Every year on ANZAC Day I look forward to listening to the dawn service from Martin Place on the radio. This dawn service is on the television, of course, on almost all networks, but I find there is something very special about listening to the service rather than seeing it.
My preference is to listen in a dark room, maybe even in bed with no light whatsoever. The service becomes more intimate in this way and allows a mental image to be drawn of a quiet, humble service by candlelight occurring just as the sun starts to make its light known. More importantly it allows me to imagine what our servicemen and servicewomen endure in dark and hostile locations around the world, and specifically given it is ANZAC Day and the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli in World War I, how our soldiers in that time must have felt, in the dark, on the other side of the world, with their only link to the rest of the world being a radio if they were lucky and an occasional letter service at other times.
I made the mistake one year of turning on the television for the Martin Place dawn service and was aghast at the entire area being floodlit. I know light is important for television, but it ruins the atmosphere of a very important and solemn event in my view.
The marches during the day require light and a generally happy atmosphere of gratitude, but this is not the case for the dawn services which occur in the dark as a commemoration of the events of the fateful landing at Gallipoli at dawn on April 25, 1915, and deserve a solemn atmosphere which dark and candlelight provide, and floodlights do not.
With a 57% strike rate this is a decent strategy, but this is not a “set and forget” system. In order to be profitable it does require a few minutes of management each day.
This is using the Stop At A Winner Greyhound Deluxe software to dutch bet (proportionate bet sizes per runner to receive the same amount of profit regardless of which one of them wins) the top two favourites in the market. In my testing over the course of two weeks, it has generally returned a daily profit of about 100x whatever the per-winning-race profit target is set to.
There have been some drawdowns and stop losses hit along the way, which is why a bit of daily management is required to keep it on track. I explain the details of how to do this in the video, along with a second way of managing it which returns a lower profit but also carries a lower risk of hitting a stop loss and so potentially could be a better way to manage the system in the long run.
Somewhere around 2006 to 2008, a new and bizarre twist on the gameshow format took over the wee small hours of television both in Australia and the UK, maybe elsewhere too. It was a live-to-air interactive gameshow which tried to get viewers to call in to answer extremely simple questions for a chance to win cash prizes. The catch was that these shows were really there to make money for the networks by requiring viewers to ring premium rate phone numbers for a chance to get through, and most of the time the callers did not get through but were instead put on a callback list, and eventually when a producer decided enough money had been made, one of those callers would be called back at random…in the middle of the night, when the majority of the target audience was inebriated or crazy.
In between calls it was the host’s job, with some support from the crew, to fill time with whatever their imagination could dream up. Many many hours of filling airtime while the hosts slowly went as crazy as some of the callers.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well…one of the hosts of the British version of Quizmania, Greg Scott, was the subject of more than a few peculiar live-to-air moments and managed to roll with most of them very well indeed. This has been one of my favourite video clips on the internet for many years. My favourite moment is the caller who seems to have called the wrong channel with an answer to a question on a competing show on another network.
Eventually these shows died off almost entirely, although there was a studio in the Czech Republic churning out dozens of versions this type of show for various countries only a few years ago. As free-to-air TV viewership dwindles, it’s hard to see how this type of thing would make enough money to pay the bills these days. It was a strange form of fun while it lasted.
Thank you to all of you for your patience during my recent absence. I would like to especially thank those of you who offered your kind wishes to my mother while she was in hospital. Mum is back at home now, happy and comfortable, but still requires surgery at a date in the future which is yet to be set.
Today I have for you a rather simple little strategy which works quite slowly but also quite steadily on the horse racing markets. This is looking at the place market and looking to lay the favourite if it is at odds of 1.60 to 1.99. This generally indicates that although it is the favourite, it is quite a weak favourite, and often this results in it not running a place. Most favourites tend to sit at 1.50 or lower on the place market so this strategy doesn’t get a lot of bets but it does tend to get a good percentage of successful bets.
I am running this on races globally, wherever Betfair offers a place market. This is generally every horse and harness race in Australia and New Zealand, just about every race in the UK and Ireland, and then some of the French, South African and American races. The settings are fairly straight forward.
