The election thread - Two middle-late aged white men trying to be blokey and convincing..., same old shit, FFS.

[Binaural]

The first responses from technology companies are starting to come in.

"Signal, one of the most secure messaging apps, essentially told Australia this week that its attempts to thwart strong crypto are rather cute.

"By design, Signal does not have a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles, or group avatars," Joshua Lund, a Signal developer wrote. "The end-to-end encrypted contents of every message and voice/video call are protected by keys that are entirely inaccessible to us. In most cases now we don’t even have access to who is messaging whom."

Lund is referring to a recent law passed in Australia that will fine companies that do not comply with government demands for encrypted data up to AUS$10 million.

Signal users will find a way, he suggested.

"If a country decided to apply pressure on Apple or Google to remove certain apps from their stores, switching to a different region is extremely trivial on both Android and iOS," he continued. "Popular apps are widely mirrored across the internet. Some of them can even be downloaded directly from their official website." "

 

[Flow-Rider]

You can always tell when an election is coming up, it's been discussed on here many a time but at least they're starting to see it's an issue.

 

[John U]

Well at least it appears Labor agree now. It’ll be a fucking tough fight to win back some of the stuff lost to os. Maybe we’ll no longer see ‘fully imported’ as a selling point.

 

[Scotty T]

Can't see anyone voting for this kook, despite him sending all of us text messages about wonderful things he won't actually do:

 

[John U]

Got a funny sms from UA over the weekend regarding making unsolicited political sms’s Illegal. Not sure if it was meant to be funny though.

 

[Haakon]

Must be an election coming - people are bitching about petrol prices again...

Free markets, they charge what they want. Dont like, dont buy it. The end.

 

[Flow-Rider]

Well at least it appears Labor agree now. It’ll be a fucking tough fight to win back some of the stuff lost to os. Maybe we’ll no longer see ‘fully imported’ as a selling point.

They'll need to make policy to start programs to make it worth while to set up again but agree, a lot of the manufacturing will be long gone to very cheap labour.

Like this one, haha! @John U

 

[Binaural]

They'll need to make policy to start programs to make it worth while to set up again but agree, a lot of the manufacturing will be long gone to very cheap labour.

We do all our high tech manufacturing in Australia and are looking to set up some world-leading stuff in the near future, and I can tell you there is already a surprising amount of money available already for manufacturing if you're willing to play the games required to obtain it with the various state and federal governments.

However, the various grants and programs like the R&D tax incentive are marginal amounts that are largely available to companies that are already established. It's really the bigger picture that's drying up large-scale manufacturing in Australia - cost of labour, power and land near the labour. Additionally to this, the know-how of manufacturing engineering to set up successful production lines is getting rarer and rarer, and clusters of special competency that drive spin-off companies are getting more isolated. For example, I've previously worked in the biomedical sector, and there's only a few big companies and virtually every engineer you meet at those companies has worked at one or more of these, unless they're from overseas.

Really, we need to have programs to decentralise a bit and spread the wealth a bit, something like the German Mittelstand. The demographics of Australia right now make sustaining a proper manufacturing industry really difficult.

 

[John U]

Australia, and I guess a fair proportion of world, has board rooms full of people who outsource responsibility for operations. In a lot of circumstances this outsourcing is sold as reducing cost. Company knowledge is given redundancies, the outsourcers can’t do the same job at the same quality, in the same time, for the same cost. The job satisfaction of those who didn’t take packages goes down because they need explain things repeatedly, regularly to different people. Satisfaction with the product goes backwards due to increased timeframes and lower quality. The following year the board says you’ve got to do it all for 40% less.
The board isn’t held to account because they operate with a single focus of getting their bonus, and secondly, returning dividends to shareholders, and they’re usually fairly mediocre as humans. None of them are properly held to account for the results of offshoring, ‘it saved money’is all that’s written, regardless of whether it actually did, and all the other factors.

Bottom line, Australian company boards need equal representation from execs, employees, and customers. I understand that it the way the Germans do it somewhere. Sounds awesome.

 

[hifiandmtb]

Hence why I'm on a con-call right now with India.

The timezones mean we only have a two hour business day alignment...can't do everything in two hours.

The US outsourcing to India is even worse...someone has to do night work.

 

[Calvin27]

cost of labour, power and land near the labour.

Goes back to error is the Howard government. Howard bought votes with tax cuts when he should have taken the money out of the economy to invest in infrastructure (assuming the government wanted at the time to plan for growth). Instead cash was used to out I'd each other on property speculation and even after mining died, the wage push persisted due to new construction picking up a lot more slack than economists predicted. So fast forward and we have high wages, high land input costs, high private debt and struggling infrastructure. Not a great place to do business let alone manufacturing.

