Images from a flat spin.

[catsidhe]

Mother-in-law/Landlord got her Land Tax bill today. Last year it was $8500 or so. This year it is over $20,000. She is, somewhat understandably, a little freaked. And as our low rent is dependant on her ability to subsidise us, so are we.

There are several varieties of virus/trojan/worm going around which have in common that they use the autorun.inf file as vector. The first time I ran into this, once I figured out what was going on, I was a little impressed. Now I just want to find 1. everyone responsible for making this possible, and 2. everyone who takes advantage of (2)'s culpable stupidity, and beat them all to a fine paste. Like Microsoft, I will put forward a reward to my finding these people. The reward is that you get to help me in the aforementioned beatings. There was one yesterday for which the user was continually in my face (“it's still not working. It's still not working. It's still not...”), until I re-ghosted his machine: completely nuked it fresh. This morning, he comes in saying that it's infected again. His USB key, the one I had scanned and thought was OK, had reinfected him. It had the autorun.inf on the key, and the infection itself was hidden as a boot-time system file, one set in \WINDOWS\ini (this directory should not exist), and the other in \WINDOWS\Fonts (there should be no executables in there, no *.exe, no *.dll. And the usual hidden dlls in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ and \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. I really have better things to do with my life.

Why, in the name of all that's holy, does the autorun.inf have the power to insert arbitrary dlls into Windows Explorer (and thus effectively the kernel) just by sticking a disk into a drive? Why the fuck are you able to change the very way the file browser, and by extension, the OS operates simply by inserting a disk, before you've had a chance to agree to anything? Autorun.inf is useful for 1. autostarting a program (if you have decided to allow it to, otherwise either ask every time or simply don't and make people click on a link like they had to in the old days, and 2. changing the favicon for the device. That's it. Whoever decided to make it able to arbitrarily insert dlls into explorer should be strung up by their genitals and beaten like a piñata. Fuck!

And I read today that someone has pointed out that the .desktop files in KDE and Gnome have similar power (although not the all-encompassing power as in Windows, but its bad enough).



Creating the image for the labs continues apace. After an email pointing out that I didn't know where to even find half the things I had to install, and that I could find, I had no idea which bits to install, and what license servers to use, and, and, and... I had people replying that they were putting it in the file store as they were typing, or the precise path in the tangled mess which is the ECR repository where I could find the exact version with the proper hacks needed to work... Each major package adds another 1-2GB to the image. And in the interest of students from anywhere in Engineering being able to work in any lab in Engineering, they all have to be installed everywhere. There are about 10 of them. Give you an idea: one of them is MatLab. And it's not one of the biggest. This is going to be a monster image. Then we (I) have to start figuring out the Default profile, and setting up two of them so that the image can be used if the machine has to be used as a standalone instead of on the AD, and then seeing if all this crap still works when you log on as a user, and, oh christ can I get drunk yet?



On a complete tangent: LUST!



And completely unconnected, “... But that hasn’t stopped neoclassical economists from touting how great their theory is, nor from making pronouncements that indicate they still really don’t get it.” Shorter Steve Keen: NeoClassical Economists don't only not know what they're talking about, they either don't realise that they don't know, or else they're wilfully ignoring anyone who tries to point out that their assumptions are just as often completely insane.



What was once BoltWatch, and then became the Blair/Bolt Watch Project, has expanded its mandate and is now based at Crikey! as Pure Poison. “And you know what? It’s not just a duty - taking these guys on is actually a pleasure. The columnists we’ve been watching - and the ones we’ll be adding to the roll at Pure Poison, from both the left and right - produce volumes of the stuff each week. A lot of it is so disingenuous, misleading, nasty or simply nonsensical that it’s extremely satisfying to send up. All that’s needed is a space in which to do it, and an audience that’s been looking for an antidote to this sort of malevolent intellectual dishonesty.”

Comments

[pearl]

What was once BoltWatch, and then became the Blair/Bolt Watch Project, has expanded its mandate and is now based at Crikey! as Pure Poison.

Ah, what a resource that would have been during VCE, when we had to analyse emotive language and how stupid some arguments are in English class. This collates them altogether!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Last year it was $8500 or so. This year it is over $20,000. She is, somewhat understandably, a little freaked.

