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I think it's fair to say that, generally, there's less concern for males. Would you disagree with this assertion?

Here's a link for you
Males are more likely to be victims of crime, however the general message is that it's dangerous for a woman to be out at night.

In 2016:

1604 Americans were murdered by knife. With a population of 323.1 million in 2016, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.496 per 100,000.

175 Canadians were murdered by knife. With a population of 36.3 million in 2016, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.482 per 100,000.

71 Australians were murdered by knife. With a population of 24.1 million, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.295 per 100,000.

213 people were murdered by knife in the UK. With a population of 65.6 million, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.325 per 100,000.

Despite the widespread availability of guns, Americans killed each other by knife at a higher rate than other countries. So it's not the guns. There's just something about Americans which make them more likely to kill each other, period. In that light, it's not at all surprising that U.S. police response is more aggressive than in other countries.

In the first place, Australia's net immigration was 182,000 in 2015-16.

In the second place, the largest single number of those come from the UK. Second is New Zealand. Granted, both countries have housing issues, but neither set of immigrants generally considers "sharing a house with five other people" a palace. (Unless it is a palace, of course. You can fit quite a few people in one of those.)

Source.

Housing in Australia has several components to it which I will try to cover in this post. I live in Melbourne Australia and I want to provide insight to people interested in learning more. 1. The 1980s Hawke/Keating Market reforms set the country up for the past 30 years of economic growth. Anyone denying that is crazy. They floated the currency, freed up the market for global trade and set the nation on a path to long term wealth. They did however over stamp on the breaks in 1991 causing a short recession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 2. Negative Gearing and the Capital Gains Tax concessions are two massive tax breaks for existing home owners. Their effects are huge and not to be underestimated. Negative gearing allows any loss on a property such as repair work or investment loss to be written off against the owner's taxable income. Originally it was introduced to boost investment in the housing market. The Capital gains discount allows a property owner to not pay tax on 50% of their profit on a property when they sell it. In the current market this has created a situation where it is better to leave a property empty, appreciating in value and then sell it without the hassle of dealing with tenants and property management firms. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... 3. Foreign investment. Market research data from Vancouver shows that implementing a 15% tax on foreign property investment caused a property price drop of around 20%. Where that money is coming from doesn't really matter, the point is that foreign investment accounts for approximately 8-11% of properties purchased in the market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news... 4. Recent studies of water usage in Melbourne and Sydney show that upto 80,000 properties in Melbourne alone lie vacant. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ne... and http://www.afr.com/real-estate... 5. Immigration, 182,000 people migrated to Australia in 2015-16 the 2016-17 stats are not available http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats... This is a large number by Australian standards, but most immigrants are not rich enough to buy property outright. Mostly they increase competition in the rental market. Most of these people are settling in Sydney and Melbourne with an estimate of 70-80% of people moving to these two cities. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... 6. The mining/resources boom. In the late 1990s/early 2000s the mining/resources boom brought a ton of wealth into Australia, this prevented a natural correction from occurring in the property market. More money flooded into the market which has helped to inflate prices and keep the cycle going. Now, with all of these factors combining there are many things occurring in the domestic market. Yes the car industry is closing, but overall that's not a big deal so far, because we haven't been exporting many cars for years and it's been a government funded jobs program. Wages are stagnant and growth is quite low at the moment, at the same time we have seen layoffs increasing especially in the mineral states such as Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. The biggest threat to the economy in my opinion is high house prices growth at a time of high unemployment growth. We are seeing areas which most people would not consider desirable to purchase housing in (traditionally poverty stricken high crime areas)

The official claim is that they intentionally took the site down as they found a security issue while trying to mitigate the DDoS. Not exactly inspiring confidence.

Source? I saw they said: http://help.census.abs.gov.au/...

Just after 7.30pm, the following confluence of events occurred:

A fourth denial of service attempt
A large increase in traffic to the website with thousands of Australians logging on to complete their Census
A hardware failure when a router became overloaded
Occurrence of a false positive, which is essentially a false alarm in some of the system monitoring information.

i.e. no security issue. Their systems got overloaded, melted down, and flagged an alert for a possible issue that didn't exist, so they shut it down.

Well the problem they have is they claim the data isn't used for data matching

Where do they claim that?

From the privacy page:

Why does the ABS collect names and address in the Census? The collection of names and addresses in the Census is a critical part of ensuring the quality and value of the Census.

Names are collected in the Census for a number of reasons, including:

• To assist householders completing the form to report the relevant information for each person
• To ensure the Census covers the entire population and data is of high quality

• To enhance the value of Census data, by combining it with other national datasets to better inform government decisions in important areas such as health, education, infrastructure and the economy.

Addresses are collected in the Census for a number of reasons, including:

• The ability to release data for geographic areas, such as postal areas, states and territories, capital cities, towns, remote areas and many more
• To ensure that no household is missed in the Census
• To produce both usual residence and Census night population counts
• To provide insights on the internal migration of people within Australia.

How will they check that "no household is missed in the Census" using the collected addresses?

The fine for false data is $1000, So getting caught with fake data is actually cheaper than not providing it.

No, not quite.

The maximum penalty for providing false or misleading information is 10 penalty units ($1800) (see s15 Census and Statistics Act 1905 (Cth)) The serious offences (see s19), with a maximum penalty of "120 penalty units ($21600) or imprisonment for 2 years, or both" is for an ABS officer divulging census information.

No, the statistics are clear. The Australian firearm laws introduced in 1997 did not change already downwards trend of firearms homicides.

Further to that, the total homicide rate hasn't changed much, with firearms being replaced by knives as the choicest weapon for murder.

http://www.aic.gov.au/statisti...

Or go to the http://www.abs.gov.au/ and find the same information by a different department.

Look to New Zealand to see a perfect example of how the Australian laws did not work. They have a very similar culture to Australia's. Their last big firearms massacre was in 1997. They didn't change their laws the same as Australia did. I.e. they didn't introduce firearms restrictions, magazine restrictions, or have any buy backs etc. They did introduce a sensible licensing scheme that prevents crazy people and criminals from owning firearms. Most of their firearms do not need to be registered (I believe they've publicly stated it does not decrease crime with firearms). Their homicide rate is lower than Australia's. Their homicide by firearm rate is lower than Australia's.

