• 9 Posts
  • 231 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: May 8th, 2023
  • A1kmmAtoAustralian Politics@aussie.zone•The Antisemitism Envoy’s Call to Ban Antigenocide Protests in Cities is UndemocraticEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    I think her continuing as the antisemitism envoy is untenable now. Conflating protest against a genocide targeting a semitic people with antisemitism just provides cover for actual antisemitism.

    The rallies show that Australians are generally anti-genocide. The group “Jewish Australians for a Ceasefire in Gaza” has gathered over 900 signatures from Jewish Australians opposed to the genocide - and those are just the ones who signed the petition (it’s generally hard to get people to sign a petition, and only a relatively small percentage of Australians are Jewish, so that is a massive number).

    Jillian Segal’s absurd position is effectively that most Australians, including Jewish Australians, are antisemitic because they are anti-genocide. Human behaviour is to copy behaviours when they see prevalence signals indicating it is common; if far-right extremists believe that the majority is antisemitic, they’ll feel empowered to be antisemitic, and it will lead to an uptick in actual antisemitism. And when they are called out for it, people are likely to tune out because they have heard the term being used for benign behaviour like being anti-genocide. In fact, part of the job of Antisemitism Envoy should be to use their voice to actively counteract the misuse of the term antisemitism, so it retains its power.

    And freedom of expression, including through protest is a long-standing Australian value that is shared by most Australian.

    All this places her far below the standard for a government role, and I think it’s time to appoint someone who will stand up against real antisemitism and act against the dilution of the term.

  • A1kmmAtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•This app requires access to your contactsEnglish
    24·
    5 days ago

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  • A1kmmAtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Will Republicans try another Federal Right to Work attempt?English
    3·
    9 days ago

    This slowly degrades the power of the union and ultimately reduces wages and benefits of the workers

    I’m not sure I buy into that - but that said I live in a country where unions are popular, but unions are not allowed to force people to join (but unions do have a right of access to workplaces to ask people to join / hold meetings).

    Firstly, it doesn’t take that big a percentage of an employer’s workforce to strike before a strike is effective… companies don’t have a lot of surplus staff capacity just sitting around doing nothing. And they can’t fire striking union workers for striking.

    Secondly, if all employees have to belong to one particular union, that also means the employees have no choice of which union, and hence no leverage over the union. Bad unions who just agree to whatever the employer asks and don’t look after their members then become entrenched and the employees can’t do much. If there are several unions representing employees, they can still unite and work together if they agree on an issue - but there is much more incentive for unions to act in the interests of their members, instead of just their leadership.

    A lack of guaranteed employee protections, on the other hand, is inexcusable - it’s just wealthy politicians looking out for the interests of their donors in big business.

  • A1kmmAtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•Dead internet theoryEnglish
    1·
    22 days ago

    The term meme was introduced by Dawkins in 1976 as “a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene”. So any idea that is transmissible is a meme (even the concept of a meme is itself a meme).

    The meme of the meme has mutated over time from its ancestral form, and today to many people may mean the transmission of GIFs on the Internet.

    However, even in a sense closer to the current meaning than the 1976 ancestral form, memes certainly existed in online communities in the 90s (not as images generally, however, but text certainly).

  • A1kmmAtoAustralia@aussie.zone•24 hours left to make a submission to the senate inquiry considering social media age restrictionsEnglish
    7·
    1 month ago

    Here is my submission - please feel free to edit it and make your own based on it…

    My rather long submission

    For the reasons set out below, I believe that the bill, as it currently stands, would be a significant net negative for all Australians. In my submission, I will set out some more effective alternatives. I would strongly urge the committee to reject this bill in its present form.

    Here are some problems with the bill:

    Negative impact on children The bill would prevent children from being able to use many services that form a positive part of their life and education.

    While the bill inserts ss63C (6)©, which provides for specific services to be exempted by regulation, there are two problems: 1. It requires individual services to be exempted, not entire classes of services. This means that it is not a scalable solution for new and emerging services; if anything, it would create an anti-competitive moat around larger services. 2. Without significant exemptions provided under regulations, the liberties of children will be significantly restricted, and so certain exemptions should be legislated rather than being left for regulation.

