Coalition government wants to ban public right to boycott

So, I recently received a letter from GetUp discussing the new Coalition governments plan to make boycotting an illegal activity:

"They are considering legislation to remove our right to speak up against companies with poor environmental records. In other words, the Government knows just how powerful our movement can be when we work together – and they want to put a stop to it."

Why would the government, a group of elected individuals supposedly "of the people and for the people" actively seek to end any voice of the people? A voice only raised because the government is obviously failing in its duty to be "for the people".

There's only one reason - the [current] government is FOR the corporations.

A discussion I had with a friend recently touched on the issue that most cultures, communist, socialist, democratic etc are all still 'monetist'. That is they seek to get ahead through gains in paper wealth. This is most obvious in economies that allow money to not only be the main means of trade but also to allow the trading of money to be the most lucrative way to make money.

One difference between, say, communist countries and western-democratic would be that in communist countries the 'state' interferes more in the way business runs. Whilst 'the west' has less of this interference or controlling interest, of late the trend seems to be that business is now dictating *to* the state! Telling the voted representatives what they should, can, must and will do.

At least this, to me, explains why a government would try to suppress the voice of the people, when that voice is discussing what [big] business is doing to the situation of/for humanity.

If the 'job' of politicians is to 'keep' their job, rather than truly speak for the people, there are two main criteria.

1) convince the people they are the one(s) for the job - ie. campaign and

2) find money to finance such a campaign.

So the cycle is, bend over for the corporations that will finance them, ie. promise to make certain things happen for their corporate sponsors; and then bull shit on to the public about who they are and what they will do in their campaign so that the public will vote them to *not* do much of anything for the people.

Rinse and repeat every few years and we have the mess that the western world is in.

A drain hole of corporate design and intention, and of epic proportions now that it is propped atop 7 billion people.

Act without doing...

Act without doing; work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many. Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts.

- Lao-Tze

Just for fun

Toilet humour can be pretty low, but this one tickles me (with a feather? :)

Toilet Cam

Stop the Internet Kill Switch!

Add your name to the petition at Access Now Stop The Switch

As online communication becomes an increasingly important part of all aspects of our lives, governments have sought to censor, filter, surveil, and now, shut off access to these vital tools. Just imagine if your government decided to switch your internet -- and you -- off.

In Egypt, using powers granted to Mubarak under emergency law, the government was able to shut off the internet with a couple of phone calls to each of the internet service providers (ISPs) operating in Egypt. Egyptians employed innovative work-arounds to avoid the shutdown like using international dial-up, but do we really want to resort to that? Lets draw a line in the sand as governments around the world race to acquire an "internet kill switch."

Governments habitually put their own survival above the wellbeing of their people. The only real deterrent to the internet kill switch is us -- a global movement for digital freedom; please join the international campaign to “Stop the Switch!”

From Australia to Zimbabwe, we see how vital access to the internet, both on computers and mobile phones, is for people to freely express themselves. An internet kill switch puts your ability to communicate with friends and family online in jeopardy by placing control over the internet firmly into the hands of your government, who may not necessarily have your interests and rights in mind when they flip the switch.

Add your name to the petition at Access Now Stop The Switch

Egypt used it last week, Austria’s already got it, the U.S. has a law drafted to establish it, while other governments across the globe are testing to see how easily they could plunge their country into an information blackout. And they can do it one of two ways: either by creating the legal authority that gives them the power to demand that the internet service providers (ISPs) operating in their country shut down, or by configuring a “switch” that controls their country’s entire internet infrastructure.

Breaking The Great Australian Silence

All Australians should watch Johy Pilger's address at the Sydney Peace Prize.

What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness; the revelation of a seed beneath the snow.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda - “public relations”, or PR.

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere - from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia... a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies - are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East. Only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister of Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken rule, this impunity, attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we?
Or are we a murdochracy.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore suburbs; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are?

Silence.

Agribusiness and Chemical Corp's have fooled us for long enough

Lappé is critical of modern livestock feeding practices. We feed ruminants grain, she says, not because it is a food they would eat in nature, but because we want to fatten them faster. They used to convert grasses that were inedible for us into high-grade protein; but today one half of the world's grain goes, not to feed people, but to fatten animals, and it doesn't all turn into flesh. More than half of that food is is excreted by the livestock or used for energy. Lappé calls livestock animals "protein disposals" rather than "protein factories." "And now," she says, "we're performing the same disappearing trick with the world's fish supply, in fish farms, feeding fish to fish." Why have we adopted such inefficient agricultural practices? Lappé says it's because we produce for the market, not to feed the hungry: "The hundreds of millions of people who go hungry cannot create a sufficient 'market demand' for the fruits of the earth. So more and more of it flows into the mouths of livestock, which convert it into what the better-off can afford. Corn becomes filet mignon. Sardines become salmon."

