Do we always have to pay the rent

Posted on 4 May, 2022 by alloporus

When I was growing up through the 1970s the only financial advice that stuck with me was the rule of thirds on what to do with income. It was to allocate one third on rent, one third to spending for everyday living, and a third saved.

Oh, how naive; how quaint.

Today rents in England account for half of the tenants’ take-home pay if you are lucky enough to live outside London. In the big smoke expect the proportion to be 75%.

The rent just ate the savings.

And for today’s younger renters there is no bailout from inheritance despite the apparent wealth of the baby boomers. The typical inheritance age in the UK is somewhere around 60, and the median amount handed down is about £11,000.

Not surprisingly the youth are not happy.

The Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in the UK, was brave enough to publish numbers that suggest 80% of youngsters blame capitalism for the housing crisis, 75% believe the climate emergency is “specifically a capitalist problem” and 72% back sweeping nationalisation.

Worst statistic of all for a right-wing think tank—67% of youngsters want to live under a socialist economic system.

It’s a similar story in the US.

A Harvard University study in 2016 found that more than 50% of young people reject capitalism, while a 2018 Gallup poll found that 45% of young Americans saw capitalism favourably, down from 68% in 2010.

So much for the libertarian land of opportunity.

And so much for the trickle-down.

The numbers for youngsters do not add up anymore.

At the end of 2021 in Sydney, the average house was selling for $1.36 million and units for $837,000 with a typical Sydney house about $340,000 more expensive than it was at the end of 2020.

Take a deep breath for this statistic—the rise in value in a year matches the full cost of a house just 25 years ago.

Image modified from photo by Maximillian Conacher on Unsplash

Who can afford the mortgage?

Borrow the money to purchase one of these $1.3 million houses to avoid paying rent and you will need $65,000 on the minimum 5% deposit and expect to pay back the bank $4,500 a month for 30 years.

Total repayments of 1.62 million at $54,000 per year in after-tax dollars.

The average salary of an Australian in 2021 was around A$99,600 per year with a wide range starting around A$33,000 and a median salary of A$72,000.

Assuming an approximate tax burden of 25%, a single person on $72,000 could pay the mortgage but would have zero dollars left for any of the other bills life throws their way.

Clearly, this is not sustainable.

Rather than do what most of us baby boomers would do and lament the loss of the picket fence and the Sundays spent painting it white, how about a reboot.

What if ownership was not the only route to the long-term security of house and home?

What if we invented new social norms that not only promoted rents but removed the landlord. Let’s take rent-seeking out of the equation and have society build the housing stock at cost, then rent that stock to individuals in the community at rates that reflect recovery of those costs and perhaps a modest return linked to the bank rate.

You know, the sort of thing a sovereign wealth fund could handle.

Just thinking.

The left left their talk to the right

Posted on 24 March, 2022 by alloporus

True freedom emerges from respect for other people.

This is George Monbiot doing his thing in an article about how leftwingers — his crew — are lured to the far-right by conspiracy theories.

It is true because the world is upside down, in a scary state of flux.

Democracy as we thought we knew it, with a vote cast, tallied and winners declared after a simple count, is not strong enough anymore. It can’t resist the manipulation of the socials or the authoritarian undermining by the lawmakers.

One minute we all agree to stay at home, don masks and not see friends and family for months, all at significant personal and emotional cost, then we are told to go for it. Some do for a short while until reality voluntarily puts us back at home.

Check out Australia in its wet summer of 2021/22.

Apparently, with the health system straining like never before and frontline staff at the end of their rope, it is the right time for the Australian government to announce a $3.5 billion expenditure on 120 military tanks from the United States. This is more than 10% of the $30.2 billion NSW Health budget for 2020-21.

It is weird and scary.

Well, we could always vote them out.

Only the point that Monbiot makes is summarised in this quote.

The left left their talk to the right.

And the right left their talk to the left.

Rumsfeld would be delighted with such linguistic conflagration.

So when I exercise my democratic right to vote and place a cross on a ballot, the choice is impossible. There is no way of deciding who stands for what anymore.

All we know is the period of stability in the age-old power balance between people and state is over. The struggle is back, and for the moment, it is the state and the supporting cast to the authoritarians that have the upper hand.

People beware.

Hero image modified from a photo by Alvin Leopold on Unsplash

The right of free speech

Posted on 17 March, 2022 by alloporus

So Neil Young decided to remove his song catalogue from Spotify because he didn’t like what another Spotify artist, Joe Rogan, said on his popular podcasts.

Then Joni Mitchell came out saying the same thing, remove, please.

I am conflicted by this.

