Just use Qwant. They won’t even LET you log in.

EDIT: I think Qwant may have some ties to the far-right. So maybe not Qwant. But I’m not gonna bother checking.

This seems like a really stupid solution and I have no idea what the government’s thinking.

You can’t prove it, but you can evidence it. And in some cases you can prove it (we’ve proven vaccines don’t cause Autism, for example).

Although this whole “produce studies” approach is such BS. The “do your own research” slogan is what got us anti-vaxxers (plus, and I can’t stress this enough, I really can’t be bothered). Expert consensus is how we should approach it. The experts know how to read the studies.

Produce studies saying to say it’s not harmful, or be quiet. Social media is too new, and all the psychologists that know the implications are working for the social media companies to make it more addictive. We don’t know whether social media is harmful, but there is ample anecdotal evidence of the three issues I raised. I should not I haven’t actually looked for any evidence because who can be bothered using Google for a Lemmy (Reddit) argument.

In my experience, the type of engagement that social media encourages is not healthy in any way, and this is not on the level of books or movies (some video games fall into the same category though).

Or let’s just go with privacy laws. Any information on engagement with their platforms should be depersonalized before use in content recommendation and ads. Users should need to manually select the criteria of content they want to see, rather than TikTok deciding they’re autistic or something and doing that automatically. In practice though this’d probably just means there’d only be the trending page, but as long as it’s useless (and we’d need to rely on human recommendations) then all’s fine.

I read that as less of a “belief” and more of an “assumption”. Most people don’t think about paraplegic sex at any point on their life, so her assumption went unquestioned until she was prompted to by sex work.

I think the harms are real. They’re not exclusive to children.

There are three categories of harm:

• Radicalization, as the algorithm deliberately feeds you bad takes from your political opponents and good takes from your political allies, to keep you engaged.
• Overstimulation, the YouTube Kids channel Cocomelon is way too addictive for kids. This isn’t exclusive to social media, and YouTube Kids apparently has an exemption.
• Addiction, social media eats into hours upon hours in kid’s days. Time they could spend with their family/friends or processing their emotions, instead they’re being numbed out on their phone.

I think we should ban algorithmic recommendations (or strictly limit them), ban the practices of Cocomelon, and … I’m not sure what we can do about the addiction thing (humans are super prone to addiction). I’d also ban smart-phones in schools, kids should only be allowed flip-phones/brick-phones.

Banning new gas installations is an easy one. We should not be pumping gas into people’s homes.

Wood fireplaces is a tough one. The ACT did it, but we don’t burn wood for electricity and wood isn’t as prone to leaking. The problem is that wood smoke is carcinogenic.

That phrasing comes from a channel that calls the Teals “not-shit”. The imported narrative that “both sides are the same” gives license to the conservative working class to vote against their economic interests, but frankly speaking the Labor party is broadly made up of people who genuinely care but are faced with a corrupt system operating under American global dominance.

We have it quite good in Australia, for the most part. It could be SO much worse.

Can’t use a smartphone with gloves.

Try getting fingerless gloves.

If we’re so concerned about the South China Sea, we can give Taiwan or Japan diesel subs. It’s not like the nuclear subs would be of much use to us anyway if they’re on the other side of Indonesia.

Although I can’t imagine an Internal Combusion Engine sub being at all stealthy, so I’d hope there’s some kind of third option.

I think, given the (presumed) widespread perception that the Greens are arrogant, they ought to publicly air that reflection. If I’m speaking purely strategically, that would be more likely to win votes from me than what they ended up doing. I think the reason they don’t is because they’re incapable of such reflection. The only policy changes I recall them making are to support increased defense spending following Trump’s win, and to oppose IRV and support PR after Bandt lost his seat (I BTW, support going the opposite direction with Condorcet).

As for Chandler-Mather, I think the other MP’s complaining is more to do with them not seeing him as an adult than the severity of his treatment. Given how he went on the radio to complain about the treatment, I’d say they were right to.

I can’t speak much to your anecdote, as you said. I can easily imagine the Greens apologising for using the wrong pronoun or mocking disability. I’m not sure where the exact line would be (in my almost entirely imagined idea of the Greens). The idea that their decisions are any less than perfect seems to be a sore spot for them, the only public self-reflection they’ve done regarding the last term is that “Labor ran an effective campaign on us blocking the HAAF for a year” IIRC.

I think they’re a lot more sensitive regarding the Greens political party than they are individually. They are also sensitive individually when they’re speaking on behalf of the Greens publicly (see my earlier example with Bandt, and Max Chandler-Mather’s comments about other politicians being mean). You could instead say they’re sensitive to humiliation, but that wouldn’t fit my (entirely imagined) narrative of the Greens being racist so I’ll put that theory aside.

Also maybe changing your vote because you thought an individual action by someone was stupid is a childish way of thinking about politics?

I didn’t change my vote because of that. I became open to reconsidering my views after that. Although I’m not even sure if that was the exact snowball that started this.

I think people on the hard left or hard racist are more likely to specifically feel angry when criticized because the specific association of “makes me uncomfortable = evil” is much more likely. In the left’s case, they’re in the child prodigy “I’m too smart to be emotional” camp. In the hard right’s case it’s because the possibility that their gut instinct should maybe be interrogated is unfathomable to them.

In other words I think both One Nation and the Greens are made up of people with low EQ.

I’d say the Greens are the most likely to be racist. They’re the kinds of people who could never even conceive of the possibility that they are not completely virtuous ("they’ as in themselves, not POC. I’m not claiming some reverse racism BS).

I cannot imagine them being called racist and them not feeling angry at the accusation. I cannot imagine them admitting to fault. And I cannot imagine them growing as a result.

It took a while, but the trigger for me switching my vote from the Greens to Labor was when Bandt asked Albanese something in question time and was absolutely seething in anger when the (Labor) speaker said his question was against the rules. The Greens (or at least Bandt) are people who consider anything that makes them uncomfortable to be absolute evil.

They couped Whitlam and Rudd for trying to tax the mining corpos, can you imagine if Albanese tried to shut down Pine Gap.

The accounting newsletter my uni made me sign up to had an article criticizing this from the SMSF association.

Their key complaint is “unrealized capital gains” which is … real estate basically. You can tax shares and they can just sell a few, “unrealized capital gains” only makes sense if you’re using your super fund to evade income tax as a property investor. These elites, even the obscure accounting newsletter elites, know full-well what they’re doing.

Please don’t scare me with a title like that so soon after an election.

Sure, privatize the railroads. That going well is the norm, not the exception. /s

No, it’s not the angle. The sun’s orbit isn’t exactly symetrical, it’s a bit lopsided. In January the sun is about 5% closer to earth.

In the Northern hemisphere this is during winter, so it’s the best of both worlds. In Australia though it’s the reverse. We get extra dim winters and extra bright summers.

Be careful of the summer sun.

The sun isn’t always a fixed distance from earth. It’s closest in January, which is winter in America but in Australia that’s summer. So they should be ready for hot summers with a high risk of skin cancer.

There’s probably more to worry about in the tropics (invasive species like kane toads and fire ants especially) but I don’t live in the tropics so I’ll leave that to someone else.