It’s really sad to me that Americans get put in the awful position of choosing between tipping, which supports the low wages, and taking responsibility for ensuring another human being has a living wage. It’s just such a terrible position for a consumer to be placed in, having to make ethical and moral choices about how much money to pay for goods and services.
Instigate
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 4th, 2023
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They’ve been doing that for a long time - ever heard of Apple Pay?
22·4 months agoWe 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.
10·4 months agoAgreed, but rather than take it to the tip (and therefore have to pay fees to dump anyway) just don’t put your name on the box. Be the anonymous hero that the council needs, but very much does not deserve.
So glad to hear their fundraising outstripped the fines! If council won’t reward them (as they so obviously should have), I’m glad that the people rallied to do so.
You’re totally right, but I wish we lived in a world where leaving your name on that box would lead to a reward rather than a punishment. I can’t understand a council wanting to not only fail to incentivise, but actively disincentivise works of public good, except that it gave them an opportunity to extract more revenue. It’s a really, really sad state of affairs.
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!
The first thing I played when I bought mine was Losing My Religion - so much fun to jam out to some REM on these beautiful lutes. Looks like you’ve got yourself one sexy sounding songmaker right there!
2·4 months agoDid you buy freebase or salts? And what mg/mL did you dose at? I still use my reusable vape and dose my own and have dosed both freebase and salts - what MalReynolds says is the truth. The salt has a much lower throat-hit, which has allowed the disposable vape companies to jack up the mg/mL to 50+ which is just fucking insane territory. A friend of mine dosed his own with nicotine salts at 50mg/mL to compare and it gave that exact head spin you’re talking about. It’s a combination of the dosage and use of nicotine salt that does it.
1·4 months agoUhhh, 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.
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.
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 Poremoved, 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.
4·4 months agoThis is an argument I’ve been pitching in the Australian context for some 20 years now - we should have been world leaders in solar technology, to the extent that by now we should have massive solar farms across the North of Australia in order to export clean, green energy up to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and other near-neighbours. We could have created a whole new industry of both research and advanced manufacturing, and if we’d nationally sequester our resources correctly we could be doing every step of the way - dig out the minerals, refine them, manufacture them into panels, export those panels - all the while generating very low cost energy and exporting it for profit as well! Not to mention so many new jobs!
Even once you take away all of the obvious arguments for climate change action (environmental, ethical, prevention of future disasters etc.) there was always going to be a strong financial incentive in a capitalistic market to move to technology that has the lowest input cost to generate energy, which just so happens to be renewables. It just baffles me that so many politicians crucified themselves on the altar of coal when they could’ve been remembered for ushering in simultaneous economic benefit and environmental benefit, with a long term impact of lowered inflation through cheaper power bills, but that’s what the minerals lobby in this country has managed to achieve. What a disgrace.
Good to see a world leader using the economic arguments in addition to the other more obvious ones.
Same boat mate - Aussie govt employee myself who has access to flex. Personally I felt it was better when I was working for an NGO and they always gave me the choice between being paid overtime or banking it to flex later. It was nice to get the extra cash when I needed it and extra leave when the time came too. That should be the standard the employee should have the choice between OT or extra leave.
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.