‘DON’T LEAVE EXPERIMENTAL PAPERS LYING AROUND FREE-THINKERS’

The Astonisher has always had an unwritten policy that when making decisions that they should, as often as possible, be either left to sheer chance or never made at all. A decision delayed keeps ones mind busy and can’t hurt anybody unless you’re a surgeon.

I came to this conclusion a dozen or so years back when I was accidentally browsing through some papers that my ex-partner was reading then about ‘Conformity, Compliance and Acceptance.’ What caught my eye was some experimental data from tests applied to a different range of people to record their reactions under certain circumstances.

One of the tests showed that when giving electric shocks to a subject, the more distant or detached the subject the more severe the shocks could become before the person applying the treatment refused to go any further. The voltage applied was less severe when the subject was in the same room than if they were out of sight. So it was that the idea that our public servants, including politicians, don’t give a fuck about you or me is that they don’t have to come face-to-face with us and can apply as much pain as they want without consequence.

Obedience to instruction also varied depending on whether the person applying the shocks were on their own or in the presence of a ‘perceived’ superior authority. There was less compliance to instruction when it was received over a telephone. So if the Town Clerk is standing in front of you, with the power to make your life a fucking misery, then you are bound to do exactly as you are told.

Another test showed that people tend to conform to those around them, adopt the same corrupt and unethical practices and will even follow orders that under normal circumstances they would find morally repulsive. This might explain why large bureaucratic structures, with volumes of instructions on how one should act under different circumstances, will inevitably, and sometimes inadvertently force employees to follow certain procedures that may be an anathema to an individual acting alone. And so it in confrontations with local councils they will act immorally in favour of a council contractor regardless of the best interests of the ratepayers.

Other experiments showed that some people assisted in the consensus process of decision making either ‘because they didn’t want to upset their peers’ or ‘ wanted to be liked’. Extreme examples of this same phenomena can be applied to Hitler in WW2 Pol Pot in Cambodia and Australia on Nauru.

What breeds ‘obedience’? Physical and emotional distance from the ratepayer, closeness and legitimacy of authority, institutional authority by way of Acts and other instruments of control, the way the group is packaged and who is supporting who, and the liberating effect of group influence emanating from the Lunchroom all effect a persons responses.

Several experiments reveal that someone who punctures unanimity deflates its social power and observing someone else’s dissent, even if it is wrong, increases our own independence. So the Astonisher has become, in a small way, that instrument to debunk the bullshit that comes out of local council offices and other concrete-minded entities. As a result of this we hope that the readership will be more likely to make the right self-determining decisions if they feel someone is on their side.

Add to this the fact that people once publicly committed to a position, seldom yield to social pressure. Umpires and referees rarely reverse their initial judgments in footy matches, and neither do we. People conform based on desires to fulfill others’ expectations and often to gain acceptance. Conformity is greater when people respond before they can reflect. Conformity results from acceptance of evidence about reality. We conform because we want to be liked and approved, or we want to be right.

So I recommend, as I am often pulling myself up for not doing it, that if we want good things to happen or to give honest answers we need to consider who is around at the time, who holds the authority and is the balance of power between us and them equal?

Each of these tests showed, as it is applied against good practices in management, that real face-to-face involvement in decision making was most likely to create a more honest environment, more likely to happen, and thus lead to more positive outcomes.

If people don’t want to participate then we are at fault not them.

DEAR DOCTOR

DEAR DOCTOR COLUMN

Rarely asked questions, and some strange occurrences, at the Skipton Medical Centre.

When I pull out my nose hairs why do my eyebrows dissappear?

A man who accidentally bit his native tongue.

The patient who wanted to be discharged by saying he was as healthy as Elvis Presley.

A lady asking about these new revolutionary diet fads

“There is one called eat less and exercise more which doesn’t sound right to me”.

The patient admitted in an emergency who was advised that he should burn off some of his fat. The Doctor never thought that anyone could set their tongue alight.

As part of questioning to determine how a mans diet was going he was asked how his movements were going.

