Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "ABC News In-depth" channel.

If we were holding them accountable then we would have already executed most of them. That whole stupidity of pushing interests rates down and down was always going to bite when they went back up and they were always going to go back up.
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@dumdumbrown4225 NOBODY has ever proven that to be TRUE for any country. That's just another function of NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS and its just as flawed as the REST of NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS. NONE of the central banks are truly independent because they're all run by people from the banking industry and do whatever the banks want. Go have a look at how many Goldman Sachs people run the US Fed and we're no better. If you don't understand how much power the banks actually have over our lives then you really do need to WAKE UP.
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And Media Executives across the world keep wondering why people have lost faith in what they pump onto the airwaves. I missed it because like so many others I can't be bothered watching their waste of time childish news services anymore. What I watched of the Winter Olympics a lot of it was with the mute button on because the commentary was so damn awful.
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@zen1647 Sorry but we need a lot more than just 1% of our land mass for solar and wind. When you look at how much power you get from each square meter of floor space both wind and solar are quite poor compared to other systems. Nuclear is the best in that department. Price is NOT the best way to identify locations for wind and solar geography and condition data are.
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@PopcornMax179 Yeah - sorry for the length but its a subject I have been looking into ever since I had this consult job about 7 years ago. I found out how old our large power stations were and that there were NO PLANS to replace any of them. Even today right now there are NO PLANS even on the table to even discuss. Its like all the people are involved know there's a problem and are just waiting for "someone else" to do something. That's one of the major flaws I found in neoliberal mentality. One of its central ideas is the notion that "someone else" will do what's needed. Problem is if nobody can see a way to make money then it never gets done and you just have people standing around waiting like we have right now. 🤷‍♂🤷‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂
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@zen1647 Your right neoliberalism has some very serious issues. There's lots of people way better qualified than me to talk about that. Mark Blyth is one of the best and his Rhodes Centre podcasts where he talks with a lot of people who have written books is with your time. Mariana Mazucatto is worth your time on the subject of government being effective at managing projects and NOT letting itself be dominated by consultants. There's a recent series of 4 lectures by Damon Silvers on neoliberalism that starts with "Understanding Neoliberalism as a System of Power." Yeah its almost 6 hours in total but totally worth the time if you really want to get your head around neoliberalism.
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@MrRatclima Absolutely correct on the foreign money. We changed the rules years ago and allowed a flood of money to come in. Its was all following the mantra "Foreign investment is good" which is an unquestionable economic policy that NOBODY is allowed to challenge. What we did was allow a lot of very questionable money to be laundered through our real estate market and its had a devastating effect on house prices and the rental market. But because the political power of the banking, real estate and construction lobbies its NOT allowed to be questioned.
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@MrRatclima As I have said to others its all symptomatic of neoliberal economics, but people need to realise that neoliberalism more than just economics. Its a whole set of ideas that includes political and social ideology. At its core is the elitist view that people are incompetent and they need to be managed. To do that "we (the elite) have to have the freedom from law to do what we need to do to manage the rest of you." That's where the American Libertarians get their "We need the liberty to strip you of your liberty." political ideology from. Its a weird from of Orwellian logic that comes from what we'd normally consider the political Right rather than the political Left. Its incredibly arrogant and a lot of the hard core neoliberals are insanely arrogant. Their establishments are places like Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago. Most of their economics comes straight out of Milton Freidman's "Greed is good" and "Corporation's have no other task than profit." mantras. Freidman was a professor at the University of Chicago. Neoliberals manage governments through consultancies and in that game the biggest of the consultancies is McKinsey which was started by James McKinsey another professor from the University of Chicago. They have infected the American justice system and the main player there is the lobbying think tank the Federalist Society which was started by students at Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago. They felt their universities were the bastions of real judicial knowledge. Right now the 9 on the SCOTUS consist of 4 Harvard, 4 Yale and Notre Dame who's a known member of the Federalist Society. If you really want to understand neoliberalism better. There's a lecture series by Damon Silvers over on the UCP IIPP page here on YT. Warning there's almost 6 hours but its worth your time if you really want to know what neoliberalism is about. The first one is titled "Understanding Neoliberalism as a System of Power" and even if you only watch that one you'll understand neoliberalism better than most people.