New Zealand is the model to copy. Forget about Australia. Copy New Zealand with its lower homicide rates and more sensible firearms laws.

There are 24 million people in Australia. We take over 200,000 migrants (net) a year.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats...

It should be noted that the largest single entrant type was Australian Citizen (I.E. ex-pats returning back to Oz on a permanent basis) being 16% of all arrivals... Humanitarian visas make up only 1.2% of arrivals and 2.5% of net migration. It should also be noted that 52% of net migration are temporary visas, So over 120,000 are expected to leave Australia. This brings that number down quite a bit. The largest subgroup of permanent visas by net migration are still Kiwi's (New Zealanders) with subclass 444 taking up 17.6% of net migration. In terms of raw people that is 41,000 staying in Oz. The majority of permanent migration in Australia is skilled or family. This certainly puts the fear mongering over immigration into perspective. Australia is to be destroyed by 5,000 people? If that were remotely true, we'd deserve it for being that weak.

There are 24 million people in Australia. We take over 200,000 migrants (net) a year.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats...

Which is why the main control is interest rate, if you get high interest you save more and low interest you spend more.

Interest rate have little to do with spending - they are a tool to control borrowing (and inflationary investment). The economic function of interest rates nowadays is to drive credit creation - the ability for the financial sector to create wealth by loaning out the same dollar many times.

High interest rates remove the ability for people to borrow but attract external investment. This can be a useful technique to draw foreign investment into your country.

The quoted point does have value for people with variable rate mortgages. Since interest is a large part of their monthly payment and often people borrow up to 80% of the value of their home, movement in interest rates (not matched with movements in income) will cause - often significant - changes in movement in available cash which leads to the spend/save more scenario. However very little economic academic debate is focussed on the individual hardships of the poor. Economics in general is more focussed on the macro level as constantly demonstrated by the ineptness of the acts of politicians.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australia-needs-more-tax-lower-interest-rates-international-monetary-fund-20150930-gjyns8.html

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/imf-chief-christine-lagarde-predicts-disappointing-2016-after-us-interest-rate-hike-china-1535407

RE: The article:

In Australia we have a statistical unemployment issue as the many factors can stop you being counted as unemployed (for example not being able to arrange childcare or not being available for work because you are in a course)

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/products/FBE517ECA9B07F63CA257D0E001AC7D4?OpenDocument

In Australia there is a very very very large service industry that feeds on the bottom dwellers of the recruitment sector by getting people into government sponsored courses. They get payments from the government and from the training organisation (who also get payments from the course attendee).

So basically you have millions of government/taxation dollars to fund the apparatus around one aspect of welfare - with the statistical upshoot of showing lower unemployment rates to voters.

If a Dutch town is doing away with the machine that keeps the welfare recipients under the watchful eye of the government to justify their payments in the eyes of voters then I can't help thinking that there is more money being saved and more to go into useful things.

Personally I would want all education and healthcare to be free - an educated and well society will achieve far more than a unemployable one that is ill and most likely broke.

Don't worry, I had read through the thread, I was just adding my two cents in regards to Australia's too restrictive firearms laws.

Mexico may indeed be a third world country and not the best comparison to the USA, but it's also a good example of how things can fly in the face of the law.

There is a wikipedia page for Australia's mass murder events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yes, there was a dip from 1996 to 1997 in the data you linked to. But something important happened in 1996, a small upwards spike, this normalised in 1997, then in 1998 there was a small downwards spike. These small variations up or down do not equate to the long term trend (and are expected). Just like climate change. I'm suspicious of gunpolicy.org data. E.g. gunpolicy.org lists the homicides by firearms alone in 1997 (a key year) as 428, yet official Australian government data from two sources lists the total homicide amount as 322. IMO better data for homicide in Australia can be found from government data sources:

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats...
http://www.aic.gov.au/statisti...
http://www.aic.gov.au/statisti...

Interesting points: Knives (or other pointy things) have almost always been used at a higher rate than firearms in murder. Arguably targeting them would have been the right thing to do (versus firearms). I wonder if the USA is the same? The overall homicide rate in Australia was very steady from 1993 to 2003 and only started making real headway after 2003.

Did you find any data for registered firearms in 1997 or 1998? That would make an interesting picture (a correlation between increased firearm ownership rate and lower homicides. Lol.).

This. This. A thousand times this.

I was unemployed for a period of time; I won't say how long, only that it was as a consequence of a contract coming to its end. I looked for work. I couldn't get work. I watched my savings slowly dwindle as time progressed.

I ended up taking the first job I could get, and moving to a different country, so I could get back on my feet.

That has left me with some serious long term mental health scars; I'm forever wondering, "am I doing enough to keep my job?" Even when I demonstrably am.

Now, let's have a look at a few figures. First, over here: 778,400 unemployed persons in my country as of August this year (the latest figures available at the time I wrote this comment.) Now have a look over here: 155,700 jobs advertised in May this year (again, the latest figures available; the August figures are due out in a week, and should be readily accessible at that URL, or with a Google search).

Having verified those figures, I would like you to tell me: how can 778,400 people all get a job, when there are under 200,000 jobs advertised? And remember: unemployment figures do not include underemployment (somebody working, say, five hours a week who wants to work forty), nor people that are not actively seeking employment for some reason. Also remember that this paragraph assumes anybody can take up any job - even somebody who's trained as, say, a carpenter taking up a surgery position at the local hospital.

It's very easy to say, "Quit the job if it violates your ethics" when it's not your job, and your life on the line. (Never mind your family.) It's a lot harder to actually do it when you have people depending upon your income. I may not agree with somebody's decisions in such circumstance - but I certainly wouldn't condemn them for it out of hand.

This. This. A thousand times this.

I was unemployed for a period of time; I won't say how long, only that it was as a consequence of a contract coming to its end. I looked for work. I couldn't get work. I watched my savings slowly dwindle as time progressed.

