Instigate

In Australia, when a minor signs a contract, it’s only legally binding on the other (adult) party. That is, if I were 14 and signed a contract I can force the other party to meet their obligations under the contract but I cannot be forced to meet my own obligations. The contract favours the minor in that way so that they are protected from anything predatory while still able to engage in and benefit from contracts. I think that’s the best approach.

Why water

Because it’s one of the most abundant resources available on earth that is imperative to our understanding of the existence of life and is the commonest solution regularly used by humans in scenarios where temperature is a relevant factor.

why sea level?

Because vast swathes of humanity live at or near sea level, where we already arbitrarily nominate the level of atmospheric pressure to be 1 ATM.

While K has a natural zero-point, the gradation (by your logic) is entirely arbitrary as well because it’s based on C and not some other cosmological constant.

There’s 12 cops there because they know they’re doing something so abhorrent that if they only had one or two cops with her, they’d likely get mobbed. It’s a cowardice thing.

Do you mean shot dead?

Too many enjoy the (temporary) safety that Trump provides them to stand up for others. Too many still are afraid to stand up for the rights of others for fear that their rights might be taken away in response. Too many others are beaten down and exhausted from the system that keeps them oppressed to be able to stand up for what’s right. Too many have either never read or truly understood Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came”.

I’m curious, what’s your definition of communism?

Agreed, 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.

Uhhh, 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.

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.

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 Pocock, 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.

This 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.

I absolutely love this idea, and not just because I proposed to my wife on Cape Tribulation where the Daintree Rainforest - the oldest rainforest in the world - meets the Great Barrier Reef - the largest reef in the world. Fun fact: it’s the also only place in the world where two UNESCO World Heritage Sites back onto one another!

These wildlife corridors and reserves are becoming more and more necessary, particularly as terrible fires ravage our landscapes (not so much in the Daintree, but elsewhere). The Black Summer fires of 19/20 absolutely devastated so many native populations across the country and many have not come close to recovering since then. We’re in for more and more of these continental catastrophes, and given we lead the world in mammal extinction and are fourth in total species extinction, we really need to get our lazy arses into gear. This is a great start but it needs to be dramatically expanded.

Not all rights are won through violence. In Australia, the union movement has managed to secure the following through peaceful means, specifically through lobbying, striking and peaceful protest:

• 40 hour work week; overtime for hours worked beyond this
• sick leave and annual leave
• maternity and paternity leave
• Medicare, our semi-universal public healthcare
• enforceable safety standards at work
• compensation for injury at work
• our ‘award’-based system of minimum pay and conditions per field
• federally mandated superannuation (forced retirement saving paid by your employer, tax free)
• protections against unfair dismissal

While not all rights are gained through violence all rights are limited and revoked by violence, in particular state-sponsored violence.

Sorry, what? I was agreeing with you. I’m not the other poster you were arguing with.

What you are suggesting is cornering an animal, and then saying “Hey, we should corner it more because it’s acting aggressively.” And then acting surprised when it attacks you.

I really like this line of logic because it highlights how the insipid manosphere’s propaganda directly targets the most animalistic part of the brain - the amygdala - and uses fear and anger to propel antisocial behaviour much as a cornered animal lashes out against its captor. It’s a very apt metaphor beyond the simplistic reasoning it suggests.

it’s more than analog cigarettes

I assume you mean less and yeah, that would make sense on the face of it. It just seems as though there’s no empirical evidence that nicotine specifically causes skin damage - only evidence that it causes blood vessel constriction. Do you have a source that shows a causal relationship from constricting blood vessels to poor skin health? That again would make sense to me, but I just don’t like to base my positions on assumptions - I’m a raw data sort of person.

There’s definitely no world where nicotine is harmless - it causes very clear harms beyond simple addiction that we’ve known for some time - but it’s important to be accurate around how much safer nicotine is in its other forms, particularly as you mentioned that it’s a necessary medicinal quit-smoking aid compound.

If vaping nicotine is the equivalent of five minutes of sun exposure per day without sunscreen, that’s a tolerable risk. If it causes anywhere near 50% of the damage that cigarettes cause, that’s a serious issue.

Thanks four the sources. So there’s evidence that nicotine impacts blood vessels, but not yet that that impacts skin condition? That makes sense, nicotine use in isolation hasn’t been around all that long yet. As I mentioned, that specific link doesn’t appear to have been studied yet to the best of my knowledge, but I don’t have access to journalistic databases that I used to.