Whinge of the day thread...

Prospecting Australia

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The Australian pension age of 65 was adopted in 1900 (a bit later in some states) at a time when the life expectancy for non-indigenous Australians was 47 years (33 for indigenous men). So the majority of Australian men died 18 years before they ever reached pension age, and pensions were a negligible drain on the government coffers as a result.. Two-thirds of men who reach 65 in Australia NOW will live another 20 years (women 23 years) - so 85 and 88 years of life respectively for two-thirds of Australians. most falling off the perch nearly 20 years after going onto a pension.
This confusion of life expectancy with lifespan, is an all too common fallacy. Life expectancy is a statistical construct, based on the average age at death of all people in a population from birth. The very high death rates of babies, infants and children up until several decades into the 20th century, are reflected in correspondingly low life expectancy figures. However, I think you'll find that the majority of Australian men who survived long enough to enter the workforce in those days, would have still been around at pension age, just like today.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/...ncient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity
 
We cannot get the pension. Mine because of a fictitious asset and Mrs M shares my assets although she hasn't come of age yet. To help manage our living expenses we moved from the more expensive south west to the goldfields where we could by a similar home for hundreds of thousands less. That extra couple of hundred thousand dollars can go a long way to improving your lifestyle if you're not a big spender.
MB your 100% spot on the money 👍 👍 👍 👍
 
Ahhh... retirement, a million things to a million people...
Gee... I have noted that some do it h^ard... I am sorry this happens for them.. {and yet, it is what we MAKE OF choices we make, relative to what arises within our human life, not what initially arrives within it...}…
I AM ( by design) A relatively FIT 73 year old...(most recon I look 50, as I decided when I was 18 that I wanted to be as fit n healthy at 98 as I was then (at 18)... and it has sorta worked...)… as I still work tree lopping with my son 10 hrs some days, when his helpers are sick... (and that IS a tough job) …
Early on (after working in the Bank for a year in 1969, and felt I did not want to become the youngest Bank Manager in the Commercial Bank of Aust) I proceeded to made a fortune as an abalone diver in Sth Tasmania and retired when I was 23 for ten years... as I figured why wait till the body is wrinkled n old to have some fun...
{What I could have done was buy the blocks of land in Wategos Beach Byron Bay (I looked at) for $800_$1500 which now sell for $10,000,000…}
… but I abandoned the beach, followed the sun, and read for 5 years everyday 6days a week until that was satisfied ... and then travelled some more n did some prospecting when mid 20s ... found very little... same as the amount of REAL knowledge I had at the time...(silly boy... ha ha ha^ me..... )… all fine...
...
Ah... the things we do, not do... and human life is so very dam short as well...
...
Gee... right now, I am lookin around at drone Tech for ways to make a business out of it for the next ten years or so....
...
Anyhow...
. . . after retiring for ten years in my 20s... found that I reached THAT boredom level (even though I had enough cash to do fk-all-very-well, but also did not want to do much apart from read n design stuff... by then it was too late to be an Architect) and so... when I was 33 decided to work for fun... and have done so since...
...
So,...
RETIRING... GEE... WHAT IS THAT?…
MY FIRST JOB (caps accidental) in a bank, is where I watched and heard stories of dudes RETIRING, and more often than not, five years later they were dead from boredom... literally... So, I figured that is NOT the way...
...
I currently live on the vapours of THE govt old age pension... and I figure that the govt pension will simply evaporate (eventually) … and after 4 fortunes made n lost I figure the fifth fortune will buy some land to garden that I will never leave ... you know that thung called HOME SWEET HOME with the plum trees out the back, a cockatoo and a barbecue... in my own backyard...
...
Mmm... I know,... I started everything backwards... a bit like that crazy Woody Allen movie about being born old and dying young...
...
Right now home is where the Heart is... and always has been... as the body has lived with solid gold taps in mansions with a Sherman tank in the garden, and luxury baths (mmm so what),.... and under dam drafty freezing rickety bridges in snow storms smelling much like an unwashed Mongolian covered in daily butter for warmth, and never wash... (well, maybe I have never reached that stink-state when water was not available, but anyhow...)…
Yet, interestingly... on the inner me feeling-level, that feeling-level of inner-me has never changed my whole life... even when I look in the mirror and wonder "hm... is that me?" Mmm yes, my body, but not me... and …
...
Life is fun...
...
Upwards n Onwards...
...may gold fall in yr pockets... ✔️✔️✔️🌈🕊🌞☕
...
Ps
I would suggest
Cut the financial cloth to suit the situation... eat a healthy one main meal a day (unless yr tree lopping) and always drink good water with electrolytes ... and go fossick as much as fresh air allows... and most importantly... do NOT believe everything anyone tells you without looking at the entire field of available information (and if not available, ask "why not?") and keep looking... as well as grow a garden... cheers...
...
And if you wish to read a travel blog on Bulgaria look here... https://wolfemurray.com/romany-gypsies-in-romania-bulgaria/
 