(click image to enlarge)
On these settings I would recommend a balance of $200 as a starting point (and yes, I know my balance is less than that in the screenshot, but I had some unexpected expenses recently and withdrawing some funds from Betfair was the best option at the time, and it does mean I’m running a bit of a risk having less than an ideal amount of funds to work with for this strategy but it has been steady over the month that it has been running so I’m willing to take that risk at this point in time).
These graphs show you results over the last month of testing, running a Stop At A Winner Staking method. You can see it has made approximately $80 in the month. Not a huge amount, but it has done so in a fairly steady manner with only two brief drawdowns of note.
It’s worth noting that the place market doesn’t have a heap of liquidity and not every race globally has a place market, and the number of races with a favourite in the target range is a fairly small percentage of events. But it is being selective in this manner which allows the system to flourish. Keeping the odds under 2.00 also means the stop at a winner staking method escalates in bet size quite slowly, which also helps to maintain it as a fairly safe and steady system. And the Stop At A Winner Deluxe software handles the job quite nicely.
Those of you who are reading this and thinking it has been a bit quiet here of late would be correct. Alas over the last couple of weeks I have been working a roster which is not my usual roster and has taken a bit of a toll on my sleep, which has made it difficult to find time to write much. And now I have a close family member in hospital awaiting an operation so I remain distracted.
Hopefully everything will settle down soon and I will be able to write more soon. I have run out of pre-written Sunday Share posts too, so I will need to put something together there before the end of the week.
There are many more peculiarly translated songs that I could share with you, but I’m going to end the series of translated songs today, at least for a while, with this one which is my favourite of all of the translations. A translation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
I hope that you have enjoyed this and been very happy about these fabrics. A change of pace is upon us next week for The Sunday Share.
In recent weeks I have shared with you some videos of Weezer covering various songs while being impersonated by other people in the video clips. This week, for the last Weezer clip I will be sharing with you, the band will actually appear!
This is another cover which I prefer over the original. Pumped Up Kicks, originally by Foster The People. Unfortunately Weezer have never officially released a cover of this song and I wish they would, so a video from one their concerts where they have performed it will have to do. This one, despite Rivers Cuomo seemingly forgetting the words, is probably the best quality of the concert videos in terms of the performance combined with picture quality.
Yesterday I had a dream that I was back in a previous workplace and I found out there was going to be a national power outage, so I had to run the generator to keep the power on at work.
I went up to the generator room (which looked like a larger and emptier version of one of the air conditioning plantrooms at the Canberra Centre) and started the generator but it wouldn’t get up to speed due to what it claimed was an insufficient airflow. So I went and found as many industrial size fans as I could and set them to blow on the generator to provide it with airflow. I had set up a dozen and was happy with that but thought it could use a few more to be on the safe side, and went away to find some. When I came back, the fans I had previously setup were missing and I found out that my present-day boss had sold them to the department store David Jones. So I went to David Jones to get the fans back but the store was a large maze and it was difficult to find the manager.
Meanwhile, I received a communication from an evil spirit which required my permission to pass through my property as a shortcut rather than going the long way around. I granted permission as long as it didn’t stop on my property, so it went through with a dozen other evil spirits and I had to contend with all manner of peculiar objects chasing me including a floating alligator-elephant thing which wanted to recite strange poems at me.
A good rule of thumb when there is a news story dominating the media despite being of little importance or relevance to the overwhelming majority of the audience is to look around and see what else is happening. Usually, when one story is blown out of all proportion and dominates the news for no good reason, there are other far more important stories which are getting a slither of coverage but not enough for most people to notice, and so most people are successfully distracted from seeing the stories which matter.
Today seems to be one of those days.
There dominant story in the news is about a bridge which collapsed in Baltimore. This is undoubtedly an important story locally in the Baltimore area. The fact a handful of people are missing and might be dead probably makes it worthy of some amount of national coverage in the US. Elsewhere in the world it really deserves no more than a few lines in the papers, and maybe a cursory mention near the end of TV and radio news bulletins. It is a story of no relevance to most of the world outside of Baltimore. And yet, from the moment it happened, it has been THE story dominating just about every news outlet in the western world. A stark difference from when the Gungahlin Drive Extension bridge collapsed here in Canberra and it barely rated a mention outside of Canberra. Unfortunately this distraction technique in the media works, as if you listen to people discussing news stories while they go about their day, primarily this is the story they are discussing even though it makes no difference to their lives whatsoever. Sadly most people will uncritically take whatever mainstream news says is important as being what is important.