I ended up taking the first job I could get, and moving to a different country, so I could get back on my feet.

That has left me with some serious long term mental health scars; I'm forever wondering, "am I doing enough to keep my job?" Even when I demonstrably am.

Now, let's have a look at a few figures. First, over here: 778,400 unemployed persons in my country as of August this year (the latest figures available at the time I wrote this comment.) Now have a look over here: 155,700 jobs advertised in May this year (again, the latest figures available; the August figures are due out in a week, and should be readily accessible at that URL, or with a Google search).

Having verified those figures, I would like you to tell me: how can 778,400 people all get a job, when there are under 200,000 jobs advertised? And remember: unemployment figures do not include underemployment (somebody working, say, five hours a week who wants to work forty), nor people that are not actively seeking employment for some reason. Also remember that this paragraph assumes anybody can take up any job - even somebody who's trained as, say, a carpenter taking up a surgery position at the local hospital.

It's very easy to say, "Quit the job if it violates your ethics" when it's not your job, and your life on the line. (Never mind your family.) It's a lot harder to actually do it when you have people depending upon your income. I may not agree with somebody's decisions in such circumstance - but I certainly wouldn't condemn them for it out of hand.

I budget to travel 25,000km per year and usually end up at between 22,000 & 24,000. The average commuter vehicle travels 14,900km per year where I live (Queensland) so I sit about 50% over the average but my job sees me driving quite a bit - http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats... . My work commute is 23km each way so just too and from the office I do 230km a week alone getting to and from the office.

You commented lower about my calculations. The vehicle is salary packaged taking advantage of some of the fringe benefit laws in Australia to allow me to pay for part of the running costs out of my pre-tax income. The figure I quoted is my out of pocket costs (actually I checked my paper work and the figure is actually $231.68 per week) so this may account for the differences between the IRS and my running costs. In addition though I drive a fuel efficient car and not one of the American gas guzzling cars, my car runs at 5.9l / 100km and I doubt the IRS figure is tailored to each individual car.

As for the capital costs the car is financed through-out it's life of ownership with a guaranteed buyback written into the contract. This means that the cost I quoted includes the financing costs and the capital loss costs. At the end of my three year contract I am given three choices, first is to renew for another period (costs will be lower), or sell the car myself, pay the balloon and pocket the difference, or allow them to take the car at the previously agreed price. To date I have always sold the car myself and pocketed the difference.

The biggest thing though, is I have kids. There are two considerations here. The first of which is both of them are in car seats. Fitting and removing a car seat is a MASSIVE pain in the arse and the last thing I would want to do is to have to hump a car seat around my destination. The only way that works is if I wait longer for a car with car seats fitted. The second is safety. I pay more for a safer car. I also ensure that it is always maintained. I have been involved in a couple of major car accidents, the worst of which was being hit by a semi-trailer on a highway. In that case the emergency services that attended said the only reason my kids were alive was because of the car I was driving. Self driving cars may potentially be safer than driven cars at some point in the future, but that is a massively long way off. I think I will always be the person that wears a seat belt no matter what.

Oh and the average weekly car travel in the UK is 244km in 2013 according to http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...

I guess that applies here to - it's pegged to the CPI.

Note that the CPI in reality isn't a constant basket of goods and services, it's an expanding basket.

Maybe in the USA (?)
"The CPI measures the change in the cost of purchasing a fixed basket of goods and services." Source Australian Bureau of Statistics. Those figures are calculated from costs in capital cities. Costs in regional areas are much higher (and that's where most of "poverty" is).

But the US keeps adding on new benefits on top of the basic welfare system: food, health care, housing, phone service, Internet service, etc.

No disagreement there - though I find the late trend of saying that poverty is a choice morally offensive.

The problem is that welfare isn't poverty:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics...

Interesting (thanks). It's defined differently here (we currently use an international standard). i.e. welfare is actually below the defined level of poverty. Labor (left) wants to use "relative" poverty, the Liberals (right, currently in power) disagree.

In fact, "poverty" in the US (and Australia I imagine) has largely been eliminated. The term "poverty" these days is defined as "relative poverty"; it has little to do with lack of material resources, it's just another measure of the spread of the income distribution.

I've covered our use of relative poverty (see above). As to whether it's largley (1 in 7) been eliminated here, I'd go with "less visible in the capital cities".
This article is based on the fairly recent ACCOS report.

I don't know of a solution but I suspect that education and integrated public housing may help reduce problems in the future.

I don't think so. Since poverty is defined in relative terms [sic in the USA], raising the general level of education doesn't affect poverty rates at all, even if it makes everybody more productive. Public housing has been a failure, and you can't force people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.

Raising the level of education could change the number of people who qualify for jobs for which there are few or no candidates. We (Australia) can put public housing anywhere - and do. I don't know that it's been declared a general failure (here). Certainly when it's segregated high density it's a failure - people tend to be more likely to change when shown how to do things differently as opposed to told. When all the people you "know" (your neighbours) sleep all day, drink all night, and spend their waking hours trying to work out how to get by without working, and how to get "things" without paying - there's little to contradict the belief that you can't change how you live. Especially when it's institutionalised i.e. public schools in low income areas cater to the perceived outcomes - lifestyle subjects, little or no preparation for higher education, and what's called "vegie" subject (math and english for the unemployed - not for the workplace).
As an example of proposed measures to "solve" the problem (which seem unlikely to work) one proposed plan is: to relocate large numbers of people from a Southern NSW housing estate - to a high density, low income estate in Canberra (yet to be built). Canberra is a relatively small place, not on a port or with a major river from the sea. Not only is the local market small - it's economy is based almost entirely on a trickle down from Federal government expenditure. The "idea" is that this move will somehow create a manufacturing industry by providing a large workfo

The primary difference between the USA and other developed countries is the length of the prison sentences. As for forced mental hospital stays I don't think that comes even close to covering the difference. I am struggling to find any authoritative numbers for forced mental health stays in Australia but if we assume that all the available beds in our health mental health system are used for forced stays then that is 4625 beds as a maximum. https://mhsa.aihw.gov.au/resou...

