Thursday, August 15, 2019

Deskilling Among Manufacturing Production Workers

“There are two kinds of people in one’s life—people whom one keeps waiting—and the people for whom one waits.”
~S.N. Behrman, Biography

Satellite images show China’s military massing near Hong Kong border


“For each of us, salvation means no more and no less than taking up daily the same cross of Christ. … What it means, in practice, is spelled out as always by the poor old body.  It means getting up each morning and going to bed exhausted.It means the routine, not the spectacular.”



COMMUNIST FRONT CORPORATION: Huawei Covertly to Sell Smartphones in U.S. “Chinese telecom sought to circumvent U.S. government ban.”
U.S. intelligence agencies learned of the plans last month and alerted senior policymakers.
According to the officials, the Shenzhen, China-based company planned to ship a large number of its smartphones to Mexico where the smartphones would be re-labeled and shipped into the United States.
As non-Huawei devices, there would be no prohibition on selling them in the United States.
The phones, however, could be identified as Huawei devices by examining their electronic components that can be traced to the Chinese telecom.
No other details of the secret smartphone operation could be learned.
Huawei’s U.S. affiliate did not return emails seeking comment.

Mining giant Glencore loses High Court Paradise Papers



According to the committee's report, the CCC had since April issued the Department of Premier and Cabinet two notices to produce over three years' worth of emails and attached documents sent via the parliamentary email accounts of three former MPs and their staff.

The privileges committee then developed a method to deal with how the CCC could access these documents without breaching the privileges of the Legislative Council.

But the report said that in late June, the Department of Premier and Cabinet advised the committee it had devised its own way of identifying privileged documents "that it intended to follow in order to expedite the production of the documents to the CCC".
The report said even though Mr Foster was warned he and his staff risked being in contempt of Parliament, he and his staff nonetheless went ahead with their own sorting process, sending only certain documents to the CCC.
Ms Doust said only the Parliament or its authorised delegate could determine if documents were subject to parliamentary privilege, and not Mr Foster or his staff.
"These two related matters of privilege and their effect on the sources of information to the Parliament and its members strike at the heart of our democratic institutions," she said.
Identifying privileged documents 




*Deskilling Among Manufacturing Production Workers

More evidence of how manufacturing workers have taken it on the chin.




CHRISTOPHER SHEIL & FRANK STILWELL. The continuing redistribution of Australia’s wealth, upwards


The recent release of the results of the ABS’s biennial survey of income and wealth met a critical response, perhaps due to a slip-shod press release. The official statistician’s headline read: ‘Inequality stable since 2013-14’. In summary, the ABS announced, ‘income and wealth inequality has remained relatively stable since 2013-14.’ The immediate difficulty was that neither the media release nor the official summary of the key findings included any statistics from the benchmark, the 2013-14 survey. To make sense of the news, commentators had to dive into the ABS’s data cubes, where they found a different story, particularly for wealth inequality, our main focus here.Continue reading