Housing oversupply and sluggish migration rates mean today's rate cut will do little to stimulate the Perth property market, as the city's average property price falls another 0.8 per cent.

Find out how match fixing works. It's ubiquitous and now recognised as the biggest threat to sport integrity.

Building an artificial reef could be the key to stabilising a popular beach at Queensland's Inskip Point that suffers from repeated landslips, a geotechnical expert says.

People experiencing homelessness are being moved from the street and shelters into four-star hotels. The radical plan is meant to protect them from the pandemic and it's temporary. But as Hagar Cohen discovers, there are questions about what happens once the virus crisis is over.

It's been just over three decades since most of us first heard about global warming. Meanwhile, the 20 hottest years on record have all occurred in the last quarter century. The implications of extreme weather and climate change are now being felt. Why have we done relatively little in response? Richard Aedy goes looking for answers in a four-part series on RN. Look for RN Presents in the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Efforts to reduce the spread of coronavirus see Italian authorities suspend all sports leagues, including Serie A and Six Nations rugby union matches, until at least April 3.

Returning to a country she adores, Kumi Taguchi wanted to find her family to deliver news her dad had died.

The Coalition has promised to fix 1,600km of SA's dog fence if it returns to government, an announcement warmly received after almost 20,000 sheep were lost to wild dogs last year.

Hospital buildings where flammable cladding posed a major fire threat to the public in Sydney and across the state are identified in NSW Health safety documents, with Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital the only one where potentially combustible panels still need to be removed.

Up to 100,000 litres of water is being used each weekday by a regional New South Wales council to keep drivers safe on its gravel roads all 954 kilometres of them.

DAILY BRIEFING: An 85-year-old retired GP has been missing in the state's north since Monday, and the Opposition calls on the Government to fix issues within TasWater after a boil water alert is issued for parts of Hobart.

A Victorian water authority bows to pressure and abandons plans to pump more groundwater from an area where it caused major environmental degradation.

A key element of the NT Government's budget repair plan is in limbo, with a union saying it has received legal advice that public service executives cannot be forced to sign pay freeze agreements.

Previous attempts to reform Question Time have largely fizzled out, but with public faith in politics in a tailspin, both major parties now seem serious about an overhaul of Parliament's most theatrical hour.

Australia's consumer affairs ministers agree to consider laws boosting people's ability to repair their phones and other electronic goods, rather than send them to the dump.

New laws are before Queensland Parliament to protect the Great Barrier Reef from harmful nutrient and sediment run-off, with a voluntary scheme not working fast enough according to the Environment Minister.

British Author/Musician MICHAEL MOORCOCK Releases Live At The Terminal Café.

Now is the time for the governor to reign in unelected officials, take back his order, re-work it, and immediately begin to restore freedom and responsibility to Colorado businesses to save our state.

Elizabeth Warren discusses access to capital for minorities.

COVID-19 has shone a very bright light on the importance of widely available, affordable broadband. Nearly 42 million Americans lack access to any broadband whatsoever--double FCC estimates. And millions more can't afford service thanks to a lack of competition among very powerful, government pampered telecom monopolies.

As usual, with political pressure mounting to "do something," DC's solution is going to be to throw more money at the problem:

"The plan unveiled Thursday would inject $80 billion over five years into expansion of broadband infrastructure into neglected rural, suburban and urban areas, with an emphasis on communities with high levels of poverty. It includes measures to promote rapid building of internet systems, such as low-interest financing for infrastructure projects."

To be clear, subsidies often do help shore up broadband availability at coverage. The problem is that the United States government, largely captured by telecom giants with a vested interest in protecting regional monopolies, utterly sucks at it.

Despite ample pretense to the contrary, nobody in the US government actually knows where broadband is currently available. Data supplied by ISPs has never been rigorously fact-checked by a government fearful of upsetting deep-pocketed campaign contributors (and valued NSA partners). As a result, our very expensive ($350 million at last count) FCC broadband coverage map creates a picture of availability and speed that's complete fantasy. It's theater designed to disguise the fact that US broadband is mediocre on every broadband metric that matters. Especially cost.

