IT HAPPENED: Norway just REJECTED cashless agenda: Shops are now required by law to accept cash as a form of payment
They have now rejected the cashless agenda. From the 1st of October, all shops are required by law to accept real physical cash as a form of payment.
As long as payments are under NOK 20.000 ($1871), shops cannot refuse cash payments. Those that do so will risk being fined.
The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection even recommends people to have some amounts of cash at all times in case digital forms of payment stop working.
Just recently that was the case, after a software update caused computers all over the world to crash, affecting banks, airports, supermarkets and more.
As many as 600.000 Norwegians are not digital, especially many elderly people.
With the World Economic Forum having pushed a cashless agenda, Norway is going the opposite way.
It is important to have cash. Because in a cashless society, it would be very easy for a tyrannical government to control who can buy and sell, monitoring every transaction.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149888588
*******************************************Spare us the cringeworthy back story
Judith Sloan
I’m in charge of streaming in our household – someone must be. Luckily, there is a joint preference for contemporary crime dramas, even if they involve solving cold cases. It’s one thing the BBC still does well, by and large. We also love a bit of Nordic noir.
Almost without exception, however, the makers of these series can’t resist the temptation to include some cringeworthy back story about one or more of the detectives solving the case. Do we really care that they are having marital difficulties? Do we really care that one of the kids has gone off the rails? Get on with solving the crime, I say. It just looks like unnecessary padding.
Sadly, far too many politicians have entered the field of recounting their tragic/uplifting/moving back story. Mind you, Kamala Harris, current US presidential candidate, moves her back story around depending on her audience. Some days she is just a middle-class kid; the next, she is a working-class kid. (Her mother was a medical research scientist, her father an economics professor – sounds solidly middle-class.)
She also has some bizarre story about the woman who looked after her and her sister while her mother went to work. Evidently, this woman also ran a small business – I’m not sure when she had the time – which means that Kamala understands small business. Sure.
The back story has become a part of the kitbag of too many politicians here. How many times have we heard about Albo living in public housing as his single mother struggled to make ends meet?
The messages are twofold: with grit, determination, a loving mother and a supportive state, even a boy like Albo can make good. Secondly, public housing is a plus rather than a minus, notwithstanding the evidence that public housing estates are far too often hubs for crime and drug-dealing and the employment rate among tenants is very low.
Of course, everyone has a right to bang on about their background if they want to. But the real problem for politicians is that they too often use their very narrow, individual circumstances to inform themselves about policy, ignoring wide consultation, research and the consideration of all options.
One of the most egregious examples of the tedious and irksome back story is from federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, who comes from western Sydney. He is very proud of the fact that he is the first member of his family to attend university. He undertook a double degree at the University of New South Wales in arts and law before he became an advisor to Bob Carr, Labor premier of NSW. So, well done, Jase. But what he doesn’t seem to appreciate is that university is not for everyone. Many young people, including those who live in his electorate in western Sydney, would be much better served by pursuing a trade, particularly one in the construction industry. Jase is also very big on equity of access, irrespective of the record of the applicants or their capacity to pass the required subjects.
Jase commissioned the Australian Universities Accord which unsurprisingly recommended, in view of the minister’s circumstances, that the participation of those aged 25 to 34 years of age in university education be lifted from the current rate of 45 per cent – which seems extremely high – to 55 per cent by the middle of the century. In addition, those groups currently most under-represented in higher education should increase ‘to achieve parity across the Australian population’. So much for universities being centres of excellence.
It doesn’t seem to occur to our hero from western Sydney that the country will not be well served by having more graduates in Sociology, Cultural Studies or Chinese Medicine. Give us more plumbers, electricians, carpenters and brickies any day.
It’s worth observing here that many jobs that now require a university degree were once done by school-leavers. This is the case, for example, in accounting and bookkeeping. There was generally a lot of training given on the job and the holders of these positions often progressed quickly. Interestingly, the accounting profession is currently considering reverting to this model, at least partially, much to the chagrin of university accounting departments.
