Andrew E. Scott – Page 24 – It's all about me, really.

Book Club Homework: complete!

A couple of hours ago I finished reading the last book for our book-club this year. It surprised me. For a literary novel – a genre which typically doesn’t excite me – it turned out to be enjoyable. Lucky, because the book-club only picked it on a re-count. And given the truculent and debate-hardened members of the book-club, it’s a wonder we managed to get someone to change their vote at all!

Anyway, before I discuss this with anyone else, or check out the publisher’s official book-club website, I thought I’d jot down my thoughts while I can claim that they are still mine.

The History of Love
A tangled history that I loved being caught up in.

This is a book about the intertwined histories of a number of quirky characters, all with Jewish ancestry, around New York, and their relationship to a book called The History of Love. It’s the second novel by Nicole Krauss, and I would not be surprised if she drew upon her own family’s history of Jewish culture and migration. Certainly, those details had the feeling of accuracy throughout the book.

Strangely, one thing didn’t quite ring true for me: the male voice of the character Leo Gursky, who we are introduced to through his narration in the first chapter. I must confess that I like to play a game when reading articles in the newspaper, trying to guess the gender of the author from their style, and usually it’s not too hard. However, finding out that Leo was male was a little unexpected. I assumed he was a Leonore or something. And once I’d identified that the male characterisation didn’t gel for me, I noticed that other male characters weren’t as well realised as the female characters. But it was a minor thing, really, and a little strange.

Something far more impressive was how Krauss maintained the half-a-dozen storylines through the book. To be honest, I was confused for most of the way along about which stories were “real”. And the stop-start manner of my reading this book didn’t help given the concentration required to keep track of what had happened and when. But perseverance paid off, and by the end I was thoroughly enjoying how it was all coming together. Not the sort of book I would’ve normally picked off the shelf to read, but glad that I did.

My rating: 4.0 stars

Real Christmas Carolling

I saw this clip on a friend’s Wall in Facebook, but I’ve stolen it and put it here instead. It took me back to my carolling days when, during the 1,000th rendition of O Little Town Of Bethleham you could easily forget what verse you were meant to be singing. Except these guys are doing the 12 Days Of Christmas, and a couple of others besides. And they have talent!

The other cool thing is that I’ve actually sung Africa in a choir too.

The Karma of Kringle

Christmas is a time of giving, and this is keenly illustrated by the tradition of the Kris Kringle. A group of people committing to give presents to each other, often anonymously, and generally randomly, up to a fixed dollar value. It’s fair, fun and festive. However, what if people don’t play by the rules?

The other week I went out to dinner with my Toastmasters club for our Christmas break-up, and everyone who came had to participate in a Kris Kringle, up to a value of $5. The other rule was that everyone had to give a short talk on the present they got – well, it was Toastmasters after all.

It took me a long time to find something for no more than $5 that I would like to receive as a gift, and was interesting enough to be able to talk about. Ironically, once I left the shop, I immediately found something better, but I felt I had to stick with the original present. What’s worse: spending $5 on a $4 present, or $10 on a $5 present? I thought that the latter bent the spirit of Kris Kringle a little.

Unfortunately, on the night it became clear that almost everyone had cheated. Most presents would have been between $8 to $10.Â One person appeared to have spent $15 on a $15 present – the RRP was printed on it! I get it that people may have valued their own time highly, and traded off searching time against present cost. But it was not a level playing field any more – not everyone was giving a talk about a $5 present, and some people were probably disappointed at what they received versus what they gave. Personally, I benefited, since what I received would have cost more than $5, but I felt a bit let down on behalf of the person who received my gift. If I’d known that the Kris Kringle was a minimum, not a maximum, then I would have shopped differently.

Should you keep to the Kris Kringle limit? Can you conscientiously break the implicit agreement between the group? Is it just about the giving, not the shopping? All I’ve been told is that Santa knows who’s been naughty or nice …

Blame it on the rain

A week ago, Australia voted in a new government, and there are many theories going around as to why. Politicians and commentators are pointing to leadership issues with the Liberals, interest rate rises, the Tamar Pulp Mill, WorkChoices legislation and the Kyoto Agreement. Well, I’ve got another theory: it was due to water restrictions.

