It's becoming too expensive to drink in hotels

The tax on alcohol is again increasing making the very occasional trips I take to a pub, even less occasional.

In South Australia where a 475 ml schooner is called a pint (I'm not sure if it's pretending to be an Imperial pint or a metric pint), drinkers are already at a disadvantage. It's the only state in Australia where 475 ml is considered a pint. (See here.)

I pay between $7 and $10 for a pint of beer at present. The $7 rate is a special rate one hotel provides an in-house branded beer for and it's not always available. So, it's usually $9.50 or $10 for a pretend pint. So a night out with four or five beers is $50.

You can buy a carton of 375 ml beers (24) for around $50 or pay more for boutique and special beers. Some beer comes in 30 can size and costs less than or a little more than $50.

At just over $2 per unit for the 24 can pack or $1.60 per unit for the 30 pack cans, buying your packaged beer and drinking at home or from your own stock is much less expensive than hotel drinking. You don't have to pay for fuel to get there and back - fuel is also becoming increasingly expensive - and if you don't have a non-drinking wife like I have, you may also have to take into account not driving while inebriated.

God knows what the new prices will be, but they will no doubt have an impact on the number of people drinking and the volume being consumed at hotels. Another blow to an industry that has faced the rigours of surviving during COVID-19.

My trips to the hotel will definitely become less frequent and I'll probably have a maximum of two pretend pints.

Robin

Dr Roy Spencer's Global Warming Graph

 

Dr Roy Warren Spencer is a meteorologist, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He is known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society's Special Award. (Source: Wikipedia)

Every month Dr Spencer issues an update to the graph at left that shows how the global lower atmosphere temperatures are changing. You can see the original here.

You don't have to be a climate scientist to understand the graph, the figures speak for themselves.

Robin

Happy New Year - 2022!

On 31 December 1999 I was living in a rented house at Seacliff, not far from the sea near Adelaide.  My wife and I were taking a 12-month break from the rigours of living in the Northern Territory. She was doing an afternoon shift at a local hospital and arrived home around 11 pm.

Intending not to miss out on New Year's Eve, we grabbed a couple of bottles of bubbly and walked a few hundred metres to a gazebo high up and overlooking the coastline. There we found a group of half a dozen people all doing the same thing we were doing. We got talking and found them to be good company. We chatted until 12 midnight and then watched the fireworks explode above Glenelg Beach a couple of kilometres away.

After another half hour or so, we walked back home wondering what this new year, 2000 would bring us.

If you are old enough to recall 1999, it was the year the world was tipped to end because computer programs couldn't transition from 1999 to 2000 automatically. Alarmists said there would be rioting in the streets, power systems would fail, airplanes would drop from the sky and dozens of other horrific outcomes. 

Needless to say, none of the chaos happened because programmers had been vigilant in updating their software programs to cope with the change. Had they not done so, there would have been some programming challenges, but I'm sure aircraft wouldn't have dropped from the sky or rioting occurred in the street, even in the US.

Life moved on and now it's 2022, a decade later and today we have the climate alarmists telling us the world will flood or get so hot that we'll all melt. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Happy New Year. I hope 2022 is a great year for you.

Robin

The Sad Demise of Human Resources Management?

The world is being taken over by extreme Left-Wing morons. Wokeness is becoming the new norm as the media, governments, academia, and other institutions fall over themselves to show how woke they are. There's hardly a Left Wing stupidity they don't adopt.

Now, according to an article you can find here, an academic and a co-author question whether universities still need a Human Resources Department. The basis of their argument, which is a sound one, is that the HR function has now become so woke, that it no longer fulfils a useful function. They referred to it as a parasite on the universities budget and resources.

When I left the full-time workforce in 2012 and began consulting for a few years, I could see the writing on the wall and was pleased to be old enough and well-heeled enough to retire. At around that time, my wife was a registered nurse and midwife and came home one day to give me the latest news fresh off the internet; the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation had issued an edict that white staff dealing with non-white staff were to "apologise for being white." My wife was furious and we both agreed it was time to retire and escape from the stupidity of the new world.

The majority of my wife's 'patients' was indigenous, most of whom, at least in Central Australia are black. Without exception, they were pleased to have someone to provide essential care before, during and after childbirth. Needless to say, none of the midwives had any intention of apologising for being white, a condition that none had control over.

The UN Agenda 21 had a blurb about inculcating students at school with UN principles so that when they became adults, they would promote and support the UN Agenda, a bit like being brainwashed into a religion. We are seeing the benefits of that approach now with the irrational, stupid and often childish nonsense coming out of the mouths of our younger generations. Sadly, those old enough to know better are too afraid not to follow the new social trends for fear of being ostracised, de-platformed, fired, or worse.

Now, universities are paying high salaries to employe "Gender Equity Officers" and more importance is being placed in job applicants' focus and intention to promote and integrate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion into their working activities. It doesn't matter whether their specialism is engineering, science or social work, the weighting placed on those criteria is often greater than the qualifications and experience in their specialty. 

I suspect large numbers of students who can see the deterioration in the HR discipline will opt to do something else eg, law or accounting. I can understand why and if I had my time over again, I'd study politics/law, run for the Australian Senate and try to rectify some of the nonsense taking over.

What do you think?

Robin