Anyone, including Rogan, who peddles crazy ideas and statements that are potentially harmful to anyone, is out of order.

However, if we want free speech, Rogan has a right to speak even if what he says is nonsense and dangerous. After all, he claims to be a comic.

Equally, Spotify customers have the right not to listen.

They choose to stream a podcast or not. And that is the key. Nobody is forced to listen to Joe Rogan for three hours or any other anti or alternative purveyor of brain farts; each person chooses to listen.

Of course, this version of free speech where anyone can say anything must assume that listeners are discerning.

Not only must all Spotify customers have the skills and experience to decide for themselves, but they must also exercise the ability routinely. The reality is that many don’t have the skills — few schools teach discernment and the mental fortitude to turn off a feed — nor do those listeners who have a discerning taste use it all the time.

Crap gets into all our lives.

Then there is another problem.

Neil Young has 6 million monthly listeners and Joni Mitchell 3.5 million. Modern heyday artists like Drake or Adele are in the region of 60 million listeners keen enough to follow an artist and stream their songs.

Unless they get publicity by pulling their catalogue, the older generation simply doesn’t have the reach.

As Guardian reporter Edward Helmore puts it, “Streaming is highly competitive, with low margins. Apple, Google, and Amazon are competing for market share. Spotify reported 172m paying subscribers, up from 144m when it signed Rogan. When it comes to plotting a lucrative future in modern media, Young, a cultural legend, was simply not competitive.”

Not that this stand against stupidity is to gain more streams, not even Alloporus is that cynical, but it does leverage past infamy into present-day relevance. Presumably, the hardcore fans are still listening to albums on vinyl and care little for the pristine 160kbps, so there is little to sacrifice.

And no doubt such established artists don’t need the change either.

This is all a little convoluted, and maybe I am missing the point.

Everyone should stand up to what they know to be wrong in whatever way they can within the constraints of no harm to others.

Songwriters limiting their audience in protest at another’s voice just seems an odd way to go about it.

Hero image modified from photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash

One will help you and the other will hurt you

Posted on 24 February, 2022 by alloporus

Daniel Levitin is James McGill Professor Emeritus of psychology and behavioural neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

All five books of his books are international bestsellers: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006), The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008), The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (2014), A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (2016) and Successful Aging (2020).

He is also a music producer and sound designer with contributions to recordings that have sold over 30 million copies.

There is a real worldliness to his writing with many a quotable quote.

Here is one.

The internet delivers one who will help you and the other who will hurt you.

Sharp and insightful this one. The internet will either help or hinder and the responsibility to choose falls on the consumer of the information.

That’s you and me.

A ubiquitous and accessible internet is life-changing. We get all the information we need with a few clicks.

Knowledge is power but with power comes responsibility for ourselves. In everyday web use, it’s in the decision to value or trash the information that the internet coughs up in a millisecond.

In other words, it is not the fault of information access and free speech that we get trolls, alternate facts, deception, and lies. Bad stuff is a consequence of an open platform.

It is what we do with information that matters.

Do we take the time to choose?

Hero image from photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash

What do you value in life?

Posted on 17 February, 2022 by alloporus

Ask a thousand people and some version of family, health, education, safety, work, and maybe happiness, are up there on top of the list for everyone.

The evolutionary biologist knows this already because these values map directly onto fundamentals that apply to all organisms — the blueprint for organic life.

survival, growth, and reproduction

Happiness and the many other higher self values that are supposed to be unique to humans are also predictable for an organism that can integrate the basic values into something bigger.

We can smile when we have the fundamental values met.

What value means

Value when used as a noun to mean one’s judgement of what is important in life is consistent with this evolutionary idea. What is important in life is what gets us to the successful reproduction of our lineage in spite of the drama.

Then we also use value as a verb meaning to estimate the monetary worth or consider (someone or something) to be important or beneficial.

This too is consistent with the evolutionary imperative.

Items and actions that are important, beneficial, and financial all matter to how successful we think we are, be that in the evolutionary currency of reproductive success or the more immediate race against the Joneses.

Value as a verb — the expression of an action or a state of being — is to estimate or assign the monetary worth to an object or service or anything with utility.

It can also mean to rate or scale in usefulness, importance, or general worth.

Either way, value is linked to the modern expression of evolutionary success, namely money.

All this makes the claim by economists that economic theory is value-free quite absurd.

And yet we let such theory run our society.

Why would we run the show on a supposed value-free premise, when in reality we value everything?

Hero image from a photo by Sarah Medina on Unsplash

Why the baby boomers had it good

Posted on 1 November, 2021 by alloporus

Photo by Esther Ann on Unsplash

I was born in 1961 as one of the last Baby Boomers, the demographic cohort that came about from a spurt of fertility following WW2.