So, what else is happening? Well, two stories seem to be of particular importance but are receiving minimal coverage.
Firstly, a few weeks ago I noted the crazy circumstance where Julian Assange couldn’t just appeal his extradition to the United States but instead had to plead for permission to appeal. Well, convenient timing, the UK High Court last night announced that they will grant Mr. Assange this permission, but only if the United States fails to assure them that they won’t impose the death penalty if the extradition is granted, and even then only make an appeal on the basis that he might not get a fair trial in the United States if the US courts fail to accept foreign nationals are subject to first amendment (free speech) protections. Meanwhile Mr. Assange sits in a British jail for even longer.
This story is far more important than a bridge collapse as it fundamentally revolves around the rights of people to find out things which governments might prefer be kept a secret. A society where people are punished for exposing that governments might be doing something bad is a terrifying prospect indeed.
Another important story is some weirdness going on with GPS systems. It is claimed that more than 1,600 aeroplanes across Europe have suffered from some sort of GPS outage. The official spin on this is that it’s Russia’s fault, with basically no evidence to back this up other than “they might be capable of it”. It seems more likely to me to be a result of the severe solar storm which has been hammering Earth’s atmosphere over the last week or so.
Our reliance on technology, and in particular satellite technology for communications and navigation, is a particular concern when solar storms (or cyber warfare) can knock out systems for short or long periods of time. Indeed, as we enter a more active solar cycle, with more reliance on such technologies than we had the last time the sun was particularly active, it is worth considering what backup plans you have in place should a large solar storm knock out communications to some extent. A Carrington-level event could even knock out power for a while. I’m in my mid-30s and I know I would struggle if most technology went away for a few days, but at least I’m old enough to remember a time before modern technology ran just about everything; I shudder to think how the young’uns would handle such an event. Navigating by paper map would be a trial for many.
There’s probably more news of importance than those two things I’ve highlighted but that is what has caught my attention so far. Good luck finding important information on the 6pm news though. Dig deeper. Much much deeper.
It is my pleasure to announce that, after a sky mouse decimated the supply of moon cheese during the night, the moon cows worked overtime and the moon cheese is now back at full capacity.
All I can say is: thank goodness ABBA had a good grasp of the English language and didn’t have to rely on dodgy automated translations.
Somehow I don’t think predictions about future digital video technologies or all-seeing wifi would have been received quite as well by the public. Brexit predictions at Eurovision would have been bold indeed!
A few people have been asking when I would have a soccer strategy ready to publish, well here it is.
I fiddled with it for a little while before arriving at these settings, which have now been in place for two weeks, and I’m pleased to say there has been some fairly steady profit.
For the first week or so I had it running on a 50c base stake and it produced a profit of about $16.
For the second week when I had more confidence in it, I increased the base stake to $2.50 in a balance of $100. It generated $50 of profit. Impressively there was only one loss in this period.
If we put both periods together and look at how running at a $2.50 base stake over the entire period would have looked, it would have generated $130.
This is using the LayPro88 Football Bot and is placing lay bets on the favourite in correct score market, if the home team is heavily favoured to win and the favourite in the correct score market is paying between $5.00 and $7.80, as long as the favourite score is not 1-1 (which is unlikely anyway if the home team is strong favourite to win). Full details of this can be seen in the video, along with how I’m managing multiple tabs to boost the potential profits from the strategy. However it would also work with just one tab running, perhaps with lower profit, but also lower risk, and so I have details on how I would suggest setting that up in the video too.
Hopefully this has been worth the wait. I know a few people have been eager to see this released.
Denise had been unwell for a few years and it was clear that this had been taking a toll on Kevin, who is widely regarded as one of the nicest people in AFL circles.