If the value of the land has increased that much, sell.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Ah, definitions. By ‘value’, do you mean:
* ‘what the land is worth’,
* ‘what someone is willing to pay’, or
* ‘what the government has decided more-or-less by fiat is the market value with no possible reason to overvalue whatsoever’?

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

Independent valuation time, but I'm sure you knew that.

Failing that, suggest to her that she put it on the market as a tenanted property. For auction, with the land tax department valuation as the reserve price.

When it doesn't sell, you and your good lady make an offer on the place, claim the first home buyers grant and arrange finance through your mother-in-law with monthly payments not too much more than the rent you pay.

Then the value of the property has clearly been shown.

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

I should have added that this scheme is entirely reliant on your relationship with your mother-in-law and it could someday cause a minefield of problems with your good lady's siblings if not done right.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

By value I mean exchange value; i.e., what it can be sold for, as opposed to use-value, or utility. As for the government fiat, land valuation is usually quite accurate (and independent). It can, and should, be legally challenged if one feels that its is valued too high.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

It's not just that it's too high, I suspect that it's based on last year's valuations (you know, right at the tippy-top of the real-estate price bubble that they're trying to let down slowly), and Elsternwick has been overpriced for decades.

Also, part of the problem is that Mother-in-law is a professional Landlord. She used to be a computer professional, but her mother (and a long slow decline into paranoid senility) put paid to that. So now, her sole income is in rent. She provides places for people to live, she doesn't jack up the rents at every opportunity, she proactively fixes and upgrades things, she's not one of those parasite rent-seekers. She provides a service. And she makes enough to live comfortably, if not extravagantly.

And she does plan for Land Tax. But here's the rub: you can't plan for it. It varies by a factor of two between years, or more. (In this case, this years valuation is, without warning, two and a half times the year before's.) Were she to sell off the properties, then she would be without an income, and her tenants would be ... where?

It's not always as easy as ideology and theory dictate: one of the problems on relying on ideology and theory. Just ask a neoclassical economist.

[(Anonymous)]

So if she sells and gets far below the market valuation the council put on the land, is she able to sue for damages and recoup the excess tax that she has paid?

-- mpp

[sjl.livejournal.com]

In addition to catsidhe's comments, consider: if one sells up, one presumably needs to buy somewhere else. On average, "somewhere else" will also have gone up a similar ratio ...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

one presumably needs to buy somewhere else

Not true. This is land tax. It does not apply to owner-occupied residences. It should but that's another matter entirely.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Then my mother-in-law is doubly screwed, because she would be taxed even harder on the proceeds of all those sales, then again on interest (which she would have to be living off if she didn't buy more properties or try to resurrect decades old computer skills just when she would be preparing for retirement), and the people who lived in those properties... they are either bought out by a larger landlord, more able to soak the tax (thus encouraging centralisation into powerful corporate bodies, and that always works out well), or they buy. With what? We can only giggle grimly at the thought of thinking about buying a house, what with a family of four on one HEW5 salary. Just Not Possible.

enrobso's suggestion might help, but only for us, and as he said, that would cause all sorts of other, non-monetary pain.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Then my mother-in-law is doubly screwed, because she would be taxed even harder on the proceeds of all those sales, then again on interest

Yes, there would be capital gains tax, and also tax on the interest. Both of which are particularly bad to society as a whole, but to your mother-in-law they would still be financially much better than holding on to land with what is generating an uneconomic return.

they are either bought out by a larger landlord, more able to soak the tax

It is a lack of sufficiently high rates of land tax that encourage centralisation of property because when land tax is high the price of land falls (and I may add, the fluctuations in prices is less).

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is the seeming arbritrarity, verging on capriciousness, of the amount levied. The year before it was 14,000, then 8500, then 20,000. Next year it might be back into four digits. You can't budget for it, you can't plan for it, most people don't think to appeal it, and next to no-one understands how it is calculated.

It's not that it is a tax per se, it is that it is such a random tax.

It is also, don't forget, a tax on renters and a tax on business. It is one thing which ensures that businesses like Scheherazade can't afford to exist in places like Acland St (yes, I know Scheherazade left for other reasons, but the principle holds). Shops which have been somewhere for decades find the yuppies moving in around them, and before long the things which attracted the locusts are gone because the yuppies moved the property values and the land tax followed, and that's it. The business didn't change, the clientèle didn't change, but the neighbours did, and that's enough.