The world of the 1960s was very different to today.

There were far fewer people for starters, technology had not reached everyone, there was no internet, no streaming, and a long-distance phone call cost over $1 a minute. There was also no Covid.

My grandma bathed her children in a tin tub in front of a coal fire. I always had access to instant hot water.

My father bought his first car, a third hand Austin A40 the size of a peanut when he was in his 40’s. I am lucky enough to buy a new car with a turbocharged engine and big enough for five adults.

Image source: Morse Classics

Personal computers, mobile phones, the internet, global travel, gastronomic delights, and Netflix have arrived in the lifetime of the Baby Boomers. So many things have changed over the last 60 years that my infant self would never have imagined my future.

I have experienced so much that I need to pinch myself to be sure it all happened.

Cmglee, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The Alpha generation

What of the babies born today, the Alpha generation? What will they experience in their lifetimes?

If the Boomers went from landlines to Facetime, maybe the Alphas can expect holograms, space travel for the masses, and bionic body parts. They could also have to pinch their virtual selves.

Only they will have more to do than the Boomers.

We know that their generation must solve many problems made from the successes of the previous generations. They will be faced with issues of food security, water security, wealth discrepancies, refugees, and any number of technology transitions, especially with energy.

Oh yes, and Covid or its derivatives.

They will also be impacted by changes to the climate.

Here are some of the numbers based on a warming scenario should we meet the Paris agreement targets and see a global average of 2.7℃ of extra heat

This is a lot of extra disasters.

The WHO describes heatwaves as the most dangerous of natural hazards. From 1998-2017, more than 166 000 people died due to heatwaves, including more than 70 000 who died during the 2003 heatwave in Europe.

The Alpha generation can expect over 600,000 heatwave related deaths every decade.

A golden age

The Boomers parents and grandparents did it tough too — nobody goes through a global war unscathed.

So I am lucky to be born a Boomer and forever grateful.

However, my generation has done a lousy job of preparing for the future. We have not curtailed population or consumption but promoted both. Nature has buckled under our excesses, and the natural resources we leave for the Alphas are either depleted or dangerous to use.

The Baby Boomers had it good because we were born at just the right time, the golden age of technology and wealth. We tapped the sun’s ancient energy for a cheap fix and a costly legacy.

It will take a lot to make a platinum age from what we will leave behind.

Feel free to browse the Alloporus back catalogue for more ideas and random thoughts.

Yippee! There are 500 posts on Alloporus

Posted on 4 October, 2021 by alloporus

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Well, who would have thought that after 13 years and a handful of readers that this blog would reach 500 posts?

Not me, certainly.

I am amazed and a little proud of myself for keeping it going all this time.

When I started, the blogosphere was the online space. There were prospects for a wide readership and perhaps even a side hustle from the proliferation of traffic. Then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and a host of other online distractions hogged the breeze, and what was left was quickly mopped up by aggregators like Medium. Bloggers do it now for personal satisfaction, with only a handful of the early adopters maintaining their readership.

I can’t complain because I write rather than read blog posts, and it seems unfair to lament a lack of traffic. So the blog ticks along with 50 to 100 visitors a month.

Anyway, low traffic volume just needs a few viral outbreaks to explode. We live in hope.

A huge thank you to those kind folk who stumbled onto this blog over the years and read a post or two. And especially the few regulars who clicked the RSS.

It is nice to know that there are real people in the ether.

What did I blog about?

Not surprisingly, for an ecologist, the environment was the most popular category (142 posts), chased by awareness (135) and the Big Picture (127).

I did not expect to write about leadership (88 posts) as much as I did. But the political debacle that Australians have lived through in the last decade meant that laments on the absence of leadership were inevitable.

If any of these whinges offended, then good. It is beyond time that we woke each other up with a cattle prod and did something about the ugly, shameful behaviour that passes for political leadership in this country.

This week, I watched Strong Female Lead, a documentary film billed as “an exploration of gender politics during Julia Gillard’s term as Australia’s first female prime minister”.

It was harrowing to see grown adults dispense abuse to a colleague without the slightest remorse. I might have looked for the nearest bus if it wasn’t for this documentary’s hopeful ending. Let’s just say those 88 posts came about because the nation’s moral compass is buried six feet under.

No doubt there is more to say about our vacuous leaders.

I have always believed that awareness is essential to human wellbeing. No surprise that several posts were tagged thus. Our personal and social lives are better if we pay attention to each other.

Knowledge and perception of the bigger picture are more tricky.

