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Aussies and NZers: Jabs, Jobs and (grounded) Jets


Paxter

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25 minutes ago, Wall Flower said:

Apparently I missed the announcement of Perrottet being declared PM of Australia and therefore authorised to unilaterally open international borders without quarantine regulations and with no reference to the national plan or national cabinet. If people want to know why Canberra is soon to be the most vaccinated city in the world, take a look at what we're surrounded by.

I’m sure the PM is 100% on board, though it was a little odd to hear it first from Perignon.

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18 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

NSW scraps quarantine and Scomo announces he'll go to Glasgow afterall on the same day. Hmmm...

Quarantining at the Lodge or Kirribilli House was too tough on him. I think it might have been the slap down from QE11 and the Prince of Wales.

Apparently, Dom got a bit premature and Aus is not open to tourists yet, just citizens and immediate family, at least that's what SCOMO says. I guess they can settle the leadership of the country between them.

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NSW is hurtling head-long into opening up, and the acceleration in plans is a little unnerving.

ScoMo will be very happy with Perrottet. By opening Sydney to all the returning citizens he's basically solved that big headache for Morrison and yet Dom will probably take all the blame when it goes pear-shaped.

It's a massive gamble, but for the economically-minded Dom he's obviously hoping to get all the international business and tourism for Sydney ahead of all the other states. I don't think any other Premier (maybe Andrews) is going to fall for it, but it wouldn't surprise me if the other states hang back more and wait to see how it pans out, potentially with hard borders to NSW for a while yet.

Tasmania in a lockdown situation now due to one non-cooperating doofus. I think their vax rates are pretty good though so they may escape.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So SA will be the first currently covid free state to open borders, in a little under a month. We're just hitting 80% single dose so should be around there with the double jabs by then. Probably a little earlier than I expected. I'm sure Qld, Tas and WA will be keeping their eyes on how this goes.

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Given net zero by 2050 means taking substantial action now, a lack of specifics from a govt about what it will do means net zero by 2050 is going to be difficult to achieve.

Perhaps they are hoping to get lucking and technological solutions will present themselves at some point in the next 28 years that will allow a very rapid change so that the goal will be reached without having to actually do anything. Perhaps in spite of the govt doing nothing to transform transportation BEVs and HEVs will progressively displace ICE vehicles. Power companies will install wind and solar generation. Boeing and Airbus will develop H2 powered passenger planes as will shipping companies, and new BBQ technologies will replace propane so we can all have fair sucks of the sav without putting fossil CO2 into the atmosphere.

It is true that the market will deliver what the customer demands, but it still relies on a critical mass of customers demanding it.

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I think net zero is all window-dressing. It's a good thing to declare but getting there in practical terms is going to be difficult for many countries, let alone us laggards in Australia. Government can pull some levers but it's a very blunt tool.

The real momentum for this is going to have to come from the business side. ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing has been on the rise and a lot of publicly listed companies have had motions passed about emissions etc. I think there is some momentum there and companies are increasingly trying to decarbonise but whether they can do it in time is another matter.

Another lever is households, but I think a lot of Australians are already doing the "low-hanging fruit" - getting solar power on roofs (I think the highest percentage of this globally), water tanks and so forth. Probably the next piece of the puzzle is more widespread adoption of electric vehicles and the infrastructure needed for them to become more widely used. However, I think Australia isn't well-suited to EVs - we're a very large country and we like our road trips and long drives.

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1 hour ago, Jeor said:

ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing has been on the rise and a lot of publicly listed companies have had motions passed about emissions etc.

The company I have my govt retirement saving account with is being all socially responsible, by not investing our money into various "bad things". One of these "bad things" they proudly say they are not investing in is nuclear power. Fricken idiots! I wrote to them giving them a stern talking to that nuclear power can be part of the solution to climate change so they should rethink their populist decision not to invest in it. They wrote back to me with one of those pat responses "thanks for the feedback, we are always reviewing our investment portfolios etc etc."

When has the real momentum for major social change come from the business side? It will keep squeezing blood from this stone until forced to stop. The business side has had plenty of time to take a lead and get ahead of things. But business is not proactive when it comes to this kind of thing. It is reactive and almost always reacting too late to avoid most of the preventable damage.

EVs on a carbon burning electric grid is still better than ICE transport, just. So transition to EVs and transition to non-carbon burning electric grid should happen in parallel.

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Really, govt should be poking and prodding the market/businesses to take up initiatives to move towards becoming carbon neutral as quickly as is feasibly possible using incentives/disincentives.

The LNP are totally allergic to taxes so forget about them using the stick, but are also very "hands off" (or just can't be fucked would be a more accurate description), so no carrots being dangled either.

The approach is sit back, do nothing and let the states/markets sort it out for us?

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2 hours ago, Paxter said:

EVs don’t help much if your grid is all carbon, either.

Australia is full of shit on this issue, as always.

Pretty much anyone with the cash for an EV at this point is going to have solar that they can charge off a good portion of the time. And the grid is pretty rapidly decarbonising, and will continue over the next decade, despite the governments best efforts to the contrary. I know SA is ahead of much of the east coast, but here an EV purely charged off the grid here emits a decent amount less CO2 than their petrol/hybrid equivalents.

The main issue to me is cost at the moment - the only thing really in our price range would be the MG ($45kish) which has about a 250-300km effective range (have borrowed and driven one for a couple weeks, it was ok). Entry point for an EV with a decent (500km+) range is $70-80k. That needs to drop by half, which as production expands it will with time. We'll probably seriously be looking towards the end of next year or start of the next, so hopefully there'll be more options by then. Though I honestly think the range issue is mostly overblown. Unless you want to be able to drive between capitals or you do a lot of remote camping.

