Serrath posted:

I'll bite; what's wrong with quinoa?

Tokamak posted:

Is that based on a comp sci. undergrad, or something else? I could imagine an undergrad data mining degree being an interesting combination of compsci/science/math/economics and social science courses.

Those On My Left posted:

I think NationBuilder was used by Adam Bandt's 2013 campaign as something of a pilot program, to see whether it was worth it. I'm pretty sure it's now getting some use in the Victorian Greens campaign- for the state election this November.

Small Keating posted:

Good poast. I believe (TOML, plz correct if I am wrong) the Greens also make use of Nation Builder (http://nationbuilder.com/), which was a big US Democrats staple.

Murodese posted:

The amount of poo poo that can be found out about you from what you eat, the TV shows you watch and your browsing history is hilariously terrifying.

DAAS Kapitalist posted:

There's this article about how Target can work out that a woman is pregnant and estimate the delivery date without her buying anything explicitly baby related.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

DAAS Kapitalist posted:

There's this article about how Target can work out that a woman is pregnant and estimate the delivery date without her buying anything explicitly baby related.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

Cleretic posted:

Yeah, I remember seeing this one on the Checkout. I was honestly more impressed than anything else.

Maybe it's because I've never had this come up as a personal issue, but I'm not phenomenally against shops and services using my direct history with them to tune things specifically to me. Sellign personal information, okay, that's lovely and I'm against it, but I find it hard to be pissed off at them using the information I directly gave them. Hell, I'm all for it in theory; I'd probably hate ads a lot less if they were about things I actually cared about.

Again, maybe just lack of experience, and I'd change my mind when how it actually works rubs up against me. While it's most definitely more and worse, I'm all for Target going 'yo, you buy a lot of X and Y, our ridonkulous amounts of data indicate that you might also like Z'.

quote:

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/secret-agl-political-donations-while-seeking-csg-approval-20140810-101yrj.html
Secret AGL political donations while seeking CSG approval
August 11, 2014 - 12:15AM


Energy giant supplier AGL gave almost $100,000 to the NSW Labor and Liberal parties while seeking approval to drill 110 coal seam gas wells near Gloucester on the mid-north coast, but only half of those donations were apparently disclosed to the Planning Department making the decision.

AGL's then head of government affairs Sarah McNamara – now an adviser to Prime Minister Tony Abbott – declared on May 13, 2010, that the company had made four political donations over the “relevant” two-year period totalling $48,250.

The funds were split $26,250 to Labor and $22,000 to the Liberals, who were then in opposition. However, the declaration omitted $11,000 donated for membership to the Liberal Party’s now discredited Millennium Forum on October 1, 2008.

Between the application and its approval by the Planning Assessment Commission on February 22, 2011, AGL donated a further $39,300. Of that, Labor received two donations of $13,750 and the bulk of the remainder went to the Liberals, including for several meals with then opposition leader and later premier Barry O’Farrell, who won a landslide victory in the subsequent March 2011 elections.

Details of the donations were compiled from public election funding records by Groundswell Gloucester, a local group opposed to AGL’s plans.

The group made no allegation that the donations swayed the final decision to approve drilling. However, they had engaged the Environmental Defenders Office NSW, which last week wrote to Planning Minister Pru Goward seeking an investigation by her department.

“The disclosure of donations to political parties made by proponents is a requirement of any planning system that has integrity,” said Sue Higginson, a principal solicitor at the EDO, who added the Independent Commission Against Corruption – now examining a series of donation issues – had said disclosure was essential for planning matters.

By coincidence, the EDO letter was sent the same day Energy Minister Anthony Roberts extended AGL’s CSG exploration permit for Gloucester by six years and approved hydraulic fracturing – fracking – of wells within a few hundred metres of homes.

“We call upon the Energy Minister to immediately suspend all AGL operations until there’s a full enquiry into the whole process of approval,” said John Watts, a barrister and Groundswell Gloucester spokesman. The probe should also include “whatever donations were received up until the renewal of the licence a few days ago, and the approval of the fracking”.

A spokeswoman for AGL dismissed the claims as “one of a number of claims that anti-CSG activists have raised”.