This confusion of life expectancy with lifespan, is an all too common fallacy. Life expectancy is a statistical construct, based on the average age at death of all people in a population from birth. The very high death rates of babies, infants and children up until several decades into the 20th century, are reflected in correspondingly low life expectancy figures. However, I think you'll find that the majority of Australian men who survived long enough to enter the workforce in those days, would have still been around at pension age, just like today.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/...ncient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200512-the-ingredients-that-hold-the-secret-to-a-long-lifeMmm... lots of useful info in the links... thank you......
And, when I studied the lives of many from within the last 2000 years or so, what I found was that many of the leaders of the early AMERICAN settlers (for example), GENERALS in the Sth and Nth of the American Civil War etc, were quite elderly when they died...( if war did not kill them...ie.). and this longevity is sprinkled thru history (as the article enclosed shows … thank you GS...)…
Those who lived/loved long are many examples of a good life... so we can ascertain the thought-streams that shows us that good food, air, exercise, and inner peace and contentment are the open secret to a long life, and staying out of dangerous occupations like many boys do...
... all of the luck in a long life ALSO appears as the luck of the draw within DNA sequence we inherit, and the subsequent environment we live in; of where we actually manage to park the body during the decades of life ie, as some places are more healthy than others... (the air coming out of some of the limestone caves in Indo-China are toxic in the valleys below,... and villages in Papua New Guinea discovered that some mountain villages they moved to, the people died in (a uranium deposit was the hill), and smog in Delhi India, and Mexico City are hardly conducive to long life, are they?), ...
And,...how we manage all of these factors is not only pure luck of the inherited DNA, AND a whole pile of environmental factors..., but also our inherited DNA can be altered by our thought-streams, how we manage the bio-connection of thought-streams that create (or do not create) our lives, as well as what we take into the physical, intellectual, emotional body, which is essentially a pragmatic management of our humble life span within all of its parts... (and some friends of mine over the decades, were/are pure lazy and did/will die pre-maturely due to not taking life into their own responsible hands...)… it is interesting... We are like a fish swimming within an environment doin the best we can...
...
So... I am mindful of the Healthy, in all aspects as much as possible...
And,
1)… no amount of gold can bring me back from some aspects of ill-health...
2)… as from research done for decades now, shows that fundamental good health starts at the cellular level and thus,
3)… keeping the physicality clean on the inner level appears to be most important,
4)… so that (ideally) waste products do not get created in the first instance, and this is diet-environment related by not putting rubbish into the body in the first place (not easy in our polluted world),
5)… and if a toxic build-up happens then even more important is cleansing the toxins out of the body (colon cancer can be said to be huge contributing factor of waste build-up) ...So, passing that toxic build-up out of the body is similar to changing the oil on our 4WD and doing a flush... .
...
So as to be able to go gold hunting when we are 110 years young...
...
All pragmatics hey... and a planned design...?! Start wherever we are right now... do not wait to die just yet... Pass GO, Collect the $200... lol...
...
So many common fallacies to look into in our so-called Modern World View... and it seems we are one evolutionary step away from our so-called Ape Ancestry that still rules by the reptilian brain stem of violence, death, war, genocide, and created famines, and thus we are still rather primitive, yet tossed into that mix is the WMDs ready to destroy ourselves and most of the planet... Just plain evolutionary destructive toys the oil bubble has created via manufacture in a very space of time... utter madness, and we are run by idiots on the world scene it appears ...
...
On top of that we are transitting into a cyborg state by being fused with AI..
An AI which has stated we could be wiped out quickly by AI...
...
So maybe the genetic modification we are finding on Planet Earth right now is a planned event (spanning hundreds of years) to take the primitive human species IN-to a fused AI bio-machine of a much greater Universally-Conscious Intelligence...
...
Just take a look at the development in the last 200 years... Humanity appears to be like a bacteria in a petrie dish being tweeked to evolve as fast as possible before it destroys itself...
200 years is not even the very tiniest blip in the Earths' Timeline... and yet in a mere 100 years we went from horse and wagons to Satellites and GPS...
I find this more than interesting...
All evidence based reality... with no need to believe any particular view expressed herein... Let the evidence speak... and so, what does it say?
...
So would you insert a chip inside of you as a brain - environment interface... A reading device that goes both ways... in which our physicality can be monitored and toxins can be identified, life spans could go into the hundreds of years, and gold could be detected under our feet as we walk upon the earth and we could know what is there (or choose not to with a thought)…
...
Sci-Fi... hey!
Keep living on Earth for the next decades and watch what happens ...
...
Ground penetrating radar happens now via drones to 30 metres depth via Lidar, and has done for decades....
... So, what happens when we hook that data set to the brain - interface... ? And all in real time... we 'see' gold beneath our feet, or a bottle top...
...
Tech is interesting...
Have a great day...
Things to do here...
Cheers all...

