Sour Cream, Orange and Raisin Pie Recipe

Sour cream, orange and raisin pieThis is a recipe from the most recent Donna Hay Magazine (issue 38). This is not the first recipe to leap out at you, but I’m here to tell you that it’s worth it. It’s not very sweet, and the combination of ingredients is not particularly common. It’s awesomely yum.

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour (for pastry)
1/2 cup caster sugar (for pastry)
1/8 teaspoon baking powder (for pastry)
100g softened, unsalted butter (for pastry)
1 tablespoon of water (for pastry)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (for pastry)
1 1/4 cups raisins (remove all stems)
2/3 cup orange juice
1 tablespoon orange rind (equivalent to 1 small orange)
2/3 cup caster sugar
1 tablespoon plain flour
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream

Method

Firstly, we need to make the pastry, so be aware you’ll need about 30-40 mins for this before the real cooking starts.

Sift flour, sugar and baking powder into a mixing bowl. Cut the butter into very small pieces and mix into the dry ingredients with your fingers using a clicking motion. Or just do it all in a food processor. It should form a bread-crumb consistency.

Add the water and vanilla extract, and mix through. It should now stick together form a smooth, dough ball.

Cover in cling-wrap, and place in the fridge for 30 minutes. Go away and make yourself a cup of coffee, or watch an episode of Scrubs.

Preheat oven to 160 degrees.

Grate the orange rind. Remove the pastry from the fridge to let it soften a little (especially if you’ve left it for more than 30 minutes like I did).

Warm raisins and orange juice together in a small saucepan over low heat for about five minutes. Raisins will soften. Then add the orange rind, caster sugar and flour. Stir to combine, and cook for another five minutes until the mixture thickens a little. Remove from stove.

Blend sour cream with the eggs in a bowl, and then stir in the orange mixture.

Roll out the pastry. Grease a 24cm shallow pie tin, and line it with the pastry. Place the pie base on a baking tray, and pout the filling mixture into the base (do not overfill).

Bake for about 40-45 minutes or until cooked through. Serves 6-8.

Google sends me cheques

GoogleOkay, they’re not very big cheques, but the ads on this site apparently get clicked on by enough people that Google sends me cheques. Okay, only one cheque so far. It was for $120.47 – that’s enough to pay for my hosting fees.

Although, I hear you asking, how can an obscure personal blog get enough visits – let alone clicks – for Google ads to work? This is an obvious question, with a pretty interesting answer, that if I have it right, suggests that web ads are a special case of search ads.

A quick tutorial. Google has two advertising programs: AdSense and AdWords. AdWords enables advertisers to submit ads that are displayed against particular words or search terms (e.g. “negative gearing”). AdSense enables web page authors/publishers to give-up space on their pages for ads to shown. Google matches the AdWords advertisers with AdSense publishers in order to maximise the chance of visitors clicking on the ads.

I am a member of the AdSense program, but it’s really token involvement. You’ll see only a single text-based ad block, capable of showing two ads, on any page. I’m not exactly running an advertising honey-pot, here.

However, apparently certain pages on this site are popular enough to attract a significant amount of traffic. The top pages are (in order):

Now, I haven’t run the stats (yet), but of the above, the only pages with ads that seem likely to generate clicks are the Best Man Speech, Cheesecake Recipe, Positive Gearing Analysis and Investment Book Reviews. These aren’t pages that change at all often, so it’s not my regular readers (!) who are clicking on those ads. I think this is the norm for blogs – it’s not the regular readers generating advertising revenue.

The ad revenue comes from those who arrive on the site via web searches. Near 80% of all visits come from search engines. The top search terms of visitors are:

  • “best man speech”, “best man speeches”, and “bestman speeches”
  • “cheesecake recipe” and “cheesecake recipes”
  • “positive gearing”

Those terms account for a third of all search visitors, and there are several other variants of those. What it strongly suggests is that there are people searching for particular terms, and instead of clicking on the paid ads in the search results they click on a link to one of my pages. And then, once they’ve arrived on one of my pages, they click on a paid ad.

