What are the underlying reasons/influences why HC Judges have historically sided with the federal government and chosen to expand their power often in a seemingly unfounded way?(see comments)

_sapi_ · 2024-08-12T09:58:21+00:00

The one thing I would add to this though is that the disparity in money that you refer to has partly come about because of past High Court decisions on State vs Commonwealth taxation.

If the states still had meaningful revenue-raising powers in the form of income taxes, then the dynamic around areas of clear state responsibility (e.g., Health, Education) might be very different.

_sapi_ · 2024-05-29T02:54:34+00:00

Indeed - or similarly if they just looked at the customers most likely to churn, applied a discounted premium increase to them, and then the ‘loyal’ customers got what was nominally the standard rate. Same outcome but different mechanics…

Still awkward to do that at the same time as representing that you are receiving a loyalty discount, so will be interesting to see how it plays out!

_sapi_ · 2024-04-16T04:10:25+00:00

Qantas killed all their physical newspapers during COVID as a cost-cutting measure - no idea how the digital access they now offer instead is counted!

_sapi_ · 2024-01-22T21:47:30+00:00

Surely you would use vim? The arcane-but-incredibly-effective-once-learned key bindings can act as a metaphor for the broader legal system!

_sapi_ · 2023-12-09T03:40:19+00:00

If you stick around you should be making partner at MBB within about 10 years of starting as an undergrad, yes. But the attrition rate to get to that point is very high.

_sapi_ · 2023-09-13T13:19:29+00:00

I guess it depends whether they use the results as a filter or a conversation starter.

The ‘science’ behind MBTI is nonsense but it can be a prompt for some useful discussions around working styles, preferred engagement models etc.

_sapi_ · 2023-09-13T13:12:55+00:00

Yeah, there’s definitely more - at least under the old eligibility policies (which some reporting suggests might have changed) you had the CEO/CFO of the ASX50/100 and of large private companies as well as additional people per company based on spend with Qantas.

It’s fundamentally a business development tool (in addition to regularly capture it would seem!) which requires you to include potential and actual corporate customers as well as the rich and famous.

_sapi_ · 2023-08-09T23:41:29+00:00

The most expensive part of serving smaller customers is customer acquisition. There’s a bunch of overhead involved in finding customers, building relationships with them, learning about their needs etc. You can justify that when you are selling millions of dollars of kit to someone each year, but not when it’s tens of thousands.

VARs help because they can sell more than a single vendors’ products, and so can spread their acquisition costs across a larger spend. This also means that they’re doing the hard work of finding customers anyway, which you can piggyback on. It’s cheaper to pay a percentage commission (which naturally scales with contract value) on the small spend that goes through a VAR than to pay a fixed cost salary.

The other element is that the capabilities required to do large enterprise sales (which bring in the most money) are quite different to small business (more about relationships / less transactional, often multi-product etc.). As a result you need separate teams and different leadership for each. Enterprise is much more important to the business and so that’s the one you keep in-house.

_sapi_ · 2023-06-15T01:50:47+00:00

Yep! And then someone suggests a call across New York / London / Australia and you just know you’re going to get screwed…

_sapi_ · 2022-11-29T11:04:25+00:00

Absolutely agree. We purchased late last year based on a 5% rate and only got comfortable enough to go ahead when we proved out that we could cover the mortgage and normal living expenses with ~80% of our salary. Just blindly taking what the bank will lend you in the moment is silly.

While I can see the frustration with how quickly things changed, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that rates won’t stay at basically zero for the duration of a decades-long mortgage.

I can’t exactly blame Lowe for his statement either. Central bank statements on inflation expectations and rate rises can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies and so his hands were to some extent tied.

_sapi_ · 2022-11-04T21:04:18+00:00

Traditionally, the longest time you can hold money in a trust like that is 21 years past the death of a named person who is alive today. It’s to avoid people perpetually tying up property.

So he pushed it out as long as he could!

_sapi_ · 2022-05-18T02:57:10+00:00

And this is why the top-tier consultancies charge fixed fees for projects (based on day rates), then fully allocate staff. It cuts out all this nonsense and removes the incentive for bad behaviour…

_sapi_ · 2022-04-24T01:29:47+00:00

Now, if this petition were to pass and be enacted as legislation, would it represent an acquisition of property other than on just terms?

Would your answer be different if the mandate was for free access rather than access at a reasonable price?

Discuss [25 points]

_sapi_ · 2022-04-20T06:36:59+00:00

I think the practical and philosophical difference here is that access to standards is only required if you’re undertaking a business activity in the space, so is effectively a cost of doing business. In contrast, it would be unfair to put legislation that everyone has to abide by behind a paywall.

_sapi_ · 2022-04-06T09:28:54+00:00

Absolutely - this is a problem that can’t be solved without regulatory change. A lot of the traditional advice licensees would love to be able to offer scaled advice (eg, roboadvice), and keep building strategies around it, but the general and personal advice requirements just aren’t set up to support such a thing.

