How do you spend even $2 million on a dog? Diamond encrusted collars?Helmsley also left $12m to her pet dog, Trouble, while explicitly leaving out two of her grandchildren.
A Manhattan judge later reduced the trust fund for the nine-year-old Maltese to $2m and the grandchildren received $6m each.
In recent weeks, the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Finland have all included measures to expand broadband access and to bolster connection speeds in their planned economic stimulus packages. Australia, France, Hungary, Ireland, Japan and South Korea have announced separate broadband plans, according to a compilation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...
While analysts agree that investing in communications technologies makes economies more competitive, they are skeptical about whether the promised gains will materialize quickly enough to make the spending packages - ranging from €11 million, or $14 million, in Hungary to $7 billion in the United States - effective recession-busters.Indeed. Count me as a skeptic when it comes to claims about how high speed internet to the likes of the back of Bourke is going to supercharge the Australian economy. According to the article:
...investments in telecommunications typically generate positive returns, said Olivier Pascal, an analyst at Analysys Mason, a consulting firm. Complex economic models show that every $1 spent on network improvements increases the gross domestic product by $1.30, he said. And that does not include the increases in productivity that such investments generate, he added.When I can download lunch, print it out at my desk and eat it, I'll be a little less skeptical.He said that the same models showed that "allocating spending to telecoms will create far more jobs than giving it to, say, agriculture."
A top executive of Vivendi, which controls SFR, the owner of French fixed and mobile networks, said recently that faster connections would simply worsen the problem of online piracy, undermining Vivendi's music, movie and games businesses.
"Today, fiber serves no purpose," Philippe Capron, chief financial officer of Vivendi, was quoted as saying by a French business paper, La Tribune. "There is no new revenue stream and no supplemental service to offset the considerable investment. All that it does is to encourage the illegal downloading of films."
If this film isn't the work of a man who not only has nothing left to say, but is revelling in his ability to continue not saying it, then I don't know what is.
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will include the story of the superhero's origins and will feature music and lyrics by U2 members Bono and The Edge.This'll probably give Jason Soon nightmares.
A case could be made to modify the CPRS so that those who want to do more than respond to higher energy prices can do so. In fact, they can do that already, by clubbing together and buying emission permits that they simply retire so the aluminium smelters can’t get their hands on them.Hamilton argues that the fluctuations in carbon price are something that just have to live with, because it is easier for politicians to handle:
I don't know about that line "Business has certainty but the environment pays for it." As I noted recently, I am swayed by the argument that sufficient business certainty is exactly what is needed to drive investment in a relatively rapid change to cleaner technology.Against this, a carbon tax fixes the price of pollution through the tax rate and leaves it to the market to decide the amount of pollution. Business has certainty but the environment pays for it. If Australia has a legally binding emissions cap, as we now do under the Kyoto Protocol and will have again under a Copenhagen agreement, then the government will be compelled to adjust the tax rate frequently and by large amounts as it tries to hit the target.
Imagine the politics of that, remembering that the GST rate is virtually cast in stone. Politically, it's infinitely easier to let the price fluctuate in the marketplace, with the peaks and troughs smoothed by business planners.
....the extent of abatement through such voluntary action is likely to be tiny.The operating revenue of Australia’s four largest conservation organisations is around $60 million per annum. Let’s make the wildly optimistic assumption that all of this money is directed to buying and retiring permits, which will cost around $25 each and will equate to one tonne of CO2-e. This would reduce emissions by 2.4 million tonnes, or less than 0.5% of Australia’s annual total. This is hardly the type of rescue package the CPRS needs.
It's true only in an arithmetic sense that anything we do "contributes directly" to Australia meeting its emissions target. Everything contributes to the bottom line of the sum. But, because the bottom line is controlled under the scheme, any helpful contribution we might make just leaves more scope for others to make unhelpful contributions.So, the point that individual actions to live more frugally leaves more room for industry to increase CO2 is correct.When Wong says strong actions on our part help make it easier for governments to set lower emissions targets in future, the future she means is after 2020. As it stands, the only changes governments can make under the scheme are to the "trajectory" or path we travel to get to an unchanged destination level of emissions in 2020.