[Vandana Shiva, winner of "the alternative Nobel prize" - Right Livelihood Award] point to reams of studies by universities, the UN and FAO (the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization) showing that the most productive form of agriculture is not our modern, tractor-serviced, big field monocultures, but multiple crop (termed "polyculture"), manual labor-intensive small holdings. As we've seen with water and livestock and now with agriculture, the natural physics of this planet favors variety and small, localized production. FAO charts of countries from countries like the Sudan, Nigeria and Uganda, Burma, India and Nepal all show maximum productivity on tiny farms ranging in size from between one and two hectares -- the typical peasant smallholding.

When a farm gets larger, productivity drops. In Brazil, for example, Shiva points out, "the productivity of a farm of up to 10 hectares [25 acres] was $85 per hectare, while the productivity of 500-hectare farms [1235 acres] was only $2 per hectare. In India, farms of up to 5 acres [2 hectares] had a productivity of 735 rupees per acre. while 35-acre farms [14 hectares] productivity levels were about half of that." Green Revolution methods, which need machinery, expensive chemicals and monocultures, are not suitable for smallholdings, and the heavy subsidies and government incentives that have accompanied them demand big fields. This has meant that over the past thirty or forty years, government subsidies have gone to larger, less efficient farms and agribusinesses rather than to the small, more productive farmers.

In India, Shiva says, "the displacement of varied crops, which were mixtures of cereals, legumes and oilseeds, by monocultures of High Yielding Variety (HYV) crops for export, has undermined food self-sufficiency in a drastic way." The small peasant, who concentrates on food for her family and does not fit in the cash crop package, is displaces by the subsidized, richer farmer and loses access to the food she used to grow for herself. Ironically, this loss has ended up being expressed as a food "surplus" in many national statistics. Both Indian economist V.K.R. Rao and nutritionist C. Gopalan agree with Shiva's analysis that the "surplus" food stocks that have built up in India since the Green Revolution - up from 63 million tons in 1966 to 128 million tons in 1985 -- have been created not by better yields, but by people losing access to their land and not having any money. In other words, this grain goes into warehouses because an increasing number of Indians cannot afford to buy it. Statistics also show that during this same period, "food consumption dropped from 480 grams per capita per day, in 1965, to 463 grams per day per capita in 1985." That doesn't sound as if more poor people are getting fed by industrial farming.

[..] Shiva says, "it would be no exaggeration to say that small, family-run farms are the answer to our terrible problems of declining agricultural productivity and vanishing biodiversity." When countries have pulled back from large-scale industrial farming for a variety of political and economic reason, and especially when they've also paid attention to indigenous knowledge, they have experienced benefits in terms of food production that are nothing short of astounding.

In Indonesia, subsidies for the use of pesticides were eliminated in 1987, and restrictions were introduced on the use of 57 pesticides in rice-growing. By 1990, not only had pesticide use decreased by 50 percent, but rice yields had increased by 15 percent. Farmers' net incomes increased by $18 per farmer, per season, and the government was saving $120 million a year. What's more, this $120 million of Third World money was no longer going out to enrich large chemical corporations, it became available for much-needed internal social programs. In Bangladesh, a "No Pest" program led to another reduction in pesticides use of a full 76 percent. This did not cost the country any of their rice harvest, as they' feared, but instead gave them a yield increase of 11 percent.

A United Nations Development Program project on sustainable agriculture introduced an indigenous system of raised fields that had evolved in the Altiplano of the Andes to nearby South American countries. These methods tripled and quadrupled yields in Honduras, for example, raising them from 400 kilograms per hectare to between 1,200 and 1,600 kilograms per hectare. Finally, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, reviewed sustainable agriculture projects affecting almost two million households in the Third Worlds, and found that farmers; yields of wheat, corn and sorghum doubled when they switched from industrial, high external-input agriculture to "biodiversity-based, low-input," organic polycultures.

So, even with an extremely inefficient system -- industrial agriculture setup to benefit export markets -- we have half again as much food as we need to feed the planet. If we implemented more small polycultures, we could feed a lot more people -- and they'd have the land security they need to take care of themselves without expensive and politically and socially difficult redistribution programs. To say that small poly cultures meet the sustainability requirement of double dividends is putting it mildly. Not only have the countries which have maintained or introduced such programs saved their land and water systems from more contamination by dangerous poisons, but they have simultaneously achieved what the poisons were supposed to be doing all along: they have increased their food supply. This is so contrary to what we've been told about chemical farming for the past fifty years that we were hardly able to believe it, and we spent a great deal of research time on this question. But again and again, all around the world in every kind of agricultural production, we found that growing more food does not work the way agribusiness and the multinational chemical companies have been telling us.