 

[John U]

Hence why I'm on a con-call right now with India.

The timezones mean we only have a two hour business day alignment...can't do everything in two hours.

The US outsourcing to India is even worse...someone has to do night work.

When it first started for me the people in India moved their work hours to more closely align with ours. I moved away from companies that used outsourcing for about 7 years. When I returned it was exactly as you stated. Not only no co-location, but virtually no working time cross over! A very inefficient way of doing business.

 

[scblack]

Goes back to error is the Howard government. Howard bought votes with tax cuts when he should have taken the money out of the economy to invest in infrastructure (assuming the government wanted at the time to plan for growth). Instead cash was used to out I'd each other on property speculation and even after mining died, the wage push persisted due to new construction picking up a lot more slack than economists predicted. So fast forward and we have high wages, high land input costs, high private debt and struggling infrastructure. Not a great place to do business let alone manufacturing.

Hahahahaha, that's a good joke. Good one, I had a laugh. Howard caused this, hehe.

Hang on.....are you actually serious?

 

[SummitFever]

Howard bought votes with tax cuts when he should have taken the money out of the economy to invest in infrastructure...

Yep. Was a huge wasted opportunity.

To be fair, Labour saving us from the GFC by pumping money into construction was also a dumb move. Would have been better to buy everyone solar panels or invest in future tech.

 

[Calvin27]

Hahahahaha, that's a good joke. Good one, I had a laugh. Howard caused this, hehe.

Hang on.....are you actually serious?

Yeah common knowledge he blew the biggest windfalls we had. I don't blame him in isolation of course, no doubt any politician would have done the same to stay in power. Seems to be what it's all about.

 

[Calvin27]

To be fair, Labour saving us from the GFC by pumping money into construction was also a dumb move. Would have been better to buy everyone solar panels or invest in future tech.

I believe the logic was that construction multipliers are much more beneficial than just buy presumably imported stuff. But in any case money still blown - should have went to public infrastructure like transport for example.

 

[scblack]

Yeah common knowledge he blew the biggest windfalls we had. I don't blame him in isolation of course, no doubt any politician would have done the same to stay in power. Seems to be what it's all about.

I heard Zero complaints at the time.

He took Australia down to Negative debt. That left us in the position to withstand the GFC etc with 20years of continuous economic growth.
"Blew the windfall" - Nah.

 

[pink poodle]

Would have been better to buy everyone solar panels or invest in future tech.

They did...but then they had to face an investigation because people like coal. But I agree with your future tech dreams. Australian governments seem to be good at delivering yesterday's ideas to the world of tomorrow...actually probably a longer time delay than that.

Hahahahaha, that's a good joke. Good one, I had a laugh. Howard caused this, hehe.

Hang on.....are you actually serious?

I may not agree with all that was said, but there is a fair case that Howard/Costello (what a great cheese though) squandered the resources boom by pork barrelling parts the electorate. Though I'd be scared to imagine what type of internet tech Howard would have rolled out if he was capable of vision.

 

[johnny]

I heard Zero complaints at the time.

He took Australia down to Negative debt. That left us in the position to withstand the GFC etc with 20years of continuous economic growth.
"Blew the windfall" - Nah.

You heard zereo complaints from a population that was getting tax cuts? Well, isn't that a shock?! Not like the electorate to vote on their back pocket and to be short-term thinkers....

I'd be reluctant to pin the 1st prize on Howard only for Australia being able to weather the GFC? I'd argue that there were many reasons Australia made it through: China carried out a massive economic stimulus program, much of it that went into construction that powered Australian exports, mining development and also resulted in a lot of capital flight that went into Australian real estate. US quantative easing made Australia a safe haven and saw mountains of foreign capital flow into Australian investments. The earlier structuring/regulation of banking in Australia and the management of financial risk meant that the contagion didn't hit Australia like it did much of the world (Howard era policy if I recall correctly) and a number of other variables (excludig pink bats.....).

It is widely lamented that Australia wasted a lot of what we gained from the start of the Asia boom on middle class welfare, in order to win elections - both parties eing guilty of this. The missed opportuunities are often cited as future funds (modelled from the Norweigan experience), national infrastructure, integrating new technologies into the national school curriculum, reducing foreign aid in the immediate region, etc.

There's a lot written about this stuff and a lot of it from non-partisan economists.

 

[Haakon]

Norway rocks. A relatively inclusive and generally wealthy place. Great social services and high levels of employment and general well being. Countries are very productive with a high number of entrepreneurs when people feel supported and don't have to worry about basic survival in a libertarian nightmare...

Howard would hate it. Howard did massive damage to Australia economically and socially, and is rightly despised by many.