This is how businesses continue shady practices :(

Satire outlet.

Droll means humorous, did you mean to write dull or do you have a different point I am not understanding.

I don’t think that’s legal here. Australian political campaigns are typically not on the scale of corrupted that usa ones are. Clive Palmer is probably the most dramatic example of someone trying to buy influence and it didn’t work out as amazingly cost effective.

I also suspect that Murdoch would fight hard to resist any attempt to remove him from his station as political kingmaker in Australia.

The impression that I’m getting is that some people are angry at not being praised, having people say mean things sometimes, or at the possibility of being passed over because of what rather than who they are.

Which I get it, that shit sucks. But like women are dealing with that too. Idk if men experience like getting catcalled and being like “shit, am I in danger now?”. Do guys feel like you need another man to walk with you home from a train station at night?

It just seems a bit to me like there’s not much empathy here from the blokes complaining. Yes we should all be kinder to each other, and being looked over is awful. On the latter women are looked over all the time and surely broadly making opportunity 50:50 is a fair goal (realistically because women live slightly longer a true unbiased society would see a very slight majority women in major positions). Like look at Parliament and tell me women aren’t held back from power.

And with mean stuff being said like yes that is rude but again women also deal with that and worse. It doesn’t seem like a reason to hold a grudge, it seems like a reason to band together to equalise everything so the fear and suspicion can stop.

Thank you

I am curious if you have any episodes you would recommend? I have seen the worst. I wonder what the good ones are and would be interested to better understand the appeal.

I tend to go for very dry and academic podcasts. We’re not so different, maintenance phase, when diplomacy fails, Australia in the world, tech wont save us etc.

Yeah… he seemed like a kind of person I’ve known but it’s a few snippets from an interview. Maybe there’s a more charitable way to read it, more of a joke.

Dole bludgers rhetoric is just useless eaters dressed up and made palatable again.

It is government policy that 5% of people actively looking for work are kept unemployed to supress wage growth and weaken labour as a social force (not Labor). That’s one in twenty people actively looking for work. It is also government policy to demonise those same people.

Cool and Good.

Competition can result in dynamic improvements in value and also in service quality. A nationalised company with no competition can stagnate and be just as destructive as a commercial monopoly.

This is the propaganda put forward sure, but this argument works just as well for privatising medical insurance (Medicare is just an insurance program), roads, rail, telephony, building regulation etc. We know how those turn out.

It’s not fundamentally addressing the problem that insurance is not something you can innovate in. Something like a house costs X to rebuild, that’s somewhat flexible but at the construction level not the insurance level (unless you’re proposing vertically integrated insurance and construction?). The chance of a house being destroyed is Y per month, you charge Z such that Z - operations > Y x X

There are complicated methods of spreading the risk across multiple suburbs and such so your capital reserve isn’t anhilated in one fire but everyone must be insured so across an industry there is no efficiency to find there and the only other way to improve yield is finding ways to deny claims which just pushes the costs onto society so that is not something a government should try to encourage.

If it is not nationalised then either high risk suburbs are not insured, the government subsidises insurance in high risk suburbs which is just silly, or the government insures high risk suburbs. If the latter this is worse as private industry gobbles up the profitable suburbs and we all foot the bill for the rest.

Nationalisation of Utilities, like Water, Power, Telco, Rail, Roads, etc does make sense, but Insurance, Banking, Media needs to be private (although government-funded competitors are great at keeping the industries honest).

Why? That’s just an assertion. Mathematically I only offer you insurance if it is, on average, a bad deal for you. It’s just a casino for houses, the house always wins.

Private businesses aren’t charities, but everyone suffers if houses cannot be rebuilt, or people cannot replace the tools they need to flourish after a car accident or break in etc. We all bear the cost of this anyway since we all have to be insured which is (cost of covering this damage + profit). It is effectively a regressive tax for a scheme which doesn’t cover everyone equally.

When people aren’t covered it’s a disaster for everyone and it’s cruel to leave people in the lurch. The government sets the social conditions (property crime, availability of welfare etc), the environmental conditions (natural disasters, harms from pollution etc), and releases land to build on (risk profile). Community bodies such as government are the only bodies that make sense to run insurance from, and it motivates us not to e.g. release land that’ll flood and just say “lol sorry you poors who had to live there because we won’t densify”.

Please make your argument for privatisation.

2035, come back to my zuckermusk hab unit after a hard day in the lithium mines. Silksong has released. Saved all my metacoin for this, haven’t had a hot shower in years. Boot it up, it’s beautiful. The art brings tears to my eyes, makes me remember a world beyond concrete and steel. Level one, let’s go. Movement so tight it’s euphoric, get to first boss.

Electricity rationing kicks in.

I hate people who paint over door hardware so much.

Painting this wardrobe is now this ludicrous rigmarole because the antique hardware replacements (last stuff corroded to hell because paint traps water and it dies) are on order and I’ve got to hand clean paint off the good ones.

Seriously everyone who paints over brass hardware get a special place in hell. Painted hardware doesn’t even look good if you are worried about it looking “dated”. I’m so mad!

It hasn’t, it refers to neoliberals. The massively dominant ideology with near total hegemony in the anglosphere.

Neoliberals couple some elements of classical liberalism with some rather courageous (in the yes minister sense) beliefs about the magic of free market capitalism and a diminished role for the state.

Leaving insurance privatised is insane to me. The whole of society hurts if people can’t rebuild their lives and we just let people screw people for as much as they can then drop them the moment is looks like turnabout might be coming. Ok.

All LLMs have propaganda baked in to them.

incredibly based.