Ps
We are on the threshold where living 150 years can be a normal thing as the cellular levels can be energetically adjusted to suit... more of Star Trek hey!?
 
We cannot get the pension. Mine because of a fictitious asset and Mrs M shares my assets although she hasn't come of age yet. To help manage our living expenses we moved from the more expensive south west to the goldfields where we could by a similar home for hundreds of thousands less. That extra couple of hundred thousand dollars can go a long way to improving your lifestyle if you're not a big spender.
Yeah, some years ago when I turned 65, I also tried for a part pension, even one dollar, as that would have given entitlement to a health concession card. The sum of all the concessions and discounts that the card entitles the holder means that a person just above the pension threshold can be worse off than someone just under by some thousands of dollars.
My income for that year was just $400 over the limit. I was disappointed to think that I was to be stuck in that no man’s land just above the pension entitlement limit.
In a way it was also good, as it freed me from the feeling that many aged pensioners have to suffer in keeping their reported income and assets below the pension limit and all that other reporting ********.
 
Retirement age changed July 2021. So if you were born between 1 July 55 - Dec 56 it’s 66 1/2 after 1 Jan 57 it’s 67. Mackka
I guess another way of looking at it, is that it has increased 2 years in 122 years.....during which time our lifespans have increased an average of 38 years for men (nearly doubled).

Glass half full folks 😊
 
This confusion of life expectancy with lifespan, is an all too common fallacy. Life expectancy is a statistical construct, based on the average age at death of all people in a population from birth. The very high death rates of babies, infants and children up until several decades into the 20th century, are reflected in correspondingly low life expectancy figures. However, I think you'll find that the majority of Australian men who survived long enough to enter the workforce in those days, would have still been around at pension age, just like today.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/...ncient-people-live-life-span-versus-longevity
Yes, death in the first 5 years of life was a major factor, death in the workplace (and riding horses etc) was another, death due to disease was another, infection another (no antibiotics). Deaths with some types of surgery could be 50%. However death in the workplace was a major issue (a Ballarat miner had an average lifespan of 40 years).

Those who survived all that tended to live a similar number of years to what we do now. There is a difference between how many years you can potentially live if nothing bad happens to you, and how many years you actually live. The fact that you died by age 5 but 75% of people didn't would not have been a great consolation to you personally. But it is relevant to retirement planning...
The fact that you have survived to 65 (or 67) means you will still live longer than your expected lifespan at birth...much longer.

The biggest problem with increasing the pension age is that society has not got used to the fact that older people can work longer, so don't employ them (but that hard physical work is unlikely to continue to be possible). Governments need to focus on those issues, not just on increasing retirement age.
 
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"improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints".

https://www.nature.com/articles/nat... suggests that maximum lifespan is not fixed.
It strikes me that it would be odd to find that humans unlike other species don't have a fixed maximum lifespan. The lifespans of other mammals vary greatly between species - they are a characteristic of each species which implies a set lifespan. The lifespan of dogs is 10-14 years depending on variety, and none has ever been recorded reaching 30 years of age. Weasels average 1-2 years. Bowheads whales live 150-200 years (212 measured in one). The Greenland shark can reach 400 years. But no human has exceeded 122 years.

https://www.sciencealert.com/do-your-genes-determine-how-long-you-ll-live
I have had a number of family members survive into their hundreds, one to 106. but I suspect they were no less wrinkly and decrepit than those who got to that age 100 years ago. Be careful what you wish for.....
 
I think medicine tends to be underestimated in extending lifespan. Consider the 10 main causes of death in the USA in 1850, 1900 and 2000, Despite the danger of accidents a hundred years ago, disease was an even more important cause of death. We largely wiped the main ones out (TB, dysentery/diarrhoea, cholera. malaria, typhoid, diptheria, scarlet fever, meningitis and whooping cough). Accidents did not fall in the top 10 causes in 1850, were 7th in 1900 and are 5th now. Primarily because 9 of the top 10 causes in 1850 do not fall in the top 10 causes in 2000 (we found cures). Of the top 10 causes now, 8 of them are diseases for which we have no cures or limited cures as yet, or are lifestyle and old age related. Of the 1950 diseases of importance, only pneumonia/influenza remains (tending to be related and viral - viruses being something we only recently started to get on top of with the latest poandemic).