Kevin Bartlett was a legendary player for the Richmond Tigers and later became a commentator, calling many games for Seven throughout the 1990s and Fox Sports after that. He also called football on radio for SEN where he was the long-time host of the morning show Hungry For Sport, a play on his nickname “Hungry” from his playing days. In more recent years Kevin moved to 3AW as a commentator, but when Denise fell ill, Kevin took a step back from commentary to look after her, which was a great loss to football. On the odd occasion that Kevin did return to the airwaves, it was clear that his wife’s struggles were taking a toll on him too.
Kevin and Denise had been married for 54 years. She was as well-regarded around the Richmond football club as Kevin himself. While football had been Kevin’s life for the most part, Denise was his rock.
I’m sure that Kevin has many wonderful memories of Denise, and I hope that these memories can bring him comfort at this time.
Here in Canberra, just as in many other parts of the country, there are speed camera vans which can be setup in a wide variety of locations to measure the speed of passing vehicles and issue speeding fines. Here, these are operated by ACT Government employees unlike some other jurisdictions where the operation is outsourced to private contractors. The ACT’s vans are white and have a retractable sign on the roof which states “your speed has been checked” but are otherwise fairly unremarkable vehicles.
I am strongly opposed to the existence of these, partially because I believe most speed limits should be abolished, but moreso because I believe they deny natural justice by:
1. Removing the element of discretion from the enforcing officer
2. Making it impossible for the driver to know with any certainty whether a fine will be issued, as the fines take weeks to be issued and delivered, thus removing some of the driver’s ability to contemporaneously collect and preserve evidence for their defence
3. Reverse the onus of proof, by requiring the registered owner of the vehicle to prove that they either weren’t speeding (practically impossible if they don’t have the opportunity to collect evidence at the time) or they weren’t the driver involved; in a society where a person is supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, there are grave problems with the processes of the speed camera van system.
There is also an issue that is not confined to the speed camera vans but more broadly of the infringement notice system which is used by the speed camera vans among other government agencies, that the receiver is coerced into accepting the fine rather than defending it in court by virtue of the infringement notice fine being substantially less than a court could impose. It is effectively a coercive tool to make people admit guilt by offering them a smaller punishment, and for many people it is simpler to just admit guilt, even if they don’t believe they were guilty, rather than go through the process of defending the charge when the system will effectively treat them as guilty until proven innocent.
I also believe that the speed cameras are not an effective road safety tool as they don’t do anything to correct driver behaviour at the time of the offence. In my view, only police officers should be able to conduct speed enforcement as they have the authority to stop a driver at the time, something which the speed camera vans can’t do, and police also have the ability to exercise discretion based on the circumstances at the time. I believe that speeding fine should only be able to be issued if police detect a driver to be speeding, and then make a reasonable effort to intercept the driver.
A couple years ago I decided to make my position on this matter known. Apart from writing a submission (which was largely ignored) to an ACT Legislative Assembly inquiry into road safety, I also had a sign produced.
When I saw a speed camera van and had the time to do so, I would set up an impromptu protest near the speed camera van, where I stood there waving the sign about. This received an overwhelmingly positive response from passing motorists.
Originally, and this is starting to get the point of why I’m writing this today, I was setting up somewhere in the line of sight of the speed camera van, partially obscuring the camera’s view of traffic. On the second occasion of this, the speed camera van operator called the police and they attended. The police officer asked me to leave the area. The ACT has a Human Rights Act which, among other things, protects the right to peaceful demonstration, so I wasn’t going to leave without the police officer providing a very good reason as to why they thought I had to do so. The police officer claimed that I was breaking the law by “hindering a territory official” which is quite a stretch considering that law was really designed to allow emergency services to go about their business without being obstructed, not to protect bureaucrats sitting in vans, and given I was not interacting with the speed camera van operator or preventing them from operating their equipment, it was unlikely that such a charge would hold up in court. However, it was likely that the police officer would take me into custody if I didn’t oblige and move on, so I moved on.
It’s also worth noting that if merely being in the line of sight of the camera between it and passing vehicles could be said to meet the criteria of “hindering a territory official” then every driver of a vehicle in the lane closest to the speed camera would be contravening this law by blocking the view of a further away lane.