Why has the Government constructed its scheme in such a strange, off-putting way, which fact it has then wanted to conceal and obfuscate?
Carbon offset schemes which involve growing trees, especially if they are in areas where bushfires are a distinct possibility.As Andrew Bolt has noted, it would appear that at least some carbon offset plantings have been burnt in Victoria, with more under threat.
+ Children at a junior school in Cambridgeshire were asked to write down as many rude and obscene words as they could think of, as part of some ill-conceived campaign against bullying. Parents weren’t too happy. One mother said she was disgusted “when my 10-year-old showed me an exercise book with words like c***sucker, d***head and fat arse rewarded with a tick from the teacher”.
Meanwhile, in a similarly fatuous attempt to combat Muslim extremism, pupils nationwide are to be asked to empathise with suicide bombers, to see the world as a nihilistic Islamic psychopath might see it.
Schools have long since given up on inculcating a sense of right and wrong in their pupils; the whole notion is outdated and, frankly, authoritarian. Which is something to be thankful for when a 12-year-old child screams “fat arse” at you and then detonates himself. At least he was able to empathise.
The rats started stealing my clothes. One morning, I found my shirt jammed hard down a hole in the floor behind the washbasin in my bathroom. When I tugged it out it was shredded: the rats had been trying to drag it down to make a nest. They just miscalculated its size. Confronted with unassailable evidence, I did an audit of my underwear, and found half of it had disappeared. My husband, table-leg at the ready and a desperate look in his eye, swore that it wasn't him. Nightly, it seemed, the rats had been on forays to tug my discarded knickers and socks underground.Kind of amusing, from a distance.
Britain must embrace nuclear power if it is to meet its commitments on climate change, four of the country’s leading environmentalists – who spent much of their lives opposing atomic energy – warn today...Mr Tindale describes his conversion as follows:
The four leading environmentalists who are now lobbying in favour of nuclear power are Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace; Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, the chairman of the Environment Agency; Mark Lynas, author of the Royal Society’s science book of the year, and Chris Goodall, a Green Party activist and prospective parliamentary candidate.
“It was kind of like a religious conversion. Being anti-nuclear was an essential part of being an environmentalist for a long time but now that I’m talking to a number of environmentalists about this, it’s actually quite widespread this view that nuclear power is not ideal but it’s better than climate change,” he added.Australia, meanwhile, with lots of uranium, twiddles its thumbs.
Not every activist is so keen on the parish, then.I cannot understand why radicals and intellectuals have totally bought into this bullshit that St. Mary’s does such good work with the poor and oppressed, a narrative repeated in tonights 7.30 report as a key element of the church.
On Saturdays and Sundays a travelling show comes into South Brisbane. Like ants, the St. Mary’s congregation come from all over south east Queensland to have a special experience with each other and then they return to their communities. Hardly any of them are locals who are likeley to run into the poor and oppressed at the shop or have them knocking on their door asking for a cup of sugar.
These outsiders administer the biggest welfare agency in Brisbane, not just South Brisbane, that deals with homelessness. Micah is a government funded organisation that operates within government policies and programs regarding homelessness. It is government outsourcing.
While the social workers are administering their programs, the St. Mary’s community remains insulated from the poor and oppressed including those of the South Brisbane community just as church goers in every other congregation in Brisbane do. St. Vinnies, run by amongst the most conservative catholics, operates on a direct engagement between congregation members in each parish and the welfare clients. The congregation actually gets to meet the people they are helping which is more than what occurs with the St. Mary’s mode.
St. Mary’s is just another West End illusion that people from outside West End come to experience, just like the coffees shops are for people from all over Brisbane come to be part of the West End experience.
I wonder: was the product used by the 9/11 hijackers in addition to their "real"training?Of course, what every simmer dreams about is being called on to land an actual plane in an emergency. A trembling stewardess announces over the public address that both flyers upfront are suffering debilitating convulsions from the in-flight catering and has anyone flown an Airbus before?
"Er, not really but ….." you splutter.
You are the last hope and with increasing confidence and cool, you inform ground-control that the myriad of dials and gauges you face, once the ailing captain has been hauled from his seat, are second-nature. Eventually, you plop the aircraft on the runway with a couple of harmless bounces, just for dramatic effect, and applause from the passenger-cabin rings in your ears.