While there has been some effort to fix the mapping problem via recent legislation, the FCC still needs several years (and more money) to do so. And while you'd think this would be more obvious, you can't fix a problem you can't even effectively measure. There's also not much indication that the $80 billion, while potentially well intentioned, would actually get where it needs to go. Especially right now, when federal oversight is effectively nonexistent.

You may or may not have noticed this, but US telecom is a corrupt, monopolized mess. Giants like AT&T and Comcast all but own state and federal legislatures and, in many instances, literally write the law. Feckless regulators bend over backward to avoid upsetting deep-pocketed campaign contributors. So when subsidies are doled out, they very often don't end up where regulators and lawmakers intended. There's an endless ocean of examples where these giants took billions in taxpayer subsidies to deploy fiber networks that are never fully delivered.

If you were to do meaningful audit (which we've never done because again we're not willing to adequately track the problem or stand up to dominant incumbent corporations) you'd very likely find that American taxpayers already paid for fiber to every home several times over.

That's not to say is that there aren't things Congress could do to help the disconnected during COVID-19. Libraries for example have been begging the FCC for the ability to offer expanded WiFi hotspot access (via mobile school buses) to disconnected communities without running afoul of FCC ERate rules. But while the FCC said libraries can leave existing WiFi on without penalty, it has been mute about whether they can extend coverage outside of library property. Why? As a captured agency, the FCC doesn't like anything that could potentially result in Comcast or AT&T making less money.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't subsidize broadband deployment once we get a handle on the mapping problem. But it's a fantasy to think we're going to immediately fix a 30 year old problem with an additional $80 billion in a mad dash during a pandemic. US broadband dysfunction was built up over decades. It's the product of corruption and rot that COVID-19 is exposing at every level of the US government. The only way to fix it is to stand up to industry, initiate meaningful reform, adopt policies that drive competition to market, and jettison feckless lawmakers and regulators whose dominant motivation is in protecting AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Spectrum revenues.

Maybe the pandemic finally provides the incentive to actually do that, but until the US does, these subsidization efforts are largely theater.

Switchzilla issues a whopping 30+ patches in time for the long UK weekend

Cisco has emitted a fresh round of software updates to address nearly three dozen security holes in its products.…

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It 

The coronavirus has starkly revealed what most of us already knew: The concentration of wealth in America has created a a health care system in which the wealthy can buy care others can’t. 

It’s also created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency,  and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail. 

Almost everyone else has been hurled into a dystopia of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate indifference, and the legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

The system is rigged. But we can fix it.

Today, the great divide in American politics isn’t between right and left. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system, and the vast majority who have little or none. 

Forget politics as you’ve come to see it – as contests between Democrats and Republicans. The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy.

The market has been organized to serve the wealthy. Since 1980, the percentage of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest four hundred Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent.

The three wealthiest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population. Big corporations, CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have vastly more influence on public policy than the average American. Wealth and power have become one and the same.

As the oligarchs tighten their hold over our system, they have lambasted efforts to rein in their greed as “socialism”, which, to them, means getting something for doing nothing.

But “getting something for doing nothing” seems to better describe the handouts being given to large corporations and their CEOs. 

General Motors, for example, has received $600 million in federal contracts and $500 million in tax breaks since Donald Trump took office. Much of this “corporate welfare” has gone to executives, including CEO Mary Barra, who raked in almost $22 million in compensation in 2018 alone. GM employees, on the other hand, have faced over 14,000 layoffs and the closing of three assembly plants and two component factories.

And now, in the midst of a pandemic, big corporations are getting $500 billion from taxpayers. 

Our system, it turns out, does practice one form of socialism – socialism for the rich. Everyone else is subject to harsh capitalism.

