It's about buying the fringe instead of mainstream religious vote so the "nutter" tag is very apt.
Some of those bunches like Hillsong Church, Exclusive Bretheren and Magnificant Meal are very dodgy in the way they operate no matter what they pretend to or do believe.

And a cow costing as much as a house?

Don't laugh, taking people off benefits for six months at a time could mean shantytowns within a few years, so a lean-to house worth less than a cow isn't entirely unlikely.

The true classic - praising the bravery of Japanese submariners attacking Sydney. To put that in perspective Americans could consider an example of praising the pilot who dropped the first bomb on Pearl Harbour.
He's a political infighting attack dog that never should have been put in charge of anything more substantial than a sausage sizzle - so long as somebody else is counting the takings and there are no girls for him to grope.

I think we've got a couple of open cut coal mines about as big as some of your east coast states.

We are talking about a government that just spends all the time

For the entire life of the last one interest rates were rock bottom so they borrowed to build stuff to improve the place. Isn't that what businesses do as well?

Tying the MRRT and carbon tax to the NBN

We're in the phase where any trace of the previous government is being carefully removed and Ziggy has returned to ensure the NBN is never heard from again. Sadly "infrastructure spending" is seen as roads because the people in charge are still stuck in student politics mode and haven't listened to anything since they were children stealing traffic signs or goosing other children. Let's hope some bad poll figures make them run screaming to adult supervision from staffers or something because these clowns clearly have no plan other than not being Labour.

I'm so sick of being told that because one party has a majority at one election they have 'a mandate'

Don't worry people, Tony Abbott can easily get his man date with Alan Jones if he wants. Just think of that every time the "mandate" word comes up and it's less annoying.
And no, I'm not having a go at homosexuality, I'm having a go at those who say one thing and do exactly the opposite. They say "conservative" but are foaming at the mouth reactionary with a wrecking ball. Unless there was a referendum question there's no real mandate and he's just pulling a justification out of his arse (or another form of man date if you prefer).

but I believe that a carbon tax is NOT the right solution to climate change. The RIGHT solution is a trading scheme

Wind back a few years and think about the negotiation between the parties - where a trading scheme was proposed but the Libs rejected it and said they would compromise with a carbon tax. Thus the carbon tax was pushed as better than nothing but then the Libs kicked Turbull out and backflipped on their own idea. The ALP pushed it through anyway instead of taking the time to do something better.
That's how we ended up in the situation even if it wasn't a good idea.

As to what is happening now, it is as simple as the new government removing anything with the faintest scent of the previous one to try to make it look like the earlier government achieved nothing. That's had side effects like today's elimination of a forestry research group that's been running for 85 years. Maybe we'll get something other than knighthoods all round for the Party boys after the wrecking period is over but sadly it's still too early to tell.
It's reminding me of the utter disgust I felt at watching student politics back in the day - especially since there some of the same clueless yobs involved and they don't seem to have done any growing up since. It's also a good reminder of how destructive party factions are and how it can limit the available talent pool.

by a similar amount to their gain from the removal of the carbon tax (for the average person who chooses to buy coal fired electricity)

That gain is just an assumption and I think is going to be an incorrect one. Over the next few years I predict that there are going to be a long string of excuses as to why the price of electricity is not going to fall instead of an actual cost reduction. The lower expense of reduced taxes will not be passed on to the consumers because there is no actual competition and no means of enforcing a price reduction.

By putting that stuff into a company policy manual, they're treating you like a child.

Behind many rules that should be too obvious to print there is often a story about someone gaming the system and pretending ignorance.
Also there's things like the military approach, where if you break the law AND the military rule telling you not to break that law you find the rule was added deliberately to double the punishment.

So I am honestly asking, what is BSD good for. I presently use CentOS

The largest difference between the two platforms is the capability of ZFS - rock solid for years on one and sort of coming out of alpha on the other.
A second reason is you can use really crappy old hardware as a test box for it and it still works - for instance I ran it on a retired file server with IDE drives for a while to learn how to use it and it ran with far more speed than I expected.

That all you've got? If you are getting paid for this shit somebody is getting very badly ripped off.

For anything resembling domestic use, it's still not gonna happen

This is industrial scale computing but it really doesn't have industrial scale power usage compared with light or heavy industry.
I don't think you could even fit that number of racks into most houses so why bother wondering whether you can power it without a few 3 phase plugs :)

So, sure, if you have a huge space, and a 1950's jet engine hooked up to a generator you can trivially generate this power.

They are actually not all that big but you do need to keep people away from the exhaust and they are noisy as hell - it's amazing how many little Avon jets ended up as generators. It's something you use to do a cold start of a coal fired power station since there are so many conveyors, crushers, sootblowers etc that require electricity to run.
Anyway, my point stands that you could power 130 of these things with something in use as a (large) backup generator! From the 1950s!

Mainboards etc. have gone way down in power consumption in the last years ... Let's say the power difference when idle is 30W

I'm not sure that is very realistic since we are now discussing components that draw very little power in comparison to CPUs and storage. At 5V DC that's a whopping 6 amps of current remember.

Just calculate for yourself!

Based on a faulty premise it becomes nothing but pointless numerolgy :(

SSD versus spinning storage on the other hand IS going to save quite a few watts, so replacing those old 80GB or less operating system drives on some things would make a dent.

I should have known that - thanks.

I don't believe they have anything like 45 modules with 4x 8-core ARM processors in 5U

The numbers are a bit different but the "new style" is not new.