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Australian Immigrants Retiring to Home Countries

There was a joke going around in Adelaide in the 1960s when I lived there - all these Wogs will probably go home and live off of the Australian pension. Wog was a common term then. It referred to southern Mediterraneans, Greeks and Italians for example. English people were called Poms when immigrants were flooding in.

How a joke can become truth. People who have moved to Australia and indeed spent most of their lives here are going back to their home countries because of favorable exchange rates. Not so much the English. They seem to be staying here.

Between 2007 and 2012 the number of Australians living overseas and drawing the Aussie pension increased by 30 per cent. In the same period the overall number of Australian pensioners went up only 17 per cent. Recent changes in the budget will not affect those currently on the pension. Most will not be here when the pension age goes up to 70 years in 2035.

Most expatriates by far return to Italy and Greece in their twilight years. While the majority of citizens in Greece are doing it tough now, those on Australian pensions have guaranteed income. Others go to Spain and oddly, the Netherlands - there must be something tempting to move to a cold wet country from a hot dry one.

This group of baby boomers, however, will probably be the last ones to enjoy such a bonus. As people retire who have paid superannuation all their working lives it is inevitable that state funded pensions will be phased out. This is seldom admitted but it is the truth. Changes are being made now by government to ultimately benefit government.

Society by Ty Buchanan

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The Elderly Deserve a Pension

It is a pipe dream to raise the pension eligibility age and expect the elderly to go back to work. With thousands of young able bodied young people unemployed what kind of work are older people going to do?

Employers will not have older workers unless there is some sort of financial benefit. It makes no sense to give this with all the youngsters looking for work. Furthermore, making the unemployed wait six months to get any money at all is absolutely irrational. How are they going to get food to eat? The crime rate will rapidly increase. We will be back to the days of being imprisoned for stealing an apple.

Many of the young would like to see the accumulated assets of the elderly confiscated and given to them in benefits. Little goodwill is left in society. The old, worked 12 hour days, seven days a week in hard physical labor to gain their assets. The young today will only lift things under a certain weight. They use lifting machines to move heavy things around.

When I was a child I used to marvel at my father, a short man of average build. He took me with him in his delivery truck during my school holidays. He would unload 112lb bags of cement, but he carried two bags, one on each shoulder! Other men only carried one.

The elderly have worked hard for what they have. They should not be attacked and treated like lazy old welfare bludgers. They have served society and paid their taxes: they deserve respect and a decent income in the twilight of their lives.

Society by Ty Buchanan

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Nexus 7 Review - Poor, Do Not Buy!

You have to be careful buying new tech products. There is a belief out there that a new version is always better than the old one. This is not always the case. Take for instance the new Nexus 7. A lot has been written about this with some rave reviews.

I don't know what some of these reviewers are on, but they certainly are not seeing things clearly - some bias is there. The widely held view that buying the latest Nexus 7 is the road to Nirvana is wrong. If you have another Android device with the same login you will not get an automatic restore. It just does not work because Google picks up the two Android devices. A trip into the Play Store will be necessary. Click on the icon in the top left and "My Apps" will be shown. You have to click "All" to see the apps you have paid for.

Re-installing each one in turn is the requirement and don't think all your data is automatically backed up. You discover that you should have backed up the data for each app separately before you dumped the perfectly good older version. A thing that you will regret.

The only virtue of the new Nexus 7 is that it is thinner. That sums it up. Despite having stereo speakers one at each end it does not cut the mustard. What a stupid idea having stereo on such a small device! Sound quality is very poor indeed. It really is disgraceful. If you plug it into a hi-fi you have to turn the volume up to number 22. This compares with 10 using the old version of Nexus 7.

Another odd thing is the hi-fi volume can be turned to maximum and it doesn't get louder - it gets more distorted. The old Nexus had beautiful base and full hi-fi volume could not be set as it was too loud. There is just a pinging "sort of" base with the new one. It is an odd sound. You cannot enjoy listening to music, podcasts only I would say. Even then there is only treble, no base at all from the two speakers. There was some base on the older version playing on its own.

A mystery to me is that all the BBC apps have disappeared from the Play Store. Has Google had a falling out with them or something. This sudden parting seems strange.

Don't be reckless and buy the new Nexus 7. It is a waste of money. No wonder the price has fallen. Many customers would return it if they kept the receipt. Oh, how I miss my old Nexus that unfortunately was dropped and became stuck in the "ON" position. Google picked that up and would not do an automatic install. Buying online may be easy, but it is risky. I should have gone to a store and taken it for a test drive. You do learn something every day.

Technology by Ty Buchanan

"Do not open. Return it!"

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Earth's Oldest particle Found in Western Australia - a Zircon Crystal

Everyone knows that Australia is old. Just how old has been defined by science - A zircon crystal on a Western Australian sheep station is the oldest piece of planet Earth. It is 4.4 billion years old.

Tests were done to determine the crystal's age. The rate of decay of uranium against the constant lead showed how old it was. This was confirmed by atom-probe tomography where the mass of lead atoms is measured.

