Trump claims he gave troops 10% pay rise – lie

When US President Donald Trump visited troops in Afghanistan recently he claimed, no boasted, that he got them all a ten percent pay increase this year.

He also claims he was counselled to only give two, three or four percent but no, the magnanimous President insisted on ten percent.

Only it was 2.4%, according to the full story at news.com.au.

He also claimed they hadn’t had a patriae in ten years. In fact they have received one every year. More last year in fact.

So the Donald Trump personal fake news train rolls on, with self agrandising lie after lie. US citizens now know what it is like to be have Vladimir Putin as President.

GIFs: How I hate them!

Yes I know, not liking one of the largest and latest crazes is not great for a writer’s popularity, but then they call them crazes for a reason, don’t they?

Because they are followed by people who are crazy.

And this is not just a recent ‘thing’, or an attempt to be different or to create a headline. I genuinely hate GIFs!

Why?

They distract me from what I am reading. They seem to have no point other than attempt to assist the writer to make a point – which if they need help doing then they are not a good writer to begin with.

My opinion.

What purpose do they serve? To show how clever someone is for remembering every second of every Seinfeld episode? Or that you can take any video footage and ruin it by shortening it to a few seconds of ever repeating, distracting, meaningless rubbish?

To me, and I realise I could be in the minority here, it shows nothing but someone with time to waste who wants to spend it by wasting my time.

And I can’t switch them off!! I can stop videos playing as I scroll through the leftovers of humanity but when I get to a GIF….bang! No escape!

Call me old fashioned by how can you possibly say something meaningful in several seconds of repeated video of people making funny faces?

That old maxim comes to mind – Get a life!

And yes, for writing this you can say exactly the same about me.

My great prediction

In a few days time, if it passes into law or not, we will pay GST on any goods we order that come from overseas.

Apparently this will be a big boost to our local retail sector. Unfortunately my prediction is that it will not be anywhere near as big a boost as they are hoping for.

For decades we have all had to pay the Australia Tax. This is the massive differences in price to, say, a notebook for sale in the US and the price the exact same notebook sells for here. You can find even worse examples in everyday painkillers (we pay around $8 for 24 ibuprofen tablets and in the US you pay $10-15 for 500 tablets!

Other examples are DVDs, CDs, books, food…. basically anything.

And when the companies that sell these products at vastly different prices are asked why, the excuse they always offer is the distance to Australia and our smaller market.

So either the suppliers are making a fortune because no-one in Australia has the guts to ask the tough questions or our local retailers are terrible at negotiating.

Maybe a bit of both. Personally I am staggered by the number of people here who will pay nearly double for the latest smartphone or Apple product, as they sell for in the US. Go ahead, check it for yourself.

So, my prediction is that on the 1st of July the people of Australia will have finally had enough of governments introducing new taxes seemingly every week. (A sugar tax? What a laugh. Apparently we can’t be relied on to make our own decision on what we should drink, so of course we need a tax to help us out. To paraphrase The Beatles, they’ll be taxing air next).

We will have had enough, finally, and we will revolt. Personally those items I purchased from overseas – because of this thing that is meant to be free, called the internet – I simply will not buy again.

Why not? Because every time I go to do so online there will be a stark reminder in my shopping cart, GST of 10%. I will get angry and log out.

And I will not buy it locally because unfortunately local retailers, big and small, are lacking when it comes to understanding buying on the internet. Ask them what a Google rating is and they will ask what movie are you referring to. Seriously, key into Mr Google the item you want to buy and stipulate Australia. The first items listed will be Ads for overseas sites, followed by some articles or reviews (from overseas of course) followed by something completely unrelated. Unless you include a store name in your search you will not even get close.

So until the local retailers discover Google search, it will make me so angry trying to find the item I want that I’ll end up not wanting it anymore. Shopping online should be easy and fun, and only a dozen or so Aussie retailers get it.

So, our local retailers will see a much smaller increase in online sales than they hoped for. My prediction is that less than 50% of what was spent overseas up until June 30 this year, will be spent locally in the next financial year.

If I see a news article stating how local retail has boomed I will know it is false, and was probably influenced by government press releases. How do I know this? Because every year, about two weeks before Christmas, every news outlet predicts the biggest spending Christmas ever of $X billion dollars. Then in February or March, on page 27, will be a small article saying the figures are in and it was actually a very disappointing Christmas for retailers. It happens every single year, like clockwork.