One explanation is that the pages on my blog provide a type of advertising filter. Perhaps the search engine , say Google, is not able to fine-tune the paid ads when all it has to go on is the term “best man speech”, but when Google can utilise all of the words in one of my pages, it does much better. So much so that people click first on a real page, not as a way of getting everything they want, but as a way of giving Google more information on what they’re after.

And a diversity of topics on a blog lends itself to being used by Google in this way. Typically a blog will focus on a single topic and build up a readership that is strongly interested in that topic. But those readers aren’t likely to be clicking on ads anyway. So my atypical approach of rambling wildly about many things doesn’t build up much of a readership, but it does enable Google to use my content to optimise its ads and hence pay me a small commission when people click on them.

The Summit – or perhaps a long way from it

2020 Summit logoI have been pretty interested in seeing the outcomes of the Australia 2020 Summit, and even put my own submission in. And in trying to find some detail on how the first day of The Summit went, I came across Andrew Bolt’s blog posts on it.

Andrew Bolt is pretty amusing, and strongly stands in the conservative camp. But I could not believe what I was reading – it sounded like the first day was a complete waste of time. How could this have happened – surely it was professionally facilitated? Well, I then checked out the the video of the first day’s plenary highlights.

It wasn’t as bad as I had feared, but it was pretty bad. Almost everyone put on camera struggled to communicate their thoughts or articulate what initiatives are looking likely. Most seemed to be in awe of the celebrities and powerbrokers also present. We got a lot of motherhood statements, but they genuinely seemed to feel uplifted by being a part.

However, the Summit’s not for them, it’s for us. Here are the initiatives that were mentioned by people in the video:

  • Put indigenous people on the boards of cultural organisations.
  • Establish a Ministry of Culture (don’t we have one already?).
  • Draft a national Cultural Policy (isn’t that it’s job?).
  • Mandate a national Creative Curriculum.
  • Draft a national Action Plan for Social Inclusion.
  • Provide one-stop-shops for local communities for housing and communal support.
  • Establish a Community Services Commission, like the Productivity Commission.
  • Establish a National Sustainability Commissioner, like the ACCC.
  • Draft a national agreement/treaty with indigenous peoples.
  • Set a policy of continuous disclosure for the government, particularly online.
  • Draft a Bill of Rights.
  • Become a Republic.
  • Establish a “rights based labour mobility programme” to enable Pacific peoples to work in Australia.

Alright – that last one isn’t like the others. It is actually an idea that sounds new.

I understand that each of the ten groups is meant to identify one “big idea” and two or three smaller policy initiatives that could be worked on following the Summit. So, that’s up to 40 actionable items in all. The list above is for 13 items, so they still have 27 to find.

I really do wish them all the best, but if the above represents the results from Day 1 then there’s still a long way to go to fulfill the ambitions of the Summit by the end of Day 2.

All part of Sony’s grand plan?

Sony logoFrom the side-lines, it’s been hard to fathom what Sony is up to. In fact, it’s easier to explain their actions as a lack of strategy rather than a grand plan. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume they’ve got one.

Kate sent me a link to an article at The Age about James Gosling, who was touring around Australia recently. He’s an interesting guy, and I actually got to meet him. I also heard him speak at Sun Tech Day at the start of March, where he voiced an interesting thought: that players for Blu-ray Discs (got to have the hyphen) could make excellent TV set-top boxes.

The recent version of the Blu-ray specification (called Profile 2.0, also known as BD-Live) requires that the player has an Ethernet port, the ability to connect to the Internet, and 1GB of local storage. It’s intended for newer content to be pulled off the web to supplement the disc, rather having to rely on what’s stored on the disc. However, there’s nothing really to stop it from pulling all the content from the web, and having nothing on the disc. The disc could be a bit like the BBC iPlayer, and enable you to watch any movies or TV programs you like without having to insert a new disc.

And now that Sony’s won the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war, we’re all going to eventually get Blu-ray players to make use of the High Definition TV screens we’re all buying. But what makes this different from all the other Sony boxes that you’ve ever bought, is that you may never need to replace any of your media.

