Instigate

I donate regularly to a charity and don’t try to dictate how they spend that money, because I have faith that they’ll responsibly use my donations.

And their venom HURTS. They’re not particularly deadly or anything but their venom will land you in the hospital or at least laid up in bed for a while. My stepmother grew up out in the bush in NSW the ‘70s and received one of the few recorded platypus envenomations and she described it as the most painful experience of her life. She said childbirth was a breeze compared to the platypus sting!

It’s the political extremism ouroboros - any political ideology that is based upon hate inevitably ends up eating itself as they need to keep inventing things to hate and eventually turn inwards. I love to see it.

They’ve been doing that for a long time - ever heard of Apple Pay?

https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/apple-pay-costs-for-australian-banks-revealed-20221209-p5c527

For reference here in Australia my wife has been asking to get mammograms for years now (in her 30s) and she keeps getting told she’s too young because she doesn’t have a familial history. That issue is a bit pervasive in countries other than the US.

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.

Thanks for the advice - I’ll definitely take that into account! To be clear (without doxxing myself) my emails came from a ‘.nsw.gov.au’ address so I hope that wouldn’t steer many academics away from sharing their findings, especially those whose research was conducted in other Anglophonic countries (specifically the US and Canada). I can understand the hint of hesitation though. I always assumed using my .gov.au email would have evaded spam filters, but perhaps my regular email address might have more luck.

I should also state that the research I’ve been trying to access is predominately psychological or social work academia (I’m a child protection caseworker), and I’m not sure if the same “share it if you got it” mantra applies in those fields.

We got a small taste of that during the Obama years… just imagine what happens when you multiply African-American with South Asian and female! I think we’ll see those whose masks have been slowly cracking through the ‘45’ years go absolutely balls-to-the-wall mask off. It will be an interesting four years to say the least!

Honestly, a part of me wants the Dump to be completely disqualified from running; Biden to step aside; and Nikki Haley to come back from the grave so that there’s a contest between two South Asian women for president. The voting public’s mind would EXPLODE.

Honestly I’ve heard this and seen it written very many times, but any time I’ve ever reached out to a lead author to request access to their paper I’ve been met with zero reply. Like, nothing, from at least six different attempts (that I can remember right now). And I’m a government employee emailing from a government domain, usually with a very well written plea for information. Maybe I’m the unlucky one?

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!

I had a little chuckle-up myself

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.

Many people with vaginas have a lot of sex that makes no babies

The reference is to Rupert Murdoch; a man who hasn’t been Australian since 1985 when he gave up his Australian Citizenship to become naturalised as an American. He created NewsCorp which became the Fox Corporation; one of the most politically viable and mainstream news sources of the 20th and 21st centuries in the US media landscape.

The revocation of the word ‘mate’ just honestly shows that Americans are so very alien to the concept of immigrants that even an Anglophonic immigrant who’s been a US citizen for almost 40 years still isn’t somehow ‘American’ if their slang hasn’t been fully naturalised as well.

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.

I dunno, if I suddenly grew a vagina I might want to use it.

Original source: https://facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2656977204337311

Denis Lushch - ‘The Bullshit Weaver’

It bugs me that this image has been altered and reproduced so many times without crediting the artist. It’s a wonderful political cartoon and very pointedly aimed at Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp.

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.

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.

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.