Our criminal incarceration rate is about 185 per 100,000 population [1] and the current prison population is 33791. Assuming we added all of those 4625 beds as new prisoners this would bring the total to 38416. Assuming all other things are equal, ie duration, at that number we would be looking at 210 per 100,000 which is still dramatically lower than the 750+ per 100,000 in the USA.

In essence forced mental stays play basically no part in hiding the incarceration rate in Australia.

[1] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats...

The Howard gun laws did nothing statistically speaking, there's even a research paper which shows that there are no statistical breaks as a result from the gun buyback.

ABS and AIC statistics are pretty clear that death and injuries due to firearms in Australia (locally) peaked in the year of the buyback, and has steadily decreased in all years since. Data on homicides and data on suicides are available for your own analysis if you don't believe the statisticians.

More than 90% Australia's population is confined to a tiny fraction of the land area.
    Like Canada, where 80% of the population lives within 100 miles of the US border.

If it is so bad then why not ban tobacco? The problem with tobacco is that it is so widely available, making getting off the stuff so hard. I certainly would not visit a dealer to get illegal baccy.

Sorry, but you would visit a dodgy dealer to get illegal smokes. In fact there is already an illegal tobacco industry in Australia.

Banning things simply does not work because it forces the users to go underground. When you're talking about drug users, people who have a chemical dependency on the substance its even harder because they will go to extraordinary lengths to satiate their cravings.

So if you want to discourage the activity, you need to target people starting, not people who are already addicted. When you force an activity to go underground you lose all influence over it.

To the credit of the Australian government, smoking uptake rates over the last two decades have declined.

The reality is that governments are addicted to the tax income. 11 billion a year in Australia.

Smoking is estimated (conservatively estimated) to cost the Australian public in excess of $31 billion per year. So it's not nearly enough. Source: ABS

Alcohol abuse (which is pretty bad in Oz) only costs $15 Billion and Obesity only costs $8.3 Billion. The costs of smokers exceed the two next worst health issues in Australia combined.

why are americans such judgemental pricks?

Why are aussies all so naïve? Repeat offenses are a thing. In fact, three fourths of all crime in Australia are committed by people that had been caught for committing a previous crime.

Just a typical self-righteous Aussie. They live so far away from everybody else, in their insular little world of mostly white mono-cultural bigoted bogans

1956 called, it wants its demographic stereotypes back.

Australia has changed significantly in recent years. Even in the late-80s, people were complaining that "Neighbours" didn't reflect the multicultural reality of the country, and it's far moreso now. 2011 Census reveals one in four Australians is born overseas.

Just take the Tube from Heathrow

Yeah, Londoners. Never guilty of assuming the world revolves around *their* f****g insular metropolitan bubble, are they?

But now compare the violent crime rate.

Australia had a big gun-grab back in 1996. I want to know what effect
this has had, so I will start at 1995.

**Australia, 1995**
Population - 18,100,000
Murders - 321
Attempted Murder - 301
Manslaughter - 30
Robbery - 16466
Assault - 101149
Sexual Assault - 12809
Kidnapping - 469
Total Violent Crime - 131545
- - - - -
Murder, per million - 17.73
Violent Crime, per million - 7267.68

**Australia, 2010**
Population - 22,300,000
Murders - 260
Robbery - 14,582
Assault - 171083
Sexual Assault - 17757
Kidnapping - 603
Total Violent Crime - 204285
- - - - -
Murder, per million - 11.66
Murder, change from 1995 - 34.3% decrease
Violent Crime, per million - 9160.72
Violent Crime, from 1995 - 26.05% INCREASE

Yes, read that again. Murder dropped by 34.26%, but overall violent crime
is **up** by 26.05% For every life saved, an extra 312 people were the
victims of violent crime..

Wow, WHAT a slam dunk! Sign our country UP for some of that!

During the SAME period (1995-2010), here are the USA trends.
Murder - 42.6% down (compare to 34.3% down in Australia)
Violent crime - 43.5% down (compare to 26.05% UP in Australia)

Austalia, 1995 numbers.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats...

Australia, 2010 numbers.
http://www.aic.gov.au/media_li...
I used 2010 becaise of this note:
2011 figure does not include information from Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania. Therefore, the assault figure **cannot be compared with those prior to 2011**

USA figures (spot-checked, and the numbers were very close to FBI estimates.
http://www.disastercenter.com/...

That seems highly excessive, even allowing for fuel and Canadian winter heating costs. I find it hard to believe that energy costs outweigh food and/or housing.

By comparison, in 2012:

Australian households' average expenditure on energy represented 5.3% of total gross weekly household income (2.0% for dwelling energy and 3.2% for fuel for vehicles).

What about Europeans and people from other parts of the world where tobacco products can't be marketed, cigarettes and nicotine products have to be hidden from view? People still smoke, people still start smoking. No marketing happening to them though.

You've still got the old fashioned way, peer pressure. Even advertising depended on a large number of people applying gentle pressure to others to begin smoking.

All the current evidence suggests that hiding tobacco products and banning smoking in certain places is not stopping people smoke nor reducing the number of new smokers.

Citation needed, I'd put good money on your source being flawed (or outright lying).

Actually the number of new smokers are decreasing. Especially in Australia where there is a ban on cigarettes advertising but they don't need to be hidden from view (they are in lockable cabinets, not sure if this is law or just the fact that a pack of smokes is very attractive to shoplifters).

4125.0 - General Indicators, Australia, Jan 2013 - Smoking

Besides, what ever happened to people doing what they enjoy? Some smokers do feel trapped sadly, but not all. Many do it because they enjoy it.

What about others who don't want be subject to the acrid smell of cigarettes? They don't just feel trapped, they are trapped. Which is why they had to fight back with harsher laws. Smokers are in the situation they're in because they're inconsiderate and irrational.

In Australia, there are an average of 1 deaths per year from Shark attacks

For comparison there are an average of 121 deaths per year from drowning at beaches, harbours and rivers.