Dissonance, denial and disbelief are much more accessible than confronting the truth of a finite planet with close to 8 billion eager people. Ostrich behaviour makes it hard to raise awareness without sounding pessimistic or preachy. But we all must confront fears, or our grandchildren will have a terrible and short time on earth.

I am working on some practical tools to help with awareness. It is a little early to announce what they are, but the intro has begun over at our new website sustainably FED.

What happens next for Alloporus?

A blog with 230,000+ words of depressing content should have run its course.

After a break from posting through 2010, I tried to reset Alloporus onto a more positive path, and it lasted for a month or two before returning to the usual laments. It seems I am stuck with the frustration of the information age being full of worthless detail.

Why can’t we see that food security is critical to the future of humanity, not climate change or koalas?

Humanity needs 23 trillion kilocalories per day, for goodness sake, just to keep the people alive, let alone the pets — by 2030, it will be 32 trillion.

There is a therapeutic effect of writing about the world in this way. It makes for depressing reading, but it helps to get it off my chest.

I am semi-retired now, too — phew, that was an admission I have been avoiding — so there should be more time to craft more engaging pieces.

So I will continue to post once a week in the hope of seeding some healthy thinking.

Thanks again for reading,
it means a lot to me.
Alloporus

Are you looking the other way?

Posted on 6 September, 2021 by alloporus

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

I am.

There, like an addict in rehab, I admit that cognitive dissonance has got the better of me and I am looking the other way from a host of societal and environmental ills.

As a career scientist who works with the evidence of climate, food security, and the social reality of nature’s exploitation, I am still in denial. I am no more ready to give up my morning latte or my afternoon stroll across the links than the next over indulged Westerner.

I console myself with this admission.

At least I know that my ecological gumboots are stomping on the world even if there is little that I can do about it. And, of course, there is further balm in knowing that l am not alone but a member of the vast majority.

A pandemic, a climate crisis, the Taliban, and 40 million Americans on foods stamps notwithstanding, here are three randomly selected things from recent news feeds that I let happen…

In the decade from 2010-2020 diplomacy decreed that the nations of the world attempt 20 targets for the protection of global biodiversity including protecting coral reefs and tackling pollution. We failed. And in response to that abject failure negotiators are now working on a better plan with new goals for the next decade and beyond. Einstein just turned in his grave.

Republican governors of Florida and Texas have stopped schools, colleges and local authorities from the requirement for vaccines, proof of vaccination, a Covid test or masks. Any Florida school administrator who demands the wearing of masks could lose their pay. Just one of the many things that should never be politicised.

The national security advisor in the White House this week asked global oil producers to increase production so that US motorists can buy gasoline more cheaply. This week is 8 months into the Biden administration, he of the green deal and a pledge to ban new drilling and fracking on federal lands, yet his administration has granted more than 2,000 new permits.

“Ah,” I hear you say, “but it wasn’t just you. It’s not your fault,” coming to your own as well as my defence.

Well, it was.

I am part of the system that allowed and continues to allow such ineptitude, lies and selfishness to persist.

The only solace is that I can admit it now. The first but the most important step to making things better.

Please share with others who might want to own it.

Death and taxes again

Posted on 2 August, 2021 by alloporus

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

The theme of death and taxes we gave an evidence argument in a previous post. This one is about the hip pocket.

As a private citizen in Western democracies, you are certain of two famous things: death and taxes.

Except for those independently wealthy, to survive in the system you have to earn income and that income is taxed. Modestly for low-income earners and at a greater proportion as your remuneration grows.

This ‘work for money that is taxed’ keeps going until the inevitable happens and your body can’t fight entropy anymore.

Would you rather pay $20,000 or $1,000,000 in tax per year?

The weird part of this is that, after some thought, most people would be more than happy to pay a million dollars a year in personal income tax.

Obviously, it would mean that earnings are high enough to spend at least 10 grand a week and still have change. Compared to the low-income individual who plays $20,000 a year in tax, your bum is in the butter.

Similarly, a business paying tax is a good thing.

Corporations have many more ways of avoiding the tax dollar than the individual, but the reality is that net profit after tax, NPAT, where profit is the operative word, is the objective of the business, the reason it exists.

The company will have directors who, should they fail to maximize profit for their shareholders, risk prosecution. That NPAT number, the profit measure should be as high as possible.

A business not declaring a profit is very creative in its accounting or has previously made losses or isn’t a very good business.

Either way, the shareholders are not too happy if profit is not declared because that is their reward, their dividend for risking their own hard-earned to invest in the company.

Once the accounting smoke and mirrors are over, paying little to no tax is not a good thing.

