A Handful of Throttle

I am normally pretty quick at the business of solving problems, riddles and conundrums. I used to be renowned for being able to add three two-digit numbers together within 58.67 seconds. However, there is one mysterious phenomenon that has me completely stumped, baffled and bewildered.

The problem that has me beaten, is one of the great paradoxes of the engineering world. In this wonderful world of engineering feats that we now enjoy, things are being made smaller, more efficient and more environmentally friendly, but with what seems to be one notable exception. I refer to the motor cycle, and in particular, to the petrol fuelled motor bike with an internal combustion engine.

As far back as the 1920’s, Rolls-Royce were able to equip their cars with muffler systems that rendered their very sizable engines virtually silent. In modern times, car manufacturers such as Toyota, are able to achieve much the same effect. Anybody who has driven a modern Toyota Camry will probably confess to having tried to start an engine which was already going. My gripe is that the same engineering thoughtfulness is not generally being applied to the motor bike.

I make the reference a general one, but note that some motor bike manufacturers such as BMW and several manufacturers of lower priced bikes, take their muffling seriously. However, in general, irrespective of whether the motor cycle is a big chopper such as the Harley Davidson, with its big, slow revving engine, or a smaller machine such as a Kawasaki with its smaller, but higher revving engine, our ears are bombarded with noise that is many times that of the normal motor car. At one extreme, the noise is like that of a thousand fie crackers being let off every millisecond, and at the other extreme, it is like fifty million well trained mosquitoes in synchronicity.

Now, to get to the crux of my gripe, why is it that the stringent controls over car exhaust systems, including noise restrictions, are not applied to the destroyer of sound sleep, the interrupter of mediocre television programmes and the ridiculous and unsuccessful competitor of the lovely kookaburra in the game of tonally marking out a territorial claim, namely the mega-decibel motor bike?

Crankyfella

Everyone's a Guru

No matter where I go in dear old Oz, I find wizards, Aussie financial wizards.

Not only are our wonderful superannuation schemes run by wizards, but, indeed, almost every man, woman and child in the street is a self-professed wizard.

Our super-wizards (pun definitely intended) are the financial investment gurus who gamble with our money and are highly paid to do so. These gurus are so wonderful that they are highly paid when their gambling is paying off, and are still highly paid when their gambling takes our hard earned bread that we are legally obliged to invest, and throws it off some wind-swept ocean cliff. Many of these gurus, or fund managers, as some of them like to be euphemistically called, have not even been able to match the modest return of savings bank interest. Not only have they reaped a rich lifestyle at our expense, but they have also shrunk our life savings even more effectively than the Jivaroan people of the Amazon Basin were able to shrink heads.

Many of the victims of these people are also guilty of the same greedy practices, and have whittled away their own bread by either voluntarily giving more of it to the fund managers to play with, or by making their own investments in the stock market, with results that rival the genius of the fund managers.

I like to question both fund managers and men and women in the street who fancy themselves as the equivalent of the fund managing gurus. As it turns out, they are not the true equivalent of the fund manager. They differ on one teeny-weeny criterion. I ask them all just one salient question, and that is, “To what or whom does the official cash rate, as declared by the Reserve Bank of Australia, apply?”

Despite their overwhelming stupidity in relation to most things financial, the fund mismanaging gurus are able to give succinct and accurate responses to this monetary question. The man-in-the-street know-all of things financial misses out by a long country mile on this little monetary detail. Typical responses skirt around the subject in great diatribes but miss the essential focus, with the like of, “It’s to control inflation.” Unfortunately, I have had to conclude that such home-grown know-all gurus would not be the slightest match for the professional fund mismanaging guru. I think that they would be hard pressed to make half the losses with our hard earned bread that the professional guru is able to attain.

It is a pity that the man-in-the street does not comprehend that the Reserve Bank of Australia is our central bank, one of the functions of which is to lend money out to the established banks at the official cash rate, and that the banks when lending to customers, typically against a property mortgage, add their own profit margin to this rate to determine what the customer pays. The banks who borrow from the Reserve Bank of Australia and lend to members of the public (or to companies) are under no legal or contractually enforceable obligation to adjust any subsequent lending business to reflect changes that are promulgated by the Reserve bank in official cash rates.

Another pity is that we have mass media (including the ABC) that make no attempt to educate the public on such matters, but instead treat all of the viewers and readers as knowledgable whiz-kids, and thus re-inforce their baseless status as gurus.

Battler