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Unitarian Services/Addresses, HPC Training, Emissions Price
Last Sunday attended the Unitarian Church, with the assumption that I was giving the service. As it turned out the speaker didn't show, so at the last minute I gave my notes to the person I was supposed to be replacing and gave an address (I was especially impressed with the words by the Knox Dunedin Church), specifically a repeat of a talk I gave to the atheist society a few months prior on The Rejection of Imposed Authority, Divine or Human.
Spent today out at Monash University to assist in training researchers at the Melbourne HPC GPU Computing Workshop by familiarising said people with PBS/Torque. An extremely good turnout and was very impressed (again) by a presentation by Phillip Ward on HPC benchmarking and optimisation. Now planning to write an addditional course manual on "An Introduction to Scientific Programming Using Python, C, and Fortran" to bridge the gap between the Linux/HPC courses and the OpenMPI programming courses.
Big political event of the week in Australia was the announcement of a Clean Energy Future by the federal government. For once, the ABC has done a good job in explaining the matter of the carbon emissions tax that's part of the package in terms of how it works, key figures (note that tax-free threshold - it's been tripled!), effect on food prices, and Australia's contribution to emissions. The fact is, this is a bloody good policy and should see both an improvement in the Australian economy, a reduction in greenhouse emissions and significant assistance for the lower-income earners. What's not to like? Oh that's right.. it's socialist.
Spent today out at Monash University to assist in training researchers at the Melbourne HPC GPU Computing Workshop by familiarising said people with PBS/Torque. An extremely good turnout and was very impressed (again) by a presentation by Phillip Ward on HPC benchmarking and optimisation. Now planning to write an addditional course manual on "An Introduction to Scientific Programming Using Python, C, and Fortran" to bridge the gap between the Linux/HPC courses and the OpenMPI programming courses.
Big political event of the week in Australia was the announcement of a Clean Energy Future by the federal government. For once, the ABC has done a good job in explaining the matter of the carbon emissions tax that's part of the package in terms of how it works, key figures (note that tax-free threshold - it's been tripled!), effect on food prices, and Australia's contribution to emissions. The fact is, this is a bloody good policy and should see both an improvement in the Australian economy, a reduction in greenhouse emissions and significant assistance for the lower-income earners. What's not to like? Oh that's right.. it's socialist.
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Ok, substantial tax cut offsetting the carbon tax then. When I plug my details into the governments carbon tax estimator tool it shows me getting a $16 tax cut while paying $441 extra due to price rises.
Looking up the tables shows only those on incomes under $45k (higher for those with dependents of course) actually get ahead.
The issue is not that raising the tax-free threshold shouldn't talked about in the context of offsetting the impact of the carbon tax but that rises to the other tax rates dropping that offset to nearly nothing if you earn 80k+ and basically wiping out the direct government assistance for singles on $45k wasn't mentioned. Thus when people on middle incomes go to the calculator expecting to see the lower tax offsetting the carbon increases they get a nasty shock which can't be good for the governments popularity.
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http://www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au/household-assistance%E2%80%94tax-reform/
(Horrible non-standard characters in a URL.. Sheesh, what are they thinking).