the expected warming this century would be 1.4 degrees. I'll grant you that keeping a trend constant over that time is unlikely to happen, but the trend seems to be going downwards.


I'll give you the last ten years have been flat, but downwards? How are you getting that?
There have been troughs and lows through the NASA chart over the last 150 years, but the trend has been consistently up.

Kerrby said:
Naked Gun 33 1/3 is on channel 11. Why aren't you watching it!?
Totally is. God it's good. You'll be missed Leslie Nielsen
 

`Moe Joe.

Banned
Yeah, families will be compensated a fair amount to help them adjust to the rise in weekly costs; but what happens when prices inflate more and more? Will the tax thresholds rise, will more money be placed in the pool? Of course not; there's only so much people can be compensated before it runs out - as it essentially was already our money. Further, what happens when, after all these years, and obviously paying more for every day stuff, the panzies wake up and realize carbon tax has no fucking effect on reducing carbon emmissions at all?

We're running into a battlefield blindfolded, and it would only be fucking Australia to be one of the first country's to try to implement this, much like it being one of the only western country's to try and implement an internet filter.
 
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