Socialism for the rich means people at the top are not held accountable. Harsh capitalism for the many, means most Americans are at risk for events over which they have no control, and have no safety nets to catch them if they fall.

Among those who are particularly complicit in rigging the system are the CEOs of America’s corporate behemoths. 

Take Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, whose net worth is $1.4 billion. He comes as close as anyone to embodying the American system as it functions today.

Dimon describes himself as “a patriot before I’m the CEO of JPMorgan.”

He brags about the corporate philanthropy of his bank, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to his company’s net income, which in 2018 was $30.7 billion – roughly one hundred times the size of his company’s investment program for America’s poor cities. 

Much of JP Morgan’s income gain in 2018 came from savings from the giant Republican tax cut enacted at the end of 2017 – a tax cut that Dimon intensively lobbied Congress for.

Dimon doesn’t acknowledge the inconsistencies between his self-image as “patriot first” and his role as CEO of America’s largest bank. He doesn’t understand how he has hijacked the system.

Perhaps he should read my new book.

To understand how the system has been hijacked, we must understand how it went from being accountable to all stakeholders – not just stockholders but also workers, consumers, and citizens in the communities where companies are headquartered and do business – to intensely shareholder-focused capitalism.

In the post-WWII era, American capitalism assumed that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. CEOs of that era saw themselves as “corporate statesmen” responsible for the common good.

But by the 1980s, shareholder capitalism (which focuses on maximizing profits) replaced stakeholder capitalism. That was largely due to the corporate raiders – ultra-rich investors who hollowed-out once-thriving companies and left workers to fend for themselves.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, for example, targeted major companies like Texaco and Nabisco by acquiring enough shares of their stock to force major changes that increased their stock value – such as suppressing wages, fighting unions, laying off workers, abandoning communities for cheaper labor elsewhere, and taking on debt – and then selling his shares for a fat profit. In 1985, after winning control of Trans World Airlines, he loaded the airline with more than $500 million in debt, stripped it of its assets, and pocketed nearly $500 million in profits.

As a result of the hostile takeovers mounted by Icahn and other raiders, a wholly different understanding about the purpose of the corporation emerged.

Even the threat of hostile takeovers forced CEOs to fall in line by maximizing shareholder profits over all else. The corporate statesmen of previous decades became the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was to “cut out the fat” and make their companies “lean and mean.”

As power increased for the wealthy and large corporations at the top, it shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.4 percent of them are.

The wave of hostile takeovers pushed employers to raise profits and share prices by cutting payroll costs and crushing unions, which led to a redistribution of income and wealth from workers to the richest 1 percent. Corporations have fired workers who try to organize and have mounted campaigns against union votes. All the while, corporations have been relocating to states with few labor protections and so-called “right-to-work” laws that weaken workers’ ability to join unions.

Power is a zero-sum game. People gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.

The oligarchy has triumphed because no one has paid attention to the system as a whole – to the shifts from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from strong unions to giant corporations with few labor protections, and from regulated to unchecked finance.

As power has shifted to large corporations, workers have been left to fend for themselves. Most Americans developed 3 key coping mechanisms to keep afloat.

The first mechanism was women entering the paid workforce. Starting in the late 1970s, women went into paid work in record numbers, in large part to prop up family incomes, as the wages of male workers stagnated or declined. 

Then, by the late 1990s, even two incomes wasn’t enough to keep many families above water, causing them to turn to the next coping mechanism: working longer hours. By the mid-2000s a growing number of people took on two or three jobs, often demanding 50 hours or more per week.

Once the second coping mechanism was exhausted, workers turned to their last option: drawing down savings and borrowing to the hilt. The only way Americans could keep consuming was to go deeper into debt. By 2007, household debt had exploded, with the typical American household owing 138 percent of its after-tax income. Home mortgage debt soared as housing values continued to rise. Consumers refinanced their homes with even larger mortgages and used their homes as collateral for additional loans.

