[Cosmo]

I totally agree and I just hope that Dan Andrews’ courage in cancelling this unnecessary event will act as a precedent for other leaders to follow.
All I have heard from opposition and sports commentators is sympathy for the athletes. I am not aware that mid level athleletes pay much tax towards this sort of thing but what about the average hard worker who is short changed by their taxes being siphoned off for this non productive enjoyment by the few.
I’d like to see a tick box at the bottom of every tax return form asking if the person would like to make a tax contribution towards sport and building more stadiums.

[Cosmo]

The surical profession is notoriously conservative and I wonder if this is another example of professional tall poppy syndrome. It is almost certain that the patients with complex brain cancer who died after operations by Charlie Teo were unfortunately likely to die anyway.
If I were in that horrific dilemma of dying from disease or risking an experimental operation by Charlie Theo, I’d take the latter any day.
Yet again our loss is China’s gain and how many times we have allowed that to happen in so many ways only to later lament our stupidity.

[Cosmo]

There is a way to minimise your phone’s exposure to these scams.
Use your phone and give your prime number only to people you know and trust. Buy a $15 a year (decoy) sim card and put it in an old phone. When you are asked by the numerous businesses and contacts for your phone number but you know they will never phone you, give them your decoy number. Check it every few weeks and you will be amazed how many scam calls you’ve dodged.
Also, use a different email account for banking to the one you use for general use. A decoy email address is worthwhile too.

[Cosmo]

And people will eventually leave Qld because what they were looking for ie space and freedom of movement is disappearing. Only two years ago getting over the border from Northern NSW into Qld was a relief. Now after driving back through over 100km of congested suburban turmoil and road works from Brisbane to the the Gold Coast, reaching Northern NSW is a relief and delight.
Extreme weather, floods, cyclones, box jelly fish, crocs. and cane toads, youth violence out of control, a State that is so reluctant to embrace education that even it’s Premier can’t pronounce her own name.
Queensland, a great place to visit an even better place to return home from and I’m sure that’s what many new arrivals will eventually do.

[Cosmo]

Im not too pessimistic about AI. Common sense seems less than common amongst politicians, business people and the general public and strategic thinking seems to be a dying art. So could the Use of AI help? Would AI have suggested invading Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea? Humans did! What about Woolworths disastrous venture into Masters Hardware or Bunnings aborted move into the UK? What would AI have said about Brexit or Robo Debt or the inland Melbourne to Brisbane freight railway?
Even the machines which invariably answer my phone calls to government and businesses don’t seem very smart so a bit more AI to provide the ability to better understand my responses would be a stress reliever.

[Cosmo]

I think it’s just the supermarkets’ obsession with plastic wrap on nearly every food item they sell. So what did we do before plastic wrap was available? The biggest problem now is end rot which is disguised by the plastic until you get the cucumber home.

[Cosmo]

KSS pull the other one! A tourism industry which produces thousands of low skilled low value jobs which is currently running on two cylinders because of the shortage of foreign back packers. I recently stayed in south eastern Queensland where the foreign owned hotel operator apologised about the lack of service due to an absence of back packers. It certainly explains why education is not a necessary priority in Queensland where you have a youth crime epidemic.

[Cosmo]

Absolutely not! Of course you wouldn’t include education as a priority in a State that is so obsessed by totally unproductive sport. We don’t even have industry spin-offs from sport such as manufacturing and exporting sports equipment and clothing, we have to import that too. Then of course there is the greenhouse effect of flying thousands of participants, administrators and spectators around the world.
When we have tens of thousands of homeless people living on our streets it is obscene to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars and employing thousands of building trades people refurbishing numerous stadiums for this one event.

[Cosmo]

Many of these companies could help reduce scams themselves by reducing the amount of personal information they collect on us and then archiving offline, non-active accounts. They demand our phone numbers but do they ever phone us; our street addresses but do they ever deliver, age; drivers licence number but do they ever provide a car? Woolworths is an example, I tried to change my email address for my customer card but they refused to change it if I didn’t provide my street address as well as my postal address. So they have been sending emails to a cancelled email address for the past five years and we don’t get bugged by their promotions.
A simple cheap way to reduce the scam texts is to buy a cheap 12 month SIM, put it in an old phone. When someone demands your phone number but you know they will never phone you, give them that number. I have many times more scam texts on my ‘reserve’ phone than my regular phone.