Furthermore in 2010 217 people died as a result of an assault and 1,503 died as a result of a transport accident (706 car, 236 motorcycle, 227 pedestrian)

Does that put it in perspective?

No, you dont.

Did you even check, or did you assume? What sort of Americans are you dealing with when they're 'shocked' by 100 km to the next gas station? That's only 60 miles. I've seen signs that say 125 miles to the next, or 200 km. Must be East-coasters who think the mid-west is 'flyover country'.

Let's check your work: You guys average 15530 km per year
Americans average 12k-15k miles per year, this site says 13,476 miles. Which works out to 21,696 km/year. Or 40% more than Aussies, which I'd qualify as 'heck of a lot more'.

Let's verify a bit: Population of Australia: 22.7M. KM driven: 232,453M km. KM per man, woman, and child: 10,240 km.
Population of the USA: 313M. Distance driven: 3M million miles., or 3,000 Billion miles. 9,413 miles per year, or 15,154 km per person. 48% more than Australians.

but if you blow 0.06 an Aussie cop would just tell you to sit down for half an hour and test you again if your BAC reduces he lets you go as long as you pass the personality test).

Personality test? Oh, institutional corruption, got it.

Once again, Australia has already solved this problem. If you cant pay your fines in Australia, a sheriff starts repossessing your property (starting with your car). As for people who drive on a suspended license, they risk years in jail here in Australia.

You mean the totaled car that was wrapped around a tree? Or do you kick people out of their homes in Australia?
Oh, and we do it in the USA as well. Problem being that, especially for multiple DUI offenders they generally drive such crappy cars that it costs more to have the sheriff confiscate it then they get at auction. Oops...

You'd be surprised how many offenders are white collar.

You really think this? The problem is twofold:
1. The poor people can't pay the fines. It costs somewhere around $22k/year to keep them in jail/prison.
2. The rich people can pay the fines, then carry on more or less like nothing happened.
3. Both parties will often obtain a $500-1000 car to drive that they register under somebody else's name so no breathalyzer equipment is installed.

A first time DUI in the USA can run you over $15k. It's not cheap.

You're going to have to face it: There isn't some 'magic bullet' policy difference between the USA and Australia. It's a lot of little ones, and the difference between .05 and .08 for DUI isn't really one of them.

This is why blood tests will reduce the number of people going to court.

With the really sleazy lawyers they'll still go to court, especially the rich types, because all they have to do is convince the jury something is in doubt, that he doesn't deserve the conviction, get some piece of evidence like the blood test tossed out on some technicality, etc... Heck, get some sympathetic drink-drivers on the jury. Lots of options.

Stop locking up pot heads and concentrate on removing actual dangers from society.

Agreed.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the problem with guns is that they make it far, far too easy to kill someone. In a country like the UK where I live, a disagreement or fight might end up with someone getting punched; it is fantastically unlikely to end with someone getting shot.

You missed the point of my question. You were talking about how you have "less gun crime" - i.e. you looked at the actual numbers (commendable!) instead of just saying that guns obviously cause more murders; but then chose to focus on a narrow category of murders instead of all of them. Why not look at all murders? In the end, that's what matters.

Case in point - in Australia, after their 1996 gun ban and mandatory buyback, all anti-gun organizations in US were proudly proclaiming that it "significantly reduced gun crimes". Which it did, but if you looked at the whole picture, the total number of murders actually increased (and so did the number of assaults, rapes and suicides). They just weren't gun crimes, and so they weren't counted. But from utilitarian perspective, your goal should be to decrease the total number, not one particular subcategory. If statistics show that the same number of people die, just from knives rather than guns, your policy didn't have any meaningful effect.

By the way, if you don't trust me and want to go look the numbers up - you will quickly find that murder rate in Australia today is lower than it was immediately before the ban (but still higher than a decade before that). It spiked somewhere in 2002, IIRC, and then returned to its usual downward progression common for all developed countries, at the same rate it was going down before the ban. Ditto suicides. If you want to see the whole picture, don't look at specific points in time only - find graphs, preferably for at least a couple of years before the ban went in effect, so that you can see the trends as well as changes. E.g. this, this and this (taken from here).

Gun-lovers can protest all they like, the fact is that the murder rate in the US is much higher than in comparable Western countries.

The fact is that there's no evidence that specifically points out at guns as the factor that causes that higher murder rate. There are numerous differences between countries like US and UK, and some of them - e.g. much higher wealth and income disparity in US, or lack of efficient public healthcare system - are known to be considerable contributors to more and stronger poverty in US, and poverty correlates very well with violent crime.

On the other hand, in US itself, if you look at state-by-state statistics, murder (and other violent crime, and suicide) does not follow gun ownership at all. And the data about Australia shows the complete lack of any meaningful correlation between murders and gun ownership, and slight positive correlation between lack of guns and assaults/rapes (though I would be very reluctant to claim causation on these grounds). For that matter, similar figures are available for UK, where the murder rate was several times lower than US long before any wide-reaching gun bans went into effect, and actually rose over the years as gun control tightened (again, I'm not claiming causation here, just lack of correlation in the other direction).

Here's one interesting bit of data that I think is directly related, though. In US, 13% of all burglaries occur while the owner is at home. In UK, it's 45%.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the problem with guns is that they make it far, far too easy to kill someone. In a country like the UK where I live, a disagreement or fight might end up with someone getting punched; it is fantastically unlikely to end with someone getting shot.

You missed the point of my question. You were talking about how you have "less gun crime" - i.e. you looked at the actual numbers (commendable!) instead of just saying that guns obviously cause more murders; but then chose to focus on a narrow category of murders instead of all of them. Why not look at all murders? In the end, that's what matters.

Case in point - in Australia, after their 1996 gun ban and mandatory buyback, all anti-gun organizations in US were proudly proclaiming that it "significantly reduced gun crimes". Which it did, but if you looked at the whole picture, the total number of murders actually increased (and so did the number of assaults, rapes and suicides). They just weren't gun crimes, and so they weren't counted. But from utilitarian perspective, your goal should be to decrease the total number, not one particular subcategory. If statistics show that the same number of people die, just from knives rather than guns, your policy didn't have any meaningful effect.