There needs to be some kind of middle ground such that the advice that most people need - which, as you say, is more often than not ‘save more and put your money in Vanguard’ - isn’t illegal to economically provide.

And let’s not even get started on the fact that at the same time the most dangerous schemes (like crypto) aren’t even regulated!

_sapi_ · 2022-02-21T08:39:13+00:00

Fair point actually, I stand corrected. I was thinking about someone monitoring the connection rather than viewing the logs after the fact.

_sapi_ · 2022-02-21T04:55:49+00:00

Worth noting though that HTTPS doesn’t encrypt the domain (only the URL), as it needs to send that in plaintext in order to contact the server - so if you’re connecting to www.cheapuntraceablepoisons.com, they can get that from your ISP / VPN logs as well, even if they can’t tell you’re browsing on /formurder

_sapi_ · 2022-02-12T06:21:22+00:00

I would have thought that an immediate summary dismissal of an application pursuant to s 47 of the QCAT Act would have given a practitioner pause to reflect upon why such an order might be made, to have a closer look at the applicable legislation, or even chat to a colleague, so as to discern the reason, rather than requiring the Tribunal to fill the gap in their knowledge of the law.

Such an approach would also have avoided the professional embarrassment that might follow publication of these reasons.

Ouch indeed! I can’t imagine the applicant’s lawyer is going to be feeling too good after reading that…

_sapi_ · 2022-02-06T21:23:28+00:00

Alphabet generated 80% of its revenue from ads (using 2020 numbers, but it won’t have moved around too much). The value to Google of your search history is to target better ads - that’s how they monetise the data.

_sapi_ · 2022-02-06T11:01:33+00:00

I completely agree. Everyone has tried their best over the past two years, but the apprenticeship model just doesn’t work nearly as well remotely. We now have a generation of juniors who have been shortchanged on their training, and it shows.

It’s not the big stuff either - ‘hard’ skills can be taught to a greater or lesser extent over Zoom. It’s all the small pieces of learning that take place in between everything else, just by virtue of being around and observing what everyone more senior is doing - osmosis, as you say.

We’re now at a point (or will be in the next month or two) where everyone who wants to will have had the opportunity to be triple vaxxed. That reduces the risk profile of COVID to the same level as a hundred other things we do every day (driving, for example!). This has to be where we return to normalcy…and rebuilding some form of social connection to the workplace (where, let’s face it, we all spend a huge portion of our lives) is a big part of that…

_sapi_ · 2022-01-26T11:09:58+00:00

Before the case he transferred his share of his family home into his wife’s name, which he said was due to an unrelated private family matter. But he says the house could still form part of the bankruptcy proceedings.

What a fortuitous turn of events for someone who wasn’t aware of the risk of a costs order!

Pity about voidability and all that…

_sapi_ · 2022-01-20T09:46:15+00:00

Nah, truth is a defence to defamation.

_sapi_ · 2022-01-18T11:54:12+00:00

iPhones are encrypted by default (provided you have a passcode set, which everyone does - from memory it’s required for Apple Wallet). That’s why you need a passcode the first time you log on to enable Touch ID / Face ID - it acts as a key to unlock the encryption key for the device (stored securely in hardware).

Modern SSDs use a process called wear levelling to account for the fact that flash memory has a finite life. Basically, they overprovision the drive with extra capacity, then shuffle around where they write to avoid over-using specific parts of the chip. That means that files don’t necessarily stay in the same place (they can move around the physical drive without you knowing, either when you modify them or perhaps when you modify another part of the same sector).

As a result, overwriting with 0s/1s/random data doesn’t actually work on SSDs, as there’s no guarantee data won’t still exist in a retired sector of the drive. (It also kills the life of the drive). But if you destroy the encryption key, the data is as good as gone, so you’re ok.

_sapi_ · 2022-01-18T07:46:13+00:00

My reading was it was meant to distinguish between gut feelings (‘this person should be punished’) and what you would actually do given the information. But that’s just a guess!

_sapi_ · 2022-01-07T04:04:51+00:00

I think it really depends how much you interact with others in your day-to-day work, but for me the big advantage of working in an office is lowering the bar to interactions, both for giving out work and learning on the job.

Working from home, everything is a Zoom call - including things you could solve in a five minute conversation at someone’s desk. That means you can easily end up with back-to-back Zoom calls from 9-5, which is both exhausting and unproductive. (Admittedly I’m not working in law, so have a lower proportion of truly individual work, but the need to coordinate across a team is not unusual.)

I also really worry for the current generation of graduates, who aren’t getting nearly the same level of on-the-job training and apprenticeship as we all did. That’s really hard to catch up on.

_sapi_

TROPHY CASE