I know a family, 4 voting adults, who won’t vote Labor at any level because the father had a dispute with a Union when he was the 3IC of a medium sized business.

I mean I hear what he was saying, the union was protecting a bunch of workers who had hit the point in life where they felt the company should hold their current jobs open for the next 10-15 years (until they retired) and they refused to negotiate around upskilling to up to date technology and work practice’s. The idea that a whole company should be stuck with 40 year old process on 50 year old hardware due to a small contingent of union employees is ridiculous.

But voting against your own interests at every state and federal election in the last 6 years and for the forseeable future as a response…

I had the “strong economic mangers” conversation with them about Gladys “Koala Killer” Berejiklian, “Oh she is doing a great job, you leave her alone… she’s only ever done her best and she gets picked on all the time…”

You know I was thinking that rents have been climbing throughout the whole country. Maybe the government needs to take into account that Trump and his cronies are out there ratcheting up tensions internationally and posturing as bullies on a global stage, then apply a small rent increase on US bases on our soil. A lazy hundred billion or so for Pine Gap should cover a lot of trade shortfall and somewhat compensate for the extra risk we are shouldering. When Trump calls to posture about it tell him we will increase troops on the border to prevent fentanyl and crack down on the cartels, then offer him the same price and watch him Art of the Deal™ that into a negotiating victory for himself.

Our government banning wealthy off-shore interests just because they happen to be highly toxic and detrimental with negligible benefits to the citizens they are exploiting…

Sounds like a slippery slope there.

I imagine there are more than a few companies/industries that would see that as a dangerous precedent.

And just look at what is happening in the US right now, this statement being arguably true today means nothing about how things will be tomorrow. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle here.

How many of these Chinese government supported companies are being provided a veneer of legitimacy by being officially sanctioned to use on state and federal supplied and supported IT resources? Because Microsoft 100% is. Hell they are even getting to supply training materials to government workers on how best to integrate Copilot into their day to day workflows. I am no fan of the Chinese government but I don’t reserve a greater store of trust for US backed Ad-tech companies either and thanks to Five Eyes once one of the aligned governments has your info it’s the same as all of them having it. I have only once interacted with an online LLM, run a few self hosted on my own hardware for probably 3-4 hours and realised that they aren’t worth the power consumption, and really aren’t worth opening a gaping hole into my own privacy. The fact that there are government workers and government organisations who are happily surrendering our data to these companies with no explicit consent sets off more alarm bells than I can express, regardless of the country of origin. And yes I declined the eHealth record and will be doing everything I can to resist digital drivers license because our government is fundamentally untrustworthy and borderline tech illiterate and the IT consultancies they deal with for any IT related infrastructure or services make them look like paragons of virtue and competency.

But that’s just my opinion.

Edit: fixed my spelling, sorry to anyone who gets as annoyed by that as I do 😃

And yet Copilot is busy burrowing into the flesh of the government like a growing hookworm, a large swathe of big business is simply trusting to Microsoft’s: “Oh no we keep your data entirely seperate and safe. We don’t use it to train the LLM, pinky promise.” Whilst ChatGPT keeps showing up in the hands of the most clueless people, “Oh I gave it all my personal info so it could rewrite my resume. How great is AI!”

I feel like this could be solved immediately and easily, make every privacy breach by any company subject to a fine totalling a single digit percentage of global turnover of the company. So for each privacy breach where Copilot is involved that will be… say… 3 billion dollars. They would yank their “AI Solution” from the local market so quickly you would hear a cracking sound.

I imagine that a society that votes in a wannabe fascist dictator will continue to be a bastion of safety for people of different racial backgrounds. I know if I was fleeing violence and gangs I look for somewhere with a nice welcoming camp just waiting for me.

For clarification I am Australian so I have a bit of experience with a national bias of racism leading to poor outcomes for asylum seekers.

I am taking a more positive view than I was about what’s happening over there though. I think that the Trump presidency may well serve as an unambiguous demonstration of the end results of allowing democracy to become necrotic. I really hope Australians heed this lesson before our next election, although I won’t be at all surprised if they don’t.

My family has extras cover, for Dental and Optical, that’s all we ever use. My wife and I have both used up enough dental to make it worthwhile. But my son is getting braces soon which will basically Max out his lifetime orthodontics cover. So at that point we need to change insurers.

On a tangent I don’t get lifetime covers. It seems like they are so focussed on not letting an individual recipient cost them more than an approved amount that they instead cause recipients to jump ship once it’s used up without contributing any more into the fund. That seems like a perverse incentive to me, or am I ignorant of some gotcha there?

So I was thinking about the way he worded this, 25% tariff until the border crossings stop. I think he might be onto a 4D chess move here.

If he tanks the US economy so badly that it’s financially detrimental to cross the border then the flow of people across the border will definitely come down. If he tanks the economy hard enough we may even see the flow reverse, at which point he can lift the tariffs and declare the job done.

He is already happy to make Americans ignorant, illiterate, and spiteful to outsiders; is he really going to baulk at making them dirt poor as well?

This may come across as naïve, but I also wonder if the excision of all those “essential” layers of needless bureaucracy, might not free up some resources at a societal level to allow a more complete or holistic physical and mental health care system to emerge. After all we need to figure out something for the eye watering numbers of people who are employed directly or indirectly by the Insurance industries to do with their new found free time.

Hell, couple UHS with large scale tax reform and we might find that there are advantages at all levels of society to providing for people whatever their needs might be.

But then maybe I am a pathetic utopist who just needs to realise that Capitalism is simply the perfect structure for us all to live under.