MHLoppy

Can access fine (with reduced functionality) on my end with JS disabled - maybe you have something else tripping it up or something?

I used to believe in this (and to a degree still do), but the idea of increasing the attack surface of unreasonable people (who seem to have become increasingly common in the last 10 years) who will do insane things like SWAT you, or doxx your personal details (like home address), or even just follow you around online to harass you has made me have second thoughts about the tradeoffs involved in this approach 🫠

See also: Betoota Advocate: Australian media faces existential crisis after realising this whole Free Palestine thing might extend well beyond university lawns and Instagram (which I think has a better headline but Betoota links never seem to embed quite right)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

See also: The Shovel: Inner-city leftie in panic after finding herself siding with Murdoch

you madlad

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

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.