This last coping mechanism came to an abrupt end in 2008 when the debt bubbles burst, causing the financial crisis. Only then did Americans begin to realize what had happened to them, and to the system as a whole. That’s when our politics began to turn ugly.  

So what do we do about it? The answer is found in politics and rooted in power.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and form a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything America must do.

The oligarchy understands that a “divide-and-conquer” strategy gives them more room to get what they want without opposition. Lucky for them, Trump is a pro at pitting native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, white people against people of color. His goal is cynicism, disruption, and division. Trump and the oligarchy behind him have been able to rig the system and then whip around to complain loudly that the system is rigged.

But history shows that oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever. They are inherently unstable. When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing, oligarchies become vulnerable.

As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We have before. We will again.

In order for real change to occur – in order to reverse the vicious cycle in which we now find ourselves – the locus of power in the system will have to change.

The challenge we face is large and complex, but we are well suited for the fight ahead. Together, we will dismantle the oligarchy. Together, we will fix the system.

I went to Florida a few weeks back which will be the last time I get on a plane this year unless something wacky happens. Thinking more about carbon footprint stuff even though I am doing solidly well in that regard because I have no kids. It was a good time, pictures are here. I […]

The re-imagining of the city’s main artery must look to the future, not the past.

It’s clear that Toronto is changing; it’s not so clear that our political leaders have noticed. The debate about the revitalization of Yonge St. in North York Centre, where the cityscape is now dominated by residential towers, highlights the problem. ‘RE-imagining Yonge’, a city initiative covering the area between Sheppard and Finch Avenues, goes to […]

The post Our One Chance to Fix Yonge Street appeared first on Torontoist.

What's a kludge? Is it like a monkey wrench or something?

If you use some type of analytics to monitor your websites performance you’ve probably seen its bounce rate. So what is bounce rate exactly? It can be defined in a couple of different ways; it can either be an indicator to the number of visitors who view only one page of your site and leave. Or the number of visitors who leave your site after a short amount of time (usually only a couple of seconds)............

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Microsoft-Xbox-One-X-1TB-Black-Console-as-is-for-repair-or-parts-only/264227168298

YMMV obviously--I ordered two of these a month ago and they have been running fine for me.  All I had to do was reinstall the newest system update and they have both been fine with no issues.  One system's issue noted was "freezes" and the other was "no video". 

It says he has only 2 in stock, but I bought two a while back and the listing has remained active for the entire time with stock available, so he probably leaves the number low to keep demand going. This is probably a bulk buyer who doesn't extensively troubleshoot the systems.  I am not affiliated with the seller.  Cosmetically, the systems are nice enough to trade in without taking a refurb fee when stores re-open for business.

On iOS — check it out

Watch the trailer. Download the iOS game.

By WADNER PIERRE

For too long, people paid by Haitian people to do their job have not been held accountable. Now, it’s the time for the Haiti’s electoral officials – the Conseil Electoral Provisoire (CEP) – to either fix the electoral mess or go to jail.

It is despicable that a CEP official threatened to shut down the whole electoral process instead of collaborating with a government-backed commission to investigate massive electoral frauds that they fail to avoid. Marie Carmelle Paul Austin, a member of the electoral council, told a radio in Haiti’s capital that the electoral council members are ready to depart in bloc “If this commission’s purpose is to redo or verify the work that the CEP has already done, the council members will resign.” What Madame Austin did not say is that when you betray your people, violate your country’s laws and contribute to social and political destabilization you should be in jail.

For too long, Haitian people have been struggling for participative democracy and social justice. They’ve been ignored by Haitian officials who primarily seek to satisfy the interest of their international backers like the United States, Canada and France by either plotting electoral coups. Although the Martelly administration finally established a commission to address the latest electoral disaster, it is uncertain that anything will come of it.