Kennedy insists that St Mary’s is a community church that is acting in the spirit of Vatican II in being driven by the congregation. He parts company with Bathersby in that he believes the role of the priest is to help guide the congregation, not dictate to it.I have come to the view that he is incredibly disingenuous in nearly everything he says. His talk this weekend was that he would not enter into negotiation with the Archbishop because it was up to his parish "community" to negotiate about it, and anyway he already knows his community wants him. (Never mind that his idea of "community" for St Marys obviously does not extend to the "community" of the entire Roman Catholic Church.)
Yet here’s a contradiction: Kennedy insists that while St Mary’s is about the community rather than him, his presence there is vital. “This community will die when I leave,” he says. “After that, they will either appoint a priest who’ll toe the line and deliver exactly the Mass they want, which will mean a lot of people will leave, or it will be absorbed into another parish.”
Most commentators have seen this as a strike against emissions trading, but actually it’s a positive. The big concern about price uncertainty arises when we are very uncertain about the cost of reducing emissions. Under cost uncertainty, setting the emissions target too low could impose unexpectedly high costs on the economy.There are many comments following which contest that view, and I find some of them very convincing. TerjeP argues, for example:What’s happening here is that we are uncertain about the rate of growth of the economy. An emissions target is countercyclical since it imposes a relatively high cost when the economy is strong, and a much smaller cost when the economy is weak. This is a Good Thing.
If the focus of the carbon emission policy is to reduce carbon emissions by ushering in new energy technology then the key business sector that needs price certainty from a carbon tax is the renewable base load energy sector. They are after all the ones in need of new capital and who must persuade investors and bankers that things will work out as planned.....And besides which: doesn't a hell of a lot depend on whether the US goes down the ETS path as well? If Obama actually goes for a carbon tax, wouldn't it be wise to follow?
However dealing with the volatile carbon price that an ETS would deliver makes investment in such unproven high risk commercialisation a far less certain venture.
Arguments around the merits of emissions reductions policies can be complex, but the core explanation for why emissions trading is superior to a carbon tax is simple. A carbon tax does not guarantee emissions reductions. A cap-and-trade scheme does.
Delivering a target is a key part of domestic and international efforts to reduce carbon pollution.
Cap and trade gives us certainty that targeted reductions will occur, whereas a carbon tax gives no guarantee over the quantity of reductions. Under a cap-and-trade scheme, the government issues permits for each tonne of carbon up to the total cap. Under a carbon tax, the government needs to estimate how emissions levels would respond to a carbon tax rate, introducing uncertainty about whether the target would be reached.But Penny: that assumes that the ETS actually works. She claims:
Emissions trading gives businesses and the community more certainty.....While the carbon price will fluctuate under a cap-and-trade model, there is a capacity for firms to use market instruments to help manage movement in the carbon price.Yes, market instruments have been working so well, lately. (Disengage sarcasm mode.)
Emissions trading opens up the prospect of sharing the burden of reducing emissions with other countries through linking the CPRS to schemes overseas. A carbon tax would take Australia out of this emerging international market.But problems with the credibility of credits claimed for reductions in other countries has been one of the major issues of the European ETS, hasn't it? And wouldn't common sense suggest that there is always going to be an incentive for businesses engaged in quantifying the effects of overseas mitigation to be biased towards overstating the benefits of schemes? I mean, that keeps all potential customers happy.
Now is the time for getting on with the job not kicking around theories.It's not the theories we want discussed, Penny; we're saying it's the practicalities that need to win out over theory.
The upper 3 meters -- about 10 feet -- of permafrost stores 1.9 trillion tons of carbon, more than double the amount in the atmosphere today, according to a recent study in the journal Bioscience.
"We are seeing thawing down to 5 meters," says geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska. "A third to a half of permafrost is already within a degree to a degree and a half [Celsius] of thawing."
If only 1% of permafrost carbon were to be released each year, that could double the globe's annual carbon emissions, Romanovsky notes. "We are at a tipping point for positive feedback," he warns, referring to a process in which warming spurs emissions, which in turn generate more heat, in an uncontrollable cycle.