Furthermore, the Human Rights Act’s protection of the right to peaceful demonstration applies unless a law specifically prohibits the activity. Standing somewhere with a sign is not an illegal activity unless a prohibition zone is created, which is what was done by the ACT Government in the streets near the abortion clinic in the city. It was necessary for the government to specifically list the areas in which protesting abortion were to be illegal in order to overcome the Human Rights Act. There is no legislation to create a prohibition zone in the vicinity of a movable object such as a speed camera van, so really, it was an empty threat to charge me with “hindering a territory official”.
Regardless, to ease tensions and keep the peace, on future occasions I moved my protests across the road from the speed camera vans, or occasionally opposite their headquarters in Hume at their shift changeover, so that I would not be in their line of sight of traffic. The speed camera van operators (apart from one) still don’t like it and I have even had one stop doing their work of their own volition to take photos of me and threaten legal action, but obviously what I am doing is perfectly legal and should be perfectly legal in a democratic nation, so nothing has come of it.
What brings all of this up at this point in time is that the Australian Federal Police, who provide police services to Canberra among other things, are about to embark on strike activity. They won’t be walking off the job as such, but will engage in various activities, one of which caught my attention as being relevant to my activities.
Union members voted on 36 potential actions which range from putting slogans on AFP vehicles and uniforms and blocking mobile speed vans, to not attending court matters, not transporting alleged offenders, and not investigating any referrals to the AFP from the offices of politicians where no offence has been committed.
Blocking mobile speed vans. In other words, demonstrating in a place which will block the view of a speed camera van. The very activity which they threatened to charge me over. There is no difference from a legal standpoint between them demonstrating for better pay and conditions in front of a speed camera van, and me demonstrating against speed cameras in front of a speed camera van. The only potential legal difference is that police officers have special powers not afforded to civilians, however the wording of the proposed strike action makes it clear that the officers are not considered to be working whenever they conduct their strike activity, so it cannot be argued that they are using special powers available to police officers at such a time.
The exact wording of the proposed action, as notified to the Fair Work Commission, is slightly less clear than what the writer of the news article has interpreted it to mean
21. The indefinite or periodic interruption of work for members to park police vehicles in front of speed cameras, at school zones and any Australian Federal Police related Government facility while displaying emergency lights.
It was suggested to me that “in front of speed cameras” could mean they’re a little down the road and slowing passing motorists with their flashing lights before the motorists would reach the speed camera. If this is the case, it is still a useful precedent for my activities as my current across-the-road approach tends to slow down traffic as it passes, which is exactly what the police strike action would do. Given the stated aim of the speed camera program is to reduce the speed of motorists, it is impossible to argue that my actions or those of the striking police officers are “hindering a territory official” when the actions in fact help them to reach their stated aim.
Regardless of how exactly the strike action plays out, the precedent set by the proposals alone is enough to confirm what I have believed all along. It is perfectly legal within the ACT to protest near a speed camera van, regardless of the reason for the protest, unless it happen to be a protest against abortion within a couple blocks of Moore Street in the city. So waving an “abolish speed cameras” sign is A-OK!
The other day during my sleep I had a dream that I had taken a job as an actor. I was supposed to play a doctor in a rural town and the filming was to take place in a town about ten hours drive from Canberra. Of course, I am not an actor, so I was hoping that the people in charge didn’t notice my distinct lack of acting skills.
I drove to this remote town with one of the other actors and they spent most of the trip reading their lines from a very small notebook. After we arrived in the town there was a meeting of everyone involved in the filming, and I read through a larger notebook containing my lines, but paid no attention to the meeting so I missed all of the details about the filming schedule.
I then went to the only store in town, which was a very large version of a Go-Lo store (which used to be a discount store with many hundreds of outlets across Australia) which had floor tiles which looked like an Aldi store. There was a wall of discount blueberries, half in small size and the other half in large size. They were very tasty so I decided to buy some, however as the store was very large, it was recommended that customers wear skis so they could travel through the store more quickly. I started skiing towards the checkouts however ended up at the other end of the store in the high speed aisle and found myself doing laps of the store at 80km/h while all the paths to the checkouts were blocked so I was required to just continue circling the store on skis while eating blueberries!