Whether or not it's justified in theory, the way it's done is random, unpredictable, and deleterious to people's circumstances out of proportion to the tax money which disappears into General Revenue and is never seen again.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is the seeming arbritrarity, verging on capriciousness, of the amount levied.

Well the actual valuation is conducted according to the Valuation of Land Act 1960. Valuation is relatively simple, something that is usually done as part of real estate studies.

Variation in land prices has much to do with the infrastructure value of the area (such as tramlines, demand (from a population boom, for example) and - and here's the killer - the level of existing land tax.

A lack of the tax leads to greater fluctuation as the boom-crash cycle in speculative land values is opened up. The sudden increases witnessed in this particular example are not surprising given the fact that the Brumby government did his utmost to reduce the actual rate to the lowest level possible (and yes, it is easy to backwards calculate the estimated value they've come to for a $20,000 bill).

It is also, don't forget, a tax on renters and a tax on business.

No it isn't. This is a common fallacy. A tax on land is not a tax on renters, because it doesn't change either the demand or supply of land. It does not reduce the propensity to produce, nor does it carry deadweight loss.

cf., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_tax#Efficiency

It is one thing which ensures that businesses like Scheherazade can't afford to exist in places like Acland St

Sure, there used to be farms in Carlton as well. We can see what happens when taxes and rates are derived from capital value rather than site value.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

mimdancer informs me that her mother knew about the page in question, is thoroughly aware of prices in the area (it is, after all, or professional interest), and had calculated this years tax, based on the previous valuation and taking into account the increase of prices in the area, and came up with an expected tax bill of $11-14K.

Someone's sums are badly out.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You can always appeal against a valuation.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I'll pass on that info (thank you), but in the end it's not up to me.

Besides, from a quick calculation (as I see you saw), the valuation comes out at $2,637,000, which is over three properties, one of which is a block of six flats opposite a park (which is where we live), and easily worth over $1×10e6. The valuation itself is probably fair, which raises the question of why the tax itself is so far out of line with the previous years tax + predicted increase.

That's not a trivial glitch, that's half again over what was budgeted for. I don't know that MIL has a problem with the tax per se, but getting a bill for half again what you had allowed for, when the amounts are non-trivial to begin with, it'll give you a nasty shock at best. And given that we depend on her goodwill, what gives her a nasty shock gives us a nasty shock, only we don't have a say in what is done about it.

[sjl.livejournal.com]

Dude. You're on HEW FUCKING FIVE?!

When I finished up at Monash, I was on the top step of HEW 7. Part of the reason why I jumped ship was that I knew I had bugger all chance of going to HEW 8 (that, and I knew I was stagnating.)

Have a look at this. Get your CV up to date, and apply. You shouldn't have any trouble with the work ...

[(Anonymous)]

Note that the actual salary range for HEW levels is different at various institutions. For example, a HEW6 at Deakin is equivalent to a HEW5 at Melbourne. I cbf looking up comparison between Monash and Melbourne, they're probably pretty similar.

Oh, btw, nobody gets promoted at Unimelb anymore. Apparantly we're all over paid.

-- mpp

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I checked. There is a considerable difference in the amount in this position, and what I get now. And, as you say, I (we) have a snowball's chance in Hades of getting promoted.

[sjl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm well aware that there's a difference in salary ranges.

HEW5 at Melbourne => $50,505-58,013. In comparison, in Monash, HEW5 => $48,982-56,263. So there's about $1-2k difference at that level between the two universities.

HEW7 at Monash (the level of that advert), in comparison, is $62,699-68,770. It's a difference not to be sneezed at. And given that nobody gets promoted at Unimelb, all the more reason for catsidhe to get his CV up to date and start applying for positions. The worst that can happen is that he gets knocked back, in which case he's no worse off. (To be fair, I spoke today with a former colleague who will be intimately involved in the interviews and so forth for that position; there's been a lot of interest, and he suspects there will be some heavily qualified applicants - CCNE, CCIE, that sort of thing. But nothing ventured ...)