Teh Big Gra complains

“Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is a writer, and a former vice-president and campaign chairman of the Queensland Liberal Party.”

Teh Big Gra is also listed prominently in Google’s search index:

Gra is also a regular writer for The Australian - a national newspaper with a circulation of 130,000 plus.

But he’s afraid, very afraid, that he is being shunned and silenced by two (I repeat, two) members of the blogotariat.

RORFL!

Carbon pricing he said, she said. Part One

Letters to the Editor in The Daily Examiner on 12 and 16 August 2011:

1. One cannot avoid death

YES, Thomas Macindoe ( DEX Aug 9 ), one cannot avoid death or the carbon tax.

It seems it will apply to both cremations and burials.

Local government will face a price rise for landflll (cemeteries?) when the carbon tax kicks in.

BILL CALVI

Grafton

2. Alternative universe

BILL Calvi of Grafton (DEX letters, 12 August 2011) assures us that cremation will incur a so-called carbon tax.

One has to wonder in which alternative universe Mr. Calvi resides.

Firstly, only individual industry/business premises which directly emit  25,000 tonnes of CO2-e emissions annually, after deducting emissions from liquid fuels, LPG, CNG, LNG, and synthetic greenhouse gases (excluding PFCs produced by aluminum smelting), will potentially attract the carbon levy. (http://www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au/, 12.08.11)

Secondly, for an individual crematorium in Australia to qualify for this carbon levy it would have to cremate at least 156,250 recently deceased people each year, based on the 160kgs of CO2 equivalent per cremated person estimated in a 2008 South Australian Centennial Park Cemetery Authority carbon footprint report.

As the Australian Museum states, it takes on average one to one and a half hours to fully cremate a body, this would see the average crematorium required to operate up to twenty-seven round the clock operating years in the space of one calendar year to process enough bodies to qualify for the carbon levy.

In 2008 and 2009 there were 143,900 and 140,800 total registered deaths respectively right across the country, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. At least fifty per cent of these deaths would have involved cremation [Cemeteries and Crematoria Association of NSW, February 2009] but even this figure would not cause one crematorium to pay the carbon tax.

Similarly, as in-ground internment produces only an estimated 39kg of CO2 equivalent per burial, individual cemeteries would be hard-pressed to conduct enough of these funerals annually to attract this levy.

Just to make sure that cremation was a non-starter in the national carbon pricing debate I contacted a public servant briefed with fielding questions on climate change policy. When he finished quietly laughing, he assured me that the carbon levy was not going to be paid by cemeteries for burial or cremation.

As for local government paying the carbon levy on its landfill waste, that will only apply to waste generated after the levy becomes law.

JUDITH M. MELVILLE

Yamba

Aussie as she is spoke lives!

This spontaneous outburst from cyenne:

“You bloody ripper. You absolute, dyed-in-the-wool full-on bloody beauty.”

Are Adarsh Jaiswal & Deepika Verma fronting a company scamming elderly pensioners on the NSW North Coast?

Snapshots taken 13 August 2011

Click on images to enlarge

Excerpt from The Daily Examiner 15 August 2011:

The South Grafton pensioner said she thought it was her internet service provider Bigpond – talking urgently in a thick Indian accent – after all, he knew her full name.

“We need to check your computer Shirley,” the voice said. “People are getting in and stealing gigabytes.”

Before she knew it, Shirley's screen was scrolling madly and the voice on the phone said, “look, they're taking stuff now”.

“I must have given him permission (to access the computer remotely) but I don't remember. He took control of the mouse.”

The man told her it would cost $159 to fix the problem and she would need two “installations” to get coverage for life.

So Shirley, desperate to stop the cyber thieves, gave her credit card number and she was billed $318.

But it dawned on Shirley that she had been scammed.

“I couldn't sleep all night and I was so ashamed I didn't want to tell anyone,” she said. “I know I've been stupid but they sounded so genuine.

“My granddaughter was so cranky that someone would rip me off, she told me to go to the police and the Examiner because these people were obviously targetting older people.”

Shirley received an invoice from E-Pro Solution via email for a 24-month platinum plan support package. The invoice said the company was based in Luton, London.

That is what happened once a man called “Chris” telephoned a 77 year old woman living in the Clarence Valley.

Now E-Pro Solutions states on its website that it has offices in the U.K. and India and that it is owned and operated by NDCL INFOSOULE.

This company sells a product with the same description as the one ‘sold’ to the pensioner and its published price is equivalent to the amount of money paid by credit card for said product.

There is a company called NDCL INFOSOUL which can be called up with a simple Internet search. It happens to currently share the same physical address in India with E-Pro Solutions, as well as the identical main landline telephone number.

The very dodgy method used to sell product has been reported by Internet users for the last two years at least and could easily be called a scam.

Here is one post on a Whirlpool forum this year:

Not sure if anyone has received calls from this apparent company so far, but I received one today and it sounded super dodgy, so I just wanted to warn others about it (although admittedly most people who browse this type of website/forum probably wouldn't get sucked in for this sort of call).