By the way, if you don't trust me and want to go look the numbers up - you will quickly find that murder rate in Australia today is lower than it was immediately before the ban (but still higher than a decade before that). It spiked somewhere in 2002, IIRC, and then returned to its usual downward progression common for all developed countries, at the same rate it was going down before the ban. Ditto suicides. If you want to see the whole picture, don't look at specific points in time only - find graphs, preferably for at least a couple of years before the ban went in effect, so that you can see the trends as well as changes. E.g. this, this and this (taken from here).

Gun-lovers can protest all they like, the fact is that the murder rate in the US is much higher than in comparable Western countries.

The fact is that there's no evidence that specifically points out at guns as the factor that causes that higher murder rate. There are numerous differences between countries like US and UK, and some of them - e.g. much higher wealth and income disparity in US, or lack of efficient public healthcare system - are known to be considerable contributors to more and stronger poverty in US, and poverty correlates very well with violent crime.

On the other hand, in US itself, if you look at state-by-state statistics, murder (and other violent crime, and suicide) does not follow gun ownership at all. And the data about Australia shows the complete lack of any meaningful correlation between murders and gun ownership, and slight positive correlation between lack of guns and assaults/rapes (though I would be very reluctant to claim causation on these grounds). For that matter, similar figures are available for UK, where the murder rate was several times lower than US long before any wide-reaching gun bans went into effect, and actually rose over the years as gun control tightened (again, I'm not claiming causation here, just lack of correlation in the other direction).

Here's one interesting bit of data that I think is directly related, though. In US, 13% of all burglaries occur while the owner is at home. In UK, it's 45%.

Yes I did. Properly. Taking time to find the figures and the quotes from the prime minister of the day. And you don't even remember. Like I said, waste of time.

I'm pretty sure that I have never had a reply from you with quotes from the prime minister, much less figures. You must be confusing me with someone else.

But, in any case, the figures are the same, so long as you had them from the same reputable source (i.e. Australian government), and they show that the rate at which murder rate decreased did not change with the ban (in fact, it spiked 8 years after, and so did armed robbery), and that assault is 25% higher now than it was then. The tricky part would be reconciling that with your argument.

http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/violent%20crime.html
http://www.ic-wish.org/Australian%20suicides%20rates%201979-2004.gif
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tandi/341-360/tandi359/view%20paper.html
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/95553f4ed9b60a374a2568030012e707/4524a092e30e4486ca2569de00256331/

New Hampshire... that doesn't disprove the link between guns and violence. What you've effectively done is identify the second variable: hunting culture. NH is, as I understand it, a very rural, forested area, where lots of people hunt regularly for edible game. What's the biggest urban area in NH? Manchester, population c.100,000. Not big.

Yes, of course. That was the point of the exercise - there are many more factors to account for. Comparing New Hampshire to, say, Illinois is about as meaningful to compare US to UK. And there are many more variables that affect the picture. For example, income and wealth inequality has shown to correlate very strongly with crime rates, and UK has them significantly lower than US.

That's why, if you want a meaningful comparison, you take two sufficiently similar countries on all counts (very hard to do, and very subjective) - or take a single country that had considerably changed its gun politics, and analyze the data both before and after the change. I mentioned Australia because it is a prominent example of such a rapid change, and all the numbers are available online for anyone to look at. Although other countries' data - UK, Canada etc - is largely similar.

Someone who owns a rifle with the express purpose of having wild turkey at Thanksgiving is very different from someone who owns a Colt revolver for self-defense.

True, but "different" does not have to mean "more dangerous". How many people are killed in hunting accidents, vs people killed in cases of mistaken identity or confusion in self-defense? How many people are deliberately shot by legally owned hunting rifles vs being deliberately shot by legally owned handguns? We need to talk hard numbers, not "common sense" (which is not so common, seen how widely it differs on such issues from person to person).

Speaking of hard numbers, here's the links for Australia - most straight from the govt statistics bureau. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. As a point of reference, the gun ban was in 1996, and the mandatory buy-back completed in 1997.

http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/violent%20crime.html
http://www.ic-wish.org/Australian%20suicides%20rates%201979-2004.gif
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tandi/341-360/tandi359/view%20paper.html
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/95553f4ed9b60a374a2568030012e707/4524a092e30e4486ca2569de00256331/

That price wasn't very specific, here's a better run down of prices Holden Commodores on CarSales.com.au. The *'s mean they're not sure if it's "on road" (meaning it's inclusive of all taxes) or not. I don't think it is. There was a similar ambiguity when I was looking up the US prices.

The cost of living here is a fair bit more expensive, property is often quite a lot more expensive unless you live quite rurally. Here's a better write up on that on the "Australian forum". Almost every American I've met has complained about the price of things here though.

Apparently the median household income in the US is $52,762 and in Australia it is $68,640. Though it should be noted this is without considering purchasing power, both are probably measured quite differently, and each is quoted in their local currencies... but it's the best I could find, without going into this more seriously.

There should be a reason why the murder rate and gun violence in US is 3 times higher than in other countries with comparable living standards

Thing is, they aren't comparable living standards for most of the population - only averages look similar.

US is really set rather apart from most other developed country if you look at various socioeconomic indices beyond GDP. It has a very high Gini coefficient, for example. It does not have a true public healthcare system, even after Obama's reforms. Generally speaking, it has much less redistribution of wealth, and, consequently, the rich are richer, and the poor are poorer than in your typical European country. And poverty is the prime contributor to violent crime. But, of course, tackling that is "socialism" in American parlance, and so it is generally off-limits - much more so than gun regulation.

I agree that more in-depth studies are necessary on the subject, but, most certainly, comparing US to a random European country at a single moment of time is a meaningless metric - while comparing a single country before and after it enacts restrictive gun laws is much more sensible. If you want to compare different countries, at least pick ones that are closer together on other factors (e.g. Czech Republic, with its liberal gun laws that allow handgun carry vs Slovenia or Hungary).