[Cosmo]

Eurovision has become weirder and weirder as the years go by. It used to be good but it’s now hardly about music, certainly not melody, more about noise and lighting effects. When I hear a short preview of the winning performance I’m so pleased I didn’t waste time watching the failures. Quite happy Australia not continuing in it but given the cohort which strongly supports it, I’m sure SBS will continue to cover it.

[Cosmo]

This really raises the question “can we cancel and eliminate our personal information on MyGov?” I really don’t need a MyGov account now that Covid is past and with this negligence and incompetence by Mygov we are better off without it.

[Cosmo]

We are continuously being recommended by various government agencies to use multi-factor identification, in fact when I initially set up my MygGov account during Covid, I am sure they insisted on checking me via my mobile. So how it it that someone can change your address on Mygov several times and withdraw $150,000 In your name without a single text message to check that it’s all legit? This seems like a massive Mygov failure to me.

[Cosmo]

I would go even further and combine body weight with baggage weight. If as it appears weight is such a significant economic factor in flying a plane why not give passengers the choice of losing weight and taking more baggage or saving money on reducing both. Anyone who claims weight is genetic should look at family or community photos from the 1930s and locate the overweight person they claim as an ancestor.

[Cosmo]

Babies and professional footballers: a problem of infantiles!
A separate compartment for both would be well justified, we don’t pay good money to be locked up into a torture chamber for hours.
The worst flight I ever experienced was with a Middle Eastern airline from Sydney to Birminham UK. Most of the passengers seemed to be mothers taking their babies back home to the M/E probably to show grandparents. It was bedlam and the staff seemed to be at their wits end trying to maintain some order.
I thought the problem would be solved when we flew out of Dubai but the plane was filled with the sisters of the earlier passengers and their babies flying back to the UK. Our final small compensation was at the passport check when all these hijab clad ladies filled the EU passport line leaving the non EU line free for us.
Fortunately we flew back home from Munich with another airline.

[Cosmo]

Our first TV a National Panasonic wes still working perfectly nearly 30 years later when digital was introduced. Unfortunatly when the National was made VCRs hadnt been invented so it had no ports for a set top box. By contast the smarts of our our current Samsung smart TV failed after four years.

My expensive camera failed a year after the two year warranty expired. The manufacturer refused to replace it because the warranty had expired. I pointed out that the Trade Practices Act stated that goods needed to be warranted for a ‘reasonable period of time’ and if they advertised this as a three year life camera, consumers would consider this an unreasonable life and would not buy it. The company asked me if
I would accept the latest upgraded model as fair settlement.

I belive if a $1750 TV was advertised as having a two year life, nobody would buy it because that is not a reasonable life. That should be the test.

[Cosmo]

Trump is a media circus from which only he and the media benefit. Trump gets the publicity which he craves and the media gets pulp to fill it’s pages or programs. My only concern is that he becomes president again and the world becomes even more dangerous and unpredictable and the US even more self centred.

[Cosmo]

The best way to get really good coffee is the cheapest and healthiest. Grind your own beans and use a paper coffee filter into a jug. Simple, consistently delicious, healthy and most economical with no electrics to go wrong.

[Cosmo]

I’m not affected by this but I hope after all the recent warnings the court throws the book at Latitude. Three key questions, why does a homewares trader need to collect driving licence details, why does Latitude need to keep it after they’ve checked the validity and why do they need to store it online instead of off-line if there’s a need to store it at all?
This is shear lazy, negligent incompetence and they should pay the price.

[Cosmo]

Not interested in Bunnings pet range. Who needs a dog when they can tune in to all the neighbourhood’s dogs 24/7? I also agree with I’mOKJack on putting yet more family concerns out of business.

[Cosmo]

I agree with Peter regarding the inappropriateness of a further property tax, people leave their properties vacant for a variety of reasons. I would do too after my experience of renting out three almost new capital city houses while overseas only to find them all vandalised by the tenants on my return and RE agents who don’t do their jobs.
Many empty properties are in holiday locations where there is little or no employment and few services.
If we could solve the split family problem we would be half way to solving the housing shortage because over the past few years the housing shortage has increased much faster than the population has increased.
One solution to rapidly building new houses is to prefabricated large parts of them in factories for quick erection on site. We need also to re- establish the building products industries we once had before we allowed greedy company owners to make them in China and Finally if we could get councils to do their job and ensure that building approvals meant the home were safe to live in we would all be better served.

[Author]

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