The real message that Jase should be giving young people is that university is not for everyone and that there are great futures in a range of occupations, particularly in the trades. But this just doesn’t fit with his back story.
If that anecdote doesn’t make you recoil, let me recount another aspect of Jason Clare’s back story. Evidently, his son Jack was thrilled to learn that his parents were presenting him with a new brother named Atticus. Now, Jack is a childcare centre attendee and his response to the news was that he must tell his favourite childcare worker, Kellie, about the new arrival.
The reaction of Jase was quite heart-warming. This incident had made him appreciate the sense of community that childcare imparts as well as clearly demonstrating the benefits of childcare on children. (Sample size = 1).
Now I don’t know about you, but this is not my experience of childcare. In many inner-city childcare centres, most of the staff don’t really speak English. No doubt they would have nodded politely when hearing Jack’s news, but that’s about it. There is also a rapid turnover of staff such that, half the time, the children never get to know any of the carers.
But this is not in keeping with Jase’s (or Labor’s) political position on the topic. Parents must be highly subsidised to dump their children in childcare centres, the more hours each week the better. This is so the women can work and help the economy. But it’s also good for the children – or so the ‘experts’ tell us who refuse to accept the fact correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
The fact that the best studies around tell a completely different story is ignored. There has been close to free universal childcare in Quebec, Canada for many years. The quality of the care does vary, and all the best options are snaffled by high-income earners. (You probably get the drift of the key problem with many studies: the children of high-income earners do better in life, the children go to high-quality childcare centres. It’s just a pity about the others.)
It’s clear that long day care is statistically associated with a range of social problems for many of the children attending and that these problems persist into the teenage years. They include anxiety, hyperactivity and aggression. Jase might want to talk to Kellie about these findings.
Politicians really shouldn’t use their (mostly uninteresting) back stories as a prime determinant of policy positions, particularly as these positions generally include spending great dollops of taxpayer dollars. File the stories in the bottom drawer and get on with using best practice means of settling on policies, including the option of leaving well enough alone.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/spare-us-the-cringeworthy-back-story/
***********************************************Gavin Newsom Does Something Conservatives May Like
The California governor signs a bill banning legacy preferences at private colleges and universities.
The Supreme Court began a new term this week, but its landmark 2023 decision on racial preferences in college admissions continues to reverberate.
Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that bans private universities in California from favoring “legacy” applicants, those whose parents are alumni or whose families have donated to the school. It was California’s response to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the ruling that outlawed preferences based on race and ethnicity. Conservatives often want progressive policies that emanate from the Golden State to stay there. This may be an exception.
The left’s rebuttal to the Harvard decision has been to push against legacy preferences at selective schools on the grounds that they amount to affirmative action for affluent white people. That’s not an unreasonable argument on its face. Granting favorable treatment to the offspring of Stanford and University of Southern California graduates would tend to benefit white applicants more than their nonwhite counterparts. And if these schools are aiming to admit the most deserving students, as they claim, why should lineage but not race give certain applicants who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for admission a bump in the selection process?
Legacy admissions to the public University of California system were banned in the 1990s, and some elite private schools, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Amherst College in Massachusetts and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, voluntarily ended the practice. Virginia, Illinois and Colorado have proscribed it at public colleges and universities. But California now becomes only the second state after Maryland to pass a law that forbids consideration of legacy and donor status at private institutions.
Such bans at public schools are an easier call. It’s hard to justify why state taxpayers should subsidize a university that chooses its students based on factors that have nothing to do with merit. Still, some might argue that legacy prohibitions at private schools are another matter, and court challenges are a possibility. Even critics acknowledge that however unfair legacy considerations may be, they don’t violate the Constitution. Just as sororities, country clubs and other private groups can legally select some members and reject others—so long as they don’t discriminate on unlawful grounds—the right of association protected by the First Amendment arguably allows private-school administrators to give relatives of alumni and donors a leg up.
In an opinion that accompanied an earlier Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice Clarence Thomas, who is no fan of legacy preferences, nevertheless warned about comparing them to racial preferences. “The Equal Protection Clause does not . . . prohibit the use of unseemly legacy preferences or many other kinds of arbitrary admissions procedures,” Justice Thomas wrote. “What the Equal Protection Clause does prohibit are classifications made on the basis of race. So while legacy preferences can stand under the Constitution, racial discrimination cannot.”
