From the ABC

Prices go bananas again

The price of bananas is heading skywards again, climbing to about $6 a kilogram.

Cyclones in Queensland last year drove the price from about $3 to more than $12 a kilogram.

Prices dropped as plants re-grew but have once again started to rise.

Banana Growers Association spokesman Tony Heidrich says last year's cyclones caused a gap in the production cycle that will be felt for some time.

"We're sort of now waiting for the next crop to come on stream," he said.

"Because bananas are a plant that produces fruit 52 weeks of the year, we've got to get back to a stage where farmers have their plantation and cycling as evenly as possible through that 52 weeks of the year."

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Gus: Lucky inflation is not tied up to the price of bananas — like the US stock market is linked to pork bellies — otherwise we'd be in deep yo-yo-ing trouble. The price of real food has more than doubled in recent times but that's okay because the price of plasma TV has gone down... Soon maybe in order to create more sales for bananas, they'll give you a plasma set vith every two kilo of the bended fruit... 

 

From the ABC

Retired public servants want 'fairer' pension increases

Retired public servants are angry their pensions have not been safeguarded by the Federal Government and are threatening to take action at the election.

They say they will target marginal government seats in their campaign to improve pension entitlements.

They want wage-based indexation rather than the consumer price index (CPI) used to calculate pensions, which they say will reflect more fairly the cost of living.

Ewan Hazell from the Superannuants Association says they lobbied unsuccessfully for a change in last week's Budget.

"The average Commonwealth Superannuation pension for a couple is about $21,000," he said.

"The aged pension's well above that now, for a couple. Not a fairly happy state of affairs.

"Over the years, we've lost considerable amount of ground.

"Each time we raise the issue they beat us back and say, 'the CPI is good enough for you.'"

Mr Hazell says the CPI does not accurately represent the increase in the cost of living, and he is calling on the Federal Government to do more.

"In the tax breaks that have been given, about half to more than half of our members, Commonwealth superannuants, missed out on anything at all," he said.

"They gained no benefit.

"They didn't earn enough money to pay tax, and if you don't pay tax, when a tax break's given, you get nothing."

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Gus: as mentioned here often, even in the blog above if my memory stretches that far, the price of living is ridiculously indexed to the CPI — a figure that reflects a buying power across the board and includes imported chinese goods the price of which can be as low as zerobucks — while the necessity of life, food and housing have gone through the roof. Thus the true"inflation", that is after discounting the bits we buy cheap from China, is about 8 to 9 per cent. So how come money is so cheap..., below the "true" inflation rate? Well... you work it out...

US company defends Future Fund outsourcing

The decision to send the custodial services for Australia's Future Fund offshore has been defended by a top executive of the Chicago company that won the tender.

The chief operating officer of Northern Trust, Rick Waddell, says it was awarded the business on the basis of its technology, its global capabilities and the way it services clients.

Mr Waddell has played down Northern Trust's link with collapsed US energy trader Enron.

"We were the custodian of their pension assets," he said.

"We simply held the assets of those pension plans and were directed by Enron according to US pension law to facilitate the movement of assets in and out of those accounts.

"We were not responsible for the management of those assets."

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Gus: of course, the chief operating officer of Northern Trust, Rick Waddell, is not going to say: "we are unworthy of the money you give us to play with... we wont take it..."

So I ask why is a US company the "custodian" of moneys they can't play with, whose role is only to allocate wherever under orders form a few string pullers in Aussieland... Are each of these transactions lumbered with a fee on top of the 30 Million bux to manage, including exchange rates? Does the Federal Government knows things we don't — like the Aussie dollar going to take a plunge soon, increasing the value of the fund instantly if held in US dollars...? Do I know what I'm talking about? Not a friggin' clue...

 

Remember when Costello asked Orstrayans to get under the doonah and make babies? Well, apart from the obvious, the next step to increase the population of our cities, that are already cracking at the seams, is simple:

 

When it comes to gorillas, the males who help females out with their infants get benefits. The benefits? More babies. A new study of male gorillas in the wild in Rwanda has found that those who spend the most time grooming infants and resting with them—others’ offspring as well as their own—have about five times more offspring than males who don’t help out with the little ones.

This is surprising, scientists say, because male caretaking isn’t usually considered a smart reproductive strategy in primate species where access to females is intensely competitive. Instead, researchers thought the most successful strategy for males would be to put more time and energy into outcompeting other males for a mate, as chimps do.

That strategy still works for many male gorillas, who dominate small harems of females. But in 40% of the groups of mountain gorillas studied at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s Karisoke Research Center in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda there is more than one male in a group, sometimes as many as nine. And those males need to be resourceful to get a female’s attention.

It turns out the way to a mom’s heart is through her offspring, according to the new analysis, published today in Nature Scientific Reports. Genetic paternity data for 23 adult males and 109 infants, along with 10 to 38 hours of observations for each male gorilla, suggest the more time these “babysitters” spend with infants, the more reproductive success they will have. The findings could even have implications for the evolution of paternal care in humans, given that we are the only other ape species whose males are willing to help out with the kids.

 

Read more:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/male-gorillas-who-babysit-have-f...

 

 

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