“Well” said the man, “ my last poo was so good that my spinal cord is still dissolving in the septic. But that’s not all Doctor, when I went the day before my dump was halfway round the bend before it left my anus.”

The patient with a dose of diahroea after eating a bowl of really hot Chilli.

“I had such a tummy upset that I spent the whole night blowing spackle all over the toilet.”

A man had to have his foreskin attended to because he got it caught in a pencil sharpener. His girlfriend had told him she couldn’t see the point.

On Thursday we had a visit from male and female Dentists. Doctors Oral and Hardy. He’s an Oral Surgeon and she just likes Oral.

A lady who had the runs so badly that she was able to pass it through her flyscreen.

A final word from our wonderful Receptionist.

“You never remember the thing that kills you”

.

MENTAL HEALTH MONTHLY REPORT

There were several patients referred to the Smythesdale Clinic last month.

There was the self-loathing schitzophrenic who hated every one of his other selves too.

The man who tried to catch Disassociative Amnesia but failed. This disease causes the memory to be erased on a regular basis and he thought it would be great if he could forget who he owed money too.

The Clinic tried out a new Psychiatrist. He had nearly three weeks of experience and even treated the three personalities in his head yesterday as a demonstration.

We all sat through a training session to update us on ‘Cotard Delusion’.

It is a rare mental disorder in which a person believes he or she is either dead, do not exist, is putrifying or somehow mislaid his or her blood and internal organs. In other words they feel actually gutless.

It was probably named after a Frenchman to celebrate their courage in two World Wars.

A disabled lady who claimed her memory was so bad she had even lost one of her legs.

Then we had a referral from the Pediatrician. She brought with her a young baby who was so beautiful that she felt it should appear in Nappy Ads as a Turd. After her he mentioned he had an appointment with a Mother who wanted some tender, caring medication for her pre-teen son.

While he was here he exposed a fascinating medical fact to us all. “You know” he said “when we are concieved we all start off as just a little arsehole. It is a fact that there are many who work for our Council that never grew beyond that stage, they just grew bigger”.

The single woman from Happy Valley who believed that if she committed suicide she could collect on her life insurance and buy a husband from the Phillipines.

The short story writer from the Astonisher who said his life keeps coming to a halt every time his printer pauses.

We are looking forward to a visit from a Six Therapist from New Zealand. I remember her last visit. She was a perfect pear shape. 48, 78, 180.

DARWINS THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION

I recently became aware of the ‘Darwin Prize’. In the same vein as the Nobel or Eureka Prizes it consists of giving awards to those people who voluntarily remove themselves from the nations gene pool either by running their cars into trees at twice the speed limit, blowing themselves up for a fictional Supergod or joining a monastry/convent although not adhereing to those rules of celibacy has caused some to leak into our gene pool.

How do we know someone is in line for the award? Here we suggest ten:-

1. Women who feed Coca Cola and Macca’s to their one year old.

2. Cyclists who wear lycra and ride more than three abreast.

3. They who believe the Kardashians are Superstars instead of the big-arsed morons they really are.

4. Geoffrey Edelston who thinks teenage models are attracted to the size of his prize and not the thickness of his wallet.

5. Executives of the Linton and Happy Valley Progress Associations.

6. Reverands who think boys are attractive little beasts.

7. Australian citizens who race off to star in ‘Mission Impossible: The Caliphate’

8. Artists who paint with their won excreta

9. Voters who believe politicians don’t lie

10. Customers who want to get carpet burn from the bar-room floor

Darwins Theory ‘that only the fittest survive’ is far more plausible than Noah’s Ark ‘where only those who were welcomed aboard will survive’. It was long ago that I woke up to the mathematical impossibility that 40,000 pairs of creatures great and small were able to fit into a wooden boat half the size of the QE2 and the impossible task of preventing them from eating each other.

No, I prefer to believe that numbnuts will begat idiots, geeks will begat psychopaths and private boarding schools will begat politicians.

COST OF VIGILANCE IS GOING GANGBUSTERS

Police are complaining about having to hold each others hands when responding to a crime and then having to complete a risk assessment before they get out of the car. Halving their response times and putting others at risk. Regardless of whether there is one policeman, two policemen or twenty-two policemen any crazy jihardist is going to plan for that event. When you give in to fear and intimidation you have lost the battle.