And don't forget to look at other categories beyond "gun crime" - most anti-gun studies of Australia focus on that, and proudly proclaim that the numbers for it have dropped after the ban (well, duh), while ignoring the fact that other weapons simply replaced guns for murders for no change in total count, and other violent crimes actually rose slightly.

As a side note, here are some graphs on Australia (raw official govt data - up to you to interpret them) that you might want to look at - keep in mind that gun ban happened in 1996, and the buy-back program was over by 1997.

http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/95553f4ed9b60a374a2568030012e707/4524a092e30e4486ca2569de00256331/Body/13.4240!OpenElement&FieldElemFormat=gif
http://www.ic-wish.org/Australian%20suicides%20rates%201979-2004.gif

First of all, while murder rate did indeed fall sharply in 1997, one year after the ban, it then went back up - in fact, it was higher in 1998 than it was in 1996. The gun-related murder rate was lower, of course, but it turns out that you can murder people with other things, too - who knew?

If you look at the murder rate graph for Australia for the last twodecades or more - e.g. like this or this - you'll see that murder rate did not meaningfully respond to the gun ban (1996) at all. If you look at the bigger picture and average the spikes out, what you see is an ongoing decline that started somewhere in mid-80s. And if you don't ignore the spikes, the picture is even more bleak for the ban, as there is a big one five years after it went into effect.

As for suicides, again, it does not seem to be correlated with the gun ban. Yes, the ban reduced the number of gun suicides. But it did not affect the overall number of suicides - there were more in 1997 than there were in 1996. The overall number went down over the years, but that is from the peak in late 90s - the overall suicide rate in Australia today is basically the same as it was in early 80s, long before the gun ban. The only difference is that people used to shoot themselves to do it, and now they hang themselves instead.

Key word, think, not know.

And roughly 1/3 of Australia is banging on my door for my LED tech, plus Morocco, the UK, China, Japan, and the USA.

Sun-grown food is so inefficient that it's becoming passe, and every major country on the planet is realizing it.

And whomever pays me enough will own this world by controlling its food.

Hint: I'm never going to give it to the USA and will renounce my citizenship and move before they ever get a chance to figure it out or steal it.

So if you stay in the USA, you're on the losing team. Just a heads-up.

Think means the thought process going through my head. So whatever I think is what I know.

I don't believe 1/3 of Australian farmers are interested or intend to switch to artificially grown food any time soon. Go look at http://abs.gov.au/ for statistics on Australia - if you can show me some statistics or numbers from there or somewhere else showing that sort of demand then I'll believe it.

I'm sure there are lots of people interested in whatever lighting tech you have and I hope you succeed.

• * NBN is costing ~$40 billion compared with Google Fibre estimate of $150 billion for a Nationwide roll-out.
  Now Australia has a similar land mass to the US, but less than 1/10th the population and is heavily urbanised.
• * Google is 1Gbps for $70. Currently the highest NBN plan is 100/40Mbps with 1TB quota for $164.95/month.
  1Gbps will be available in a couple of years on the NBN, but price is $150 plus data (100/40Mbps wholesale is $38/month so retail prices will be likely to be double wholesale).
• * 50% on the NBN are predicted to connect at 12/1Mbps (page 64 of NBNCo Corporate Plan (2012-15)) at ~$40-$50 for 30GB month.
• * Current NBNCo wholesale prices are discounted, as per page 67 of the NBNCo Corporate Plan
  - 1000/400Mbps falls from $150 to $90, while the average speed grows from 30Mbps to 230Mbps. So price falls by 40% while average speed grows by 7.6 times
  - price of CVC falls by 2.5 times, while the data usage grows by 20 times

Sadly, too many people in Australia have read the "1Gbps Fibre announcement made during the 2010 Federal election campaign in response to Google Fibre Announcement. Very little investigation has been done to appreciate what is being delivered for fear that like other government initiatives, the delivery will be a failure. The reality is that for 50% 12/1Mbps will be what they experience and for maybe 25% 100/40Mbps with download quotas. The rich will have their 1Gbps connections subsidised by the national roll-out. Rather than revolutionary the NBN will be little better than current 100Mbps cable services. NBNCo are also focusing on areas already serviced by cable to re-enforce their natural monopoly and reduce competition.

The alternative would have been to release uncapped fibre speeds (everybody receives 1Gbps) and charge for data. This is fair as low quota users put hardly any load on the network, while heavy downloaders do. We would then have had something closer to Google Fibre and truly revolutionary. To quote Simon Hackett (Internode):

"They could charge that average to everyone, and open the ports up to full speed for everyone (this is my personal preference, FWIW)." post by Simon Hackett

Instead we have a fibre network where anyone downloading less than 5GB month (national average is ~20GB (ABS) is probably better using a 4G connection and ditching the land line. If we accept that NBNCo are correct in predicting that 50% will connect at 12/1Mbps, then based on the fact that 25/5Mbps plans are only $5 extra a month there is a significant number of people who may find wireless better value.

Australia isn't really known for its higher educational institutions. Both Europe and America are.

yes it is
"Australia’s share of the international student market increased from 5.1% in 2000 to 7.0% in 2009, (Endnote 2) making Australia the third largest provider of international education services in 2009, behind the United States (18%), and the United Kingdom (10%). "

roughly 1 in 5 of our university students are international students.

Imagine you're a honest politician (they exist), and you want to do something about US citizens dying prematurely. You don't want to touch the guns issue because that's political suicide, so... What about traffic deaths then? Over 15000 people a year die in the US because of the inadequacy of the traffic system. US roads are over two times as dangerous as German roads, and almost three times Swedish or Dutch roads. And it's not as if Germany has some magic recipe. They just about make the OECD average.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Features~International%20comparisons~191

33000 US citizens were road kill in 2009, and international experience shows that at least 15000 could have been avoided. How many US soldiers died in Vietnam?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_US_soldiers_died_in_the_Vietnam_War

One Vietnam of easily avoidable US traffic deaths every four years is low hanging fruit in comparison to gun control. But even that doesn't seem to be high on the political radar.