    Examples of positive content that could be captured includes educational applications, educational games for children that include player interactions, and email applications.

    This problem could be partly ameliorated by exempting the following classes of services in the bill: 1. Any service which has rules, enforced by moderators or content scanning technology, that all content posted must be appropriate for children. 2. Any service for which a purpose is education or the exchange of factual information.

    Another problem is that the target of the bill is ‘having accounts’. There is no provision for the fact that there may be different features between accounts. For example, consider a digital newspaper service that allows for accounts for children, which can read the news, and accounts for adults, which can additionally comment socially on the news and read the comments of others (effectively, a modern continuation of the long-standing tradition of letters to the editor). This implementation would be no different for children than if the social features didn’t exist; however, the bill, as written, does not recognise that different accounts may have different access. Ambiguity will drive chilling effects The bill is very ambiguous in its effects. As a new bill, there would be no relevant case law. When coupled with a large civil penalty, the likely effect is that providers, especially smaller ones, will err on the side of caution, having a chilling effect on the Australian Internet industry. For example: The bill inserts section 63C(1)(a), which provides a series of sub-subclauses i-iv, separated by semicolons. After the last of these semicolon separated clauses, the word “or” appears. It is therefore ambiguous as to whether age-restricted social media platform means a service that meets either subclause 63C(1)(b), or ALL of subclauses 63©(1)(a)(i) to 63©(1)(a)(iv), or if it is an age-restricted social media platform if it meets any one of 63©(1)(a)(i), (ii), (iii), (iv) or 63©(1)(b). Another major source of ambiguity is the usage of the term “a significant purpose”. There is no guidance provided as to what criteria should be applied for assessing if a purpose is significant. In addition, the bill uses the language “reasonable steps to prevent” without defining what steps are, or are not reasonable. Negative privacy impact on all Internet users The bill would have a profound negative impact on privacy on the Internet for all users. Given the lack of clarity over what “reasonable steps” are, it is likely that providers could, out of an abundance of caution, interpret it to mean requiring users to upload a copy of an identity document, possibly coupled with facial recognition technologies. While the bill inserts section 63F and purports that this will protect privacy, this provision is unlikely to offer meaningful privacy protection. There is an exemption for when the information is disclosed “with the consent of the individual”. However, there is nothing preventing service providers from making that consent a condition of accessing their service. They would argue that consent is voluntary (users can just not use the service), informed, specific and unambiguous (they could explain this term) and current (they could allow revocation of consent, with revocation of access to the service as a consequence). The power imbalance between large services and users is heavily skewed in favour of the service; they are often gatekeepers to key aspects of people’s social and professional lives due to network effects. I am sure service providers would like nothing more than to be able to link people to their real identities, so as to track them across sites for more targeted advertising. The reason most (apart from Facebook) do not demand proof of identity now is because it would create friction and reduce conversions for them. However, if they are required to create this friction anyway, from their perspective they might as well use the information, and so would use their unequal bargaining power to get the consent they need. An additional problem is that this would normalise providing highly sensitive information such as identity documents to sites that do nothing more than provide minor social networking features. This would increase the credibility of malicious overseas sites asking for such documents, and allow them to then use those documents for fraud (hence undermining counter-terrorism financing and anti-money laundering protections). Furthermore, it would increase the risk of data breaches impacting Australians. Regulated industry participants, such as Medibank and Telstra, have been forced to collect sensitive identity information, and this has directly impacted the privacy of many Australians. Extending the need to collect sensitive information to a much wider group of Internet services would drastically increase the scope of this problem. If the committee does make the ill-advised decision to continue with this bill, one way to mitigate the effects would be as follows: 1. The federal government should adequately fund the creation of an online age verification service. 2. The service should allow members of the public to verify their identity, free of charge, and obtain a short-lived token (with no persistent unique person identifier attached) containing a cryptographically signed attestation that their age is higher than a set number (which must be 21 or lower). 3. The service should allow for age verification tokens to be either displayed on screen, or sent automatically on to a site (without a requirement that the site register, agree to terms or pay a fee) - so that the user is not obliged to reveal the sites they are using to the government, nor reveal their identity to the service. 4. The usage of the service (including the option to paste in a valid token) should be required for age-restricted services, so that they have no incentive to require the uploading of an identity document. Negative impact on new market players The bill, as written, would entrench a significant competitive advantage to larger players, harming competition. Providing proof of identity is an action that is high friction, and requires significant trust. The net effect of this is that it would create a barrier to entry to new players, who have not yet built up a base of trust. Users might be willing to, for example, play a game with social features, and create a pseudonymous account on it, but the stakes are so much higher if they have to upload a copy of their passport or drivers licence. This would have a substantial chilling effect on the creation of new services targeting Australian users. This impact would be even more profound for non-commercial services (for example, fediverse services, games created by hobbyists, and community information and social networking services), who typically do not have the budgets to invest in creating identify verification technologies, or paying a fee per verification. There is already far too much consolidation towards a few big players due to network effects, and this has a negative impact on society, and allows those players to implement algorithmic decisions that have an outsized impact on society; these businesses often optimise over what is best for their revenues, rather than what is best for society. Many of the problems of harm to children that this bill is attempting to solve are actually a consequence of consolidation, and this bill will make the problem worse. An alternative: Increase investment in education A much better alternative to the bill would be to increase investment in reaching and educating children and parents on safe online interaction. This could include educating parents not to allow children to have unsupervised device access, and education on critical thinking with regard to content on the Internet. An alternative: Require metadata on social media Another alternative approach, which would complement the above, would be to simply require that social media features be identifiable by machines through the inclusion of appropriate metadata (in accordance with a standard to be set by regulation). This would allow parents to install parent control applications which read the metadata and block access to sites at the client in accordance with policies set by parents or caregivers.

