perpetuallunch

Carmichael coal mine in Queensland.

Queensland has a payroll tax, I don’t believe this is can be offset against losses, see here for more info https://qro.qld.gov.au/payroll-tax/

GST is payable on goods they use and services they consume.

Mineral royalties are in Queensland https://qro.qld.gov.au/royalty/calculate-mineral/rates/

Employees of said company are required to pay income tax on their earnings.

So while it may be completely factual that a resource extraction company paid no tax on its corporate profits, it is not factually complete as there is tax revenue generated by the operation of the company.

A company that manages to generate no taxable profit isn’t necessarily committing tax evasion, that’s a crime. It is most likely practicing tax avoidance, which any economically rational actor ought to do.

Note, I’m not making a value judgement here.

There’s plenty of good arguments to be made that Australia’s taxation system is in need of reform, and many that I’m in favour but are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Is cost of electricity to the commercial, industrial, and retail residential customer an important factor?

> Ah, so you are taking the anti capitalist stance.

How did you get that from anything I’ve written here, or anything I’ve written anywhere ever?

Did you read any of that page?

Have you reviewed any of the plans offered by the energy retailers?

1. The plans are optional

2. Only available in New South Wales, South Australia, and South East Queensland

3. You must have a smart meter

4. Only available to residential customers

5. The offer is for three hours during the middle of the day when most people are at work (sometimes four hours depending on retailer)

6. All of the plans offered by energy retailers have higher peak usage charge, the peak times are when most people are cooking, cleaning, bathing, etc. thereby at least somewhat negating the benefits

7. All the plans offered have a higher daily supply charge, again negating at least some of the benefits

I stand by my earlier answer: No.

And all the people who rely on that energy?

What about them?

Some of that coal is coking coal, used to make steel.

What of it?

So you’ve audited the code of these apps, apps published by active criminals, and confirmed in a via reproducible build that none of these apps are a vector for VPN access, nor try to take advantage of vulnerabilities in any of the other software installed on that system.

No! Surely not? Where did you read that?

Explain why hyper competitiveness should mean lower trust?

Doesn’t competition imply rule and order?

The other direction is merely organised crime, which tends to have very few big players.

Your argument seems to boil down to:

What we’re doing isn’t working, so let’s do more of it.

There’s a cost of living crisis in this country effecting the majority of Australians.

So let’s make energy more scares, more expensive.

I’m with Gad Saad here, in that the one thing that astounds me the most about other people is their inability to change their opinions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Why?

Why should Australians continue to tolerate a government that gives half our gas exports away, and exports at least as much coal as it uses.

But not build any modern tech coal and gas for cheap reliable base load and load following power? And nuclear too, we export all the uranium we mine, and at least some of that to nuclear armed states. Yet prohibit both on our own soil.

Why must we continue to be told we should, ever increasingly, rely on a) energy technologies that have proven to be more expensive and unreliable, and b) unproven technologies with unproven costs.

Fortunately there are other political options on the table.

Queue the continued downvotes for a reasonable comment that offers an option contrary to the received wisdom.

> in my city we literally can't buy any more grid scale solar.

Ok. That’s not the argument I was making though.

And neither is the rest of your comment a reply to anything I wrote.

Of course in the absence of the full suite of options, people will and should make rational economic decisions based on the options they do have.

And hopefully keep voting the bastards out until better options are on the table.

Yeah nah.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/yeah-nah_adv

So their business model is to profit off pirated content, and that’s why you trust them?

Very convincing argument.

Thank you for your contribution.

No it hasn’t.

What it has done is resulted in ridiculously high electricity prices, such that manufacturing anything in this country has become progressively less viable.

The Net Zero story sold to Australians is, and always was always will be, complete bs, as evidenced by three facts:

1) It’s no longer the narrative, because “data centres”

and

2) even when it was the narrative, it was always bs because Australia exports huge amounts of gas, and a metric ship load of coal, so other countries can have affordable electricity. So why don’t we just use it. There’s only one atmosphere.

and

3) Australia could double or triple its emissions and it would have approximately no additional impact on total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

We haven’t reduced our emissions, we’ve merely exported them.