Thousands of examples coming in from around the world in scientific research done by governments, NGOs and universities support the conclusion that the benefits of industrialization to farmers, both Third and First World, were not only greatly exaggerated but hid a tragic contradiction. One of the reasons that so many farmers all over the world have been forced off an increasingly degraded and poisoned landscape since agricultural industrialization first began is that, for what seemed to be very good reasons, we collectively decided to value the kinds of wealth that is created through industrialization over that created by nature.

The tragedy for people struggling to grow food, whether they are peasants in Bangladesh or wheat farmers ion South Dakota, lies clearly in the underlying goal of "industrialized" agriculture. It was created not to help farmers, but to provide cheap food for a growing urban population, the labor force for expanding industries. In other words, as agricultural economist John Ikerd says, "Sustainable farm profits are inherently inconsistent with industrial agriculture." Its goal is not to make farmers prosperous and keep them on the land, but to get them off. And this might help explain why the industrialization of agriculture in the Third World is causing chaos and misery, and also why its architects seem to be unmoved by that distress. They have another vision of human well-being.

Less than 2 percent of the population of the United States produces all the food, and people have to spend only about 10 cents out of every dollar to buy that food. Even more remarkably, the producer gets only one penny of those then cents, while the other nine cents go to the marketing and chemical companies.

extract from Good News for a Change by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel

The Easter Bunny -- why

Despite its Christian veneer Easter is a pagan festival which celebrates Eostre, the European goddess of fertility who loaned her name to oestrogen and the oestrous cycle. The rabbit and egg were chosen by the ancestors of the Europeans as symbols of fertility.

extract from - The Future Eaters

The true costs of farming

Big Operations, for example, operate with a skeleton crew of perhaps four people in charge of producing 50,000 pigs a year; the pigs are overcrowded, under cared for and must be fed hormones and antibiotics in such an environment, or the overcrowding and stress will cause infections and keep them from eating properly. This causes a serious rise in cost for society, in terms of increased cancers and other diseases in a human population that ingests the hormones and antibiotics that are fed to the pigs.

It also leads to the contamination of rural soil and watercourses by the high concentrations of manure and the undesirable chemicals in the manure. Almost none of the expenses such practices entail are reflected in the producers' costs or the final consumer price. That means, for example, that pork produced in eastern Canada and the United States, which is habitually sold overseas to Asian markets, is subsidized not just by national governments, but by cash-strapped rural taxpayers in Quebec, Alberta, North Carolina, Georgia or anywhere else there is a concentration of industrial hog farms.

If the true costs were added, no producer could afford to shoulder them and continue to raise meat in such an environmentally damaging way. They would have to adapt existing, healthy methods that make the meat somewhat more expensive but a lot less dangerous, provide more rural jobs and have an actual moral base.

extracted from Good News for a Change - David Suzuki & Holly Dressel (pg 65)

Politics - win or lose

I believe I heard Mr Abbot say something like "We lost (or failed), we didn't maintain a good enough dialogue (conversation?)." (Please feel free to inform me of the correct wording)

My feeling is that it is not a failure for a political party to not come first.
It is if you're thinking of the job you didn't get, or the policy you didn't put through to a final bill. If you're just thinking about yourself and your party. What if you're thinking about the whole country/populace?

If the reason for an election is to see what issues are important to the [majority of] people, to see what way they are thinking and what policies they want to see enacted, then there is no fail.

It has to be a win that the majority view simply becomes evident after the counting of votes finishes.

What matters to the average punter? Well supposedly the vote count gives us an idea of which items share the most 'alike thinkers/voters'.

Any election should be a win, but what really decides that is if the contenders are actually discussing important issues. Or wasting our time worrying about a handful of refugees for example.

[/rant]

D
.

Rural Exodus Metropolis Influx

Now it's long been a noted item that humans have been moving into the cities, more and more every year. 130 a minute apparently. 70 million a year.

Now I've always thought this was a pretty sad thing, much as I have enjoyed living in the city a lot myself for various "good" reasons listed in the video, I've felt that it's done at huge expense to the land those people live on.

Good healthy productive land gets concreted over so people can live together en mass, needing huge amounts of supplies to be shipped into them and creating huge amounts of waste to be removed, usually to a place that becomes something like a cancer on the face of the Earth.