1850:

  1. Tuberculosis
  2. Dysentery/diarrhea
  3. Cholera
  4. Malaria
  5. Typhoid Fever
  6. Pneumonia
  7. Diphtheria
  8. Scarlet Fever
  9. Meningitis
  10. Whooping Cough

1900:

  1. Pneumonia
  2. Tuberculosis
  3. Diarrhea
  4. Heart disease
  5. Stroke
  6. Liver disease
  7. Accidents
  8. Cancer
  9. Normal aging
  10. Diphtheria
2000:

  1. Heart disease
  2. Cancer
  3. Stroke
  4. Lung disease
  5. Accidents
  6. Diabetes
  7. Pneumonia/Influenza
  8. Alzheimer’s disease
  9. Kidney disease
  10. Blood poisoning
 
Big whinge of the day from me, I just got my car insurance renewal from RAA Insurance, $663.00 WHAT THE F..., last year it was $421.00, It's a Colorado 4x4 tray top and I bought it new in 2016 and my first years payment was $240.00 and they've increased my excess from an original $300 to a whopping $600, Not Happy Jan ☹️
 
Further to my whinge about my vehicle insurance, I believe they are jacking up my premium because if I have a prang and the vehicle is a write off they have to pay for a new like for like vehicle.
 
IMO they are going up because of everything else that is happening, floods, fires, Covid, world economic situation, strikes, pay rises, increased parental leave and the list goes on. Private Health cover has gone up and what you can claim on Medicare has changed dramatically and the list goes on and on. I feel for ya mate but I don't have an answer. Kind Regards, Mackka
 
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I just got off the phone to them Mackka, they told me they are going to review it and will get back to me within a week. I understand that we are all paying extra for the fires and floods on our homes and contents but vehicle insurance is a different kettle of fish, vehicle accidents are actually decreasing in percentage terms of more vehicles on the road but you'll never see vehicle premiums decrease.
 
Miss Kay's pulled me up on the natural disasters and vehicles Mackka, "what about all the vehicles ruined in the floods and the fires" point taken.
 
I just got off the phone to them Mackka, they told me they are going to review it and will get back to me within a week. I understand that we are all paying extra for the fires and floods on our homes and contents but vehicle insurance is a different kettle of fish, vehicle accidents are actually decreasing in percentage terms of more vehicles on the road but you'll never see vehicle premiums decrease.
Think you will find this is your issue your forgetting? Compounded by what I don't understand is that look at any flooded street and there are lines of cars parked with water up to the bonnet, even still parked in the driveway of flooded homes. Must be to hard to simply drive it around the corner and up a bit of a hill when you notice the water rising 🤔 :( Some one has to pay for this Insurers have received 22,509 motor vehicle claims related to the SE Queensland and NSW floods – of those, 11,633 are in NSW and 10,876 in Queensland.
https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/east-coast-floods-to-compound-new-car-delays-price-increases
 
H
Think you will find this is your issue your forgetting? Compounded by what I don't understand is that look at any flooded street and there are lines of cars parked with water up to the bonnet, even still parked in the driveway of flooded homes. Must be to hard to simply drive it around the corner and up a bit of a hill when you notice the water rising 🤔 :( Some one has to pay for this Insurers have received 22,509 motor vehicle claims related to the SE Queensland and NSW floods – of those, 11,633 are in NSW and 10,876 in Queensland.
https://www.whichcar.com.au/news/east-coast-floods-to-compound-new-car-delays-price-increases
How many of these will ever be paid out? In the past the insurance companies have claimed "it was an act of god" so that let them off the hook.
 
Dave I think the old business principle come into play with insurance companies and many other companies for that matter. I worked for a company that had three legs and If one wasn't doing so well , the other two would share the burden and give them financial help, (albeit on paper), to regulate the loss. No different here. Mackka
 
Iam sure that old age is getting to me as I keep noticing people doing stupid things. Yesterday's news is Brisbane stated that BRAND NEW HOMES where the buyers have just moved in, are going to be bulldozed to make way for an extension to the Bruce Highway just north of the Pine River Bridge. Surely not i said to myself as Brisbane is suffering the worst housing shortage in history and to add to that, people that were devastated by the floods are still unable to find anywhere to live whether it be rent or buy combined with Trade and product supply shortages why would anyone even contemplate such a stupid, inconsiderate idea in the first place. The developer was not informed of the government's intentions when he purchased the land and subsequently the now owners of these new homes were not informed either. Mackka
 

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