“At the time that AGL lodged the Part 3A major project application for the Gloucester Gas Project on 30 July 2008, there was no statutory obligation to lodge a political donations statement,” the spokeswoman said. The company had also updated the donation list on July 27 this year.

Details were being sought of the more recent donations, which were yet to be made public. An explanation was also being sought on why AGL's voluntary declaration in 2010 was apparently incomplete – omitting the $11,000 Millennium Forum donation – and not updated to include the $39,300 in gifts prior to the project winning approval.

“No one ever knew there were further donations,” Mr Watts said. “The general member of the public would not go hunting on the electoral websites” for disclosures that might be posted well after they were made, he said.

A Planning Department spokeswoman said the department would respond to the EDO “in due course”.

University of NSW constitution law expert George Williams said the AGL issue added to the need for an overhaul of corporate donations.

“There’s the larger issue of what they should be entitled to donate in the first place,” Professor Williams said. “Corporate interests don’t donate money unless they hope to get something in return.”

Greens MP John Kaye planned to introduce legislation within weeks to ban donations from coal, gas and other mining companies, adding that such companies could often leave longer-lasting impacts, such as with open-cut mines, than developers building blocks of flats.

“We are deeply concerned that the consequences of tainted government decision-making for communities and the environment are so great to justify the restraint on political communication,” Mr Kaye said.

duck monster posted:

O_o

duck monster posted:

O_o

ThirdPartyView posted:

Isn't Rupes doing the same exactly front pages for some (all?) his UK rags as well?

duck monster posted:

O_o

Murodese posted:

You can also use shopping lists to work out when people are likely to develop chronic diseases and use browsing history to build a full physical and mental health profile of people, which is ~invaluable~ for insurance agencies.

Sisgmund posted:

On loyalty cards - my main concern as a consumer is that they're not giving me fair value for my data.

duck monster posted:

O_o

Tokamak posted:

Without going deep into their data collection policies, I always wondered how far supermarket data collection goes. I know that loyalty stuff gets taken, but I always wondered if there was anything stopping them from collecting every transaction. There's plenty of value in (pseudo-)anonymous transaction records. Knowing how people can be easily psychologically manipulated, its odd that the government maintains a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards data collection. If the government collected and used everything they could about a person in the way a retailer does, we'd be up in arms about it.

duck monster posted:

O_o

duck monster posted:

O_o

urseus posted:

I looked up Islamic leaders condemn Isil attacks, and came back with a small artical from the Jakarta news? Ditto greens?

duck monster posted:

O_o

Bifauxnen posted:

No see, it's white Christians who are the truly oppressed minority! Everyone's freely bashing Christianity all the time but no one ever dares to speak up against Islam!

duck monster posted:

O_o

You Am I posted:

I guess you haven't seen today's Australian front page.

Tip for all: don't.

Gough Suppressant posted:

Pretty much every high profile Jewish school in Melbourne has had guards and barbed wire for yonks. I sometimes wonder what kind of effect that has on the social and world view development of the kids going there everyday.

duck monster posted:

O_o

Lizard Combatant posted:

Jesus Christ, that Life of Pyne picture is pure nightmare fuel.

Brown Paper Bag posted:

Abbott is losing/has lost the support of voters for his domestic policies, so him and his media boosters are trying to change the topic to terrorism. You need a strong leader to stand up to terrorism!

Cartoon posted:

AFR posted:

Murray and Hockey could surprise big banks

There is mounting evidence that neither David Murray nor Treasurer Joe Hockey are going to be soft-touches on Australia’s major banks, which are now worth over $400 billion and notably more than they were prior to the global financial crisis.

Sources who have spoken to both men suggest the Financial System Inquiry’s final recommendations on the extra equity capital required to, firstly, compensate for the four majors’ “too-big-to-fail” status and, secondly, reduce the enormous “risk-weighting” differentials enabling them to carry less than half the capital of competitors when lending against housing, could surprise with their policy purity.

Both men reject the proposition tendered by the major banks that they are already better capitalised than similarly sized institutions around the world, and are inverting the “funding Australia” meme the banks have advanced to protect their internationally lofty returns on equity.

