dutchroll

Wot've you got against radials??

I'm somewhere in the middle on this. The Government should be targeting the massive amount of taxation revenue on earnings from doing business in Australia which ends up overseas through "creative" arrangements, rather than targeting individual high income earners who live here. That alone will bring substantial tax revenue. I believe they are in the process of doing that (or attempting to - how successful they are remains to be seen). I mean if you legitimately minimise tax but still pay it in Australia on your Australian earnings, I don't have a big problem with it. Unfortunately some of the multi-nationals are not doing that.

Well if you understand how CGT works you're the only one!

We do Phil. It's called Capital Gains Tax. So if you buy a property for $300k and sell it for $600k you are taxed on your capital gain, but this doesn't apply to your primary residence. It doesn't just apply to houses either. Pretty much anything you bought for more than $10k and sell for a profit, and don't use for the purpose of producing income (ie it doesn't apply to stuff you sell for profit as part of your business - that's just treated as normal taxable income) is subject to the tax. It's a dog's breakfast like most tax legislation and needs a good accountant to sort it out! I don't think Marty is necessarily talking about about genuine garden variety corporate tax deductions here. I think it's more about multinational tax avoidance and the likes - corporations earning millions of dollars income in Australia but siphoning it through the Bahamas and dodgy shell companies, etc. Heck even companies resident here do it. It's called "contrived arrangements" and it's a means by which big companies deliberately understate their Australian income and tax liabilities. It's also technically illegal, but traditionally hard to prove in court, which is why new laws have come in to try to prevent it. Of course everyone strives to reduce their tax bill. But most don't make stuff up and fabricate overseas entities to do it. I've been criticised myself by colleagues for not claiming a deduction on expenses I never incurred, though there's a loophole which allows some people in my job to do it because they currently don't have to show "proof" of that particular expense (it's not a trivial amount). Their astounding logic is that because they're not (at the moment, but watch this space) being asked to show they're not breaking taxation laws, they can therefore break taxation laws! I have pointed out if they get caught, they're going to be screwed and retrospectively audited back many years, as well as completely stuff it for many others who are doing the right thing.

And if you don't do it, you're not eating. And if you're not eating, you die. It's an important part of life.

Yes.....yes I am! I do that a lot. Mrs Dutch rolls her eyes when I excitedly explain to people how our envirocycle works. Ruminant digestion or bacterial digestion in a concrete tank - I love talking sh*t.

Probably not. Atheists come in all sorts of flavours when it comes to those topics too. It's just the preaching one thing and doing another which tends to be the difference. Now sure not all religious folk are like that, but it sometimes seems that the harder they preach, the more deviance from those preachings they practice. Thus when it makes the headlines, it gives the rest of the flock a bit of a bad name.

Well going all the way back to Gnu's original joke which started the thread, where the obnoxious smarmy little Christian girl asks why a horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same stuff but do different poos: I'm sure most atheists would be quite aware that it's due to the evolution of substantially different digestive systems (in the case of cows vs deer which are both ruminants, it's simply dietary moisture content). In fact it's a beautiful example of the parallel evolution of different digestive systems to cope with digesting the cellulose in grass and hay grazing animals. The fundy religious answer is of course "that's just scientific mumbo jumbo - it's obvious God decided to make them poo like that".

I've actually never seen the need for a creator, despite the best attempts of the church in my childhood years at home to convince me there definitely is one. I've never understood why people can't accept that there are some things we just don't know the exact answer to. This is distinctly different from the natural human trait of curiosity and eagerness to find answers. I have that in abundance. However it's just a fact that we're not entirely certain of how some things happen so why do I need to invent a supernatural entity to "explain" it? I'm more than happy to let it stay a bit speculative until we actually obtain the knowledge or technology to answer it properly.

But....he's not actually all that funny. Billy Connolly, he's funny. For the veterans among us, Dave Allen. He's bloody funny. The Two Ronnies, now that's funny. This guy tries in a weird sort of way and is mildly amusing in parts, but he loses it when he makes silly and misguided anti-evolutionary arguments like the old "order from chaos" chestnut and the "shake the components of a watch for 6 billion years and they still won't assemble themselves into a watch" (duh, no kidding?). All he shows is a complete misunderstanding of the topic and his audience laugh along with him because they misunderstand it too and are none the wiser!

The whole premise is that awful and heinous things are going to happen to you if you don't conform to their religious views and pray to their god. That's a pretty disgraceful way to communicate with a child.

No, she's not my type and clearly I'm not an American. I already said she was "damaged goods". Whether I think she deserves all, or some, or none of her reputation is irrelevant. However if it was a choice between Clinton and Trump, I would clearly vote for Clinton over a bombastic, lying, tax-dodging (she may be rich, but at least she pays her taxes), draft-dodging (he's made sacrifices too, you know, just like parents whose sons were killed in combat. He's lost a hotel or two in dud real estate deals) bully who flies off the handle at the slightest teasing, and has his finger on the nuclear trigger.

Malcolm (One Nation): "only 0.3% of climate scientists agree that the climate is warming" Professor Brian Cox: .....bursts out laughing. There's no way of responding to that. This guy (Malcolm Roberts) is living in a fantasy world. Ooops sorry. I just realised not only that this is off-topic, but also that by admitting to watching the ABC (I rarely do but Cox is a highly respected scientist and very good communicator) I have identified myself as a raving left wing loon....possibly even a communist.

No....no.....the graph is faked. NASA has deliberately corrupted the data. All the world's scientific agencies and academies have corrupted the data. As Brian Cox said to the learned One Nation Senator: "so all the world's science agencies corrupted the data and accidentally arrived at the same conclusion?"