Basically, every time Sony’s come up with a new format, they’ve needed to take one of two approaches: provide backwards compatibility with previous formats, or get people to buy all new stuff that conforms to the new format. The PlayStation is a great example of them following the former strategy – the PS2 and PS3 have been backwardly compatible, allowing people to keep old games. However, most of the time, Sony follows the latter strategy. Do you remember any of these..

  • Betamax, introduced by Sony in the mid 1970s – long dead
  • Compact Disc (CD), introduced by Sony and Philips in the early 1980s – terminal illness
  • Digital Audio Tape (DAT), introduced by Sony in the mid 1980s – now dead
  • MiniDisc (MD), introduced by Sony in the early 1990s – close to death
  • Memory Stick, introduced by Sony in the late 1990s – over the hill
  • Universal Media Disc (UMD), introduced by Sony in the mid 2000s – sad and lonely

You will note that none of those technologies was backwards compatible. With Blu-Ray, Sony has changed the game, and can potentially avoid the need to provide backwards compatibility – by delivering content from the Internet rather than on physical media.

The need to get people to purchase new media every time, meant that Sony could really only rely on selling a new box to play the media every 10-15 years or so, since there was such (understandable) resistance in replacing collections of music and movies. Without this limitation, Sony can continue to innovate with formats, adding new audio and video technologies which need new boxes to play, but without requiring customers to buy new media – since the content will be delivered from the Net. They will be able to sell people new boxes every 2-5 years, and stay ahead of the cheaper boxes coming out of China which will not have the latest features.

Or maybe this is all dreaming on my part, and Sony has no such plan at all.

Why negative gearing is not going away

Attacking the practice of negative gearing appears to have become a bit of a sport lately. On the 14th March, an article in the Herald Sun stated the government “should look at ways to overhaul an extremely generous system of negative gearing”, and on the 20th March, The Age ran an opinion piece entitled “It’s time to apply the brakes to negative gearing”.

I could speculate that the attention property investors (and their tax deductions) is due to the combination of increasing rents (driven by low vacancy rates) and high property prices (driven by a long stint of housing affordability). However, the cause is not important, and what is important is understanding why negative gearing is an effective housing subsidy.

In the Taxation Statistics  2005-06 publication from the ATO, we can see that:

  • There were 1,561,630 people who declared rental income on their personal tax returns.
  • 66.5% of those had a taxable loss (net return income less than zero) from their rental properties.
  • There were 2,146,685 property schedules completed for those tax returns (note: where multiple people own a property, multiple schedules may be completed for those properties).

And in the Census 2006 QuickStats for Australia from the ABS, we can see that:

  • 27.2% of occupied private dwellings were rented, which corresponds to 2,063,947 dwellings. (Pretty close to the 2,146,685 figure above.)

While in the Australian Social Trends 2007 from the ABS:

  • There were 394,000 first home buyers in 2003-04.

So, from that barrage of stats, it should be clear that the number of renters outnumbers the first home buyers (in any one year) by over five to one, and the number of renters combined with the property investors outnumbers them over nine to one. Why compare with the first home buyers? Because they are really the only housing segment that is disadvantaged by negative gearing. Beneficiaries include renters, existing home owners, investors and the state governments (through higher land tax and stamp duty fees).

Renters have their rent subsided by the ATO, though the tax deduction on costs provided to their landlords. What other business but property rental is regularly undertaken at a loss? It should be admitted the “obvious” effect of removing the deduction – rising rents – is unproven.

I would expect it to be likely that rents would rise, both from scarcity due to fewer landlords willing to operate without such a deduction, and from those willing to be landlords increasing their rents to maintain their investment yields. However, back in 2003, the ANZ’s Saul Eslake analysed the last time negative gearing was removed (by Paul Keating, between 1985 and 1987) and commented that:

It’s true, according to Real Estate Institute data, that rents went up in Sydney and Perth. But the same data doesn’t show any discernable increase in the other State capitals. I would say that, if negative gearing had been responsible for a surge in rents, then you should have observed it everywhere, not just two capitals.