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@davidcarey9135 Sorry this reply is long but I’d like to know what you think. I had a stunning bit of enlightenment recently. I was watching Steve Keen explain his modelling work to a couple of British students. At one point Steve jumped on his favourite topic of slamming classical & neo-classical economists like William Nordhaus and their inability to properly model things. In the middle of this rant, he suddenly said "They don't even have energy in their models." As an engineer that stuns me because EVERYTHING in human society needs energy and the means to produce & use it. This is why economists have nothing but vacuum on the energy crisis. They don't have any suggestions let alone solutions. They don't even have hot air because hot air requires energy. Its like they just did what some others I have encountered. They drew a line in the dirt and said everything on that side of the line is an engineering problem and has nothing to do with us. I have this idea I call "Engine Theory." I like to explain it in terms of ancient Egypt because that was the world’s first economy. Prof. Mark Blyth (Brown U.) has repeatedly pointed out a Bank of England report (Q1 2014) that has 2 papers that explain what money is and how it’s created BY WORK. The problem is as any engineer will tell you all work is a function of using energy. As in work is produced by converting energy via an "engine" hence the name Engine Theory. Simply put, anything that converts energy into work is an engine (mechanical, biological... whatever). Smith & Marx both termed everything in terms of labour. I think they got it wrong because there’s other ways to do work than just through labour. My idea is that all work stems from the conversion of energy into work no matter if it’s done by a person, animal or machine. Therefore, all economic value comes from energy being consumed or tapped by these “engines.” The fundamental rate of return is actually a function of energy efficiency. The better you consume and use energy the better the rate of return and more wealth is generated. Going back in ancient Egypt they had slaves that sowed & reaped food, built houses, roads and monuments and they were fuelled by food. They had ox that pulled ploughs & heavy wagons and horses that pulled light wagons & chariots and they were fuelled by fodder. The ox & horses aren’t too dissimilar than the comparison of diesel to petrol vehicles. The Egyptians also had sail boats powered by the wind to go up & down the Nile. The difference was that the sails tapped a natural energy source (the wind) rather than consumed fuel like the slaves, ox & horses. Irrespective they had a variety of engines because different engines do certain types of work better and more efficiently and that’s a major part of Engine Theory. In Engine Theory you have different engines for different tasks, and you evaluate them on their efficiency to do that task. In Egypt they could have pulled ploughs with slaves but that’s not as good as an ox. They could have pulled chariots with ox, but that’s not as good as ahorse because chariots need speed. This is why today all the wind, solar, nuclear and other people proclaiming “we have the solution that will save humanity” are all wrong. They have to start seeing themselves as PART of an overall combined solution instead of the single magical “does it all” solution. Then there was the industrial revolution when we started making better engines that could convert fuel (quite literally) by the mountain and with it do mountains of work making mountains of wealth. Plus, some of these news engines didn’t do work and instead they produced energy that other engines could tap instead of converting fuel. We call these things power stations, and they could not only make more energy but do it better allowing energy to be more readily usable across a broader economic landscape. This is why I think economists have it so wrong. Karl Polanyi said you can’t commodify people because they are people. I think energy is the similar. You can’t commodify it because it works at such a fundamental economic level. Neoliberals are trapped in their own ideology and just see it as another thing they MUST marketize because marketization is the best way to distribute anything and everything. Its an ideology not backed up by real world experience. I think a lot of people realise the neoliberals are wrong they just don’t know how to argue it and that’s what I am trying to do. I started informally studying economics out of the frustration of clowns waving economics degrees interfering in projects. Part of the argument is: If work creates value (as economists say), then if they don't include the energy to do that work then they have been WRONG since the dawn of civilisation because the work that has been done has always required energy. It didn’t matter if the fuel was food, fodder or the energy was the wind. They had to convert fuel & energy into work. The massive change was the industrial revolution when we started producing BULK CHEAP energy. The bug in the neoliberal computer (as Mark Blyth puts it) is that they thought they could commodify it like they think they can do with everything and that’s just NOT TRUE as Polanyi pointed out. And this is where the neoliberals have utterly stuffed up. They switched the BULK CHEAP energy systems from economic drivers into profit machines making energy more expensive and with it everything else. That's made everything else less economically efficient because all of the work became more expensive. Unless we can flip that back we’re stuffed. The energy transition won’t make any difference so long as it remains a for profit system because the economics won’t change. We not only have to change to cleaner energy to save the planet but (economically speaking) more efficient to save all our economies which are already on the precipice of a major catastrophe. We dodged a big event in 2008 but the bail outs only made the clowns at the top think they can keep gambling with our future even more. I don’t know if you’re aware but the global FX-Swap market which is a glorified casino now has a betting pool of US$100 Trillion, which is around 5 times the size it was in 2008. Bizarrely NONE of it’s on any balance sheet because of the nature of FX-Swaps and how accountants account for them. Most of it isn’t even held by banks. It’s held by non-banking entities gambling on currency shifts. All it will take is the wrong clown to make the wrong mistake and 2008 will seem like a bad fart in an elevator because there won’t be a way off of this elevator as it plumets down the shaft. Sorry, this was so long but I'd like to know what you think.