They say they are from E-PRO SOLUTIONS, a company which has been employed by "Windows Computer Maintenance Department."

They say they have discovered that you have inadvertently downloaded junk from the internet and it is slowing down your computer, and that they can quickly remedy the problem by going through a process which I think allows them remote access to your computer.

They say they are calling from an office in Australia (the address they gave me was 83 Yaran Street, Evans Head, NSW 2473), but the three people I spoke to (two guys and one girl) all had heavy Indian accents (two of the names they gave me were David Mark and Peter Williams), and they also lied when I asked them about the weather there at the time.

When I asked for their details, the phone number they gave me was: 08 7200 7207.

Cheers.

It should be noted here that the address cited in the post does not exist as Yaran Street is a short street with no more than 18 residential lots according to Google Maps and, the telephone number is three digits out from E-Pro Solutions published West Australian telephone number.

Reverse Australia has fielded so many queries that it now features sample complaints like this one:

Contacted by "Julia Kidman" and "Harry Watson", so say from South Melbourne, Victoria, both working for E-Pro Solutions, acting on behalf of Microsoft Windows, that they had detected problems on our computer.
Landline contact is : 0872 001 707
Website: www.e-prosolutions.com , and
Email address: support@www.e-prosolutions.com
Requested to go into “start and r “ depressed together, and looked at application and system logs with errors and warnings in them. Asked to count the number of each, and got to about 30 warnings and about 5 or more errors or so, in each, then stopped scrolling through.
Asked for peoples names, and provided with above names, which are English names, but the people were Indian (or Pakistani), by accent. Was to be put through to technicians, via the “Support Connection” window, and they were going to provide a password, which should not be given to anyone else!!
I hung up and checked the White pages, which does not have a name anything like "E-pro solutions".
These people through their website, www.e-prosolution.com, should be tracked down, or they are just using this website for their own purposes. Whatever the situation, do not touch with a barge pole.
Tony, Perth, Western Australia 19 April 2011

E-Pro Solutions is also implicated in similar complaints in the U.S. and Microsoft Answers has been fielding queries about E-Pro since 2010. An e-commerce company dri swreg cardquery com is sometimes mentioned as processing its online billing

It is possible that E-Pro Solutions is unaware of this ‘scam’ and Mr. Adarsh Jaiswal & Ms. Deepika Verma are legitimate business people. That the problem may lie elsewhere.

I leave that up to readers to decide.

Little Sir Echo

The world watched in awful fascination as rabid Tea Party politicians brought America to its knees and caused stock exchanges world-wide to haemorrhage, because these same elected representatives mindlessly insisted that Small Government was God and pursued a goal of unrealistic federal budget cuts.

In Australia a Coalition Opposition led by Tony Abbott is obviously intent on mimicking this disastrous course with the policy announcement that should Tones the Terrible win government he expects to produce small government and $70 billion in budget savings.

One could sack as many as 20,000 federal public servants and hole the government grants system and never come anywhere near saving that many billions, so it doesn’t take a genius to see who will be the bunnies making the remainder of these excessive ‘savings’.

That amount of money withdrawn from federal government spending would represent roughly $3,000 less per person each year spent on either vital health services, education, family assistance payments, old age pension increases or PBS medications – just to name a few of the areas to which Abbott and Hockey could take their knives.

This level of mass sackings and belt tightening imposed on average Australian families will be painful to endure and also something which would put the wind up voters and possibly the market once it looked closely at the flow-on effects.

Australia & New Zealand- we're happy and we know it!

If Gallup’s World Giving Index 2010 is any indication, then Australia and New Zealand are prosperous, happy and generous nations:

Australia and New Zealand are, jointly, the most ‘giving’ countries in the world. These countries both boast a World Giving Index score (the average of their scores on ‘giving money’, ‘giving time’, and ‘helping a stranger’) of 57%. ….

both countries appear in the top twenty for all three behaviours…..

The link between the giving of money and happiness is stronger (a coefficient of 0.69) than the link between the giving of money and the GDP of a nation (0.58). It would be reasonable to conclude that giving is more an emotional act than a rational one….

The Queensland University of Technology’s Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies February 2011 report on major gift giving indicates that most of this giving is historically done in Australia by people making donations ranging from $1 to $3,000.

In New Zealand the most common form of giving is the ad hoc donation of money or goods to an appeal, with the highest level of support going to clubs/community organisations and primary/secondary education, according to a 2009 discussion paper.

So all those ordinary wage earners, self-funded retirees, pensioners and generous others residing on each side of The Ditch who are buying jam from street stalls, raffle tickets from school children, emptying small change into the hands of door-to-door charity collectors or sending modest cheques to a worthy cause – take a bow because you lead the world.

Profile of a McDonald's fast food customer

Pic from ourweed.com

The discovery of 79g of marijuana inside a McDonald's brown paper takeaway bag led to police confiscating a total of 130g from one fast food afficianado on the 6th June 2011.
Locals are pointing to the possibility that he was a customer of the McDonald's hamburger joint in Yamba.
Just another reason why franchisee Scott Campbell's name is not top of the pops in that small NSW coastal town.