So history is inconclusive. And, rents aside, although you might think that renters would benefit from being able to escape the rental market, many of them don’t want to. A survey by AAMI published on the 3rd April indicated that 39% of renters are “happy to rent and have no plans to have a mortgage.”

Existing home owners benefit from rising house prices since while prices go up, their morgage does not. Although when they come to buy another house, they will need to pay higher prices, they will typically sell their old house into the same market. Also, at some point, they will exit the housing market, and benefit from selling their house without having to buy one.

And that brings us to the conclusion. The group of people able to remove negative gearing are democratically-elected politicians. It’s highly unlikely that such a person will remove a policy that benefits so many, particularly when it’s a Labor government and renters are one of groups that benefit. True, it was a Labor government that removed it last time, but that also means they will clearly remember the embarrassment of having to reinstate it.

Let’s end the lies

10 week ultrasoundWe’re now telling people something we were denying before – that we’re expecting a baby. Kate’s 17 weeks pregnant, in fact. And the baby’s due around 10th September.

It’s a relief to no longer have to cover it up, and it’s exciting to be able to announce it to people. However, it’s a bit odd that something so positive is typically hidden from friends for several months before being suddenly sprung on them.

Ironically, the friends often already know, or at least are pretty suspicious. The signs are everywhere, and good friends tend to notice. Even if there is no morning sickness or change in body shape, the dietary hints are pretty clear. They wonder why a glass of wine, normally happily accepted, is now sadly refused. They ponder why the brie and proscuitto goes uneaten, and perhaps even why the seafood option isn’t chosen from the menu (although that’s never an option for us anyway). And particularly, “women of a certain age” are well attuned to these signs in their friends, but in the end are too polite to ask.

So, those people who we find it so painful to hide the news from are the very people that know anyway. Both parties (us and them) engage in a comedic farce where we all pretend nothing is going on at all, while desperately wanting to speak about it to the other.

But now, released from that cultural prison, I can tell you that I am very pleased (although a bit terrified) about the idea of becoming a dad.

Oils Aint Oils

I hadn’t heard much about this film prior to seeing it. It sounded like it might give me an insight into the American oil boom and the life of wildcatters. Yes, I got that much, but I think I would’ve been better off reading about it in a book.

There Will Be Blood

Promises blood and delivers malevolence.

This film is beautiful. This film is well acted. It is a piece of art, but one I couldn’t manage to enjoy. Although I wanted to, as it had an interesting topic (the early days of the American oil boom and how prospectors built their empires), interesting themes (such as asking what is the price of ambition, and how do commerce and faith work together), and good actors (Daniel Day-Lewis was particularly brilliant).

However, there wasn’t a single important character that I could like, the sound track was mostly irritating, and the film seemed unnecessarily long. In fact, the film could have stopped around 20 minutes earlier and been a better work, I think.

So, I was clearly disappointed. The malevolent character Daniel Plainview, played by Day-Lewis, was so nasty and brutal that it is difficult to believe such a person would have existed and been so successful, casting doubt on the otherwise amazing historical authenticity of the movie. Just not the film for me, I guess.

My rating: 2.0 stars
**

Earth Hour vs. Daylight Savings

Next weekend the world will follow an Australian initiative called Earth Hour. At 8pm, on March 29, many cities (including Australia’s mainland capitals) will turn off lights in order to raise awareness for energy conservation. An hour’s worth of energy will be saved.

Ironically, the following weekend, most of those same mainland capitals (including Melbourne) will follow a world initiative called Daylight Savings. At 3am, on April 6, the same hour will be repeated. An hour’s worth of extra energy will be spent.

Of course, different hours equate to different amounts of energy, but Earth Hour is primarily a symbolic activity. It’s about sending “a powerful message about the the need for action on global warming”.

I think it’s a nice gesture, and encourages candlelight dining, which improves the taste of food. But the timing is delicious also.

Rock the Vote

2020 Summit logoPerhaps I’m naive about what can really be achieved, but I felt the need to provide a submission to Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit. Here’s what I wrote:

Over a quarter of a million Australian citizens work for the betterment of this country, but are denied the right to participate in our democracy.