Then I saw Stewart Brand's little piece on Squatter Cities.
This TED video pointed out some interesting things for me, my favourite being that population growth slows (birthrate drops) for those in these Squatter Cities.

Food for thought... I thought.
.

Australian Government shows it Big Brother colours

The Australian Government is going to hamstring our internet access.
We already have an internet system that is far from #1 in the world, what with download caps and lack of rural infrastructure - do YOU want to have your rights to information curtailed as well? Do you agree with the kind of censorship and dictatorial control as being shown in places like China? Then go to this site and LEARN what the government is DOING as opposed to what it THINKS/SAYS it's doing.

http://www.internetblackout.com.au/
Technicians built the internet, why is it Politicians are pretending to know how it works????

The government's "solution" will COST us money, will COST us internet speed, will COST us freedom to information.

Concerned about what your kids see online? Then why do you leave that parental responsibility to someone else?

[quote]
What’s the problem?

The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste millions of dollars and won’t make anyone safer.

1.

It won’t protect children: The filter isn’t a “cyber safety” measure to stop kids seeing inappropriate content such as R and X rated websites. It is not even designed to prevent the spread of illegal material where it is most often found (chat rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing).
2.

We will all pay for this ineffective solution: Under this policy, ISPs will be forced to charge more for consumer and business broadband. Several hundred thousand dollars has already been spent to test the filter – without considering high-speed services such as the National Broadband Network!
3.

A dangerous precedent: We stand to join a small club of countries which impose centralised Internet censorship such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The secret blacklist may be limited to “Refused Classification” content for now, but what might a future Australian Government choose to block?

Important Groups of Wildlife Habitat Plants - Australia

The goal being to plant plants which provide food, shelter and nest sites for a range of nectar, fruit, seed, leaf and insect (and other prey) eating animals, eg. birds, mammals, lizards, frogs and insects.

Top habitat plant groups which provide many resources are:
Eucalyptus, Angophora, Melaleuca, Acacia, Banksia, Leptospermum and Kunzea.

Shelter plants -
many Acacia (wattles), Leptospermum (tea-trees), Melaleuca (paperbarks), Bursaria (blackthorn), Hakea, Ceratopetalum (Christmas bush), Kunzea, Clematis, Pandorea (wonga-wonga vine), Rubus (native raspberry) and any dense and/or spikey planting.

Insect-pollinated plants -
Acacia (wattles), native peas (eg. Dillwynia, Hardenbergia, Kennedia), Leptospermum (tea-trees), native daisies (eg. Olearia) as well as Hibbertia, Clematis, Pomaderris.

Nectar plants -
Banksia, Grevillea, Hakea, Correa, Lambertia (mountain devil), Callistemon (bottlebrush), Eucalyptus, Angophora, Melaleuca, Xanthorrhoea (grasstrees) and others with big showy flowerheads, Epacris.

Seed plants -
Eucalyptus, Angophora, Acacia (wattles), Casuarina and Allocasuarina (she-oaks), Glochidion (cheese tree), Lomandra, native grasses (eg. Themeda, Danthonia), rushes (Juncus) and sedges (Gahnia).

Fruit plants -
Acmena, Syzygium (lillypillies), Ficus (figs), Alphitonia, Trema, Cissus (native grape), Persoonia (geebugs), Dianella (native lily), Breynia, Stephania, saltbushes and many rainforest or wet forest species.

Native bee plants -
Persoonia (geebungs), native peas (eg. Hovea, Pultenaea), native daisies (eg. Helichrysum), heath plants (eg. Epacris, Leucopogon), Goodenia, Tristaniopsis (water gum), Leptospermum.

Native butterfly plants -
native peas, native daisies, native grasses (eg. Poa), sedges and rushes (eg. Carex, Juncus), Lomandra, Dianella, Bursaria (blackthorn), Macrozamia (burrawang), Dodonaea, Zieria, Correa, Indigofera, Cupaniopsis (tuckeroo), Melaleuca and mistletoes.

Hope I spelt them all correctly, let me know if any of the links are dead!

Taxis love 'em, hate 'em

Some one recently posted a little diatribe on the lousy taxi drivers they had encountered. Whilst I understood most of their criticisms some of the feedback that the blog generated got me a tad irked. So I opened my big mouth and started ranting, as usual...


Cabs are an interesting debate. Someone mentioned air quality and cabs sitting around wasting fuel while they are idle. I've seen that behaviour in the general public in Japan so it's cultural not job specific. Guys parked during lunch time alseep with the engine on so they can keep the air con running. Cars left running while Mom goes into the super market, _not_ dangerous...