Oh the One Nation senator is the self-educated science sceptic Malcolm Roberts who wants the Royal Commission into climate science! Yes he's going to debate science with Professor Brian Cox. Advanced Fellow in Particle Physics and Astronomy. Over 100 scientific publications in 2015 alone (let alone other years). Works at the Large Hadron Collider. But what would he know about the topic of physics and planetary sciences? Oh lololololol!

"Can't list all the illegal, shady and creepy things here because I don't really know and I certainly don't have any actual evidence which would even approximate admissible court evidence, but I heard that someone said that someone reported that another person wrote an article that another person read which stated that someone else has it on good authority that they heard from someone that she has done a whole heap of illegal things." There, fixed it for you. 7 degrees of hearsay. Excellent.

Video 1: It shows 4 (four) occasions where Hillary Clinton has had a cough while being interviewed or speaking. I mean sure, that anyone would ever have a cough or cold is pretty unheard of, right? Especially someone who is continually in the public eye and does hundreds of speaking engagements and interviews every year. How on earth could she have a cough four times.....four I tell ya!!!!!!.....over her entire political speaking and interview career spanning decades? She must be critically ill! Video 2: Oh look, there's those same coughs again, stitched together in repetitive editing! Together with some more repetitive editing of half second facial expressions. If you did the same with some of my facial expressions snapped when reading some of these comments, you could probably have me institutionalised. Video 3: After what her husband did when he was President, I would hardly be surprised if she did give him a black eye! So what? Most people would be cheering her on, not criticising her. Here you present a former Secret Service agent talking on one of America's most right wing talk shows (Hannity) who obviously has many talents. Not only is he a Secret Service agent (i.e. bodyguard), but he's also a doctor, a psychologist, a detective, etc and at the end he goes "well I'm not comfortable talking about this". Yet there he is, airing his dirty laundry. Even if it's all true, so - bloody - what? You reckon all the other Presidential spouses, or spouses of any world leaders throughout history, have been beautiful kind and caring angels? What about other female world leaders? What about male world leaders? Yet you apparently reserve 100% of your criticism for one, and only one of them (oh sorry, two of them.....I forgot Obama). Why is this so?

You can buy whatever you choose to Gnu. Like Marty D, I don't particularly like Hillary either. She is damaged goods and indeed is a political animal with intricate ties to the political establishment. However she's not a complete fool and is not easily baited, unlike Trump who will bite with a nasty snarl at the slightest hint of a dangling lure. I'd rather not have a snarly clown toying with the nuclear codes under such circumstances. By the way, on what grounds do you call Hillary "sick" and "evil"? They're pretty strong and emotive words. I can think of many uncomplimentary things to say about her, however I'm at a loss to justify "sick" and "evil".

I think it's rather amusing to have people who lambast the media and journalists for being biased........except when certain journalists or intrepid internet sleuths agree with their own political points of view, in which case they're truth seekers. How about this theory of mine: Might it be possible that most of the media are implying Trump is an ass because.....and I only throw this out there for consideration.....he's actually an ass?

I don't think the Kenyan Government is willing to release all of Obama's education records, so why bother searching for it?

Yes I did notice that. Just commenting for the benefit (or not) of anyone following the debate. It's quite a bugbear of mine, and I see it in real life much more than I'd like. I'm not alleging that's the argument you were using, just that discussion of "what to do about islamic extremism" occasionally leads to a "well heck let's just deport all Muslims" response. Well, around the backwaters and bogan country near where I live anyway! Wholesale extreme actions against entire classes of people have never seen particularly beneficial results, historically. I guess with the medical analogy it's kind of valid, as long as we don't fail to acknowledge the different complexities and principles in excising a mole "just in case" versus excising an entire human "just in case".

This is true and yes that cancer should certainly be eradicated. However doctors don't just see a little spot which bears a resemblance to something they once saw which turned out to be cancer, and decide on the spot to eradicate it because "it's therefore cancer". They investigate and make an accurate diagnosis before they act. If, despite looking similar, it's not actually cancer but is benign, they leave it alone. Regrettably I see too many people who don't seem to have the time, inclination, or ability to distinguish between the two.

I went through a brief phase many years ago when I thought most religious people were some degree of stupid - an incorrect, unsophisticated and unjustifiably intolerant former viewpoint of mine which I've consigned to the dustbin of history. Religious beliefs bring a certain type of comfort and satisfaction to some and that's fine as long as you're not advocating harm of others through your beliefs, or shoving it in other people's faces (case in point: we just moved house and within 2 days the Jehovah's Witnesses were visiting!). However I struggle to avoid an eye roll when the "God of the gaps", the "praise God for saving us", or the "we don't understand why God would do this" arguments are invoked. If your (generic "your" applied to any religious folk) God exists, I reckon they'd be getting sick and tired of having literally everything attributed to them.

He has no "legal" assets! Litigation against doctors is frequently caused by unrealistic expectations (notwithstanding that there are occasionally some very genuine cases of negligence). You come in after a big accident with your leg smashed into a hundred pieces, The surgeon does their best to patch you up. You forever walk with a very slight limp and can't play touch football anymore. You sue the surgeon for damages because your hundred pieces of leg weren't put back together again in perfect order like you were born with. 50 years ago you would've died or been terribly crippled. Today the worst result is that you can't play touch footy. That could be worth a few hundred thousand dollars. It's par for the course in the modern world and it's why medical insurance premiums are so high.

OME, on the contrary, I can find plenty to rant about when it comes to ordinary working people!