QLD Roads being destroyed by Mining Industry.

The problem is we are faced with today is ever-increasing taxes, yet we are asked to pay for services also.

Superannuation is a classic example. It used to be you pay income tax all your life then you go on the pension when you retire. Now you pay (more) income tax your whole life but there's probably no pension because you should have funded it yourself.

 

Have you ever seen a government report stating they have too much money? Yet taxes continue to increase. They're vultures, there will never be anything left, and they'll always claim there's not enough tax dollars to go around.

It's interesting to see how they value human life:

Table 4.3: Estimated Health Damages from Air Pollution in Australia

10 deaths per year = $810 million

So 1 life = $81 million

 

^^^ WTF?!?

So if each life is worth $81m then (simplistically) each year of life in terms of assessing an infrastructure project is "worth" ~$1 million per year of life.

The average GDP/person is only around $63,000. So the average value of an additional year of life is over 15 times what people can physically produce.

I can't believe they are justifying that we can spend 15 years of our life building random infrastructure assets that increase our life expectancy by 1 year!?! That's not an investment, that's just friggin' stupid.

 

You'll never become a politician with that attitude.

Imagine how thankful that statically insignificant individual would be if they knew their life was in danger, and that years of your toil potentially saved them from a not-so-certain death.

 

none of these freight/public transport/ urban conjestion issues are necessarily a roads problem... you gotta start thinking beyond the roads.

I contend that despite our best efforts, user charging always penalises the poorest and advantages the richest.

And while I may be adding to everyone's congestion costs, everyone else is contributing to mine.

 

I'm not a statistician but I suggest that you and willrocks are reading the report wrong. My brother has a PHD in statistics and could no doubt explain it so that I could understand it better however he's in Uganda doing (medical) Doctor things (He's the smart driven one in the family, I get by on my good looks and charm )

 

Where are they re-allocating their resources to? China?

Mining is different to Manufacturing in that you cant just pack up and move your operations offshore. You gotta be where the minerals are.

I suppose they could all pack up and go to South Africa for the Platinum?

 

Thanks for the reference. However, $7m per death is a LONG way from $81m per death. At $7m you are getting much much closer to the real output of a particular individual in a given occupation. Further there's a difference between valuing the risk of death of a person doing a specific job versus a generic person. I would argue that any estimate which is substantially away from the average value of output (as this 15:1 seems to be) is flawed if used to justify an investment to reduce the risk of death.

Similarly, any willingness-to-pay measure w.r.t. valuing life must account for the "ability to pay". I might be willing to pay $10m but unless I actually have enough income I can't - so it is simply nonsensical to actually spend up to $10m to save a life (or extend a bunch) unless it results in at least this much extra output.

 

$7 million per death was an example in the link (American) I provided on how the math works and has absolutely nothing to do with the specific figures from the Treasury report, you'll have to muddle through the math yourself as I personally only perform basic math. It's just not my bag



This is the sort of explanation I'd be able to provide.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITUSZ6LRHrk[/youtube]

 

You love seeing trucks on the road, but are you happy to be paying for them? A large truck causes maybe 10,000 times more damage to the road than a car while not paying anywhere near a fair share towards road maintenance. Everyone else bears the cost.

 

Actually figures like that are on the low side, especially for the really large trucks. There's plenty of research done on number of axels and road wear.

 

It's a difficult issue to fairly allocate costs. There is a book (probably out of date now) titled Privatization and Regulation of Transport Infrastructure and it has this interesting box on pricing:

 

^ A colleague at work could talk your ear off about this stuff. Bottom line is some form of direct user pays pricing (be it congestion charging/tolls or whatever) will have large benefits.

 

start making the roads from edencrete. problem solved.

 

At US$6K+ per cubic metre it is a teensy bit more expensive than normal concrete though (<$300/m3).

 

i think it's closer to $480 per cube.

edencrete is an additive added to concrete. it's retail cost is $25 US per gallon. 4 gallons does a cubic yard which is 0.76 cubic metres. you'll need 5.23 gallons to treat a cubic metre of concrete thereabouts so around $130 US which is about $180 aus.

 

Hmm. My converter said 264.1721 gallons per m3 which is where I came up with a different number.

 

That's for the pure edencrete product! it's an additive, added to concrete to improve it's properties. heh