I’m sorry, this could have convinced me in the early oughties but I’m worn out now. There’s a song and dance about how powerful the Murdoch media is but firstly that’s no longer as true as it was, and most importantly, any time Labor has had the chance to shut them down, they haven’t taken it. Literally the laws which got Labor offices raided were supported by Labor. At some point I’m going to stop believing the “small target” strategy is a real strategy and start to believe that this is what Labor actually is deep down. The toothless NACC, the active protection of the perpetrators of Robodebt, making a rod for their own backs, this is just who Labor is.

There are other unions, and if I can take a minor detour, some of them, eg teachers and nurses unions are majority women, and Labor walk over them, time and time again, whereas unions like CFMEU and TWU will strike. Health and Education are being gutted from a skills perspective, and the lesson they’re being taught is that if you stand up like the other unions, you’ll get your necks cut off. COVID came and “went”, and Labor were in power for a good chunk of it, and they’ve not had the Unions or the workers backs. The majority of deaths happened / are happening during Labor in government. How many of those were Teachers? Nurses? With friends like these…

What even is the point any more? What is there to lose when unions are basically unable to stand up to their own? When Labor must shunt to the right of the coalition. Some people blame the right for the “right wing ratchet”, but to some extent this has been engineered by the left to make the right look less favourable to their voters. I don’t give a shit about Labor, I want some fucking solidarity.

There’s also the possibility of a split. If enough of the unions want to split, and it does look like it, it’s possible that “left Labor” and “right Labor” split into two parties.

Frankly Labor has been taking advantage of the unions for a very long time, consistently kneecapping them, and has been doing so back to the Hawke / Keating years. This isn’t a “compromise” anymore, because the right just keeps on taking and taking.

They’re using “Mr Kumar” as an example here, but this story goes back a long way. Huge parts of the wealthy northern suburbs, and prime real estate near the most popular beaches in Sydney are held by a handful of people. They bought this property a long time ago, but the “newer” property investors are basically working off that template. You can actually walk around those suburbs and find a bunch of empty properties. They don’t care about the rent, they prefer to show as little income as possible. They just want the capital gains when they sell. Often these people are retired and can get significant tax concessions.

The “newer” investors are doing this but with properties which are much cheaper. They do it like a job or a business. It’s not healthy for the country either, but it’s actually less of a rort than the institutional wealth in this country.

Yeah agree with what you’ve said. I think your example of Tactical voting lines up with Zagorath’s detailed explanation. Makes perfect sense.

Overall, my main point was that there were a cohort of “small l” liberal voters who accept the science on climate change, and basically cannot vote for the LNP any longer, but for aesthetic reasons really would prefer to stay away from the Greens or Labor.

Thank you for the awesome analysis. To try and put what you said intuitively, I guess the “strategic” voting is to compromise as early as possible with a group whose “second choice” would be your last choice (and that is also a very popular first choice but only just popular enough to win). Does that sound correct?

So in your political compass, instead of picking the closest option to you on the compass with a Greens/Labor vote, you would pick a spot closer to the overall vibes of the electorate with a Teal vote to solidify that choice against an even further to the right choice which would win by a narrow margin?

Sure, what I have is anecdata, but I will say the study is focused on the teal voters, whereas the people I’m talking about were members or organisers. They did door-knocking or sausage sizzles or similar.

For this comment, I’ve decided to go to the actual study rather than use the ABC’s interpretation of it.

Firstly, the analysis is that there are fewer “rusted on” voters, which is consistent with what I’m trying to say. A bunch of rusted on LNP voters have become less rusted on, so to speak. The first half of the analysis broadly agrees with what I’ve been saying.

I don’t know if ranked choice voting really works with “tactical voting”. Someone would need to draw me a diagram, but overall the way most people vote is to put the candidate they like the most at the top, and the candidates they like the least at the bottom. If they distrust the majors, they put the majors “later”. Basically, if you think the Teals are going to get up, but you want the Greens, you’re still better off putting the Greens on top. There’s a very small corner case where the a bunch of small parties can trade places based on a handful of votes but it’s not common, and if you want the Greens but are happy with Teal, you’d still put them in the order you want. The study does say in the first half that people are way less likely to use HTV cards, which is consistent with what I’m trying to say.

I think what’s happened is that they’re looking at 2019, the Scomo era. By that era, the voters I’ve been talking about would already have shifted to Labor or the Greens as Option 1, something they would not actually want, they just wanted a Scomo Coalition even less. I think the Teals actually are the first preference here, and a lot of these guys used to vote LNP in maybe 2015.

