TheCriticalMember

Or just take it? We could call it Australia's Greenland.

Haha, saw the headline and came to argue something along those lines. It's our only hope at this point.

We have a federal election next month, with candidates that have a lot of similarities with the US situation last November. It's going to be a good indicator of what kind of country Australians want.

Depending on the US for anything is bad policy these days. I'd love to see the entire rest of the world collectively exclude them from the global economy. But of course the oligarchs won't allow that.

It's a very pretty confirmation of how fucked I already knew I am.

Believe me I will. But I'll put a socialist, green, or certain independent candidate first.

I wish that we had so few problems I could vote on this single issue, but stopping any Australian version of maga needs to be priority number 1, and then about 50 other things before legal weed. Honestly, it's not hard or expensive to get a prescription, you can do it all over the phone.

It's shocking how many maga wannabes we have in this country. If you're thinking of voting along those lines, please do more research. Don't believe anything they promise you. They'll say anything, and when they have control they'll absolutely fuck the working class to make the rich as rich as possible. Just look at what's happening in America right now. If you're not comfortably living off the returns on your vast wealth, or you have any sort of integrity, Rinehart and co have nothing good for you.

Whaaaaat? No way! Things like this normally never happen when you take a bunch of untrained morons off the street and give them police like powers.

Fuck America. We don't want their tyrannical oligarchic bullshit here. trump and his hopelessly incompetent government think they can coerce other countries into doing whatever they want through tariffs, the rest of the world needs to start a new global economy without the US in it.

In the US right now we're witnessing the logical conclusion of capitalism and unless you're one of a handful of people it's not pretty. Unregulated capitalism needs to end or it's going to take us all down. We should be looking to emulate the democratic socialist countries of Europe, but it's never going to happen while we sit back and let rich people's kids rule our lives.

IPWEA (Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia) Bridge Guide. I'm a bridge engineer. That "proper care and maintenance" line is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Sure, you can make timber last that long, but it's maintenance-intensive.

Trouble is, wood has a much shorter design life and needs a lot more maintenance than concrete. Concrete bridges have a design life of 100 years, while timber will likely need significant refurbishment within 20-40, not to mention constant inspections every year with testboring at 2 year intervals (per AustRoads) and they're often more expensive to build nowadays with the price of timber.

So yeah, they can look cool, but there are far better things to spend our money on.