Actually we have somewhere around 23 million people. (source) Still small though.

Irrespective of whether we can trust the AFP, the installation of point-to-point speed cameras which have "relatively low infringement rates" seems like a gross over-reaction to a non-existent problem. The data --crazy I know to look at it when considering emotionally driven issues -- does not bear out the expense http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/D18CA4EA930FF0D2CA25773700169CE5?opendocument

Suggesting that reducing tolerances to increase infringements (in this case, I see no other reason than for revenue) to pay for a system that is not needed is abusive. Will it reduce deaths?

The short of the data is that the ACT has about half the traffic accident-related fatalities of the western world, including those countries noted for above-average driving abilities. Indeed, one might argue that Canberra has the safest roads in the world. It makes one ask the question, what is the target death rate? Zero? As always the last 10% takes 90% of the effort and in this case, I believe, such a low rate can be accepted as part of the inherent risk of driving.

You do understand that unlike the rest of the First World countries the population of the US is growing by leaps and bounds?

[Citation needed]

Until you provide something else, let's look at some official data: "Net gain of one person every 13 seconds" with "1 birth every 8 seconds" and "1 new immigrant every 48 seconds" (i.e. 6 newborns for every immigrant)

To put the things into perspective: 1 new person every 13 seconds means approx 2,500,000/year. This means an annual growing rate of 0.78% for the over 311 mils of US. And you call it "leaps and bounds"?
Gosh, similar calculations gives for Australia an annual growing rate of 1.43% - almost double the US (and I hope you will abstain to suggest that Australia is not a First World country).

We see it as a never-ending cycle in Arizona with stories about the latest rapist being caught after being deported 13 times and being deported again.

Ah, I see. If you think the illegal immigration is the reason for which the wiretap warrants number increased, read again TFS and ask yourself why the hell the most significant jump in wiretapping doesn't take place in Arizona, Texas or New Mexico, but in California, New York and New Jersey?

(I'm stopping short of suggesting that perhaps it would be a good idea for you to go back under the bridge?)

Two-thirds of Australian Internet connections are slower than 1.5 Mbps source http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8153.0/ We Win!

Another statistic for ya - in Australia, nearly 2000 people die each year on the roads. Over 20,000 die due to smoking related illness. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, "cardiovascular disease remains one of the leading causes of death in Australia, accounting for 47,637 or 36% of deaths in 2004 (ABS 2006a)." So you're more than TWENTY TIMES more likely to die of heart disease due to crappy lifestyle choices than you are to die of motor accidents. Where are the roadside Random Burger Testers?

I read a brilliant piece by Jeremy Clarkson once where he went through all the usual causes of crashes; speeding, alcohol, poor weather conditions, mechanical failure etc. and came to the conclusion that some disturbing percentage of fatalities (30%+ I think) was due to crashes by sober drivers traveling at or below the speed limit on straight roads in good weather.

Great, these gigabit links will be real handy! Especially with Australia having about 8 terabits of cabled overseas bandwidth.

Lets see, 8000 gigabits divided by 10000000 households with just 1% (100000) trying to have all you can eat = 80 megabits per household with nothing left over for the other 99%.

We only need 92 terabits more overseas connection bandwidth to meet that insatiable 1% (the ones downloading torrents 24 hours a day).

Woohoo go gigabit.

Contention ratio is a bitch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_Australia#International

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1436043.html (post by Duideka)

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/6C0F2180158809B9CA2573D20011048E?opendocument

The whole point of the Australian government is Representative Democracy.

By my rough calculations, 75% of our politicians should be self righteous, arrogant busy-bodies who think they know better than me regardless of anything so trivial as reality.

As an atheist, I can appreciate the sentiment, but as a realist I see the fact that all our leading politicians are currently zealots as simply an aberration that even those nominally religious abhor.

By Australian standards even 200 gallons a day is a huge amount. Australians use an average of 315 litres (83 US gallons) per day. Mind you Australia is supposedly the driest continent on earth.

Link for that data http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/e5cb0b45f4547cc4ca25697500217f47/cc9d340e1feef80bca256e9900810f09!OpenDocument

Perhaps India and China don't have a water shortage but more of a usage problem. They have high but very uneven rainfall distribution and haven't realised that better usage techniques are required to utilise that water to it fullest potential.

You Americans would freak out about the data collected by the Australian Census . I remember hearing that 98% of the population responded to the last census, and it was a booklet with lots of questions (As you can see from the list of census topics). Not only that we have it every 5 years.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6302.0/

now buy a house and have kids and tell me 90k makes you feel rich. the key problem here is what has always, and will always, be the major malfunction of labor. the second you step up above average they cut you off at the knees, and that's not good for the country in the long run.

So the 68% [1] of Australians that do profess to be Christian should not partake in the federal elections? Nor have representation of their choosing? The 72.8% of people that profess a religious belief should stand aside and let themselves be dictated to by a minority?

Also, don't forget that your 28% (27.2% according to [1]) also includes people who didn't answer the religion question adequately (poor handwriting etc.), so the number of 68% Christians, should be considered the *minimum* percentage of society that expresses a belief that they're Christian (similarly for the other religions).

It's a democracy. Deal with it. Start your own party if you like, the AEC [2] would be glad to help you, that's what they're there for.

For the record, I'm a Christian and I don't vote for specifically Christian parties because they're all conservative and I'm liberal.I disagree with much of the policy of the Christian parties as it pertains to technology. I still fail to see how the Christian lobby is the problem. It's successive ministers from both parties who have shown, on a global stage, that they are utterly uneducated and inept in the realm of modern technology.

It's about technology and government, not religion.

[1] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/bfdda1ca506d6cfaca2570de0014496e!OpenDocument
[2] http://www.aec.gov.au/

Australia is predominantly female.

If you make a statement like that, you had better be ready for someone to call BS.

According to the most recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics there are 9,799,249 males and 10,056,038 females - a difference of only 2%.