The the last twelve months leading up to the election on Saturday November 24, most states of Australia introduced legislation that made life of “working families” tougher, resulting in people needing to get up earlier to water their gardens, lawns dying off, and cars getting grubbier. Water is seen as an environmental issue, and the last Federal government was not seen as doing much about the environment. Hence, they got they axe. But let’s look at the data:

City	Water Restrictions Introduced	When introduced	Wash your own car?	Water your lawn?	Swing against Govt ***
Sydney	Level 3	1 Jan 07	Bucket only	Hand-held hose or bucket	5.7%
Melbourne	Stage 3a	1 Apr 07	No	No	5.5%
Brisbane	Level 5 *	10 Apr 07	No	No	6.4%
Perth	unchanged	(permanent)	Yes	Yes	1.7%
Adelaide	Level 3	1 Jan 07	Bucket only	Hand-held hose ** or bucket	5.8%
Hobart	none	removed 28 Feb 07	Yes	Yes	-0.4%
Canberra	Stage 3	16 Dec 06	No	No	2.0%

* – Brisbane upped their water restrictions to Level 6 the day before the election (November 23).
** – Adelaide allowed limited use of hand-held hose from October 1.
*** – Swing figures from The Age, Saturday December 1.

So, you can see that the two cities (Perth and Hobart) where water restrictions were unchanged, and in fact allowed watering of lawns with sprinklers and washing of cars with a hose, the swing against the Federal Liberal government was the lowest. Also, the city (Brisbane) with the harshest water restrictions, increasing them the day before the election, had the highest swing against the government.

I’d never suggest that elections are simple affairs, decided by a single issue, but this particular issue seems to have had a significant weight, and hasn’t yet received the full credit it deserves in the analysis.

I am not a nutter

My previous post on the possibility of superannuation funds taking out loans to buy property (“That’s not a Housing Affordability Crisis”) has now been shown to be more than the ravings of a complete loony. A mere 6 days after my post, Robin Bowerman, no less than Head of Retail for Vanguard in Australia started talking a similar line. I’m going to quote from his article on “Super changes open the gearing door” from November 16:

… by investing through an instalment warrant structure it means super funds may be able to gear any of the usual investments a super fund can buy … perhaps a residential property for example. The super fund receives all the rental income and gains.

He has based this on a tax office ruling from September 24 on whether and how installment warrants could be bought by SMSF (self-managed super funds), which are regulated by the ATO. This wasn’t something I included in my grab-bag of references, so it adds to the weight that there’s a-change a-foot.

The implications are interesting to speculate about (other than significant price rises for residential property). For example, will we get a whole heap of funds appearing that buy up houses in a particular suburb, e.g. Toorak. Then, instead of parking their money in a bank account after selling their home and before buying a new one, a vendor could put it in such a fund so that it tracks the rise in house prices to help them avoid a movement in the property market in the mean-time.

That’s what I call a chocolate bar

On the way home tonight, I innocently stopped for some chocolate before I got on the train. Instead of going into the Coles, which had long queues, I went into the asian grocery next door. Little did I know that they had a range of chocolate imported from Japan.

Well, Melbourne Central has a lot to answer for because, I brought home one of these KitKat bars. Have you ever seen a 61% chocolate KitKat? Yum. They are very fine. And the Meiji chocolates that I bought there have mostly been eaten now too. They might not survive the evening.

That’s not a Housing Affordability Crisis

I won’t draw any conclusions here, but I will draw your attention to the following points:

There are 7.9 million households in Australia, and on average each household owns $298,000 in residential property, e.g. their own house and other rental properties (from ABS Household Wealth and Wealth Distribution, Australia, 2005-06).
This puts a total value on all residential property in Australia of something like $2,400 billion. However, the market cap for the entire Australian stock market is currently about $1,600 billion (from ASX Historical market statistics).
Australia is the “fourth-largest retirement savings market in the world” (from the Eureka Report) while superannuation funds are prevented from borrowing any money to buy assets, which is the main way that residential property is bought in Australia.
When it comes to shares though, the ATO has softened its stance on some types of gearing. Contracts for Difference (CFDs), when bought with cash, are apparently alright (in Interpretive Decision 2007/56), even though CFDs behave very much like borrowing to purchase a share.
Westpac has bought 441 houses from Defence Housing Australia (according to The Australian and a DHA media release) with the intent of launching Australia’s first residential real-estate investment trust.
House prices are driven by supply and demand. The superannuation industry has the potential to add a little bit of demand…

I came, I swore, I gave a speech

Tonight I presented my fourth Toastmasters speech. It was CC#4 “How to Say It”, which means that it was meant to be on the theme of language and words. So, I thought it would be a nice twist on the topic to do a speech about swearing.

