Seen a while ago on the Fediverse:

Oh, are they sharing it with me, with all their workers, with the rest of us? Yeah that's what I expected. So tell me again why should I give a shit about “shareholder value”?

If anyone knows of above board methods to establish a crowd funded piggy bank for something like this, I’m all ears.

For crowd funding, I'm a fan of Liberapay and fund a lot of my favourite people and projects that way.

Seconding the recommendation for Firefox, which is the only mainstream browser that will allow an ad blocker that isn't compromised.

Google Chrome cripples effective ad blockers (like uBlock Origin, which I also recommend), unsurprisingly because Google is one of the major forces wanting to push adverts. So it's inherently insecure by comparison.

Instead of ignorant (as in, we don't have the relevant information) speculation, please leave time and space for those charged with investigating the matter, to do their job and report what they find.

Wild speculation only fuels exactly the kind of madness that leads to this violence. Please stop.

If anyone needs another sign that today's ABC has no regard for ordinary people: a reduction in housing prices is framed uncritically as “worse”.

if they made their homes more energy efficient

Assertion misses the point: Most Australians whose homes need to be made more energy efficient, are renting and have no agency in doing anything like that to their homes.

Telling those people "you could save on your power bill by modifications to your home”, is just cruel. We know our homes are energy inefficient, we can't make the changes required.

What's needed is legislation that mandates the landlord must pay for those improvements, before they take any more money from the renter.

Betteridge's law of headlines applies here also: The answer is “no”.

The LLMs and diffusion models (that are what that author clearly means by the vague “AI” marketing term) have no mind, have no intention, have no understanding of any part of reality, have no experience, have no sensations or suffering, and have no way of ever gaining any of those things.

They are (unreliable) guessing machines, that never know anything or experience anything or intend anything or want anything.

They are not moral agents, they have no capacity to ever become moral agents or any kind of life. Please, everyone in the media, learn to tell the difference between a marketing lie versus the reality of what these things are.

Whatever the future holds for artificial minds or artificial life, these things are fundamentally not that, by design.

Also worth noting: (some of) those outside Australia seem largely to be responsible for the rise in One Nation popularity, by automated bot farms spreading racist lies on social media.

It's weird how that happens, huh?

Housing prices inflate, the rent goes up. Housing price growth slows, the rent goes up. Housing prices come down, the rent goes up.

I've yet to hear anyone involved in real estate tell me coherently what could ever cause the rent to come down.

It dates back at least to the 1980s, during the Hawke era.

A Labor party that cast unemployed workers as “bludgers”. A Labor party that concocted a Neoliberal Accord with the ACTU to suppress the rights of workers, as a means to keep wages (and worker power to negotiate better conditions) down. A Labor party that devastated social support by making unemployment benefits far more difficult to obtain.

All this was an “unleashing” of the private sector the effects of which still rage around us today.

https://jacobin.com/2020/10/australia-labor-party-neoliberalism-accord

Because we all need help as we get older.

Yes, we do. Why do we need more births for that?

There are still plenty of people being born, and growing up and entering the work force as adults. We (i.e. society, i.e. whoever holds the purse strings) can offer better pay and better job conditions for those workers, so that it's a more appealing career for the people who will already be looking for jobs.

Better help for the people who will be born anyway. Not pushing for more births.

For one thing, I want our society to welcome children, not dehumanise them as “semen demon”.

I'm glad Assange is back. His voice and ideas remain relevant.

I'm not glad he's on Xitter. The sooner everyone everywhere stops doing anything there, stops posting or paying any undue attention to it, the better.

Yeah, let’s push small landlords out of business

What landlord will go out of business with these proposed changes? Exactly how?

via @[email protected]:

Brave British police captured another dangerous terrorist today

https://freefree.ps/@faab64/115164525096428263

Aus is an affluent country used to having a high disposable income.

There is significant wealth inequality in Australia. Many, many people do not have a high disposable income. Should they “take the medicine” of job precarity, housing unaffordability, and price hikes? How would that improve the situation?

Stop the nonsense about “shrinking tax base”. Australia's government spends as much as it wants any time it wants; Australian government spending does not come from taxation.

People aren't going to be moved to commit to the huge life change of raising a child, by a measly one-time “bonus”. They need a robust system of social support, good wages for reasonable working hours in fair conditions, an end to private monopolies on essentials, housing security. And, as NigelFrobisher points out, meaningful and demonstrated progress to a livable future in the world.

All things that are needed prior to the commitment to raising children. All things our federal government is empowered to do, that it doesn't need to wait for any “tax base” to fund, that will work much better than a “baby bonus”.

Does Australia need our government to use its unilateral power to spend, to meaningfully fight the causes of climate change, to fund universal social services and stop being scared of a fiscal deficit?

You can utilize AI without a data center

This is a symptom of using the over-broad, deliberately vague marketing term “AI”.

If you can create (train) it without huge-scale violation of consent, without huge scale copyright infringement, without huge scale badly-treated human labour for labelling and refining, without huge-scale electricity and water consumption?

Then it isn't the “AI” being discussed in the article and therefore irrelevant to the point.

Good news.

I don't care what combination it is, but we need both direct progressive taxation and closing of wealth-hiding loopholes. Leave the ultra wealthy nowhere to hide.

Arming your child with basic financial information […] can help them avoid poor choices later in life

Yeah! Financial information like:

• The Australian government can always pay as many Australian dollars as they choose, for anything. They are not financially constrained, they issue the currency directly, at will. Don't ever believe their lies about being unable to pay for good government services by waiting to “balance the budget” or “find the money”, it's bullshit.

• We can tax the wealthy more than we tax working class people, we've done it many times in the past. We can tax the excessively wealthy even more than that, and thereby remove most of their wealth. This fights inflation and restores financial power to the normal people with normal amounts of money.

• Joining your worker's union gives you collective labour power, to counter the collective financial power of the plutocrats running the employers and making your job miserable. Better job conditions and better income are some of the benefits to be had.

• Housing is a human right; treating it as a financial investment is incompatible with that right. Australia has more than enough housing for its people, anyone has a right to a safe stable comfortable home, without any requirement to financially support someone else (or their bank)'s wealth. End the exploitative housing market and your finances can go a lot further.

Good financial information like this is available, and I advocate teaching it to young people.