 

So booster shots to be available in a couple weeks. That also is sooner than I expected. No fucking around there at least.

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Governments actually need to get into EVs boots and all and rapidly swap over their fleets to EVs for all people who drive less than 300KM/day in their govt car. That will effectively be a subsidy for the private car market by having a large fleet of ex-lease govt vehicles come on stream in a few years. gives a big boost to the used car market and provides competition against the new car market with cars that are still newish.

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https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/americans-take-on-tip-top-bread-sparks-ridicule-saddest-thing-ive-read-in-my-entire-life/L6DZF2BHRJ4CBFA5FYCQPIYVBE/

The article itself is of no particular interest. What I found interesting, and the reason I'm posting about it is that Tip Top bread is also an Aus brand, a new thing I learned today. Of course unlike flat whites and pavlova there is no need to argue about who invented the tip top brand, since it's just a stock supermarket brand. But it got me curious about what other bread brands might be common to both countries. Just to take a break from the serious stuff for a bit. So here's our list of supermarket brands of bread other than Tip Top:

  • Nature's Fresh
  • Molenberg
  • Burgen
  • Freya's
  • Ploughmans
  • Sunny Crust
  • Country Split
  • Vogel's

The oldest brands are Tip Top, Nature's Fresh and Vogel's. Those brands existed before I ever became aware of the concept of "brands". All the other brands were established within the last 40 or so years (OMG it just hit me, 40 years ago we were in the 1980s, it was in the 1980's when I first remember thinking about how old I would be in the year 2000(!), which happened 21 years ago). I don't think we've had a new brand for 10 or maybe 20 years.

 

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1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/americans-take-on-tip-top-bread-sparks-ridicule-saddest-thing-ive-read-in-my-entire-life/L6DZF2BHRJ4CBFA5FYCQPIYVBE/

The article itself is of no particular interest. What I found interesting, and the reason I'm posting about it is that Tip Top bread is also an Aus brand, a new thing I learned today. Of course unlike flat whites and pavlova there is no need to argue about who invented the tip top brand, since it's just a stock supermarket brand. But it got me curious about what other bread brands might be common to both countries. Just to take a break from the serious stuff for a bit. So here's our list of supermarket brands of bread other than Tip Top:

  • Nature's Fresh
  • Molenberg
  • Burgen
  • Freya's
  • Ploughmans
  • Sunny Crust
  • Country Split
  • Vogel's

The oldest brands are Tip Top, Nature's Fresh and Vogel's. Those brands existed before I ever became aware of the concept of "brands". All the other brands were established within the last 40 or so years (OMG it just hit me, 40 years ago we were in the 1980s, it was in the 1980's when I first remember thinking about how old I would be in the year 2000(!), which happened 21 years ago). I don't think we've had a new brand for 10 or maybe 20 years.

 

It's a while since I bought supermarket bread but I know that Vogel's, Country Split and Burgen are available in Australia. Tip Top would have been the main brand available when I was a kid - even earlier than the 80's. Buttercup was the other brand I remember.

I guess we can all agree that American bread must be pretty crook if a basic white Tip Top slice tastes like heaven. Though as the thread says, a Tip Top slice is perfectly ok wrapped around a  barbecued sausage with sauce. Do you have democracy sausage sizzles in NZ when you vote?

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I guess in some places there might be sausage sizzles during elections. There were definitely a lot of sausage sizzles on our big get out the vax day a few weeks ago. The supermarket white breads are actually brilliant for those.

I guess the real debate is toast slice vs sandwich slice. I am toast slice all the way, except for Vogel's the sandwich slice is best for that.

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So it's looking like the lagging states (Qld, SA, WA) are going to hit at least 80% (16+) fully vaxxed by mid december. All over 77% single shot right now without too much slowing down yet. Wouldn't be surprised if all the states get to 90% some time in towards the end of the year / early next year as people slowly realise that interstate / overseas travel, many festivals and events etc will be requiring vaccination.

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/americans-take-on-tip-top-bread-sparks-ridicule-saddest-thing-ive-read-in-my-entire-life/L6DZF2BHRJ4CBFA5FYCQPIYVBE/

The article itself is of no particular interest. What I found interesting, and the reason I'm posting about it is that Tip Top bread is also an Aus brand, a new thing I learned today.

Interestingly my wifes family's SA bakery was bought out by Tip Top 70 odd years ago. So we have a direct connection to terrible generic supermarket bread. I like to think they'd be making better bread if they were still involved, though given some of the overly sweet food my wife's family seems to love maybe not!

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The Auckland Outbreak is proving to be a bizarre beastie. They're up to 160 cases today - but it is clear from the ethnic breakdown that it isn't generalised community transmission. If it was, there would be far more Pasifika cases. Instead, the active cases remain about 45-55% Maori in a city where only 11% of the population are Maori*.

*That does not match any individual suburb in Auckland, but actually corresponds roughly to the ethnic breakdown of New Zealand's prison population.

What we're seeing is a Delta wave through a particular subset of the population, not the population at large. That subset consists of unvaccinated Maori, under the age of 50. The relative youth of the cases explains the so-far small number of deaths (2) in this outbreak. The sheer consistency of the the ethnic breakdown also suggests that affected subset is not actually reinfecting the rest of Auckland.  

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