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[sambojin]

(removed)

[ChairmanPoo]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[sambojin]

(removed)

[Ehndras]

...That's friggin' genius, actually.

[Akura]

New spambot. This one is selling fake IDs and counterfeit money. And apparently holograms.

[Reelya]

No. No I don't. The mail end of that is taken into account IN the postage costs, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Electoral Commission are Federal government departments that have extensive workforces of people that are already employed and trained, just for this. Yes, they had to bring on some temps for a month or three. Not 70 million dollars worth.

I don't agree. The ABS and AEC are big organizations, yes, but they do not have people just sitting around all year long just to process election data. The Electoral Commission's work is seasonal, only when there is an election. They're bringing those resources to bear. They are not just people sitting around waiting to process 16 million pieces of mail at once.

If they did in fact have the needed capacity just sitting around to be able to soak up the processing of 16 million bits of correspondence without putting on many extra staff, then of course that just creates a new flaw in the logic - the ongoing costs of that wasted capacity year in, year out, would be vastly more than the cost of the plebiscite, and are you railing against waste in the ABS/AEC in general?

The people who work for the AEC especially are seasonal workers, the hours they work are contingent on their being an election, so the costs are entirely contingent. If you e.g. assume that each piece of written correspondence generates about 1 minute worth of total labor needed for handling, then you're looking at a good 10% of the total budget just paid out for people's asses sitting on chairs. And the direct labor costs of someone sitting in an office chair are not the bulk of office costs.

I'm not saying that the plebiscite is a good idea or not a waste of money. I'm just saying that your logic is wrong on that. You're unable to separate your disdain for the process as a whole with illogical critiques on the specifics of process. Processing 16 million bits of physical stuff that have all been handled by different people, and then collating that into a single source of data that is also auditable with checks and balances and protecting confidentiality, while also verifying sources is a very expensive and time-consuming process, it's not the same as a production-line process.

No, there is no "someone" who made a lot of money off this. There are a lot of little someones who work for the ABS and especially the AEC who got extra shifts out of this, and a pile of other money went into the Australian Post Office. All of which are government-owned. I guess you could say whoever they bought the paper and envelopes from made money however.

[martinuzz]

New spambot. This one is selling fake IDs and counterfeit money. And apparently holograms.

Yeah, already reported it. I wonder if it should be reported to the French police as well. It has a French telephone number on the bottom.

[Reelya]

I'll also point out those "we could do X with that money" arguments are always wrong. It never works out like that, because you're assuming zero overheads in the hypothetical process. And as we see in all real processes run by large organizations, there is substantional overhead.

EDIT: The main thing however is that if you spend $120 million, then $120 million gets spent and it creates employment all of which ripples down. Exactly what you spend the money on doesn't make a lot of difference, unless it's merely going overseas to buy fighter jets that don't fly (at least $85 million in procurement costs per unit) or naval helicopters that can't fly over water.

Remember, buying the Sea Sprite helicopters from the USA cost us $6 billion, while the F35 program has cost Auistralia $15 billion for it's participation, and we don't have any working aircraft for that money, nor is the research being done in Australia.

The plebiscite is only a bad idea because of how it's messing up the debate on SSM. In economic terms it's a bloody brilliant bit of economic stimulus compared to normal fuck-ups by the government that cost many billions at a time.

[birdy51]

New spambot. This one is selling fake IDs and counterfeit money. And apparently holograms.

Yeah, already reported it. I wonder if it should be reported to the French police as well. It has a French telephone number on the bottom.

May as well, if ye have easy access to the French authorities. Might end up saving a few people a world of hurt down the line.

[Reelya]

I also want to point out that unemployed people in Australia get around $AU 340 a week in living assistance (which includes rent subsidies) , as long as you can tick a few boxes per fortnight. That's the rough equivalent of an American working a full 40 hours on the federal minimum wage per week, even adjusting for the exchange rate.

The reasons for the few hungry and homeless in Australia isn't lack of money being paid from the government. It's mental illness and drug/alcohol addiction, people who generally can't cope with shit even if you give them a 40-hour USA minimum-wage salary each week for doing basically nothing. Buying them a sandwich isn't the right response. There are already places for them to get free food in all the major cities too. You never have to pay for food even now.

So this "feed the poor" with the plebiscite money thing is not well thought out. Either you merely increase welfare cheques to the "needy" people who have constantly fucked up and can't manage the money you already give them to put a roof over their own heads, or you micro-manage the process to "ensure" they get fed/housed with that money, a process that ensures that most of the money gets spent on logistics and public servant wages, and thus goes towards the same types of white-collar workers who are running the plebiscite.

Also note here that money is only a nominal value on a piece of paper, it's not real value. Saying you can solve real social problems by merely printing enough bits of paper with numbers on them is in fact a little delusional. It's buying into the "reality of money" which is in fact just a social delusion. People's purchasing power defines their share of resources. If you create more money to buy things for some people, you're just shifting around resource allocations. Someone else always loses outm and the person who loses out are not the rich. The rich are people holding large amounts of pieces of paper. It's the common person who needs to convert most of their paper-wealth into real resources. Those are the people affected when someone else gets a bigger share.

[Yoink]

My housemate put forth the hypothesis that the reason for a postal plebiscite was to financially bail Australia Post out of the dire financial straits it's been in (due to factors such as people no longer sending letters or greeting cards and most parcels being sent by private delivery companies) without pissing off a tonne of people with better and brighter ideas of what the government should really be spending that money on.

Wait a minute...

[Reelya]

That would work out if the government planned to sell of Australia Post as a private company. Keep the balance books stocked with a ton of government correspondence, sell the thing off to the highest bidders, then change everything to digital.

But yeah, we are in fact paying a ton of extra money per year on urban delivery prices to ensure that people in back of nowhere towns can send physical mail for a uniform national cost. In the USA, early rivals to the US post office opened but were outlawed. They operated only in major urban centers and would deliver for you, and offered lower prices, on the assumption that most correspondence was to other major urban centers or within the same city. e.g. imagine if a rival Melbourne-only post office opened which offered half-price delivery but only within the melbourne CBD? Plenty of business would come their way, and they wouldn't  have the overheads of supporting the entire state of Victoria like AusPost does. In a deregulated market, services where some consumers subsidize others are doomed, basically.

[ChairmanPoo]

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his balls?

[Reelya]

I was mainly thinking about how the rural folk complain about "socialist" subsidized systems, but they are in fact the major beneficiaries.

[Caz]

I found a shop in town that sells swords and full suits of armour. Need to get a pair and begin a duel.