According to the ATO, in 2004-05 there were 280,325 people under the age of 18 years who submitted tax returns. These people earn tax dollars for the government, and yet have no say in how it is spent.

In 1973, the voting age was lowered from 21 years to 18 years. It is time to lower it again, and directly connect our government to the youth of today and the future.

“No taxation without representation” was a political catch-cry in 18th century America, and was the philosophical basis for the American colony to reject the rule of their country from the disconnected British parliament. Here in Australia, we have a section of our population who still do not have that representation, over 200 years later.

Although around 4% of the Australian population is aged between 15 and 17 (according to the 2006 Census), many more than the entire state of Tasmania, they cannot influence the election of governments that directly impact their lives through:

  • Funding of schools
  • Educational curriculum
  • Driving age restrictions
  • Smoking/drinking age restrictions
  • Youth wages and working restrictions
  • Entertainment classifications
  • Juvenile justice system
  • in addition to laws, policies and taxation rules that apply equally to all Australians.

This is essentially a moral question: is it right for the voting population’s government to impose rules on productive, yet non-voting, Australians?

This is particularly relevant in the context of the Australia 2020 summit, where it is the younger Australians who are inheriting the consequences of the decisions made today. Decisions made by elected officials that they did not have a say in the election of.

It is true that the constituency of a democracy is only those who vote. We have given the vote to Aboriginals, and Australia led the way in giving the vote to women. How can it be just to with-hold the vote from other productive citizens?

In the last couple of decades, as trading hour restrictions have been loosened, and the cost of living has increased, youths in this country have increasingly taken up jobs in establishments such as supermarkets, fast-food outlets and service stations. This is clearly different to 1950s Australia, and requires different laws that recognise the importance of our younger citizens.

The specifics of the changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act are for the political process to decide on. The specifics will include the precise age, whether voting should be voluntary, and whether it should be connected to the employment situation.

I trust that the above has made a compelling case that we are doing wrong by a significant fraction of our population, and that our democratic government is all the poorer for it. Fortunately, the solution is simple: lower the voting age.

“Taxation without representation is Tyranny” – James Otis (1725-1783)

Goals aren’t all that

Netscape Navigator 2.02 LogoI’m wondering what I’ve been doing that I hadn’t come across Marc Andreesson’s blog before. A friend even recommended it to me, but it went onto the list, and I only got to it now. However, I’m going to have to read through the back issues, as what I’ve read so far is fascinating. Oh.. and if the name’s only slightly familiar, this is the guy who kicked off Web 1.0 by releasing Netscape. (Sort of ironic, as Netscape has just been discontinued.)

However, what’s prompting this post is that he is the first person I’ve read who appears to agree with my anti goal-setting philosophy. I’ve been espousing this since high school, that goal-setting as a theory only works if you’re both omniscient and omnipotent, so it’s probably not for anyone you’ve met outside of Hollywood.

What do I mean by goal-setting? Let’s get that clear. This is where someone says “I’m going to be a fireman when I grow up” or “I’m going to retire by the time I’m 40” or “I’m going to marry Nicole Kidman”. This is not where someone says “I’m going to the shops for some milk”. Goal-setting is committing yourself to some outcome in the medium to long-term future. And it’s ridiculously egotistical to think you can do it, and frankly pretty stupid to commit yourself to something that you don’t fully understand the implications of. But, as Marc puts it in his post on Career Planning:

 You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. … Trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you, and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way.

Hear! Hear!

Although I don’t agree with everything that follows, it is insightful. For example, as he goes on to talk about a differing appetite for risk as you move through life, he neglects to mention the time aspect. You’ve got different amounts of time to devote to work at different phases of your life. A professional who is freshly graduated and single can typically throw more time into building their career than someone who has just had a baby, for example.

Since the best investment you’ll ever find is probably yourself, managing the time and risk aspects only makes sense. I’m thinking back to my previous post on the three aspects of money: the amount, risk, and time.

Anyway, it’s always nice to find someone who agrees with you, after spending years being stared at strangely. :)