shads @ shads @lemy.lol

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2 yr. ago

I apologise if my summary is too biased/inaccurate, tried my best to be as impartial and factual as I could while falling asleep on my phone at 4am.

Honestly not sure what to expect if a snap election is called, we can be a funny populace to call and a snap election leaves little time for political messaging to percolate, but also a commensurately short time to combat any poor messaging that gains a foothold.

I think Dean Winters (the Labor leader) may be unpopular enough to cause Labor some grief at the ballot box, but the Liberals fumbling is going to give the party a small lift. Labors stance that they won't partner with the Greens will also cause them some grief.

I personally think independent stand the most to gain and will hold balance of power in whatever minority government gets through.

Gun to my head - Labor minority.

The stadium is a Lightning rod issue, but it is far from the only one.

Briefly we have had a Liberal government that is terrible at organisation and makes deals based upon cronyism, nepotism and or incompetence.

The state government has demonstrated that they are largely incapable of delivering any projects on budget and lack forward planning capability. For example two new high speed ferries were commissioned to connect Tasmania and Victoria to accomodate post COVID tourism increases. These ferries were constructed in Finland and were ready before the facilities required to berth them here in Tasmania, this has meant that we have had to pay a port in Scotland to hold on to them until we can get our side of things ready.

We have had a number of crises in our Public Health and hospital systems leading to extended delays for people seeking both emergency and planned treatment.

When it became obvious that the State government was unable to balance a budget they opted to institute a Public Service hiring freeze. Talked about instituting a government body to emulate the stated goals of DOGE.

The stadium is possibly the most politicised matter, our previous Premier got super focussed on getting a Tasmanian AFL team. After a lot of big talk AFL provided a pathway that a lot of people felt was demonstrative of them not wanting a Tasmanian team to go ahead, setting a requirement that a new stadium be constructed in a difficult/impossible location, with conditions that would potentially exclude its use for other sport and event types, with the state largely being the ones to bankroll a project that had a hopelessly optimistic budget.

Since there has been a yearning for an AFL team in Tasmania for a very long time the government and AFL are leveraging this to get people to back the stadium regardless of it's feasibility.

All of this came to a head when the Liberals released a budget that would increase state debt to more than $10 billion by 2029. This would be a trigger for a bunch of state assets being put up for sale.

So the Labor Party leader pushed for a No Confidence vote, which has been successfull. By convention the Premier is expected to resign once a No Confidence motion has passed, but Jeremy Rlockliffe has opted to instead fight this by calling an election.

Now I really shouldn't have started typing all this up at 4an. I'm going back to bed. Good night.

Yeah that's a situation alright.

Oh yeah that's what I mean, the trail of wreckage they leave as they get promoted out of the positions they ruin is astounding.

Yeah, just wait until the Australian electorate has a brain fart and let's Sky News convince them to vote in spud head. He will get right on to climate change by "nuclear-ifying"* our power grid.

^ * "nuclear-ifying" is a term of art that should not be interpreted to mean any actual progress will be made towards nuclear power generation. Expect to see increased demand placed on coal and gas power plant, all hail Gina. Spoken and authorised by the Liberuhal Party... Oh and /s so it's not elecgion interference ^

Oh it's tragic. The kid is headed for a life of middle management, like I said he may or may not have been being honest. But he goes to the expensive private school that I couldn't afford to send one of my kids to, let alone both. He will make the right connections and be part of the right social circles that details like not understanding his achievements won't really matter.

I've worked for that sort of guy across industries and business, they do fine.

Or if he absolutely has to have a 1 hour response time sounds like a hiring someone to do admin might be the best way to stay competitive.

Had a chat with my kids friends while dropping them at home, they were talking about a kid who got busted using ChatGPT for some schoolwork. When I jokingly asked one of them how he avoids getting caught he admitted he uses it for "first drafts" then rewrites the whole thing in "his own words". A bit of drilling down and he admitted it takes him longer to write a short paper with ChatGPT but it's easier because he doesn't have to think of what to say, just how to change the words.

If he was being honest the irony of the dumb kid rewriting the idiot boxes responses so he doesn't get caught is just... Getting the article off Wikipedia and doing the same thing would have a similar result... Only with less faffing around and environmental impact.

I like it, however are you concerned about having something made out of hard plastic, glass and metal at roughly head height in the event of a crash?

Having seen a few improvised claymore mines in cars (rhinestones or diamontes on steering wheels or dashes) it's always something I consider.

They are already complaining about the hole in the budget illegal tobacco products are leaving, how on earth would our economy stand up to losing the addiction tax?

I get a really slimy vibe from this RFI group. Kinda reminds me of the NIMBY groups that go around blocking mobile phone sites.

I remember talking to a planner once about the mobile phone blocking efforts and he was pretty scathing about what he had seen, some of it genuinely people who had an axe to grind based upon Facebook radicalisation, but a lot of it seemed to have deeper financial motivations from some of the organisers.

He told a vague story about a guy who kicked up a big stink with a proposed tower for highway coverage in a rural area, that is until the site was relocated and he found out afterwards that the secondary site selected was owned by a relative of the guy kicking up the stink who made bag off the bush block that was suddenly worth more than 15 times its previous value.

