Last week I posted a handful of Christmas cards to New Zealand. The woman in the post office frowned and said I’d missed the deadline for international post. “But it’s only New Zealand, so they will probably get there,” she added, with a slow, small country town smile. I’m not so confident. The record time taken for mail exchanged between my sister and I was 17 days in 2020. Blimey, I could have flown over…
We were at the butcher shop, 18 days before Christmas, buying enough for this week’s meals and also a month’s supply of dog meat. Before he even knew what we wanted, Wayne the butcher asked – “How are you going for pet mince?” Since I’d just cooked the last one, this was most prescient of him. Then I spotted a leg of ham in the display cabinet. I nudged She Who Organises Almost Everything. “Have…
If you have a Twitter account you may be a bit troubled by the disruption to the business model as the new owner, Elon Musk, flexes his considerable financial muscle. There are 5.8 million Twitter accounts in Australia, the eighth largest in the world. Still, of the 1.3 billion Twitter accounts worldwide, only 192 million are actively used. The stats were uncovered in an ABC discussion about how relevant Twitter is to people. Twitter is…
It’s been nine years since someone suggested a way to stop company directors from avoiding creditors by creating a ‘Phoenix’ company. ‘Phoenixing’ describes the process when a new business arises from the ashes of a liquidated company. It’s a loophole that allows unscrupulous people to leave their debts behind with the liquidated company and start afresh (leaving creditors out in the cold). The total cost of Phoenixing to the Australian economy is estimated to be…