The economist Richard Vedder, who also frowns on special treatment for the offspring of alumni and donors, has written that so much federal funding now flows to private institutions—either directly through research grants or indirectly through student loans and in other ways—that the public-private distinction no longer makes sense.
“The Ivy League, for example, gets more government support per student than most so-called state universities,” according to Mr. Vedder. “The notion that public monies should be used to subsidize preferential treatment to less qualified [legacy] students, most of whom come from wealthy white families, is abhorrent to the American belief that anyone, regardless of wealth, race, gender or other group attribute, can with hard work rise to the top in our society.”
Supporters of legacy admissions insist that schools depend on them for fundraising and recruitment, and that may be true at institutions that don’t have large endowments, including historically black colleges. But most donations from alumni are for smaller amounts and out of loyalty and appreciation, not because the donor wants or expects a relative to receive special consideration. An empirical analysis of alumni philanthropy at the nation’s top 100 colleges over a nine-year stretch found “no evidence that legacy-preference policies themselves exert an influence on giving behavior.”
Many of the nation’s most selective schools, including all eight Ivy League institutions, still consider the legacy status of applicants. But since 2015, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted legacy-blind policies, according to the Institute for Higher Education Policy. And in a nationwide Washington Post-Schar School survey from 2022, 75% of respondents said it was wrong for children of alumni to receive preferential treatment. Americans want public and private institutions to retire legacy admissions, and rightly so. Ideally, schools would act on their own, as some already have. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of time before others fall in line.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gavin-newsom-does-something-conservatives-may-like-f3ac60dd
************************************************Soviet-style justice in the USA
Once the cops get a bee in their bonnets about you, you are in real strife
In 2019, several Hollywood notables and dozens of others were swept up in so-called Operation Varsity Blues. The FBI accused parents, college employees and their go-betweens in a bribery scheme to get nominally unqualified students admitted to top colleges.
What you might not have heard is John Wilson’s story. He’s the parent who drew the most charges, but fought them. And – after a grueling and expensive court battle – he finally came out on top.
Wilson: What the government did to me is something that's never happened to anyone in America. And what the prosecutors did to me once they put me in their crosshairs was so outrageous that if I hadn't experienced it firsthand, I wouldn't believe it in a million years.
If Wilson was known for anything, it was as a self-made rags-to-riches success story and president of Staples, International. But his story changed drastically in March of 2019 when he returned to the U.S. from a business trip.
Wilson: I got off the plane. I'm going through the normal customs and immigration security checks. They pulled me aside, say there's something wrong with my passport. I go into a back room. And then, two FBI agents pushed me against the wall, handcuffed me, shackled me and told me I'm under arrest. I was shocked. I had no warning. This came out of the blue like a lightning bolt.
Sharyl: You ever been arrested before?
Wilson: No, I'd never been arrested in my life. I'd never even been accused of a crime in my life. I've never been in a courthouse in my entire life.
Sharyl: What'd they tell you was wrong?
Wilson: They told me I was under arrest. I said, “You must have the wrong John Wilson.” I said, “There's 15,000 John Wilsons. I didn't do anything wrong.”
Sharyl: And you had no idea this was related to college or anything at the time?
Wilson: I had no idea what it was at all. Neither did they. They couldn't tell me what it was related to. They said “It's an unusual fraud charge we've never heard of. And that's all we know.”
The FBI took him to a federal prison in Houston.
Sharyl: And what'd they do with you from there?
Wilson: They stripped me down, put me in this big, I dunno, common area shower room. And the guards took a couple big hoses and started hosing me down like an animal in this large public shower. And still thinking to myself, "What did I do? How could this be happening? This can't be real." And the guard says to me, "You better watch your back in here. You know, you're the only old white guy,” he says, “and they're gonna assume you're a pedophile and they hate pedophiles here and one of 'em is likely to try to shiv you and stab you.” I was in shock. I said, “What? How can that be?” I asked, “Can you lock me in my cell so I don't get stabbed?” He says, “No, no. If they lock you in your cell, they're gonna think you're a p**** and they're really gonna f*** you up.” That's what he said, pardon my French, that’s what he said to me. I said, “Oh my god.”
