I'm still relatively new in this country, so I really shouldn't start messing with diatribe about things which I am still learning. But it seems plain to see that the Australian consumer is getting raped. And I'm still trying to figure out where in the system all the profit is being taken - though it appears that huge profits are being taken across the board, throughout the entire distribution chain.

For instance a hardware item I was looking at yesterday (Zip-it wallboard anchors) costs about $10.00 for a hundred in the U.S. - or about 10 cents each. The cheapest I can find them here is for $120.00 for the same quantity or over a dollar each. Now that's a bit of a difference. Sure, there's shipping and duty to consider, but somewhere in this distribution chain a 1200% surcharge is getting added to this item. 

Amanda was looking yesterday at horse saddles. Australian horse saddles. We can buy them cheaper in Arizona than we can in Australia. Even shipping them across the Pacific and back again - is still cheaper than we can buy them about 250 kilometers from where they're made. By hundreds of dollars on a nominally $300-400 item. If you're a local, you can pick them up for just under $800. We can ship this Aussie saddle from the states to our doorstep for about $500.

The other thing to consider is the plummeting U.S. dollar. As the dollar has collapsed, the Australian prices on U.S. imports haven't budged. The merchants are still pretending that there's a 2/1 exchange rate. There isn't. It's rapidly approaching 1/1. The situation isn't any different for Chinese goods, which are often selling for 4-8 times the manufacture cost, even if you measure everything in the same currency.

Subtract known shipping and tariff rates and currency conversions, and you still end up with 400% or greater surcharges in most cases. I was in retail not that long ago, and don't see any problem with profit, but this situation is way beyond normal profit margins. It's even outside the edge of exorbitant profit margins. Gouging is the only word that applies.  

A ruthless retail giant like Wal-Mart could wreak havoc on this country just like they did in the states - if they control the entire distribution chain. They could sell goods for less than anybody here and still maintain huge margins and walk away with record profits - while shutting out all the competition. It's ripe for this to happen.

This worries me. In the meantime, I think I'll just be buying a lot of my stuff over the net from somewhere else in the world, like a growing number of people are doing here. I don't care if it costs $50 in shipping - it's still cheaper in the long run.    

We were out looking at floats (horse trailers) yesterday near Joadja. A commercial comes on the radio...

Some bloke looked up at the mountains, saw that there was snow on the mountains, and said, "Gee - let's call these the Snowy Mountains". Another bloke looked at his house plant, saw that it was in a pot and said, "look - a pot plant".

The commercial is only about half way through, and I'm already in hysterics. You see I'm about the only person around here rolling in laughter and wondering why there isn't a queue of college students getting their picture taken under the POT PLANT SALE sign at the BONG BONG Nursery. [In the states, a pot plant is a marijuana bush and a bong is a type of hookah].

Anyway the commercial continues...

In the spirit of these great Australians, we [an unnamed global fast food company symbolized by golden arches], invite you all to visit our website at www [.........] dot com dot a-u and name our new hamburger meal.

I go through some amusing mental choices... like MicroMeal, seeing as how their flagship meal on this side of the pond isn't much larger than the basic 99 cent sandwich in the states. But Amanda (born Australian) doesn't even hesitate....

 "Turd Burger".

 

One  of the problems with living in a rural place is that you no longer have economies of scale when it comes to service outages and such. We lost the internet all day yesterday and today. Oh and the phone. You couldn't get to the outside world from Robertson. But since only two thousand people were affected, it wasn't the same as if you lost say the internet link and phone service to Sunnyvale, California. Seems there was only one guy in the entire country who was able to fix the problem and I guess he must've been out in Perth and Robertson isn't quite as important - as say Perth. At least they got everything finally working tonight. They were originally claiming that it would take another day or two. 

Have you ever encountered a 'stuck' video/audio/data tape - one of those where the tape gets swallowed inside the machine in question? I have. More times than I can count. Oh, and the nearest authorized repair facility is halfway around the world (or worse, gone out of business)? I have - more times than I can count.

So what do you do?

You open up the darn thing and figure out how to extract the tape cartridge, that's what you do. I've also done this - more times than I can count. Usually it involves:

• disassembly of the drive mechanics, which resemble the inside of a Swiss (mechanical) watch - except the gears are plastic
• destruction of the tape cartridge, to get the pieces out of the way so that the mechanics can be further disassembled
• all of the above

Faced with this task yet again, I finally came up with a more clever way to accomplish the task. You see, the drive mechanics are operated by motors, which load and unload the cartridges. In order to operate the mechanism in the absence of motor power (which has obviously failed for some as yet unknown reason or you probably wouldn't be reading this), you usually need to take it completely apart. You can't just spin the plastic gears by hand, because they're all intertwingled and won't budge unless you physically remove the motor and then spin the first gear in the chain.

But what if you didn't need to take it completely apart? Taking Swiss watches apart and putting them back together again (without messing them up completely) is no fun. Trust me on this.

So how can we convince the motor to perform the unload task? There are two of them. One spreads the tape around the spinning head assembly. The other drives the actual tape swallower assembly. Both are usually simple DC motors. And therein lies the solution. We just need a little DC. Take a 9V battery and a few inches of speaker wire. Hold or tape the leads on one end of the speaker wire to the battery. Turn the power off on the device in question. We're going to bypass the built in power (and logic circuitry). That's what got us into this mess.

Now touch the other ends to the leads of the spreader motor. Didn't do anything? That's OK, you've got a 50/50 chance here. Swap the leads around the other way. Voila, the tape spreader starts the unload sequence. Keep them connected until the spreader has done its job and it hits the end - at which point it will stop. That's also why we use a 9V battery. It doesn't have enough torque to over spin the thing since the normal limit switches aren't able to limit us from damage. Don't hold the leads very long or you really could damage something.

Now move the leads over to the swallower motor and touch them there. Again, swap the leads if you get it backward the first time and nothing happens. Yippee! Here comes the tape! Right out the drive door and into your hand. Yay!

Can't figure out which motor is the spreader, and which is the swallower? That's OK too. Just start touching motor leads (briefly) and see what moves. You'll find them soon enough. 

Now you've probably still got to figure out why the tape was stuck, but in the meantime you've got your tape back - intact; and the mechanism is unloaded and still in one piece. Chances are pretty high that something about the tape itself or how it was loaded is what made it stuck and things will just start magically working again. If not, oh well. I don't have all the answers. But if you're ever crazy enough or desperate enough to need to do this, you're probably capable of figuring out what to do next.