By the late 80s, the wholesale sales tax was creaking at the seams. Toys were taxed at 24% but luxury goods at 0%. Also it was complex and expensive to administer. The wholesales sales tax was awful public policy.

Keating knew the GST was good policy, but lacked the conviction to stand up to “jellyback” Hawke (Walsh’s characterisation) and his caucus for it. Keating had taken it to the Tax Summit as his preferred policy “Option C”. Lacking meaningful policies of his own, Keating won the 93 election on a platform of opposing the GST and could not engage in reform as a result.

In the aftermath of the 93 election, Howard said never ever to a GST. Then, during government, cabinet and treasury looked at the indirect taxation mess and concluded that the GST was the optimal policy.

They could have done several things at this point. They could have done nothing, and focused on holding onto power, as Keating had done. They could have dressed it up as a VAT. Or they could have just introduced it with their majority. Instead, Howard gave a speech where he plainly recognised that he had said never, and said he had made a mistake, and his conviction was it was the right policy.

He then called an early election, in full knowledge that he was bad in the polls, and made the GST cause the centrepiece of that campaign.

This was the greatest act of political courage and decency of our lifetime. They risked everything on that conviction. Costello then ran a meticulous publicity campaign in which he made not a single mistake to open ground to the rerun of the ALP scare campaign. Against those odds, the Coalition won the election and made the reform, which now has bipartisan support.

But if you think there was a better reform to the indirect tax system available, let’s hear it.

Credit to a few. Roger Douglas in New Zealand. Contemporary Peter Walsh in Australia, the Hawke finance minister, also got it. Keating somewhat got it, and put his neck on the line for politically-difficult but structurally-easy growth-pie macro reforms as treasurer, but did not follow through for the politically-difficult and structurally-hard reforms, like wholesale sales tax, and then became a fixed-pie prime minister. Walsh was gone by then.

Arden is indefensible. She increased the size of government, decreased social cohesion via critical theory, housing promises went nowhere. Worse balance sheet, worse outcomes, across the board.

That's not the only difference. I have had situations where I ran equivalent optics side-by-side, and then touched one and it was hot, and touched the other and it was not hot. They do contain different components. In the case of that test - the atgbics SFP was cool, and the other clone unit was hot. My dealer was able to get me in contact with someone technical at atgbics (the cool-running unit) who explained the difference, "The DSP might be say 13nm where more modern more expensive ones are 5nm."

But you definitely do not need to pay for "genuine" optics to get high-reliability optics. You just need to shop around the clones - atgbics is a clone.

I bucket it into there being three options: genuine, clone, and good-clone.

We had a bad run with fs.com QSFP+s. Their SFP+s have been better to me, but reckon I have had a couple fail.

Atgbics SFP+s have been a reliable clone supplier for us. I don't think I have had any of those fail, and they have been my main vendor for a while now. You can order them programmed with personalities for Cisco, etc.

Part of the edge of fs.com is that it is so easy to place an order and get fast delivery. My main site is in another country to where I live, and I do a few trips a year. Several times they have made low-notice projects possible.

Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods.

Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules.

User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.

On our datacentre servers, I also have tmux running. It is fast to connect to these hosts, attach tmux and continue from where I left off.

Another use case: it is common for corporates to require devs to use windows desktops, but to then give them a headless linux host in a datacentre for development work. Here, you use putty to connect to the linux host, fullscreen it, run tmux. On your desktop you have outlook and office and putty and a browser and no dev tools. You can do all your planning and dev work on the linux host, using your favourite ten thousand hours text editor and building your own tools, and this becomes your hub. You lose awareness that you are connected to this from a locked down windows host. Corporate security reboots your windows host for patching several nights in a row, and it does not cause you any hassle because your work context is in the tmux session on another host.

Sung pentatonic music seems to be accessible to everyone from a young age.

For most things beyond that, our brains need exposure to the form to be able to appreciate it. This affects rhythm, melody and instruments.

My three-year-old hates the sound of guitar distortion. I am confident he will acclimatise to it.

Accessibility of traditional choral music will be influenced by what the audience knows. People who grew up with sung carols on at Christmas will be more open to it than people who have grown up with post-war pop Christmas.

Everyone now living in the developed world has been exposed to beat-backed major/minor easy-listening music by television, films, car radio and shopping centres. This is recent. People a hundred years ago did not have the same ear. The large choral work Elijah was easy-listening to audiences who had heard sung mass hundreds of times.

In 2025, a church music director wanting a twentieth century composer would schedule Rutter easily - Rutter writes music that suits the ear of pop Christmas. They would prefer Howells if they thought the congregation had a more traditional ear. They would schedule Messiaen only for a particular occasion.

The OP wrote - "It has struck me that most recommenders and lovers of choral music [are] themselves singers (or conductors) of choral music."

It is easy to get involved, so many people who are curious get involved. Once involved, people will find their tastes becoming traditional as a side-effect of exposure to the repertoire. This creates a running division between people who participate and the mainstream.

Note that before seventy years ago, almost everyone who loved music would have participated in it, even if only singing to young children or helping out at church. Outside royal circles, the practice of loving music yet being a pure consumer is a recent phenomenon.

Some forms of choral music will have a different relationship with pop than high-church music. For example - Gospel, accompaniment to rock songs like /Under the Bridge/ or /You can't always get what you want/. The Beatles were a mainstay of post-war pop, but /Because/ on Abbey Road has the character of a Renaissance choral work - George Martin was classically trained.

The mainstream ear may be making another shift now to more sophisticated beats with closer melodies (smaller pitch jumps) and simpler chords. If it happens, we will see evidence of it in popular Christmas music. As far as I know there has not been a new addition to that repertoire since /All I want for Christmas is You/ which is c20 pop.

Could LLM participation be blowing holes in good-governance measures that were only weakly effective, and therefore a good thing in the long-term? Could the rise in the practice drive grants arrangements to better governance?

Unix gurus will recommend awk as a pattern matching and substitution tool.

But my comment was about awk the vanguard imperative scripting language. I don't know of anyone who recommends use of awk's imperative style over python in 2025.

As an exercise, I tried writing a simple roguelike in awk in an imperative style. Within twenty minutes, it felt obvious where perl came from.

Awk is sold on pattern matching, and there are earlier technologies that do pattern-matching - ML, SNOBOL.

But awk's historic significance is something else: it was the embryonic scripting language. You could use it in an imperative manner, and in 1977 that showed a new path to interacting with a unix system. It allowed you to combine arithmetic, string manipulation, and limited forms of structured data processing in a single process without using a compiler.

Two language schools grew from imperative awk. (1) The scripting language that expose convenient access to filesystem and OS syscalls like perl/pike/python/ruby; (2) The tool control languages like tcl/lua/io.

It may also have influenced shell programming. Note that awk was released before the Bourne shell.