MHLoppy

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This is now becoming incredibly tangential to the original post, but the comment thread reminded me of the time the hacker known as "Alex" uncovered Tony Abbott's passport and phone numbers, who reacted pretty well to it: https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram/

And then Tony Abbott just… calls me on the phone?
Mostly, he wanted to check whether his understanding of how I’d found his passport number was correct (it was). He also wanted to ask me how to learn about “the IT”.
He asked some intelligent questions, like “how much information is in a boarding pass, and what do people like me need to know to be safe?”, and “why can you get a passport number from a boarding pass, but not from a bus ticket?”.
The answer is that boarding passes have your password printed on them, and bus tickets don’t. You can use that password to log in to a website (widely regarded as a bad move), and at that point all bets are off, websites can just do whatever they want.
He was vulnerable, too, about how computers are harder for him to understand.
“It’s a funny old world, today I tried to log in to a [Microsoft] Teams meeting (Teams is one of those apps), and the fire brigade uses a Teams meeting. Anyway I got fairly bamboozled, and I can now log in to a Teams meeting in a way I couldn’t before.
It’s, I suppose, a terrible confession of how people my age feel about this stuff.”
Then the Earth stopped spinning on its axis.
For an instant, time stood still.
Then he said it:
“You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”
This was possibly the most pure and powerful Australian energy a human can possess, and explains how we elected our strongest as our leader. The raw energy did in fact travel through the phone speaker and directly into my brain, killing me instantly.
When I’d collected myself from various corners of the room, he asked if there was a book about the basics of IT, since he wanted to learn about it. That was kinda humanising, since it made me realise that even famous people are just people too.

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

Haha, that was Turnbull? It really sounds more like an Abbott thing to have said!

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

There is a deep irony covering this by writing about it.. on Substack

MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

Seems a bit too much lol

I agree - though it kinda feels a bit test-the-waters-y, like if it goes well maybe it'll become a recurring thing, or maybe similar "organized collabs" will happen with other gens etc ¯(ツ)_/¯

MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

Headline question, answer no...

For what it's worth, the SEO headline is "Why high immigration has fallen out of favour in Australia" (i.e., a statement saying it has, not a question or a no), but I felt the question better represented the actual text so I changed it to the normal one.

MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

I unfortunately can't find the article that discussed the idea, but someone (an economist? a think tank?) brought up the idea of raising/broadening GST, but then then just giving everyone a flat amount back. In their modeling it halved the net revenue from the GST change (though it was still a good chunk of money), but made it financially neutral for people at lower incomes.

Edit: Again drawing from uni-assignment-land, I really like the PBO's discussion of Australia's tax mix: https://www.pbo.gov.au/about-budgets/budget-insights/budget-explainers/tax-mix/characteristics-different-taxes

Chapter 3 in the PDF has a great discussion about tradeoffs of different taxes, with both Figure 3-1 (near the start) and Table 3-1 (at the end) having some great insights if you're not well-versed in those design tradeoffs (i.e., almost everyone). Here's a copy of that first chart for easier reference: https://fedia.io/media/a9/3c/a93ca8c1bc7fea26f47b9063d55a175d04c0a846d69a4a66d240808675841e34.webp

Of course efficiency (which this figure shows) doesn't mean equity (which the chapter also discusses), hence ideas like the flat offset to balance it out.

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

What the fuck? La+ Darknesss is spelt with a triple "s" at the end and I literally only noticed 10 seconds ago?

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

This is so confusing to look at lol

MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

That's not the precedent set by other similar, recent submissions though, - nobody complained about this other submission talking about an event in 2004 (also ~20 years ago): https://lemmy.world/post/32137161

If you want to police submitting to this community with an unwritten rule about editorializing titles to include chronological information:

get the rule added to the sidebar instead of assuming people can somehow figure it out when there's no existing evidence of this precedent
enforce it consistently

It's not my favorite thing to have a few people who don't even make submissions getting upset at me for following the diabolical process of (1) reading the rules, (2) looking at previous submissions, and (3) copying a title verbatim from a reasonable source. If there's something that people are expected to follow, make it a written rule or give me access to your secret mind-reading device. This community isn't called sysadmin_news so I'm not sure how I'm reasonably expected to know this.

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

Eh, that assumes that all posts are news posts. When I first saw this headline I didn't assume it was current news, but I'm also familiar with the "Who, Me?" column I guess.

MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

you madlad

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

Unfortunately it's also the monkeys holding the money here ):

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

Her voting record (again with the disclaimer that we're relying on this one source for that information) is thankfully on the short side. If excluding anything that's only "believe in climate change and that queer people exist" (and not the much larger "social and environmental issues" scope), the majority still looks overall progressive to me.

Very non-exhaustive examples:

[for] Increasing access to subsidised childcare
[for] Increasing housing affordability
[for] Ending immigration detention on Nauru
[for] Reducing tax on lowest income bracket
[for] The territories being able to legalise euthanasia
[against] Reducing tax concessions for high socio-economic status

She then does have the stuff that Frog alluded to:

[against] Criminalising wage theft
[against] Improving pay and conditions for gig workers
[mixed] Increasing workplace protections
[mixed] Increasing workplace protections for women

But even mixed-tending-against can be a sliver more progressive than status quo in a policy area, since status quo typically means voting against all changes.

MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

I've come back to this because of how cute the art is _*

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MHLoppy @fedia.io 7mo ago

If the majority of her voting positions* don't align with "big L liberals" then it seems an inaccurate way to classify her, even if she's not voting progressively on some key things like workers rights etc. Social and environmental issues (which is a significantly expanded scope compared to the previously stated subsets of just [climate change + queer people existing]!) covers a lot of important policy areas.

Given that her voting record seems to be unambiguously and substantially more progressive than any of the LNP members I glanced at, it would be more accurate to describe her record as broadly-progressive-except-in-X.

relying on this source - I don't know whether this generalizes accurately to her actual voting or not, but I'm assuming it's at least decently accurate