I am especially a fan of TV newsreaders proclaiming that in the last weekend before Christmas shoppers went crazy and spent $X billion dollars. Hello? How could you know that? Did you ring every shop in the State and ask them for their sales figures? No? Would the shops even know what their figures were for those two days, and get them to you within just 24 hours so you can run your news item? Somehow I doubt it.

Wet your finger and proudly hold it up high. There, now you have as much chance as getting your prediction right as 80% of our so-called economic ‘experts’.

As Steve Jobs said on many occasions, do not listen to anyone who says they are an ‘expert’ or worse, a ‘guru’, because no-one is, it’s impossible.

So buy big and buy now, the clock is ticking. At least this is one tax you can choose not to pay. And just think of all the money you will save!

The Royal Wedding – why it is a great advertisement for a Republic

Warning: if you love the Royal Family you may want to stop reading.

Before this event was shown on millions of televisions worldwide, I read an article that said over two billion people would be watching. This was quickly changed to a few hundred million, and I think that is part of the problem.

Hype.

The Royal Family changed their surname in World War I to Windsor, as they are all of German descent. But no, that is not what I do not like about them. What I don’t like is people holding positions of power and influence simply because of who their mother is, and the industry of hype that surrounds them.

Take Royal Commentators. Who would employ these egotistical windbags if they didn’t have the Royal Family to be interviewed and written about? No one I suspect. Also losing their jobs would be their voice coaches, who teach them to speak with an overly exaggerated posh English accent that millions fall for. Margaret Thatcher employed one of these voice coaches and went from a backbencher to Prime Minister.

Oh how gullible we are as a collective.

I am from a business background and had to work very hard for everything I have, as have the other nearly six billion people on this planet. Sure, people can be born into wealth and that happens on a daily basis, but they are not also born with power over how countries are governed. Unless of course you include North Korea, and gee isn’t that going well.

Yes we are very fortunate that the British Royal Family seem relatively sane, but if Prince Charles had married Camilla when he had wanted to, and there was no Diana in their bloodline, I believe we would already be a Republic.

My main point is that we already should be a Republic. Why?

Glad you asked.

We currently have a Governor General who can wield massive power over our country (just look at the 1970s) and answers only to their boss, the Queen. Residing on the other side of the planet the Queen mainly understands our society from what her advisors tell her. She could be receiving good advice, yes, but there is also a fifty percent chance that the advice is bad.

Bottom line is she is not Australian and is not immersed in our society, so why is she our ultimate ruler? We get upset when a politician doesn’t live in the electorate they are campaigning in, yet we bow to the Queen of England who doesn’t even live in our country?

Which brings me around to those projected television audience figures.

For some reason people become so overly excited that everything about the Queen and her family is highly exaggerated. How can billions become millions? Media hype.

The media see dollar signs in the Royals (and not much else). Television stations jack up the prices of advertising during the wedding. Countless photographs of the happy couple adorn the covers, insides and everywhere else on magazines and newspapers for weeks on end. Newspapers in particular temporarily forget that their job is to inform us about what is happening in our own country. Granted, this doesn’t happen much any more because Mr Murdoch has sacked all the good investigative journalists, instead his newspapers copy stories to fill pages (pick up a paper from Melbourne and you will read the same articles in the paper in Adelaide).

Hype turned up to 11, blaring at us from every direction, because of one wedding that is taking place on the other side of the world. And the only reason many of us are interested is because the people involved were born into wealth and power? Are we really that discontented in our own lives? Do we really believe that they should rule over us instead of a democratically elected Head of State who, shock horror, would be an Australian?

Granted they do some good work in raising funds for good causes but so do thousands of families in Australia, and they don’t get to live in a castle with servants. The amount of money spent on this wedding could save thousands of lives amongst the two billion people who currently make only $2 a day. Same with the homeless, who I suspect were removed from the route taken by the horse and buggy show before the cameras arrived.

There, but for the grace of a few missed pay days, go the rest of us.

If you want to watch a wedding and cry at the love and devotion two people have for each other, there are hundreds of them that happen every Saturday. They may not have veils longer than a football field, but they are displays of love and therefore, in my opinion, far more ‘tear worthy’ than the one on every television last weekend.

Thank god for Netflix!

Do we believe the hype?

Everything we hear about is “the worst in 100 years”. So, are we just unlucky to be living through these times, or are we experiencing information overload?

It is undeniable that information sources have exploded in the past five years. We are now bombarded with more information every day than we used to get in a month.

In order for publishers to stand out from this ever increasing crowd, their headlines have become more and more sensationalist. This makes it very difficult for us, the readers/listerners, to differentiate fact from bloated fiction.

The saying “don’t believe everything you read” has never been more appropriate!