The next morning he learned from his brother, an attorney, why he’d been locked up.
Wilson: I remember being handcuffed and shackled my feet and my hands shuffling down the hallway to this interview room where my brother was behind a plexiglass wall with another lawyer. I said, “What, what is this? What’s, what's going on?” And “They said something to do with Singer.” “I said, Singer?” He said, “Yeah, you bribed coaches and you did some fraud.” I said, “What? I didn't do that!” Again. I said, “They must have the wrong John Wilson.”
“Singer” was Rick Singer, considered the “mastermind” in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, nicknamed after the 1999 film about small town high schoolers looking for a way out – some through football scholarships.
Among the parents arrested were actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. They were accused of paying people to get their kids into top universities by bribing coaches, creating fake athletic photos, and cheating on tests. Both pleaded guilty in the case, in which 33 wealthy parents were charged.
Prosecutors claimed Wilson paid $220,000 to have his son, Johnny Wilson, recruited as a water polo athlete at the University of Southern California. And they said he spent $1 million to unfairly get his twin daughters into Harvard and Stanford.
Wilson admits he hired Singer and donated to colleges – like millions of parents have done – to increase odds their kids will get accepted in a fiercely competitive landscape.
But he says they were well qualified in their own right and there was no cheating, lying, or bribery. It was Wilson’s financial adviser at Goldman Sachs who introduced him to Singer as a consultant who could maximize a student’s chances.
Sharyl: I didn't even know that industry existed. So there are people you can hire to help your kid get in a good college?
Wilson: Yes. I didn't know it existed either until the Goldman Sachs person called me up. So whenever you asked Singer a question, he knew everything about every school, every high school, every college. So he was very knowledgeable. He was doing real charity work and he was doing real tutoring work. So I trusted him.
Sharyl: And your goal was ultimately what?
Wilson: To find the right fit for my son for school. To get him as prepared as he could for his tests, to help build his profile, to be as strong as it could and to get a school that'd be a good fit for him.
Wilson says Johnny legitimately won a spot on USC’s water polo team. He had impressive swim times, and a world record at age 9 as the youngest person to swim the frigid, choppy waters from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco.
The younger Wilson said on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2006: "See that island over there, that is Alcatraz and I am going to swim from there all the way to shore there. It is 1.4 miles and I’m a little nervous."
Wilson broke the world record, the youngest ever to make this swim.
His dad was convinced he could prove, at trial, that his children’s admissions to prestigious colleges weren’t due to bribery.
Prosecutors wanted him to plead guilty.
Wilson: And then they proceeded to literally every three months add on more charges. And each time they did, they said, “We want you to plead guilty. If you don't, we're gonna add on more charges.” And they did that again and again, four additional times. They ended up charging me with nine felonies and 180 years of prison time, all for the same act. And they said, “We'll go for more.” And I said, “I'm not gonna plead guilty no matter how many charges you put on me. I didn't do anything wrong.”
Sharyl: But the jury convicted you?
Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. They ran an unfair trial that was just outrageous.
He argues he faced a prosecutor-friendly judge who stacked the deck.
Wilson: I’ll give you a couple of examples of things they blocked. My daughters’ perfect ACT score, and near perfect scores were inadmissible.
Sharyl: In other words, that would've shown that they deserved to get in college. Not that they were given a favor?
Wilson: Right. They earned their admissions. They were qualified on their own merits for admission, even at Harvard and Stanford. My son's certified swim times and his world record, the certified swim times proved he's one of the fastest on USC’s team. They wouldn't allow his own high school coach, who's his water polo coach, who testified, to bring in his swim time.
Sharyl: When you heard what the jury found, did you think to yourself, “Well, I can't blame 'em with what they heard?”
Wilson: Absolutely.
Sharyl: Or were you surprised?