All this unnecessary interference in other people countries, all the belligerence of a world power after 9/11 set out with the aim of destroying one regime whilst destabilising a dozen others. Sometimes its better to deal with the devil you know than try to install and angel.

Saddam Hussein may have been right when he said Iraq would be the Mother Of All Wars, maybe he could see the chaos and bloodshed of the future, his war was but the fuse attached to the much larger bomb spreading conflict from Persia to include the entire middle-east and beyond.

The United States is right at the heart of Mother Of All Wars and it has no idea how it will ever end, or even if it wants the conflicts to end. Like Palestine and Israel are we now headed for conflicts that are going to kill millions over the next hundred years and still have no end in sight.

The animosity created in Syria by a ruthless Dictator has now set the scene for a century of conflict there too. The U.S supply to Saudi Arabia of the means to kill millions could only be seen as a war crime.

It’s victory for the War Industry and maybe the final demise of World Peace.

IT AIN’T A-TRICKLIN’

Victoria, once the envy of the country, with the exception of those reprobates in NSW, has always been able to hold its own both nationally and internationally. Over the last twenty years however, since the BIG SALE VICTORIAN INFRASTRUCTURE, things have been going slowly downhill.

One could lay blame at many different feet, but the most fault has to be laid at the feet of the economists, the bean counters, the mathematicians who see nothing but numbers, noughts and crosses.

In this issue I would like to explore the processes involved in our Freeway System, not that we have one in Linton, that are critical pieces of infrastructure for the economy and the country as a whole.

In this first part I would to example to the two different freeway models the states use, and, from this one can see why Victoria’s road, despite the fact with almost the same population as NSW, it only has to provide half the road distances of most of the other less populous states.

In NSW AND Victoria a freeway overpass looks like this:-



There is a major problem in Victoria (right) when every kilometre or so three lanes of traffic are forced to merge down to two lanes, thus choking 1/3rd of the cars. This does not happen in NSW (left) where lanes do not merge and thus do not choke up.

In both instances there is a general merging after an overpass but that is to be expected and as cars merge at the same speeds there is no major congestion
.
In some areas however, when traffic builds up, Victoria has installed traffic lights to ON ramps as there is insufficient roadway for any traffic, at any speed, to merge safely. This seems to cancel out any idea that these are expressways. The very term ‘Express’ means no stopping.

Then we have the examples of the appalling tunnel system in Melbourne. In NSW and Victoria Tunnel entrances look like this:-

Of course there are a couple of exceptions to every rule. These are just my observations.

However NSW has not only provided emergency breakdown lanes inside many  tunnels but installed off-ramps which can be used as emergency slip roads if tunnels slow down or get blocked. Victoria, in general, has missed this point. Along with rarely installing slip roads, except kilometres before the tunnel, giving drivers little chance to divert, they rarely have breakdown lanes either. In the event of an accident, OHS insists on two lanes being closed. In some tunnels this blocks it completely, in others it creates road rage as three lanes try to merge down to one which produces bad tempers and road rage.

Many moons ago, Main Roads Departments in all states had a motto ‘What do we need now, double that and then double it again. That should take care of the next 50 years” Now it seems to be “What do we need, what have we got in our budget, how long till the next election”.

It is safe to say that “No government has ever brought anything in on time and on budget” regardless of all the excuses they trot out. Contracts are so complicated and convoluted that not even the people who write them can explain them. When 17 Public Servants all draw their piece of the puzzle in their own way in their own time, without ever getting together. Little wonder that private enterprise runs rings around government services. In development terms the private sector thinks like mature and logical adults while the Public Sector is still dumping in its nappy.

In the second part I would like to write about……………………..hold it a second

‘Hey you……
Yes you with the fucking hat on…….
Would you stop talking while this person tries to read this story.”

Where was I, oh yes, the Trickle Down Effect. It doesn’t just apply to rich bastards trickling their money down, about as true as the Domino Theory, to us poor bastards at the bottom.