  • A1kmmAtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the smallest city in your country that everyone can still instantly recognise the name of? What is it famous for?English
    15·
    1 month ago

    By population, and not land area, certain more remote geographic places are well known but have quite a low population. ‘Everyone’ is a high bar, but most adults in Australia would know the following places (ordered from smaller population but slightly less known to higher population):

    • Wittenoom, WA - population 0 - well known in Australia for being heavily contaminated with dangerous blue asbestos (which used to be mined there until the 60s), and having been de-gazetted and removed from maps to discourage tourism to it.
    • Coober Pedy, SA - population 1437 - well known in Australia for its underground homes and opal production.
    • Alice Springs, NT - population 25,912 - well known for being near the centre of Australia in the rangelands (outback) - most larger population centres in Australia are coastal.
  • A1kmmAtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Trump thinks Putin is his friend. The Russians just issued a humiliating statement to the contrary.English
    1·
    1 month ago

    Seriously great question at this point. In 2016 it was commonly accepted knowledge that if Putin released a video of Trump getting pissed on by a woman in a Moscow hotel, that would be the end of his political career.

    Since then, he’s been found to be a rapist in court, has attempted to overthrow the government, and has been found guilty of about 3 dozen felonies with more charges pending - which doesn’t matter any way since Trump’s judges have granted him legal immunity to anything he wants to do. And he was just convincingly reelected with his party winning both the House and Senate.

    He is not going to run for president again ever in a free and fair election in accordance with the US constitution; that would require changing the constitution in ways that the Republicans don’t have the numbers for, or at least interpreting the existing constitution in a way that is so contorted I don’t think even the most conservative supreme court judges could support it.

    So in other words, he does not need anything from the American public anymore. He has no reason to care if part of his base opens their eyes to what he really is (at least, as long as at least 1/12th of the public will vote not to convict on any jury - but he can also self-pardon for anything except impeachment).

    I therefore don’t think the kompromat theory holds much water today.

    More likely, the Russians calculate that this is an opportunity to sow division in the US - they’d hope for a civil war as the best case. Supporting Trump, as a divisive president, was a start, but they wouldn’t want too many people happy with Trump either, so they want to make the haters hate him even more than is rational, and the sycophants continue to love him more.