Wilson: No, no. We were sunk. We knew we were sunk when they blocked our evidence. I remember my lawyers even talking about this is something they've never seen before. It was so extreme. They said, “The good news is you'll have a great appeals record,” but now I have to spend another two years fighting for the appeal.
Sharyl: What happened on appeal?
Wilson: On appeal, we got everything overturned except for this minor tax issue. So all the court convictions were overturned and the judges said, you know, “This is totally unfair.”
Wilson paid a fine for the tax charge: improperly deducting USC donations. All the charges related to getting his kids into college were thrown out. The official Justice Department statement is that in May 2023, an appellate court affirmed the tax conviction and vacated and remanded the remaining counts of conviction.
But the fight isn’t completely over. Today, Wilson is suing Netflix over a documentary that he says smeared him and poisoned the jury pool.
He says he sent Netflix a real photo of his son playing water polo. Yet the documentary depicted him pasting the head of his son, shown in the film as a scrawny boy, onto the body of an athlete, for a college application.
Wilson: And so he was really a water polo player at the national level. He was being recruited by other division one schools. And so we sent them pictures of that at a practice. And what Netflix used, was a kid standing in a pool in LA in the shallow end up to his waist with a water polo ball in his hand. And then they show a photographer taking a picture and then photoshopping that onto a body of a kid in the pool. They knew that was totally false and yet they used it anyway.
Wilson successfully fought back criminal charges that he’d bribed to get his kids into college. But in the end, he says he lost five years of his peak career earnings potential, and spent his life’s savings – more than $10 million – on legal bills.
Wilson: I think for me the scariest part of this, if the government puts you in his crosshairs for whatever reason, the power and the resource they have can be devastating. They've been able to weaponize the justice system against innocent people. And they can do that with impunity. And it's frightening. And I think of all those people who have less resources than I had and how they're forced to plead guilty and how they're railroaded through an unfair process. And it's outrageous and it should never happen again. And I'm gonna do what I can to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
Netflix says its documentary never implied Wilson photoshopped his son’s photo … it depicted a different parent and son – and was wholly accurate. A Massachusetts judge recently denied Netflix' motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist and managing editor of "Full Measure." Her most recent book is "Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."
*****************************************************
Australia: Landlords giving up in the face of government hostility: Victoria sees record fall in rental stock as investors leave the state
Victoria is experiencing the sharpest fall in rental stock since record keeping began in 1999, suggesting an investor sell-off is gaining pace.
The number of active rental bonds (a proxy for the number of rental properties in a market) fell from a little over 676,400 in June last year to 654,700 this year – suggesting there were 21,700 fewer rentals in the market.
The state has only ever recorded two quarters of rental bond falls, and both occurred in 2024.
The speed of rental stock loss also appeared to be increasing, with the total number of rental bonds dropping 1.3 per cent in the three months to May, and 3.2 per cent in the three months to June.
The new data, released by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, supports a trend identified in the recently-released Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) 2024 Annual Investor Sentiment Survey.
The survey described a "sell-off of investment properties around the nation" that was "continuing unabated" and "fuelling fears of an even tighter rental market".
The outlook may be grim for investors, but home owners appeared to be benefiting, snapping up 65 per cent of the properties investors sold, according to PIPA.
First homebuyers in Melbourne have also enjoyed months of falling prices, while most of the rest of the country has experienced continued increases.
However, the survey's 1288 respondents declared Victoria to be the "least accommodating state or territory for property investors", and Victoria and Melbourne were found to have some of the highest proportions of investors selling up.
In Melbourne, roughly 22 per cent of investors surveyed had sold at least one rental in the past year, the second highest after Brisbane.
When it came to investors selling in regional areas, Victoria also had the second highest rate, with just over 9 per cent of investors selling, just below NSW, where the figure sat at just over 10 per cent.
PIPA Victoria board director Cate Bakos said legislative changes around minimum rental standards and increased land taxes were driving investors from the state.
She said real estate agents were also reporting a higher percentage of sellers being investors.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-12/victoria-sharp-fall-in-rental-stock/104464504
**************************************************My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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