No it applies to the tendering process when building our tunnels and freeways as well. It’s called capitalism, but in name only, the truth is capitalism died years ago and we just haven’t noticed.

When I worked for a government department examining prices and tenders I worked hand-in-hand with experienced Clerks of Works who knew what different jobs entailed and supervised those jobs as well. We were taught to operate on the ‘Goldilocks Principle’ for the prospective tenderer.
The quoted costs would be either too high, too low or just right.

If the cost was too high it meant that a hefty profit margin had been added to the bottom line either by inflating wages or overestimating materials. If the cost was too low it was an indication that the tenderer was either inexperienced, desperate for the work, or was shoddy and unreliable. If the quote was just right, which means it fell between the two or three other quotes it was a good indication that the price was about where it should be and put forward to head office as the successful or preferred tenderer for the arrangement of contracts.

The Trickle Down Effect generally applies these days to all major contracts.
Example: Each with profit margin of 10 percent.
Company One: Designs and tenders. $20 million
After profit $18 Million.
A Major Construction firm is engaged - to oversee the whole job.
After profit $ 16.2 Million
Hire company for construction equipment - After profit remainder $14.5 Million
Sub-contractors for various activities - $ 13.1 Million remains
Hire of safety barriers and notices - $11.8 Million left
Recruitment company for labourers - $10.6 Million with the balance left for purchase of materials and to cover all other other costs including worker insurance, wages and salaries, power and water, etc.
This might leave $ 9 million, less than half of the tender price, for the purchase of the actual building materials.

This trickle down effect was shown adequately when the Linton Replica Train Station was built. Over a period of time, with Golden Pains insisting that the project come in on time and on budget had to keep erasing bits and pieces of the plans until only about half of what was supposed to be stands there today. Funded with Commonwealth money there was no way the council was going to contribute anything to the project except for all the publicity that Council was providing us with this magnificent town gift.

It is an asset to the town, but when one takes into account the many stupid errors during the process, like insisting there was no water there when there actually was water available.

Thanks for staying quiet while this was read.

