• 43 Posts
  • 408 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The Labor Government want to get onto this quickly and quietly! This is such a culture war risk for them. Also, with the geopolitical way the world has turned, theres a real national security angle to making sure the borders are patrolled adequately, however costly that is.

    Of course whatever they do they have to remember Dutton’s mantra, “We don’t comment on, on water matters.”


    Also, are these fishermen charged with things like illegal entry, and illegally fishing? Surely theres criminal remedies that come into play at some point otherwise theres no deterrent.





  • Hadn’t looked it up before.

    https://bdsaustralia.net.au/

    From About Us page,

    BDS is a peaceful and non-violent means to pressure the State of Israel to end the illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the blockade of Gaza; to allow the internationally recognized Right of Return to Palestinian refugees to the land and homes from which Israel forcibly expelled them in 1948; and to ensure equal rights for all Palestinians living in Israel according to international law and human rights conventions.

    Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a strategy initiated in 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society organisations calling for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel’s government and those entities which support and benefit from its actions in relation to Palestinians, until such time as the Israeli government abides by international law and Palestinians are given the rights and freedoms they are entitled to. It is based on the successful South African anti-apartheid boycott movement of the 1970s and 80s.









  • We need a society that once more values its dreamers and visionaries, those who uncomfortably go against the grain of what and who we are, exploring our nightmares so we might better know ourselves and create new dreams that reveal other ways of being. Not so much underfunded and undervalued as unsupported and despised, our future artists are the key to building the social fibre that will sustain a healthy, resilient and successful Australia

    Feels like he’s talking his book, so to speak. I’m not against supporting the arts, but theres a lot out there thats just a waste. Like those government grants that are awarded are so often filled by some schmuck who just wants an easy pay day.

    Another reason i think he’s talking his book a bit too much is that he’s made this fairly flimsy claim about arts being the social fibre of a nation as opposed to sports being the sugar high. I don’t know, they both seem pretty sugary to me, the fibre has to be in the strength of connections in the contextual communities of the individuals in that nation.


  • Couldn’t agree more with you’re assessment. I’m more hopeful Australia can pull its finger out its arse with military manufacturing.

    Yes we’ve shut down an insane amount of primarily manufacturing based industries, (eg cars, thanks Liberals, ya dumb cunts!), the mining and construction industries have a large amount of incidental manufacturing for repairs and unique materials, while our knowledge base from universities and the small military-industrial machine puts us in a okay position to ramp up onshore production of many items, not too mention our wealth and borrowing capacity.

    But we will need to relinquish the neoliberal monetary policy only choke-hold on our economy, and allow fiscal spending to direct a greater proportion of our economy than we’ve seen in most of our lifetimes.


    I also think while NATO and Europe should always be kept on friendly terms, we need to invest in our neighbours. We may recieve support from far off allies, but those commitments may only go so far. See the British decision to desert the region after Singapore in WW2 for an example of the limitations of far off allies.

    So strong allies in our region including Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Pacific Islands countries et al, that are bound to us through geography, and we to them can bring a deeper/different form of mutual defence commitment. Its time for Oceania as a region to become a more serious idea.







  • Interesting to learn about this company, the different storea, and different ‘front facing storefronts’ ideas soubd on the face of it to be similar to the OP’s idea.

    [I only read the wikipedia for my response] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten).

    But a read through the criticisms section and the example of the negative systemic influence of centralised power are numerous.

    The examples where the systemic centralised structure of the company influenced the pathway are,

    • the Corporate Culture section the ‘Englishionisation’,

    • disabling product reviews. This was a product specific case, but it highlights the fact they can take this action sitewide at any time, with little to no recourse.

    • Price Hiking, with up to 18 Rakuten employees having been revealed to have promoted the idea with vendors. If your online marketplace is telling you to do something on price, the pressure for an individual business is great because you are then vulnerable to them making decisions against you with very little you as a vendor can do to respond.

    With these few examples from their wikipedia page the negative and at times malign effects of a centralised platform are revealed in the same way the same exercise for Amazon would reveal the same systemic consequences. With the system OP is advocating the onlibe marketplace would be unable through its own structure to implement these pressures on vendors operating on the network. This systemic difference would make it better for vendors, and customers alike, however harder (but not impossible) for a commercial operation that maintains the network to exist. I’d look tobthe Mcdonalds’ Harry Sonneborn owning real estate example of how you can use unique adjacent business structures to build a viable business while not undermining it’s core selling point.






  • Such an important question isn’t it. What are we doing here? I feel like the importance and emphasis so much of our society is placing on superficial culture war whipping mules has blinkered them to the real and far more consequential matters the State faces.

    Such as, the triple planetary crisis which is ignored at every possible opportunity, or the destabilisation inherent of a switch from a unipolar world to a multipolar world (yes we probably have the threat of China well understood, but seem not to consider the wider implications for other nation’s behaviour in that world, namely the USA’s, (until maybe this year).


  • I’ve felt increasingly this way for a long time now about the Military and our reliance on allies with fundamentally different challenges and increasingly different world views from Australia’s.

    Australia and New Zealand, and our whole oceania region need to start taking our future planning and preparation seriously as a region with a future, or we will find ourselves on the actual road to serfdom.

    I’ll give props to the Albanese government who have made significant progress with pacific islands, png, and Indonesia over this last year, but this is a start to a project that needs bipartisan, and emphatic support otherwise our region will be at the mercy and whim of the large powers in this world for the next century or more.