Taxes benefit everyone

All this preamble comes before any moral argument about whether or not taxes are for the public good.

Remember that tax pays for collective benefits: roads, schools, police, defence plus a whole raft of services and structures that are hard to pay for as individuals, but that benefits everyone.

Tax is an integral part of the modern democratic system. It supports the social structure and a whole chunk of individual well being. Drive out of your front gate and you benefit from the tax dollar as soon as you hit the tarmac.

Without a tax system, we can say goodbye to the current quality of life that we enjoy. Arguably there is a moral obligation through the social contract for all legal entities and individuals to pay their way.

What is a fair share?

A fair share of tax is designated by the policies and the politics of the day.

And sure there’s no reason to pay more than your fair share according to the rules. As long as the tax system is equitable then everyone at some point in the process will have benefited from the taxes that they’ve paid. There should be a certain pride in paying tax toward the public good.

So to claim that you’ve paid no tax. Or to even hint that such a thing is good does not stack up in any sensible argument.

Paying no taxes as an individual means that you’re either at the very low end of the income scale in need of support or you’ve diddled the books somehow and claimed payments or shifted money around to avoid paying your fair share.

If a company pays no tax then at some point in the process the business has failed to disclose a profit or manipulated the books to sail very close to the wind and, again, avoids a fair share.

There is no doubt that corporations do this. They use all sorts of systems and hire expensive lawyers and accountants to move money around to avoid paying tax and one of the things that society has struggled to do is to reign in that avoidance behaviour.

But when no tax is paid for a very long time then the company is poor at what they do or they’re extremely good at dodging their fair share. Which even if it’s not illegal has certain moral nefariousness.

The graph below can speak for itself.

Alloporus would suggest tax is a good thing.

Paying your fair share according to your means should be everyone’s responsibility.

The joy of content creation

Posted on 5 July, 2021 by alloporus

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by creativity. Not bad for a scientist.

I like writing especially. I’m interested in all forms, non-fiction, fiction, short form, blog posts. I haven’t quite made it to Twitter, but I’ve always been tempted. I even have an alter-ego, Paul Sorol, the chronicler of the Confused Confucius. Paul is a bit slack at the moment because he’s not actually doing very much. But I hope he’ll get his arse in gear to put out some sayings and conversations in the near future.

I like the technology side of writing, especially the websites and apps that make productivity easier and more efficient. I am raving about Notion at the moment with the power of the relational database to manage all the fragments of information. Close behind is Notability that has taken me paperless.

I like the design side but I’m absolutely crap at it. I love thinking that I can produce a logo or color palette. Where in fact I haven’t really got a clue. Luckily there is Canva.

I even use Procreate on the iPad to dabble in a little bit of freeform here and there. Again with no idea how to do it.

And after a one-time career as an academic where I spent a lot of time designing and delivering science courses, I still think I’m half-decent at producing educational material. And now I’m in the process of developing online courses in kajabi for our sustainably FED initiative.

Doing it all yourself

Part of the joy of content creation in the digital age is doing it all yourself. All the technology makes it possible to take writing all the way to the reader on your own.

Only the jack of all trades syndrome applies. There is still a lot to cover even with the help of smart apps. And to stand out key elements must be mastered, in particular the look and feel of your messages, a style niched into your audience, and, critically, knowing your audience.

Fail on these things and no amount of hard work will deliver traction.

All the successful YouTubers and online entrepreneurs have a niche matched to their primary audience even as some topics are more salable than others.

Anyway, this week I had a change of heart and instead of wanting to do all of those things myself, I realised something I should have realized a very long time ago. No one person can be across everything.

So I offloaded platform and website development for the courses to my colleagues and we shared visions of who the audience is going to be. It left me with the content development and carriage of the design and delivery of the message. Still a lot to do but it eases the pressure and reduces the number of steep learning curves.

My usual motivational tools, like the daily word tally, also took a step aside.

Content creation takes more than inspiration

Content development is very different to content creation.

The raw material of creativity is relatively easy to vomit out onto the page or into the microphone. What’s more difficult is to then go back to that material and edit it down to focus on message and craft.

Offloading some responsibility has created more space for the big challenge of editing and a good job too for this fine-tuning is easily the hardest part. How the old school writers with their quills, fountain pens and typewriters managed the editing I have no idea. They must have been awesome at first drafts or had the mental bandwidth of an owl.

In the end content creation is graft. No shortcuts, no technology fixes, and no outsourcing. It’s about being with the words and trusting that the right ones come along.

If anyone is interested in the full process for this blog and the upcoming sustainably FED eLearning initiative, let me know.