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@davidcarey9135 No, No you misunderstand. The fuel type is irrelevant THE COST of the energy to BOTH society and industry is the important thing. You are totally right about Britain being the first to use coal at scale gave them a growth spurt. The most important thing there is they changed to a better "engine." Remember the rail industry changed from coal to diesel and electricity after WW2 and there was NOTHING forcing it except they were better engines economically. This is something I am trying to get all the players to understand. They various technologies will be the main player wherever they are the better engine. I really do hate when the wind, solar, nuclear (all types), wave and FOSSIL FUEL people all claim that they are the ONLY WAY. That's just garbage. That's the lesson of history, starting with the Egyptians and every economy since. EVERY type of fuel/engine system has its place and its not because people want this or that its because they are the better engine. I seriously can't see fossil fuels being 100% abolished because there will simply be places where its better than everything else, but you can't tell that to a lot of people. Likewise for the fossil fuel people to think that wind & solar aren't going to be major players in certain markets is equally delusional. In some places they will need nuclear because its the best engine in that place. Hydrogen will be a major player, but because of its basic nature its not going to be the savior that many claim and that's being said by someone who's a huge believer in hydrogen. But then I also know the limits of hydrogen. And here's the grating thing - they all lie and all misdirect and it takes hours for engineers to explain it. When I mean they all lie. I mean ALL OF THEM. Wind, solar, nuclear, fossil fuel,..... ALL OF THEM. Even the hydrogen people lie and that's my thing.
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@davidcarey9135 Yeah so coal is more energy dense than wood - that's NOT THE POINT. Uranium's energy density is orders of magnitude more energy dense than coal. So is Plutonium and Thorium but I don't see you going on about that. I'm an engine for fark sake you don't need to explain to me about efficiency. I took the classes I have the degree and I have 30+ years of experience. THAT'S NOT THE POINT. You are doing what so many others do. You are fixating on 1 thing. This is exactly why we don't have solutions. We have all these people who hype up lateral thinking and then fixate on 1 thing. This is the entire problem with economics and with it everything else because economics is so dominant in the decision processes. Neoliberals FIXATE on things and then see everything else as the enemy of humanity. Either people STOP fixating on irrelevant issues and coal is as irrelevant as it gets. OR There is no future - period.
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Yeah this is 8 minutes of the same economic crap that got us where we are. All Jennifer Westacott is saying is the investor class want the same crap they always want - lower corporate taxes and less regulation. They have been getting that again and again and again since Reagan and Thatcher unleashed their SHlT upon us and no matter what they get its never enough. For Sarah Ferguson not to simply say straight to her face "Isn't this the same stuff you've been saying for years?" is just pathetic on her part.
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@mytwosense9135 1) he never said to silence dissenting views 2) the Commie reference shows you just another right wing bigot. 3) the campaign Jacinta Price is part of is based on LIES. BIG LIE #1 There is no provision for the voice having any influence over non-aboriginal issues like the military. BIG LIE #2 There's the claim that once done the Voice cannot be undone and that's absurd because its claiming we can't change the constitution and yet this referendum is like every other referendum before it a means to change the constitution.
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@andrewduan5123 There was an ABC story where they revealed that there were 10-12 ex US Navy officers (including at least 1 admiral) who had been in Australia for more than 10 years consulting on the Collins replacement. They were being paid between $5,000 and $8,000 PER DAY that's $1.2 million to $1.9million a year. Further to what I looked through I found that ASPI, the think tank in Canberra that is heavily funded by our government to give advice ALSO receives money from the US State Department. I think that's called a conflict of interest.
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