IT AIN’T FAIR - I GOT NO JOB TO PAY FOR STUFF I WANT TO BUY FROM CHINA

In Linton, as the rest of the country we pay as much as 50% more for on-line products than the average world customer. It’s called ‘geo-blocking’ where, like film and TV classifications countries are assigned a financial formula to ensure that the price they pay in India is relative in terms of GDP as Australia. There overall prices are far lower so that global corporations can compete against the local product and if you buy on-line in Linton the overall prices are higher because our wages are higher and global corporations can charge more and still compete against the local product.
Put another way, if a pair of shoes can be made in China by Nike for about $15.00 they can afford to sell them in India for about $20.00 lower than Indian retail and delivered direct from China (a billion potential customers is also a good incentive). In the United States where wages are higher they can sell them for $180.00 or more, while other stores have to pay rent and staff and the like to sell shoes Nike can just sell direct door to door and even discount against there own shops and retailers.
In Australia, despite the fact we think we have the highest wages but don’t, our minimum wage is far higher than the U.S.A so in G.D.P terms we can afford to pay even more, so the shoes will retail here for $220.00, again, delivered straight from the factory with no middle man no locally employed sales staff and as a result extraordinary profit margins.
The major retailers will tell you that ‘price, price, price’ is all that drives their customers. Locally made comes second and quality is sacrificed to price every time. Consumer organisations will tell you that ‘parallel imports’ where shops like Sam’s and Reject will ‘wholesale’ direct from India at  far less cost and thus sell the product far cheaper does nothing for our local economy. Great they say ‘it drives down prices’ but at the same time we are deliberately under-pricing ourselves and driving holes through our employment figures.
What is better - an additional 10% and full employment or 10% less and longer dole queue’s. Already to keep down unemployment statistics a ‘job’ is defined as about 8 hours work and not the 20 hours it used to be.
Here is some sage advice, admittedly information we got through subscribing to ‘Choice’.
When buying on-line (and we only do it when it cannot be obtained within 50Km) we can go through a whole process to purchase something ‘we could not find in Australian shops’ (in our case a Koran in English) only to find at the checkout that it could not be shipped to Australia. Fortunately we already have a spurious overseas address so we arranged for the book to be sent from the U.S address to the school in Bangladesh which was our target destination.
According to Choice these third-party delivery services such as MyUS.com, Lil’ Shoppa, HopShoGo and Bongo give you an American address for parcel forwarding and they can send it on to Australia. Some companies such as Price USA even buy the product on your behalf and use their local agents to ship it to Australia. But be warned - they are not free - they all have a fee of some sort hidden in the pricing structure commonly called ‘package and deliver’. So one needs to watch out for the additional costs.
If the product is not available in Australia then you have no other alternative than to either pay the extra or look for a locally made equivalent product which gives Australians work and probably works out about the same in overall costs. I believe that there are many out there that buy a bargain on-line only to find after the final bill comes in they could have bought it cheaper in Linton.
Regardless of what we are shopping for purchasing overseas can have major problems - no warranty for a start - faked parts is another - and medicines? No - unless you want to kill yourself (seriously).
Being obsessive-compulsive the Astonisher lives by an astonishing number of self-imposed rules and protocols designed to keep idle hands busy. Our policy in general is:-
1: Buy in Linton
2: Buy in Ballarat
3: Buy on-line in Australia
4. Buy where available.
We always believe the Australian economy must come first (a pity our elected representatives don’t care about that) and will lobby for a GST to be applied to all on-line purchases not just those purchased in Australia. If we want a level playing field then we have to apply the same taxes across the board regardless of price or origin. We don’t have GST on goods under a certain value as the bean-counters say it costs more to collect than what they will collect - what they don’t tell us is that GST on pricier items will more than cover the cost of collection on the lower end of the scale - let Peter subsidise Paul. They’re just too lazy and complacent and worried about getting home for the X-Factor to bother putting it in place. Why increase our workload?
The State Liberal Government was turfed out because it allowed 60% of green waste to go into land-fill (only Labor is that wasteful?) but they did rule that ‘geo-blocking’ was in such a grey area in regard to World Trade Regulations that they shouldn’t make it illegal to flout the rules governing such practices. ‘If one could one should’ was the outcome. Pity they don’t like that concept when it comes to personal taxes. Apparently it’s the downloading and not the smuggling of USB sticks up our arse that makes the difference.
Just as a demonstration of differences between countries. Taxes for on-line purchasing in America are for any purchase above $15.00 and in the U.K it’s $25.00 (so much for the too expensive to collect argument) but in Australia the maximum that does not attract taxes is $1,000. Basically Australians can buy almost anything they want and our politicians couldn’t give a toss.
There is another way to get around your Internet Shopping problems. You can save yourself some time and money by getting yourself a legitimate U.S downloading address using a VPN (a virtual whatever) through Free and Paid VPN servers. Readers should Google TorVPN, Logmein Hamachi ( a sort of Beam-me-up Scotty type site) Hotspot Shield, HMA. IPVanish (sounds more like a slash in the dark) and Overplay. You connect to your VPN server (which pretends to be your computer - good if you’re also Julian Assange) and allows you to set up an account and use a legitimate U.S postal address. One is not quite sure if the Sheriff has realised yet that there are 17 million people living in a two-bedroom flat in Little Rock.
Yet another alternative to VPN, if you spend quite a bit on imports (GMH for example) is to adopt a US based domain name such as un-block-us.com for about $5 a month. The Astonisher gets many Linton stories through our domain in Croatia to protect our local sources.

Again - rerouting your internet connection through a DNS server (we know that one to be Domain Name Server - Duh!!!!) by changing the setting on your computer (in our case permanently on another computer but not something we can tell you how to do - a Geek did ours for us) can also trick the site you’re attempting to hack (line through) access into believing your computer is in that country.

A word of warning at this point. Be warned about the possibility of bill-shock from excess data usage charges on the faster 4G network if it ever gets to Linton which has been found to increase data usage by up to 50% in some cases. Much of this caused by the multiple routing and other data sapping uses you might put your computer through for some of these exercises.