Turns out that swearing is a pretty interesting topic. There’s a good article on swearing at Howstuffworks, although I didn’t use it for the speech. Anyway, I wrote the speech last night, and all I had to do was remember it and deliver it alright. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember it clearly, didn’t deliver it in a punchy way, and ended up going seriously over time. The lesson is that if I’d practiced it to the point where I’d memorised it, it would have been fine.

For those who are interested in what I meant to deliver, feel free to read my speech on swearing.

Support Pink Ribbon Day, but don’t forget the men

This coming Monday (22nd October) is Pink Ribbon Day. As everyone would know, it is supporting breast cancer research, which is a good thing. People (ok, women) at my train station sell ribbons for this charity, but I’ve never seen anything at all comparable for any cancer associated with men. Now, I know that there are a small fraction of men who do suffer from breast cancer, but in the main, research and support for “female cancers” like cancer of the breast, cervix, ovary or uterus are discussed and promoted significantly more than for “male cancers” like cancer of the prostate or testis.

In the past, I’d just assumed that this was because these afflictions in women outnumbered the cases in men, and the attention on them was warranted because it was another case of women simply being shafted for being female. Men seem to get things easy, and all these cancers were the universe picking on women again, just like while Viagra was approved quickly in Australia, RU-486 isn’t really available anywhere, or like GST on tampons. However, in this case, the roll of the dice has favoured the women, and it is men whom the universe has picked on. Cases of some male cancers outnumber the females ones. By quite a bit.

Cancer statistics are tracked in a lot of detail in Australia. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publishes a mountain of stats on cancer, although some stats are available up to only 2003 so far. So, in 2003, while there were 11,889 instances of breast cancer detected, and 2,720 deaths from it, there were 13,526 instances of prostate cancer found, with 2,837 deaths. Not that this is a competition, but instances of prostate cancer were 14% higher than for breast cancer. Why aren’t there guys at my train station selling ribbons for that? The Prostate Cancer Foundation should get a move on.

However, when all of the cases of “female cancers” listed above are totalled-up, they do outnumber the “male cancers”. Specifically, in that year, there were 14,164 instances and 2,854 deaths from “male cancers” and 15,311 instance and 3,956 deaths from “female cancers”. That’s almost 40% more deaths on the women’s team. So, there is a strong case to be made for emphasising “women’s issues” (particular for ovarian cancer, which looks pretty lethal from the stats). However, other types of cancer than breast cancer do need a look-in occasionally!

The cost of borrowing

Today was a very special day. Today, about a year after we first wrote the applications, we’ve finally received notice from the bank advising us that we now have the home loan we wanted.

Yes, we first met with our mortgage broker from Aussie on the 20th October 2006, and gave him the go-ahead to take out a loan for us with HomeSide (a division of NAB) on the 29th October. Everything had gone brilliantly up until then, and went disastrously from then on. In hind-sight, I’d never recommend anyone use HomeSide, and especially not when you aren’t dealing with them directly, i.e. through a broker. It has been a story of frustration and pain for us.

We’ve seen about half a dozen different loan documents, all with different mistakes in them (most were basic primary school maths mistakes). When the day of settlement came in December 2007, the lender’s solicitors demanded an additional payment or they wouldn’t settle. Then when we moved heaven and earth to make the payment, they waited a couple of hours, and demanded another payment. It was grossly unprofessional and made a stressful situation very unpleasant for us.

On the positive side, our broker from Aussie was caught up in the whole mess of the last year, and valiantly tried to fix the problem for us. In the end, we’ve managed to get a loan with a fixed rate component, using the rate that applied back in December, honouring the original deal, only nine months late.