Murray and Hockey stand by analysis published in the inquiry’s interim report that says the major banks’ tier one capital is only middling by global standards and certainly not excessive. They also believe that as a capital-importing nation that runs persistent current account deficits via the majors – which rely much more on volatile wholesale bond markets than their primarily deposit-funded peers – there is a case they should be especially prudent vis-à-vis overseas institutions.

The logic is that additional capital and less leverage means the majors will be able to raise money more easily during crises and reduces the likelihood they have to draw on taxpayer guarantees. As structurally less-risky concerns, they should also pay less for their debt and equity capital.

Hockey and Murray’s commitment to policy objectivity apropos Australia’s banking oligopoly has been repeatedly questioned.

Murray made most of his wealth during his tenure as chief executive of Commonwealth Bank between 1994 and 2005, which left him with shares and options that would be worth more than $60 million today.

Hockey, who is married to a former Deutsche Bank trader and appointed UBS’s head of fixed-income as his chief of staff, has always been “sympathetic” to financiers. His former spinner and current columnist for this newspaper, Joe Aston, told Hockey’s biographer that “around the big banks and financial services industry – they love him”.
Notoriously independent

I’ve criticised Hockey for refusing to disclose what percentage of the panel members’ net wealth is invested in major and other bank stocks, and for failing to appoint a single experienced government policymaker.

The inquiry is dominated by individuals who have made their money in banking, including the former chief executives of CBA and AMP, and a long-time Westpac director. And its advisory board includes the former chief executive of Westpac, David Morgan, who now works for a private equity firm that specialises in bank investments, the boss of one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, which presumably holds bank securities, and a current JPMorgan investment banker.

Yet sources say Murray, who had previously defended the majors’ high leverage, is notoriously independent and no bank patsy. Indeed, he is allegedly disliked by many of his banking alumni.

When I worked with Hockey in late 2010 on the policy platform for the Financial System Inquiry, and its first terms of reference, which Murray inputted into, he had me convinced he was committed to cauterizing the too-big-to-fail problem and pricing (or removing) the complex taxpayer subsidies that arguably make banking Australia’s most favoured industry.

Sources close to Hockey say he does not think reforming the banks will be a tough political battle to win given Labor and the Greens are already on side. Recognising the legacy-shaping nature of the inquiry, Hockey is said to be particularly focused on “doing the right thing”.

This includes tackling the thorny issue of “vertical integration”, whereby the big banks have been consolidating non-core sectors, including asset management, superannuation, financial planning, equities and other investment banking activities.

One interesting insight into Hockey’s thinking is his view that Australia needs to ultimately move towards decoupling product manufacturing from financial planning, which goes to the heart of the conflict of interest debate that has plagued the 70 per cent of advisers who are now owned by, or aligned to, institutions care of vertical integration.

Addressing the major banks’ too-big-to-fail subsidies and remedying the regulatory comparative advantage afforded through the lopsided risk-weighing system, which is the main driver of their superior profitability, would materially enhance competitive neutrality.

Ever since the Basel II rules were introduced in 2008 by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the majors have been able to leverage their core equity capital more than twice as much as rivals (save Macquarie Bank) when lending against housing.

This allows them to produce twice the returns on equity for what are practically similar home loan assets and has coincided with a sharp break in regional and major bank profitability, which has been amplified by the higher funding costs paid by smaller institutions that are assumed not to be too-big-to-fail.

Sanguine posted:

PM Tones was on the radio this morning proclaiming that IS(is)'s current goal is to found no less than a terrorist nation.

I presume this means an organised society based solely on exportation of terror and importation of used munitions? I can't help but feel when you start throwing around 'terrorist nation' the term terrorist may have lost something of its edge.

I wonder if Abbot is genuinely bad enough to make his main card lose its shine.

quote:

A federal Labor MP was among a list of secret KGB informants, according to newly released Russian intelligence archives.
The former Labor member for the NSW electorate of Hunter, Albert James, is listed as an informant of the Soviet intelligence service in the papers of former KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, which were released by the Churchill College Archive in the United Kingdom last month.
The late Mr James, a former NSW policeman and Labor MP who served in Federal Parliament from 1960 to 1980, is one of a number of Australians recorded in Mitrokhin’s list of KGB agents and informants active in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s.

Anidav posted:

Someone post the Courier Mail. That one beats all of em.