Several political ramblings and a bug
People, stop focussing on HECS debts (and what student has $540 per week living expenses? Only if you are helping pay off the beemer your dad gave you, or you are extremely careless in finding living quarters). Whether you will obtain a large HECS debt is almost irrelevant. Who cares if science students pay more HECS debt than arts students? If you can afford to pay it off, you eventually will. If you can't, you won't. It's not like a housing loan. And in the scheme of life's expenses, it is negligible. Especially if you're only average and still earn $1.5M more than average non-university educated people over your respective lifetimes. What isn't negligible, and what does stop people from ending the cycle of poverty, is the immediate costs of higher education. If your parents, living in the country, can't financially support you, then you're basically stuffed. I lost track of the number of times in which I thought it wasn't possible to go on, living on Centrelink's excuse of a welfare payment while paying about 2/3 of that towards rent, and using the rest to buy bowls of plain white rice for lunch. It's amazing how much effect on your mental health it is, to be just barely scraping by, skipping the occasional meal because you just can't damn well afford it. I would have loved the opportunity to gain a loan (before HELP came in) that would have given me more income at the expense of my hecs debt. Even so, I seem to remember HELP came with quite a penalty on your centrelink payments. After my postgrad scholarship ran out, I would have had a much higher chance of finishing in a timely fashion if I was again able to draw against my HECS debt. As it was, slipping through the centrelink and departmental cracks, there is not a bank in the world even a couple of years ago that would have loaned tens of thousands of dollars to someone who had no assets or income, and yet it was barely months into full time employment before I would have been able to pay such a loan off (I know this through bitter experience. It was trivial to pay off mum's credit card which I had previously maxed out).
Petro Georgiou is calling it quits at the next election. One of the very small number of people in the Coalition that I greatly respect. Good luck mate.
We had another bug in the system lastnight. Predator prey systems typically have boom/bust cycles, where a boom year might happen every 5 years or so. This year looks like it's going to be another locust and fly season. And ladybeetles. They have carpeted the floor of the new survey telescope at the top of the mountain, leading to a crunchy mess. They have carpeted a sign 500m down the road from our dome, but not an identical sign 1500m down the road. Ocassionally, when I walk out onto the outer catwalk, I get attacked by some rather high flyers (it turns out they bite!).
It's almost a wonder this didn't happen before. After iterating 10 times - each time involving the 2dF robot stamping the button down with a few kg of force and then getting upset that the button wasn't observed to the required 20µm accuracy - the robot would have given up causing the "invalid centroid" failure that had to be rectified before the start of the lastnight. But it was too late - I'm sure this poor little girl would have already been suffering from quite a bit of a headache by that stage.
Amazingly, that button didn't suffer a prism loss, and kept on observing the rest of that night. Gee I'm glad it wasn't one retractor over. Guide bundles are both fragile, and very very important. One of the other buttons on the plate mysteriously lost its prism though.
Petro Georgiou is calling it quits at the next election. One of the very small number of people in the Coalition that I greatly respect. Good luck mate.
We had another bug in the system lastnight. Predator prey systems typically have boom/bust cycles, where a boom year might happen every 5 years or so. This year looks like it's going to be another locust and fly season. And ladybeetles. They have carpeted the floor of the new survey telescope at the top of the mountain, leading to a crunchy mess. They have carpeted a sign 500m down the road from our dome, but not an identical sign 1500m down the road. Ocassionally, when I walk out onto the outer catwalk, I get attacked by some rather high flyers (it turns out they bite!).
It's almost a wonder this didn't happen before. After iterating 10 times - each time involving the 2dF robot stamping the button down with a few kg of force and then getting upset that the button wasn't observed to the required 20µm accuracy - the robot would have given up causing the "invalid centroid" failure that had to be rectified before the start of the lastnight. But it was too late - I'm sure this poor little girl would have already been suffering from quite a bit of a headache by that stage.
Amazingly, that button didn't suffer a prism loss, and kept on observing the rest of that night. Gee I'm glad it wasn't one retractor over. Guide bundles are both fragile, and very very important. One of the other buttons on the plate mysteriously lost its prism though.