The zircon particle was created on the Earth's crust soon after the planet formed. And the Earth was not a violent place until much later. Water was already present and there is a high probability that life began at this time. The Hadean eon as this period is called in now a misnomer because it means Hadean the god of hell.

Proof of life is unlikely. Science is not advanced enough yet to fully examine this period. Very little can be identified as originating in this period of the Earth's development.

Science by Ty Buchanan

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Part-Time and Full-Time Employment Means Fewer Babies

It is not work in general that is causing a decline in women giving birth at a young age. It is specifically temporary jobs that are responsible. In Australia part-time and casual employment has boomed over the last decade as employers see it as a way to keep costs down. Many work extra hours for no money at all, afraid of losing their jobs.

Women working full time can afford to pay for child care, or at least for critical periods when they are working. Such career women are having children before they reach the age of 35 years. There is a myth out there that it is these career women who are starting families at an older age. Oddly the effects of not working full time changes the behavior of women in the high socieconomic group as well. They may be able to afford childcare from a financial "nest egg", but it is the state of mind about not working enough and not having sufficient income for a family.

Financial security in regard to income is essential for women to even consider having children. Careers are not that important to women. This goes against all of the prevailing stereotypes. The number of years spent in part-time work had a strong impact. A year of part-time employment reduced the probability of having a baby by 35 years by 8 per cent. Five years in such work increased the rate to more than a third.

Another myth is that university graduates go straight into full-time employment. Over 60 per cent of these began working in a job with reduced hours. Therefore, high and low-skilled women suffered the same job market problem.

All economies are moving to less-secure employment to reduce production costs. This means that as the decades go by the world population will fall, confounding all predictions. Furthermore, the population in most countries will have a larger proportion of elderly people. Some of these will have to work to survive. Providing old age pensions will become too costly.

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Economics by Ty Buchanan

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Chick Protection

"Don't worry mate. I'll look after yuh."

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Funny Animal Photos by Ty Buchanan

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Pensioners Will Be Denied Income

Pensioners have gray hair. They are also entering a gray area, politically, socially and economically. Most people reaching pension age have never paid superannuation and others have only been paying it for a few years of their working lives. The amount saved by super is certainly not enough to live on. This group relies on the government to provide them with an income.

Calls are coming from all sides for an increase in the pension to a "livable" level. Basic costs like council rates, rents, electricity, gas, water and sewerage have gone through the roof in the last decade. There is no solid reason why this should be so. Electricity companies keep saying the old infrastructure has to be renewed. Surveys show they have actually over-spent, pushing the cost onto consumers.

Giving those who could afford solar power a massive discount for feeding electricity back into the grid is appalling political decision making. Pensioners could not afford solar. They are subsidizing the wealthy.

We are entering a tough period for older Australians. As time passes retiring workers will have full superannuation cover. What happens about those already on the government pension? When Paul Keating introduced compulsory superannuation it was with the intention of phasing out state funded pensions. Both sides of politics are pushing toward this. They are not planning to increase the pension by the needed $4,000 a year.

In the past the wandering tramp was common and this wasn't only during the depression. Nearly all of these were elderly. They could not afford to put a roof over their heads. Within a decade, such a social class will return. This time though they will join the homeless young who exist on unemployment benefit that it much lower than the pension.

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Society by Ty Buchanan

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Wax Ear Plug Illuminates a Whale's Life

Who would have thought that ear wax would add to scientific knowledge. A wax ear plug from a dead 12 years old whale has shed more light on its life. Traditional research involved blubber, faeces and blood.

Lipids, keratin and waxes built up by two layers a year. This was used to tell the age of the whale. When sliced ultrafine, 24 separate rings were identified.

Closer analysis was done and various industrial chemicals and pesticides were found. Some of the chemicals persisted in the wax despite being banned world wide ten years before. There is no doubt that these chemicals were stored in the females fat and passed onto the young.

Mercury was high at two periods in the whale"s life. Testosterone level rose when the whale reached maturity at ten years of age. The high chemical rate is believed to have an indirect effect on the high cortisol level, the stress hormone. However, a 12 year old male would have been driven to compete with other males for females and form social bonds.

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Conservation by Ty Buchanan

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Fish Fossil Sheds More Light

There are new facts about the evolution of fish. An ancient fish fossil has provided preserved muscle tissue. European and Australian scientists have examined a placoderm fossil 380 million years old. Early fish did not have moving jaws with joints. Their mouths were fixed partially open, though they could still move.

Jaw structure was presumed to be like sharks, because that was taken to be a living example. The fossil has changed this assumption. It shows a pronounced shoulder structure. From this girdle neck muscles attached to a dermal joint. So the head moved relative to the body but the jaw did not. Sharks do not have joints in the neck - their necks are flexible.

Another difference is musculature in the abdomen much like four-limbed vertebrates such as horses. Rather than being a evolutionary step for four-legged animals it was fully developed by placoderms, the first vertebrate with armoured plates and no teeth.

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Conservation

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Bully Gorilla

"Just playing with my yo yo."

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Funny Animal Photos

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Dog is a Real Redhead

"I'm not a blond. I'm a redhead."

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Funny Animal Photos