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Instigate

@ Instigate @aussie.zone

Posts
1
Comments
181
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • The Code

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  • I had one of those myself! Free full-text PDF for anyone who was registered for the course. That’s the way that a true academic who loves the dissemination of their research operates. He was so engaging and invigorating too; he exemplified the archetype of the ‘I don’t care if you don’t care; I’m gonna make you care’ professor.

    When I had a class where the text that was written by the professor was mandatory reading and they demanded buying the newest version (she made a new version every year to keep sales up) I specifically pirated her book to just barely pass the class and move on from it. Fuck anyone who hides their knowledge from those who want to learn.

  • Stoke-on-Trent couple fined £1,200 after clearing up rubbish

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  • Agreed, but rather than take it to the tip (and therefore have to pay fees to dump anyway) just don’t put your name on the box. Be the anonymous hero that the council needs, but very much does not deserve.

    So glad to hear their fundraising outstripped the fines! If council won’t reward them (as they so obviously should have), I’m glad that the people rallied to do so.

  • Stoke-on-Trent couple fined £1,200 after clearing up rubbish

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  • You’re totally right, but I wish we lived in a world where leaving your name on that box would lead to a reward rather than a punishment. I can’t understand a council wanting to not only fail to incentivise, but actively disincentivise works of public good, except that it gave them an opportunity to extract more revenue. It’s a really, really sad state of affairs.

  • They did not reply.

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  • While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!

  • A life lesson for you

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  • I had a little chuckle-up myself

  • DC Campaign to Submit Over 40K Signatures for Open Primaries, Ranked Choice Voting

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  • Uhhh, no. That’s not how RCV works at all.

    Let’s say there are five candidates - A, B , C, D, and E.

    Let’s assume candidates A & B are the most popular.

    Personally I choose to rank them as C, E, D, B and then A.

    Out of all of them, no one gets over 50% of the #1 vote. Whoever gets the lowest #1 vote is knocked out first. Let’s suggest that this is C. All of their #1 votes and therefore my vote is then transferred to E.

    Let’s suggest that after this there’s still no one who has over 50% of the vote between the other four candidates. Let’s further assume that candidate E has the lowest resulting vote after the first round of knockout. My vote is then transferred to candidate D.

    Out of A, B, and D, let’s assume none of them still have over 50% of the vote after this redistribution. Let’s further assume that D has the lowest vote of the three. My vote is then transferred to B.

    Given there are only two candidates left, one will have to have a majority. That candidate wins.

    Under RCV, as long as you mark every box with a preference your vote can never ever be wasted. It will always end up with a candidate that wins or one that loses, but it cannot ever be exhausted and therefore meaningless.

  • In the US, did Amazon kill the mall, is everyone too broke, or a combination of other factors?

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  • Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.

    That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.

    Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!

  • In the US, did Amazon kill the mall, is everyone too broke, or a combination of other factors?

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  • That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!

  • In the US, did Amazon kill the mall, is everyone too broke, or a combination of other factors?

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  • Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.

  • DC Campaign to Submit Over 40K Signatures for Open Primaries, Ranked Choice Voting

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  • I guess it depends on your definition of ‘major’. I think in a pluralistic democracy, any party that represents 10+% of the population meets that criteria. Of course, from the perspective of a two-party system 10% doesn’t seem like much, but it’s significant enough to have held the balance of power many times since the Greens came into existence in the ‘90s.

  • In the US, did Amazon kill the mall, is everyone too broke, or a combination of other factors?

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  • Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.

  • Protestation

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  • What will happen to all the USA TikTok creators once the ban on TikTok takes effect?

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  • And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.

  • DC Campaign to Submit Over 40K Signatures for Open Primaries, Ranked Choice Voting

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  • We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.

  • DC Campaign to Submit Over 40K Signatures for Open Primaries, Ranked Choice Voting

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  • Labor is the largest single party in the Lower House. The Liberal Party has (almost) never gained a true majority. The National Party, with whom the Liberal Party coalesces (known in Australia as The Coalition or the LNP) is our current major opposition, and they only hold that position as a coalition. The Greens regularly poll between 9-12%, which causes our Federal Senate to end up giving them a significant amount of power. We also (thanks to changes a recent government made) have a significant crossbench made up of The Greens, minor parties and independents. Our current senate (and most previous Senates) has many potential ‘kingmakers’ (including previous AFL legend David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and others) which mean that governments can’t pass legislation without courting those outside their party.

    To the outsider it may seem that we only have two parties, but in our context we understand it to be more complex than that. Many Australian jurisdictions have known minority-government, government-by-coalition and Lower House government tempered by Upper House diversity which tempers the passage of legislation.

    Like I said, it’s not a perfect system (and pretty far from direct democracy) but we sit in this interesting position between the absolute Two-Party System of FPTP jurisdictions and other systems that produce 5+ parties that need to form government together. Our system is far from perfect, but it’s not terrible.

  • DC Campaign to Submit Over 40K Signatures for Open Primaries, Ranked Choice Voting

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  • As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.

    In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.

    RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.

  • Biden admits to taking drugs before the debate.

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  • If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.

  • Biden has taken more action on climate than any president. His pitch? It creates jobs

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  • This is an argument I’ve been pitching in the Australian context for some 20 years now - we should have been world leaders in solar technology, to the extent that by now we should have massive solar farms across the North of Australia in order to export clean, green energy up to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and other near-neighbours. We could have created a whole new industry of both research and advanced manufacturing, and if we’d nationally sequester our resources correctly we could be doing every step of the way - dig out the minerals, refine them, manufacture them into panels, export those panels - all the while generating very low cost energy and exporting it for profit as well! Not to mention so many new jobs!

    Even once you take away all of the obvious arguments for climate change action (environmental, ethical, prevention of future disasters etc.) there was always going to be a strong financial incentive in a capitalistic market to move to technology that has the lowest input cost to generate energy, which just so happens to be renewables. It just baffles me that so many politicians crucified themselves on the altar of coal when they could’ve been remembered for ushering in simultaneous economic benefit and environmental benefit, with a long term impact of lowered inflation through cheaper power bills, but that’s what the minerals lobby in this country has managed to achieve. What a disgrace.

    Good to see a world leader using the economic arguments in addition to the other more obvious ones.

  • Greece introduces the six-day work week

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  • Same boat mate - Aussie govt employee myself who has access to flex. Personally I felt it was better when I was working for an NGO and they always gave me the choice between being paid overtime or banking it to flex later. It was nice to get the extra cash when I needed it and extra leave when the time came too. That should be the standard the employee should have the choice between OT or extra leave.