I don’t think that’s a good read of what’s happened given the “teal” voters I know about. Almost to a person, Teal voters are ex-Liberal voters. Pro Hewson, pro Howard, pro Turnbull. A lot of them probably excused Howard’s “Stop the Boats” as the realpolitik of keeping the ONP vote down (something which didn’t really pan out long term).

However, even at Abbott many were noping out. First because they could see how much trouble Turnbull was having, but also because Abbott really was the jerk they saw Howard pretending to be. The “minister for women” probably also hemorrhaged a bunch of women voters too. That I think would have meant the success of the Teals, but not a landslide, until Morrison.

The fact that he could just operate a kleptocrat government, no real skill, no real goals, just ill tempered and mean spirited. I think a bunch of Liberals were looking for a new home, and that was in the Teals. Those liberals aren’t coming back because the LNP isn’t going back to being the LNP. The nationals have taken over enough of the agenda that reactionaries are the only ones left in the Liberal party.

The reactionaries have thoroughly “won” the LNP, all the way over to being the alt-right. Brain-dead “young liberals” will keep the ball rolling over but no serious person is going to care about their stupid ideas. Over time the Liberal part of the coalition will lose votes as the coalition increasingly embodies the National Party agenda. At that point the Nationals might wonder why they are in a coalition with a party which has fewer members than them. What happens to the Nationals at that point is unclear, because Climate Change doesn’t fuck around in 2040.

Where were you for Theranos mate?

It’s important to recognise the mechanism is more important than the intent. If people cannot blow the whistle safely, then the “government” can freely keep secrets. “Government” is in air quotes here because often it’s the spooks or the military who get to keep secrets, often from the elected officials. This means that MPs are often kept in the dark (and sometimes on purpose, in a Berejiklian-style “I don’t need to know about that” sense) and this means that a bunch of people who we pay taxes for can do what they like with impunity.

If the secrets are kept, then the people keeping the secrets are not accountable to anyone. This is a serious problem if they start to violate the rights of people on Australian soil. You might feel like it’s not going to be you, but it well could be. There is no safety on that gun. The only way around it is to make whistleblowing safe.

10 deadliest animals to humans

Was watching a YT video against this idea. Basically the occupancy is quite low per dollar, and generally there’s not much expertise in building them. This means the city/state is tied to one company which can ream them price-wise. If you need the occupancy, get a train.

Barnaby Joyce??!?!?!?!??!??

There’s no evidence that self driving can be better. It’s purely faith.

Drivers are not horrible, rather horrible drivers can get a license. Treating cars as a right makes that worse. Self driving makes that worse.

I conflated two points. Driver hits something due to sudden braking = they are liable.

Driver hit from behind at high speed = dangerous for occupants. Either way no one asked the driver.

The prime minister has apparently been pushing to get him out, and has apparently been mentioning him at every meeting with the US. It is what it is.

I think it’s worth thinking about this in a technical sense, not just in a political or capitalist sense: Yes, car companies want self driving cars, but self driving cars are immensely dangerous, and there’s no evidence that self driving cars will make roads safer. As such, legislation should be pushing very hard to stop self driving cars.

Also, the same technology used for self driving is used for AEB. This actually makes self-driving more likely, in that the car companies have to pay for all that equipment anyway, they may as well try and shoehorn in self driving. On top of this, I have no confidence that the odds of an error in the system (eg: a dirty sensor, software getting confused) is not higher than the odds of a system correctly braking when it needs to.

This means someone can get into a situation where they are:

• in a car, on a road, nothing of interest in front of them
• the software determines that there is an imminent crash
• Car brakes hard (even at 90mph), perhaps losing traction depending on road conditions
• may be hit from behind or may hit an object
• Driver is liable even though they never actually pressed the brakes.

This is unacceptable on its face. Yes, cars are dangerous, yes we need to make them safer, but we should use better policies like slower speeds, safer roads, and transitioning to smaller lighter weight cars, not this AI automation bullshit.

Yeah I can’t remember where I read that but it’s definitely a possibility IIRC.

Pumped hydro is not exactly a dam. There’s a hole and 2 water reservoirs. Yes there’s a cost but so does anything.

You also can’t just turn nuclear on or off. You’d need to also get rid of existing solar. Ie: get people to disconnect rooftop solar to make nuclear work.