Congestion being added to in the city? Why that's just naive.. a cab is one vehicle (and the resources it took to build it and keep it on the road) that can be used by many people, compared to all the vehicles the irritated public are driving around with most often JUST THEMSELVES in the vehicle. THAT adds to congestion.

If congestion of the cities were the main issue, then less private cars in a metropolis would make cabs more efficient. They wouldn't be stuck in traffic all the time whilst people drive around 4-5 seater vehicles so that they can have the joy of not using public transport in an overcrowded city. As it is huge areas of a city are given over to vehicles, areas of land that used to be where we walked and talked and kids played tennis after school before it became the domain of the car! Now we can't sit outside the coffee shop and banter because of the din of traffic.

Percent of surface area in the city of Los Angeles dedicated in some way to the automobile (roads, parking garages, etc.) 70 percent
Percent of surface area in Los Angeles devoted to parks and open space
5 percent (http://www.worldwatch.org/node/752)

I read some figure on how many bicycles can get through a standard green light change compared to how many cars: something like 100 bikes compared to 20-30
cars (http://www.bikesarefun.org/)

Yes there are some poor cabbies, reasons being: it's a poor paying job!
Yes it seems expensive but it's the owner of the vehicle that gets paid for renting it out. Drivers may make only $50 a day (excepting Friday/Sat nights) and they have to put up with just the things you mention. People puking in their car leaving them no cash and a vehicle that if not cleaned properly will surely end up on your hit list of "poor cabbies" .. I got into this cab and it stank of vomit .. tsk what a slob

They get abused because they are stuck in the traffic despite their good intentions because the roads are clogged with the selfish folk who thinkg having 3-4 empty seats with them when they commute is a community minded way to travel. And yes I truly understand that public transport may not get to your part of the city very well, meaning that a car is 'easier' or more direct for you but so is a motor bike or a bike.

Cabbies work 12 hour shifts to get this poor pay, abuse and possible risk to life (maybe not so much in Tokyo) because people think they are cash registers on wheels.

And yes you may have guessed right, I used to drive cabs. 4 years in Sydney. Where I was threatened by four guys because I offered to stop the meter and check my map because I couldn't find the street they wanted to go to yet where too drunk to correctly direct me to. There are hundreds of suburbs and thousands of streets, there must be some a person doesn't know...?

So forgive me being defensive but try to play it fair.

Sydney is full of immigrant taxi drivers which everyone moans about yet the reason is simple. The money is pathetic. The traffic very stressful, the passengers expect the world because they ARE conscious of how much they are spending so it's not a win-win situation.

Oh, and if I had an accident in my cab, I had to repair the vehicle. A ding that's less than say $2000 is not something you claim from insurance because the excess you have to pay is so high, taxis being a vehicle in a high risk category.

So I park the car while I have dinner, come back to a dinged fender/broken light and I gotta cough up hundreds. It was on my watch so I pay for it. I also had my bag stolen once while I was inside for a few minutes using the bathroom at a friends house. Cab doors didn't lock properly. "Tough luck" says the owner of the cab, so I quit. Small consolation. I lost my earnings for the night and a good bag and other personal items. (I digress, sorry)

Get more private cars off of [metropolitan] roads and you might have a city that can function. But most efforts at *cheap* public transport are thwarted by the car lobby.

How can petrol be cheaper than milk? It is so we keep driving.

35,000 cabs in Tokyo? I think there's only 4,000 in Sydney. A city of 4 million. think you gonna get a cab on a Friday night? Why aren't there more cabs? well then the money would be even LESS for those drivers per week. Or else the cabs, vehicles bought, maintained and insured are to be left sitting and not earning an income for the quiet parts of the week.

Sorry to jump on you folk. It's one of those things, not so easy to see the other side.

I'm sure there must be folk here that have worked in bars. Ever thought "what a bunch of tools" the general public is? The stupid things they ask you when you're busy behind the bar? Or they way they talk to you when you're trying to do your job but it's a madhouse on a Friday night?

well we ARE the general public. We are the tools on the other side of the bar when we aren't working and we ARE the congestion that someone elses cab is stuck behind while they watch the meter ticking over and think their cab driver is a con man. I know, some of them are.. but we all look for the freebies in life, the one's on the house. Cabbies don't get 'em though. They wait inthe rank at the airport for an hour and then the person that gets in their cab wants to go ten minutes up the road. So now you know why they don't wait on the rank. They cruise the street wasting fuel like the rest of us.