I fully endorse research and feasibility studies with an eye towards minimising environmental impacts, but if the alternative to these projects is continued reliance on coal and gas I suspect that the long term impacts are far more likely to be worse by not going ahead with the OSW.

Of course I would prefer that the development were done by a domestic company rather than foreign investors, but it seems we don't really do massive infrastructure domestically any more.

I guess what I was trying to say with my rambling 1am slightly drunken screed, is that all of us swim in a sea of ignorance. I sure as hell do, I know little to nothing about mining, a lot of farming practices are completely unknown to me and the logistics used to coordinate the delivery of healthcare at a national level are frankly mind boggling (I live in a country with a somewhat functional healthcare system, ignore this example if you live in the US).

The biggest thing, IMHO, that seperates me from a lot of the younger (and older) people I meet and interact with, is that I am happy to say "I don't know." And if it's important I can and will go and find out how it works, at least well enough to approach the cliffs of competency and decide if it's worth the effort to scale them.

I cannot tell you how many topics I have learnt enough about to decide to eat the steak and declare that "Ignorance is bliss." Thankfully I haven't had to do so while betraying my colleagues to the agents yet.

Maybe the writers at Games Workshop pulled a bit of prescience out when they did their exercise in hyperbolic projection of trends across 38,000 years.

Or maybe it was influence of the warp and Tzeentch...

I am not arguing in any way that there should be some basic competence required of everyone who uses tech, in the same way that despite my aversion to cars I know how to change a tyre, check and top up my oil, feel the windshield wiper resevoir and check the radiator level. It is incumbent on me to have that knowledge as a foundational level of being a driver and car owner, and yes I am aware that there are a number of drivers who do not know these things, but that is another discussion.

I think that far, far more important than all this is teaching critical thinking, media literacy and scepticism. A grade 11 & 12 (I'm Australian so not sure how closely that maps but 17-19 year olds) health teacher I was talking to recently told me that more than 80% of her students admit to recieving the vast majority or all of their health information from TikTok. It genuinely does not matter if they understand the finer points of say file system structure, if they are uncritically listening to a shitty AI voice over a video of three people doing a synchronised "dance" telling them that oranges cause shin splints.

If our society, not just a segment of it, was taught to understand what media is, how it interacts with culture, and how rich people use it to establish and maintain control. That control from a ruling elite via newspapers, or TV, or the Internet is IMHO far more responsible than anything else for the state of your country... And my country... And the world. With that in mind I put my effort into trying to get my kids to research things for themselves and to look for the hidden motivations behind the facade of everything they do.

OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.

With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn't already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.

I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.

I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.

However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.

So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It... Just... Isn't... Important...

They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise "magic box does things when I perform this ritual" is enough for them to function in their world, the same as "Car starts when I turn this key" is enough for me to function in mine.

Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?

I miss those days, now it's the lower-back on step 4 that really scares me. Never get old.

I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am "the computer guy" he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.

He observed, "oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That's good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone."

Which I found scarily insightful.

And the worst part is we, as a populace, will buy into the mining industry captured press and vote him in enthusiastically.

There's a large part of me that wonders how bad the world will have to get before people stop voting against their best interests, and a more cynical part that acknowledges that we probably won't.

I don't know all the ins and outs of her financial situation. But I do know it's been a point of contention. And she is not the first property owner I have talked to who has been pinged for not charging enough rent as far as a bank was concerned.

Thousands of words of waffle to try to be apologists for those poor unfairly maligned property investors who were just doing their best when they took advantage of circumstances and taxation benefits to snap up the available supply of a limited resource.

Do they realise that enabling this class of people to do these things without the threat of social consequence is at least in part how this gets normalised.

Not only that but it skews society. My sister owns two properties thanks to an interstate move for work requiring her to spend more than a decade away from the first home unit she purchased. That first unit was on the rental market for a little under a year while my Mum saw out the lease at her rental she then moved into my sisters and is maintaining the unit as though it was her own. She pays the mortgage, pays for maintenance, rates etc. My sister calls the aggregate of these payments rent (I imagine she derives some tax benefits from this but I don't imagine it's super significant and she does pay for things like strata fees herself). Every time she talks to her bank she gets harassed about not deriving enough income from this property asset and that she won't be eligible for more money until she raises the "rent" my mother pays... By a lot. She is currently looking to sell the 2nd house she bought to put the money towards the next interstate purchase for the new requirements of her job and is being told the bank won't extend her a loan until the rent on the unit is increased to a "reasonable" amount.

Our system is broken, badly, and the only corrections I can see that would reintroduce equity will destroy the people who have invested into the property ponzi scheme. Find me a government who would bankrupt a large portion of the population, including themselves, for a better future. I'll arrange an airborne porcine squadron to replace the Roulettes for the next ANZAC day to celebrate.

Had a big thing written out, didn't like it when I read it back. So keeping it simple, I equivocated to try to deflect some of the potential rough replies from the cultists who have already drunk the Koolaid.