Martelly himself was a beneficiary of an electoral fiasco. How can one believe he will accept any recommendation asking the removal of his handpicked candidate? This move reminds me of an article by Haiti’s renowned author Edwidge Danticat: Sweet Micky and the Sad Déjà Vu of Haiti’s Presidential Elections.

read more

I switched my theme to fix Google Search Console errors. It complained that I had pages and posts with breadcrumb issues, and switching the theme was the easiest way to fix it. You can understand the importance of Breadcrumbs in this article.  If you don’t fix these errors, then your site is less likely to […]

Windows can't fix all the bugs on each release. I'll look at some of the reasons Windows might not fix something you consider important.

Why Didn’t Windows Fix My Pet Peeve? from Ask Leo!.
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Researchers have created a version of Mario that experiences basic emotions – now he needs a purpose that affects the real world

• It’s-a-me, Mario! And soon I’ll be playing my games without your help …

January is traditionally a fairly sleepy month, current affairs-wise, but a horrified gawp at the news confirms that 2015 has already had one heck of a morning. Clearly it takes a lot to knock a garish underage sex allegation involving Prince Andrew off the news agenda, but the Parisian terror attacks managed it, partly because the horror of it all warranted such blanket coverage, but also because the resulting conversation about freedom of speech is taking up so many column inches, there’s scarcely room to run anything else. There hasn’t been this much furious debate about the merits of a cartoon since the introduction of Scrappy Doo.

(Fun imaginary scenario: in a bid to revive their flagging ratings, ITV launch a live, feelgood Saturday night version of Celebrity Pictionary. But chaos ensues when Paddy McGuinness pulls the first card from the deck to discover it requires him to sketch the Prophet Muhammad.)

Do new societal needs increase charitable giving or simply reallocate a fixed supply of donations? We study this question using IRS datasets and the natural experiment of deadly tornadoes. Among ZIP Codes located more than 20 miles away from a tornado's path, donations by households increase by over $1 million per tornado fatality. We find no negative effects on charities located in these ZIP Codes, with a bootstrapped confidence interval that rejects substitution rates above 16 percent. The results imply that giving to one cause need not come at the expense of another.

Seen plenty of people on sidewalks or in parks gallivanting without masks and clustering less than six feet apart? Of course you have, no matter the racial, religious or ethnic composition of the neighborhood; it’s happening everywhere, especially on nice days.

Meat processing plants have shut down as COVID-19 cases turned up among workers and inspectors. Trump's solution? Force the shuttered plants to reopen.

Collecting and analyzing real-time data on the number of cases and deaths during a disease outbreak is crucial. Here's why we've failed.

I've been doing my part to keep an eye on my older neighbors, which helps calm my own feelings of fear and helplessness.

Is Kodi not working for you? Does Kodi still work for anyone? Come find out how to easily fix a broken Kodi setup or addon and access content today!

The post Kodi Not Working? Fix Broken & Slow Kodi Now appeared first on Kodi Tips.

Filmmaker Justin Pemberton turns French economist Thomas Piketty's 2013 manifesto on inequality, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," into an engaging documentary.

THE EFL returns in August with 72 clubs battling for promotion and survival across a nine-month campaign. Express Sport explains when the Championship, League One and League Two fixtures will be released.

Holders Manchester City were drawn away at Newcastle in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup. Sheffield United will host Arsenal, while Chelsea travel to Leicester.

MICROSOFT has conceded that its next upgrade to Windows 10 includes a bug that will not be fixed before the software is rolled out to one billion users worldwide. Here's everything you need to know.

SPFL fixtures have been released for the 2019/20 season as Neil Lennon’s Celtic target a ninth-consecutive league title.

DEAD grass can occur over time and can be frustrating for gardeners. Here's how to fix it.

THE majority of Premier League clubs will be involved in the draw for the first time as the Carabao Cup enters the second round. Here’s what you need to know about the draw.

Championship fixtures could be affected by the incoming Storm Dennis this weekend.

Trivia includes special guest appearances by racing legends A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti and Dario Franchitti.