Bloody Tradies! For those looking for an excuse to use “gobsmacked.” An X-post video clip from Tuesday: Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.” Financial Review: The current unemployment rate needs to rise by 40 per cent to 50 per cent to boost the Australian economy’s productivity, Tim Gurner has said. “In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said. Gurner told the Summit that the cultural shift towards a more pro-employee climate had led to tradies pulling back on productivity. “When there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude.” Gurner has received some blowback over his remarks about “tradies.” “Just a reminder corporate profits and CEO pay are at historic highs,” wrote Greens MP Stephen Bates.
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We, the computer scientists and engineers of this nation, are pleased to announce that we have invented actual, real-life portals. However, we are saddened to announce that they are fucking horrible.
We’ve built hundreds of variations of these things, and we promise none are cool. Rent-payment portals, student portals, health insurance portals—just name the portal, and it will suck.
In sci-fi, you might go into a portal and pop out millions of light-years away. We swear we tried to replicate that. But as of now, if you enter one of our portals from the comfort of your own home, at best, you might come out thousands of miles away from your closest accepted primary care physician.
We’ve completely reimagined what a portal can be. Unfortunately, our collective imagination was limited to picturing what dozens of pages of tedious dental information might look like rendered on Microsoft Excel in 1988.
We’re not sure what we’re doing wrong. Our portals successfully transport you to another time, but only to a year sometime between when computers were made of tubes and the last time somebody typed out “www.”
Human rights groups sued government agencies for information about Afghans stuck at processing sites while their applications to come to the U.S. are pending.
The post The Biden Administration Is Keeping Thousands of Afghans in Limbo Abroad appeared first on The Intercept.
When the NHS was founded, it was a central part of the UK’s post-war social contract. Now, it is struggling to perform, and there are increasing calls for so-called ‘reform,’ which is often a euphemism for privatisation and the introduction of insurance-based funding. They are calling for a fundamental change to the business model of […]
"We must stop expanding aviation until the technology exists to provide emission free, low-noise flights.”
- by Aeon Video
- by Katy Jakle
Jeffrey Zients recused himself from dealings with his brother-in-law’s company, which is backed by the U.S. and a key player in green energy projects around the globe.
The post White House Chief of Staff’s Wealth and Connections Collide With Biden’s Clean Energy Strategy appeared first on The Intercept.
The remarkable story behind the disciplining of a major charity shows how power really works. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th September 2023 Economic power seldom needs to discipline those who might challenge it. Most of the time, they do it to themselves. However extreme the ideologies promoted by corporations and oligarchs, organisational […]
In the Sneak-a-nomics podcast series, educators explained how everything from Legos to lemonade sparked ideas for economics lessons.
Kevin Lewis points us to this recent paper, “Can invasive species lead to sedentary behavior? The time use and obesity impacts of a forest-attacking pest,” published in Elsevier’s Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, which has the following abstract: “Invasive species can significantly disrupt environmental quality and flows of ecosystem services and we are still […]
Álvaro Fernández-Gallardo, Simon Lloyd and Ed Manuel Since the 2007–09 Global Financial Crisis, central banks have developed a range of macroprudential policies (‘macropru’) to address fault lines in the financial system. A key aim of macropru is to reduce ‘left-tail risks‘ – ie, minimise the probability and severity of future economic crises. However, building this … Continue reading The transmission of macroprudential policy in the tails
The dominance of micro-founded macroeconomic models—models derived directly from the microeconomic concepts of utility-maximizing individuals and profit-maximizing firms, and based on the Ramsey Neoclassical growth model (Ramsey 1928)—did not go unchallenged prior to the Global Financial Crisis. But the critics were treated in the time-honoured Neoclassical way, of being both ignored and disparaged—if they were, … Continue reading "Soul-searching by a soulless discipline"
Two items this Wednesday before the music segment. First, we saw the stark ideology of the elites on full display in Sydney yesterday with a property developer demanding the government increase unemployment by 40-50 per cent to show the workers that the employer is boss and redistribute more national income back to profits. For anyone…
I really appreciate CEO developer Tim Gurney’s honesty here:
The Big Three car companies have authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks over the past year.
600 million years ago, the sea sponge had a dream.
The post Where Did the Brain Come From? appeared first on Nautilus.
UK higher education qualifications have been suspended from the European quality standards body because of the way the Office for Students was regulating universities.
The study suggests that those groups less likely to vote Conservative were more likely to be turned away
Josh Marshall has a smart column on the right’s attempt to jettison the phrase “pro-life” because it’s toxic.(As a twitter wag quipped, “when ‘pro-life’ is a losing slogan for you, you’ve got bigger problems.”) Marshall points out just how thoroughly the anti-abortion movement has been pushed back on its heels: It now seems clear that the only thing that will be at all memorable about the GOP’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on August 23rd will be that brief speech from Mike Pence in which he staked his campaign on his bible-rooted, evangelical, pro-life record and endorsed a 15-week national ban. I remember finding it stunning in the moment. Kate Riga took it up the next day. The U.S. doesn’t keep perfect data on abortion care in the United States. The most readily available numbers look at the number of abortions on or before the 13th week (91.1%) and 21st week (98.7%). Even this anti-abortion rights group says that 6% of abortions take place on or after week 15, for instance.