I also struggle to understand the desire for a separate quicklaunch when Windows 7 Taskbar-pinning achieves the same end more efficiently.

Teachers (NSW) get $70k-$100k.

Average annual pay for my PT waiter about $25k. Average FT Oz pay about $50k.

Actually median salary is around $50k. Average is around $70k.
For a skilled, degree-qualified job, teaching is not particularly highly-paid, especially in context of its importance.
A schoolteacher's (as in, someone in the classroom) salary in NSW will top out at around $85k, no matter how long they're employed. If you want to go higher than that, you need to look at principal or other administrative positions. *Most* teachers will earn well under $85k.

Don't start me on miners, MUA or union organizers ($100k+),

Indeed, unskilled, uneducated bogans earning six-figure salaries for driving trucks around is absurd. Union organisers are just standard middle-managers, and $100k for one of them is nothing amazing. However, how is the fraction of one percent of the workforce you're complaining about responsible for our economic woes, exactly ?

The system is rorted by a process called "regulatory capture" where laws are passed that favour unions and industries that are unionised.

The increasing proportion of part-time, "flexible" and similarly precarious jobs make this claim laughable.
Once again, less than one-fifth (and consistently dropping) of the workforce is unionised. Of those, most are not being paid particularly highly. If the laws are favouring unions, they're doing a pretty shit job at it.
Compared to the phenomenal amount of waste going into utterly unproductive rentier industries like real estate and finance, it is absurd to try and blame unions for much of anything at all.
On top of all that, you're fundamentally arguing from a logical fallacy: that unionisation is implicitly bad.

Know why your kids know zilch about math and physics?

Because your mate Murdoch - along with most of the right-wing party machine - has been waging war on people like teachers and academics for over a decade. He's front and centre in the ongoing anti-science and anti-intellectual media campaign. No-one wants to be a teacher because it's gone from being a career with high levels of community respect to a dead-end loser's job.

So a math major in industry earns $150k - $200k, why would he go into teaching? OTOH The average historian/geographer/artist/Litt major would be hard pressed to get $40k-$60k. Gee we have plenty of them in schools, I wonder why?

Are you seriously trying to argue schools could pay maths teachers $150k ? Or are you arguing that children shouldn't be taught geography, history and language skills ?

Your statement is ambiguous, but I assume that you are implying that real-estate bubbles were bad for society, but that you believe that profitability as a measure would judge them to be good for society, therefore profitability is a poor measure of benefit to society.

My point is that people have spent huge amounts of money trading houses with each other and inflating huge real estate bubbles (with massively negative effects for contempoary, and particularly future, society) rather than doing anything productive with it.

The GFC never really hit Australia. Our economy has been growing since mid 2009 although a lot of idiots keep saying that it's going to hit us any minute now... Any minute now... We've dodged 20 of these recessions in the last year. Mostly because idiots dont actually know anything about the economy.
Our time is coming. Or economy has been almost entirely hollowed out and the ridiculously high real estate prices have massively and unsustainably increased the cost of living, and are now putting a drag on the whole economy as retail struggles to survive. The only thing holding the whole shebang together is the ludicrously high currency.
In short, when the mining boom stops, we're fucked. It's going to be painful and, unfortunately, laid almost entirely at the feet of Labor, even though the Liberals are at least, if not more, culpable.
The Liberals "hard saved" cash came from selling off public assets. Without selling off Telco assets and the airports, Howard would have left in debt.
You forgot the structural deficit Howard's huge cash handouts and entrenched middle-class welfare left behind. Old Labor would have fixed that by cutting back on breeding payments and non-means-tested handouts and raising taxes, but New Labor is just Liberals Lite and thus continued those same unsustainable policies.

Profit is the best measure of benefit to society: how much savings/income are free individuals willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the good or service to their standard of living.
Real-estate bubbles the world over demonstrate the foolishness and fallacy of this position.

Some sheet home blame to CSIRO's former chief executive Geoff Garrett. Before his appointment in 2000, each division of the organisation directed its own science, and its leaders enjoyed utter autonomy. Garrett bombshelled these silos, introducing a corporate hierarchy that funnelled to him and to his entourage control over funds. With the money went control of the direction of the organisation.

And that would make you another Labor revisionist?
Fuck no. I haven't voted Labor since Keating. Since they've become nothing more than Liberals Lite, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole. My political position is soft-left, and Labor hasn't been anywhere left of centre for a decade.

2009 - Labor was in power...
The rot started nearly ten years earlier.
"Some sheet home blame to CSIRO's former chief executive Geoff Garrett. Before his appointment in 2000, each division of the organisation directed its own science, and its leaders enjoyed utter autonomy. Garrett bombshelled these silos, introducing a corporate hierarchy that funnelled to him and to his entourage control over funds. With the money went control of the direction of the organisation."

Both the Liberals and New Labor follow the same neo-liberal economic/authoritarian social playbook that's been destroying western civilisation in the name of corporate greed for nearly three decades now. They are practically indistinguishable in their economic policies, though Labor at least having the minor preference of a) being responsible for nearly every positive economic and social improvement in Australian history and b) paying at least lip service to fulfilling the social contract of Government. The Liberals don't even try to pretend, anymore, that they're for anything except greater concentration of wealth amongst few, the gutting of public services and the socialisation of "big capital's" losses.

What we need is a Thatcher to stop all the union rorts.
Yeah. That overwhelming ~17% of the workforce that's unionised, mostly in average- to low-paying jobs like teaching and childcare, sure are "rorting" the system.
Like the other guy said, stop getting your new from Murdoch. All he wants to do is turn Australia into another America (and he's doing a bang-up job so far, thanks to useful idiots like you). If you want to live in America so badly, move there. It's pretty easy for Australians to emigrate.

Judging by the SMH article, the problems started when a new director came in and started to run the place like a corporation instead of a research facility.

It would appear the CSIRO is - along with the ACCC, and others - another victim of the Howard neocons. New Labor being nearly indistinguishable in this regard, have just kept the ball rolling.

Thinking you shouldn't be able to wander into a 7-11 and pick up an AK47 along with your coke and chips isn't being "anti-gun".

It costs MORE time and money (at a minimum they have filing fees and attorney's fees) for a company to get an H1-B than it costs to get a US resident.

Rubbish. Compared to the time and cost of training people to fill the jobs they have vacant, importing foreigners is chicken feed.

Disclosure: I spent a couple of years working in the US on an E3 visa (which is basically a H1B specific to Australians).

This is hardly a trend unique to the US, either. It's rife throughout the western world, as multi-national corporations seek to further privatise their profits while socialising their costs.

Some people have virtual servers, but what's the point of that if you end up with two servers on one machine that run more than twice as slow than if you just had the same server do both jobs directly.
Because 99% of the stuff that is on servers requires <5% of a modern CPU.
So you don't get twice as much stuff at half the speed, you get twenty times as much stuff at the same speed. With better reliability and flexibility.

Can you summarise that blog to something coherent ?

Not to mention the common problems with VLB cards running at 50Mhz, especially if you have more than one of them.

It does line up with my personal beliefs, but all with the political compass. 2010. 2007.
I haven't seen a lot to be concerned about with Brown's intended regulations.