In before you say “shut up Pauline”, yes I did vote One Nation at the last federal election.

And if you’re so sure I’m just drowning in koolaid, how certain are you you aren’t?

Remember the good old days when governments weren’t to be trusted and we criticised them when they laid out idiotic policy?

Since all we’re doing is opinions, and all opinions are equal.

It’s a scam.

All that money we’re coughing up for rooftop solar and batteries at home would be better spent investing in grid scale electricity generation, of any technology.

That way the best ideas generate more profit than the lesser ideas, and market discovery can solve problems.

Maybe governments could incentivise renters and home owners alike by discounting tax liabilities on new power generation investments. Or share holders could be offered discount rates. I’m open to ideas.

Rather than government picking winners, which seems to have a terrible track record.

Therefore, I posit my opinion is more valuable than yours.

Similarly here in Australia.

Electricity prices keep increasing, daily supply charge keeps increasing (this ones supposed to pay for the transmission network), while the solar feed-in tariff keeps decreasing.

With the added stupidity that, obviously the sun works during the day and so do you.

Now tax payers are forced to subsidies residential batteries as well as rooftop solar, which results in a wealth transfer from everyone else to home owners, and isn’t a policy that helps low income earners and / or renters.

It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.

Wild.

So all of these free (or paid apps? I don’t know, I don’t use any) that offer access to pirated content…

They’re all above board? Not doing anything nefarious?

That’s obviously not an argument anyone would intentionally make.

Yes, I realise this.

But if the lifts aren’t coping with the foot traffic during normal operation, I’d also not want to have to use stairs.

The propagandised idea that living in China means living under an oppressive communist regime, runs counter to the countries wild success at pretty much everything it does.

When the revolution comes, the BBC will be the first against the paywall.

> making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster.

How else can one make business decisions? Or any long term decision, financial or otherwise.

If you are correct, which I fear you may be, then we, in the West generally, are now living in a low trust society.

Which is not a good thing at all, and should be of utmost concern.

That sounds entirely reasonable.

Because short term stays put more load on the building systems, like the lifts, than perhaps the building was designed for.

Regular tenants don’t come and go at anywhere near the rate short stay guests do.

I prefer my tea brewed with SLAP, or more recently SLAP2.

Or retail at $15 per pack of twenty over-under the counter at your nearest “convenience” store, if it hasn’t been fire bomber over night in Melbourne, thought that seems to have eased off a bit since they arrested that guy.

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15975949/Melbourne-Je...

Or, the building / owners corp / code / city could simply ban short stay accommodation where it was never attended.

I would not want to be in that building if an evacuation alarm sounded.

Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?

Yep, same. I still pirate media from time to time, but it’s become increasingly infrequent that each time I think to do it I end up putting it off for months because I’d rather gargle broken glass, or watch politicians give state their opinion on topic or another, than go through all the rigmarole of pirating media.

Watching something on a streaming service, or using Apple / Google to “rent” it for a few days is like, what, three clicks away.

Rather than my media server updated over night and won’t boot, I’ve got it booting to a terminal session but the database is corrupted, fuck it I’ll just buy $2000 worth of new hard drives and then re down everything in Ultra 16k 96 bit colour with 4000 gigabit Dolby 400 channel surround-surround and upgraded to all gold plated fibre cabling and have this fixed in no time. Or my torrent site account got hacked or blocked, or the site changed URL again, or they updated their database and “hope to be back up soon”, or a Three Letter Agency seized the their hardware because they were also a involved in human trafficking of blood diamond child sex slaves, again.

It’s all too hard. I’d rather just listen to the footy on AM radio, or maybe read a book. Or occasionally complain about there being too many, or not enough, clouds / rain / sun / wind.

I recently realised even the build in iOS Private Relay gets around the Australian Government site blocks.