Thanks, I rushed and used the wrong link. I’ve updated the post link now.

Zedda is a new one to me, but I reckon it will stick.

But Was He Really the First to Fly in Australia?

Obviously such a question depends on the definition of flight, but it would have been nice for the article to give an honourable mention to Lawrence Hargrave, who lived in Australia since age 15.

Of great significance to those pioneers working toward powered flight, Hargrave successfully lifted himself off the ground under a train of four of his box kites at Stanwell Park Beach on 12 November 1894.

Obviously very different to a piloted and controlled flight like the Wright Brothers and these examples, but certainly notable.

by not using the countries name

“America” is not their country’s name either (“USA” is actually closer, now that you mention it)

no one says Gen Zed

Odd choice of example, I hear it often.

Who was our best Prime Minister and why?

Honestly, they should be. Even their rank and file members have been betrayed. As for supporters, the CFMEU fiasco gave many people in my union’s chat rooms cold feet, with the pro-Labor peeps in disbelief they would do what they have, and that’s on top of the Party’s active complicity in the Middle East conflict. Labor have mirrored the US Democrat Party in many clear ways. The main difference I see in the situation is that is much easier for Australia to swing left instead of right, since we don’t have the same FPTP spoiler effect in our federal voting system, so they can’t just fearmonger over the Coalition to scare the socdems and socialists into joining them.

It will be interesting to see how the Victorian council elections pan out as a litmus test, interestingly in NSW council elections the Labor Party lost 26 seats, with the Greens gaining 8. That’s just surface level looking at numbers but its enough for me to wonder if Federal Labor are worried.

Condorcet

Nice.

edit: for those who aren’t aware

Yeah, dismal job from the ABC this time. If you want a better account with quotes, there was one shared here.

Further details: the USyd student magazine’s article on this.

Something tells me they don’t care about the US’s opinion when it comes to invasions.

Perhaps there’s a new market for crystal cases then.

This is straight from a think tank commentary site (their words).

ASPI was established by the Australian Government in 2001 and is partially funded by the Department of Defence

The following copypasted from Wikipedia:

In 2020, Myriam Robin in the Australian Financial Review identified three sources of funding, in addition to the Department of Defence. ASPI receives funding from defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Thales Group and Raytheon Technologies. It also receives funding from technology companies such as Microsoft, Oracle Australia, Telstra, and Google. Finally, it receives funding from foreign governments including Japan, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

For the 2019-2020 financial year, ASPI listed a revenue of $11,412,096.71. The ASPI received from the Australian Department of Defence 35% of its revenue, 32% from federal government agencies, 17% from overseas government agencies, 11% from the private sector, and 3% from the defense industries. Finally, it receives funding from foreign governments including Japan, Israel, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

So it’s important to understand the article with that bias in mind - this is sponsored content.

This has been happening for over a year, it’s not sudden just now that there’s an election.

Its not like trump is any different.

That’s irrelevant. Just like Liberal and Labor here are both systematically supportive of the Zionist regime, just because one might prefer a party over the other doesn’t make them less worthy of criticism. No-one’s going to say ‘omg biden is complicit in genocide, im going to vote for trump instead!’, or ‘labor leadership have blood on their hands, hopefully the coalition will fix it!’ so I’m not sure what Trump has to do with this at all.

Did you verify that, or did you just copy paste a machine-generated comment?

afaik, ‘cooker’ has risen as a slang term for the wackier conspiracy theorists:

From Wiktionary:

5. (slang, Australia) A person who makes or uses illicit drugs, especially methamphetamine or cannabis.

7. (slang, derogatory, Australia) A person who is cooked in the head; a crazy person.
8. (slang, derogatory, Australia) A conspiracy theorist, especially one who is involved in politics.

Reminder: no out-of-area (‘absent’) votes in this election.

Council elections may not the be most exciting I find them much more interesting, because while my vote is still statistically negligible, it’s much more powerful than in a state or federal election. So less popular choices have a higher chance of competing.

Unfortunately* it feels like most of my local candidates have almost identical policies, so my second and third preferences might as well be a coin flip. At least I know who’s going last.

lol - what abuse? He said these things in an earnings presentation, probably to board and investors.

Attempting to (softly) control other peoples’ basic freedom, and their social life while at work, restricting them and alienating them from anything outside the office. The problem isn’t their choice of words, nor that they admitted it to investors.

Maybe the way I’m saying this sounds melodramatic, that I’m jumping to the extreme case and assuming the worst. But those worst cases happen regularly, and these are the warning signs - when the owners want increasing control over workers to extract more profit, to “get the best out of them”. Those employee pain points are social life: the company wants a childcare centre, a restaurant and a gym because “I don’t want them leaving the building.”, “I don’t want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that costs.” They could have lied and said they did it to improve worker wellbeing and get the best out of them, to reduce the travel-time needed, or any other seemingly innocent reason.

This attitude makes the universal truth clear, a board and investors see their workers as a resource for extracting maximum profit. It has to be that way, that’s how they compete and survive. And it alienates workers.

And I don’t see any evidence anywhere that his people are enduring shit jobs.

I didn’t say they were. I don’t know their conditions. I’m refuting the common attitude that workers are just free to leave when they’re being abused.

outrage reporting

You have a point. They said the quiet part aloud because their audience didn’t need the propaganda bullshit they would have told other people. And so, they admitted an outrageous truth which, well, is pretty normal among businesses. The journalist is taking a quote and shining the headlights on them. But, they are not inventing a fake problem. There’s no ethical justification for saying they don’t want people leaving the building to enjoy a walk and a coffee on their break. Employer exploitation of workers is a real issue in society at large, it deserves attention, and this outrage is an opportunity to give it the attention it deserves.

As the one calling the shots, he’s entitled to run the business that way.

Legally, sure. But I don’t care whether someone is legally allowed to be abusive, it’s still abuse, and their abusive attitude towards workers earns outrage.

And sure, employees can probably leave legally, but if we allow this abuse to be normalized then there won’t be another place to go in the industry. There is economic asymmetry at play, it’s not viable to just leave a job whenever it treats someone badly. There are only so many jobs available and the market is increasingly moving towards monopolization in many industries.

People don’t just work in shit jobs because they haven’t considered leaving. They have legal freedom, but they are not empowered to leave without ending up somewhere just as bad or risking unemployment. So even if no-one is forced, they’re inherently pressured, and that pressure is enough for them to accept abuse in order to keep themselves and their families off the dole. We need to create a society with an economy where people aren’t subject to the whims of their employers.

Seriously, watching that interview is a little painful with all the interrupting to try and railroad the conversation, and attaching weird attacks and assertions to make loaded questions, or rather, framing a claim as a question. I haven’t seen it so bad outside of Faux News in the US.

Glad to hear Max got a quick mention of the Green Bans of the BLF in.