    Of course, the risk for them is that they make Trump want to support Ukraine to a greater extent than the US currently is, instead of the opposite. They probably calculate he is incompetent and nothing much will change for them either way. Trump is certainly installing yes-men who will be loyal to him but likely not the most competent leaders; this is an effective way to disrupt a government, but it is likely that a declining narcissist who has structured things to remove all dissent will not be at all effective in achieving outcomes that require complex strategy and coordinated execution. So I think they probably consider this risk to be acceptable.

  • A1kmmAtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Can you think of any movies/tv shows/anime that depict a protagonist struggling with amnesia-like symptoms after being involved in time travel?English
    4·
    1 month ago

    Stargate SG-1, Season 4, Episode 6 has a variant of the loop trope, but everyone (including most of the protagonists, and everyone else on earth) don’t remember what happens, while two protagonists remember every loop until they are able to stop the looping.

    They debrief the others who don’t remember at the end (except for the things they did when they took a loop off anyway!) - but they didn’t miss too much since everyone else on earth missed it.

    Another fictional work - a book, not a movie / TV show / anime - is Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. The time travel aspect is questionable - he sends things back in time to stop Hitler being born, but no people travel through time. However, he remembers the past before his change, and has to deal with the consequences of having the wrong memories relative to everyone else.

  • A1kmmAtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Someone recorded me without permission and uploaded it to YouTubeEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    IANAL (and likely neither is anyone here) - and I think the answer would be “it depends” on other details if you asked a lawyer to make a decision on what you’ve shared. So I think that is the only route if you can’t get YouTube or the blogger to do the right thing.

    Some relevant things this might hinge on:

    • Is the person posting this doing making videos as a business venture - e.g. by making videos that they hope to profit from (e.g. by including advertising in it, or through YouTube monetisation)? If this was done as part of a business, that could make a big difference (generally businesses are held to a higher standard).
    • Which country did this happen in? Laws are different between countries.
    • Did they deceive you in any way to get you to do what they wanted for the video?
    • Are you a public figure in any way (prior to the video)?

    Some potential causes of action that your lawyer could consider if they apply:

    • Misleading conduct - if they used deception in the course of their trade.
    • Fraud - if they obtained valuable consideration (your video performance) through deception.
    • Privacy Infringement - if they processed (including collected) your personally identifiable information (e.g. including images / videos of your face, or the identifiable sound of your voice) without consent or another lawful basis / denial of right of erasure. Some of this could apply to Google too - you might be able to submit a Right of Erasure (right to be forgotten) legal request, and at minimum they might need to blur your face and mask the audio so you aren’t identifiable.
    • Copyright infringement - potentially what they recorded counts as a performance and you have a copyright interest in the video. Another one that could apply to Google and be used to take it down.
  • A1kmmAtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Largest drug "super lab" in Canada's history busted with record amount of fentanyl, chemicals and guns seizedEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    54 kg of fentanyl is an insane amount to have all in one place.

    Just to put it in perspective:

    • Assuming the lethal dose (LD50) of fentanyl in humans is similar to in mice (probably a good assumption), it is 7 mg / kg of body weight by injection. Assuming an average body weight of 70 kg, 54 kg is enough to kill 110,204 people.
    • Apparently for opiate tolerant people (e.g. addicts), the therapeutic dose for strong pain relief is 12 μg / h, so in a month, an addict wanting to stay dosed up the whole time might use 8.64 mg total. 54 kg is enough to supply 6.25 million addicts for a month.
    • According to a UNODC estime, in 2023, there were about 60.3 million opioid (including opiate) users worldwide, including prescription drug users. So that one stockpile could supply 1/10th of the world’s opioid users for a month. It almost certainly isn’t for supplying prescription drug users, and many opioid addicts likely try to avoid fentanyl, and there are other competing sources - so 1/10th is a lot.

    I’m not sure why they’d stockpile so much in one place, given they apparently have the capacity to manufacture more - unless they were planning to use it to kill people (see: they also had a weapons cache and explosives) instead of to sell as a drug. Or perhaps the 54 kg is an exaggeration and includes packaging and so on.