I’m happy to see pressure mounting on the RBA. Not so much even for the decision to lift rates, but on it’s myopic approach to analysis. The economy has changed; it has become more integrated, and duopolies and oligopolies rule the Australian markets. A fundamental lack of competition is allowing the growth of profits, and the RBA currently seems unwilling to accept this as a line of thinking.
It’s hard to choose a few highlights from Keane’s article; the entire piece is worthy of reading.
The RBA wants to wish the entire profit-inflation debate away, seemingly enraged at the suggestion that gouging by firms with high levels of market power is a greater spur to inflation than the traditional villain: greedy workers demanding pay rises driving a wage-price spiral.
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the OECD weighed into the debate, devoting a section of its latest global economic forecasts to the issue. Its data specifically on Australia shows unit profits massively outweighing unit labour costs as a source of inflation.
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this bout of profit-driven inflation comes at the end of a near-decade of wage suppression, and a historic shift — especially since 2017 — from wages to profit share of income nationally. Merely preserving, let alone strengthening, profit margins in a period of high inflation perpetuates that shift from workers to business.
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Neoliberals have a blind spot when it comes to market concentration: the core idea that unfettered markets work more efficiently than highly regulated markets means a relative antipathy to effective competition laws designed to protect the very mechanism by which markets work efficiently.
Most people have a set of skills that aren’t monetised. These skills are often linked with hobbies or interests. Why don’t people make money from them?
Perhaps there is no discernible market for the particular skill. Maybe the joy is removed when a transactional element is added. For whatever the reason, humans are adept at many things, and we often only get paid for a small aspect of the overall talent inherent within us.
A large part of the economy is built around free labour in the form of volunteering (probably much to the disgust of neoliberals - unless they are receiving the fruits of the labour). Many volunteer in some capacity; whether it’s coaching their kid’s sports team, or sitting on the board of a not-for-profit organisation, or singing in their church choir. I’ve done volunteer work such as this, except singing in the choir. Nobody wants that.
What latent skills do I have that could be put to use for some small financial gain? And what are the associated downsides or limiting factors?
Skill
Limiting Factor
Podcast editing & production
Niche
Personal finance training
Liability risk; licensed industry
Apple product know-how
Apple Store and search engines
Basketball
I’m not a coach
Personal productivity & efficiency
YouTube domination
It’s a shame I’m not a handyperson. Physical labour continues to be one area that is clearly linked to a necessity—and a willingness—to pay.
However, if you see a skill of mine listed that you think could help you, let me know. I may be willing and able to help.
Oh no, now I’m going down a Safari versus Arc versus Vivaldi browser showdown rabbit hole. 🕳️🐇
Oh, is that all we have to do? More gold from the guy earning in excess of $900,000 per year from his one job.
“People can cut back spending, and in some cases find additional hours of work that will put them back into a positive cash flow position.”
The “party” that is neoliberalism has been giving our society gift after gift.
We’ve had corruption and self-interest at the highest levels, as PwC executives had their snouts in the trough on both sides of the consulting equation, giving legislative design advice to government then flipping that information and advising their corporate customers on ways around said legislation.
We’ve had executive wages grow exponentially over recent years, irrespective of their performance, or that of the company they lead. (Hi, Alan Joyce of Qantas!) We see executives engaging more consultants and labour-hire at the expense of full-time wage earners.
We’ve had companies making extraordinary profits, helped by government supports such as JobKeeper (Harvey Norman excelled at this one.)
Yet workers have not benefited from the neoliberalism party. They’ve just had to buy the drinks then clean up the mess the next morning.
Workers have seen their share of the economic pie decrease over time. From ABC News in March 2019:
In the two years preceding 2019, Australian workers received the lowest share of total economic output since the 1950s - less than 47% of GDP. This is a decline of 11% since the 1970s. Corporate profits have increased 10% in that same time.
Wage stagnation—which is one of the design outcomes of the neoliberalist agenda—is another problem. The economy might have a high level of headline employment, but due to low levels of worker organisation (unionisation has been demonised for years) combined with individualised contracts and wages that are set for multiple years in advance, workers can’t leverage the high rates of employment to broker a better deal for themselves. The cards are stacked against them.
Today, we received another gift courtesy of the neoliberalism inherent in our economy. The Reserve Bank of Australia has determined that what our economy needs is yet another interest rate rise. Never mind that this generation of Australians are facing the highest home prices of all time, and that as a share of household income, mortgages are eating more than has historically been the case.
Canceling Netflix and not getting Uber Eats once a week is not going to make a dent in the additional mortgage repayments required of a household. Where is the extra money to be found? Surely we are nearing the point where the RBA is expecting people to find blood from a proverbial stone.
I predict a major economic calamity for Australia, and it’s not going to be pretty. My only hope is that it destroys whatever credibility neoliberalisms might have. At least then, something will have been gained from the misery.
So we are at the point where the feature update for macOS is… screensavers. Better for energy efficiency, and thus climate change, to simply have the screen turn off.
Sick day. Watching episodes of Seinfeld.
I’ve discovered the music artist Jelly Roll. Really digging his sound. 🎵
It’s storming outside. I’m sick and don’t have a voice. Today’s Public Holiday is wasted on me. My boy wanted me to feel better so brought me breakfast in bed. 🥰
Life admin takes up an inordinate amount of time, effort and resources. Problem with having a task manager is nothing ever gets lost in the mix. Full personal accountability can be a real bear.
This article was originally written for the August 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus.
I’ve written about my favourite apps before, namely OmniFocus and DEVONthink. I starting to learn and enjoy anther app — Logseq — but I don’t feel I’m in a position to yet write about it with too much authority.
I use a whole toolkit of apps on a regular basis to get my work done and enjoy my computing time. All these apps (and others) are great to use but I don’t feel compelled to write about them here now.
Upon consideration, I am going to write about another app that I use every day. It’s an app that you can install on macOS, iOS and iPadOS and experience a consistent and enjoyable experience. It’s an app that will cost you nothing - it’s free, as in beer. It can work alone or sync with services and share content to other apps.
A Universal app, that is free, that is a perfect citizen on the OS. Universal, free, perfect… Are you getting it?
That’s right, it’s NetNewsWire. One the most Mac-assed Mac apps you can find, that is also an iOS and iPadOS-assed app as well. NetNewsWire has had more lives than your local cat. I remember using it eons ago when it looked like a more exciting version of Mail.app. Then it had its dark days when it was owned by Black Pixel and left to wither. Then once again under the stewardship of its original author, Brent Simmons, it was brought back, this time into the open-source community.
NetNewsWire is a wonderful app. It doesn’t do everything. If you want everything, get Reeder 5. If you’re content with everything you need, get NNW.
But what is it? C’mon, this is a Hemispheric Views newsletter. You know its an RSS reader. Reading web pages via RSS is a feature that I have used almost every day for probably about 20 years. I used Bloglines. I used Google Reader. I used FeedWrangler. I used Feedly. Now I use Inoreader. Others use Feedbin. With NNW, you can continue to use RSS syncing services, or you can rely on its internal sync engine that leverages iCloud. I will probably do that once my Inoreader subscription expires.
NNW has a few themes you can switch between, it can share to Read It Later services, and it can subscribe to Twitter and Reddit feeds in addition to regular RSS ones. Does it do much else? Not really. Is it absolutely rock-solid in what it does do? Yessiree. I’ve never once had NNW crash. It hardly uses any system resources. It’s blazing fast. It has one job and it does it.
I love NNW and I think you will too. It costs nothing to give it a try. Why not do so?
What happened to Roam Research? For a while it was the talk of the internet. Has Obsidian entirely cut its lunch?