After whining on about buying Australian I’ve just realised I’ve told you all about not employing local talent with the exception of local geeks setting up nefarious ways to beat the system.

IT’S NOT OUR MONEY

The Linton Astonisher once had a thought that we should get rid of all political parties. That turned out to be a bit pie in the sky as political parties are the only ones that can form a government after an election. One can imagine the problem with 156 individuals all wanting to be the Prime Minister. I still believe it would, and should, apply to the Senate so that politicians would begin to represent their state and not their party very few Ministers and no Prime Ministers have ever come from this Upper Chamber anyway.

Individual members could coalesce around the laws and poilicies and vote in favour for only those policies they believe are best for their electorate, their state and not hjave to worry about the threats from Whips and other party leeches that ‘you’ll never get power if you don’t toe the party’s line’. They don’t seem to realise there is more power in the hands of a few crazies like Palmer and One Nation than ever being in government itself. You can be a pretty small tail and still wag the dog pretty vigourously as so ably demonstrated by the tree-hugging Greens.

Now you might be astonished to read that I believe we could also save a lot of taxpayers money by not allowing government employees to throw our cash to the wind in frivolous spending sprees. It is common knowledge, and I experienced it year after year when I was unproductively employed, that an attitude of use it or lose it becomes a common practice at the end of year civil servants sale.

This entails getting rid of any money you haven’t spent by the end of the financial year in the fanciful fear that you won’t get as much money next year. This is a furphy of course but is bandied around all government departments at all levels. Stupidity would reign if budgets were cut and then had to be increased again six months later, but then again stupidity is almost the exclusive domain of civil servants and pollies and in all three tiers of goverment, or as Golden Pains calls it  ‘community leadership’.

As a genetically programmed tight-wad I always treated my budget as almost my money and did not just spend it in a cavalier fashion. By the end of each financial year I might have had about $500 left over and I had mandatory instructions to spend it. As a result my office had enough stationary to last the next decade and every year I had to buy more productive items, it stretched my imagination to the limit.

What I did need was a new computer but there was never enough in the kitty to buy one. My pleas to put the money aside for the next year fell on deaf ears of course, funding from Community Services to N.G.O’s had to be spent without arguement and apparently on their part without conscience. It ended up by my applying for a special grant to buy a computer which could well have been funded from existing money and not yet another drain on the taxpayers purse.

‘Jesus! It’s only taxpayers money …. not yours’ was one response from my funding body.
So there we have it. The taxpayer around the end of June every year helps to pay for bonding exercises (see also wankers games), staff picnics and movie nights to develop relationships between the wage-earners (a.k.a dinner, movies and a free booze-up) or even paying for sessions called ‘personal development’ (including palm reading and star-sign interpretation) and in extreme cases large amounts can be exhausted on entire week-ends at a spa or other health resort (in my case it was a long-weekend at a Mount Victoria Boutique Hotel) and given such names as Peak Organisation Conferences (in my case the Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Parramatta) where we learnt more about celibacy and family counselling, or Advanced Community Development where we learnt how to sway the system towards giving us more money to spend on frivoulous personal pursuits disguised as work.

The ultimate answer is to freeze the budget at a certain level for four years (a much favoured number for governments) and enable departments and individuals in the community sector to earmark the money that is left for use the next year. It would have the effect of making civil servants more accountable and economical when spending our money.

Over the next four years the Auditor-General could check the frugality of departments, their ability to use our money wisely and ensure that tenders for building works or provision of expendable supplies are within the same playing field as the private sector. When a normal house can be built for $150,000 why should the government pay $350,000 for the same project. When a good set of bookshelves cost around $3,000 why should Senator Brandis spend $14,000 on the same thing let alone a previous Prime Minister spending $5,000 on a desk which was priced at $2299.00 on the showroom floor. You would have heard about Gillard’s $100,000 School Tuck Shop about the size of a standard single garage.

Now its up to us, after all its our money, to start asking those ‘born to rule’ what they might do about this blatant waste of money. Little wander we are going further into debt at government level, they just don’t know when to stop spending.