You better catch up bau bau
MHLoppy
joined 2 years ago
52
Things go from bad to worse for Trump as Wall Street Journal discovers his Epstein friendship bracelet
(www.betootaadvocate.com)
I enjoyed it, reading it as lighthearted commentarial satire :(
This is now becoming incredibly tangential to the original post, but the comment thread reminded me of the time the hacker known as "Alex" uncovered Tony Abbott's passport and phone numbers, who reacted pretty well to it: https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram/
And then Tony Abbott just… calls me on the phone?
Mostly, he wanted to check whether his understanding of how I’d found his passport number was correct (it was). He also wanted to ask me how to learn about “the IT”.
He asked some intelligent questions, like “how much information is in a boarding pass, and what do people like me need to know to be safe?”, and “why can you get a passport number from a boarding pass, but not from a bus ticket?”.
The answer is that boarding passes have your password printed on them, and bus tickets don’t. You can use that password to log in to a website (widely regarded as a bad move), and at that point all bets are off, websites can just do whatever they want.
He was vulnerable, too, about how computers are harder for him to understand.
“It’s a funny old world, today I tried to log in to a [Microsoft] Teams meeting (Teams is one of those apps), and the fire brigade uses a Teams meeting. Anyway I got fairly bamboozled, and I can now log in to a Teams meeting in a way I couldn’t before.
It’s, I suppose, a terrible confession of how people my age feel about this stuff.”
Then the Earth stopped spinning on its axis.
For an instant, time stood still.
Then he said it:
“You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”
This was possibly the most pure and powerful Australian energy a human can possess, and explains how we elected our strongest as our leader. The raw energy did in fact travel through the phone speaker and directly into my brain, killing me instantly.
When I’d collected myself from various corners of the room, he asked if there was a book about the basics of IT, since he wanted to learn about it. That was kinda humanising, since it made me realise that even famous people are just people too.
Haha, that was Turnbull? It really sounds more like an Abbott thing to have said!
14
Colleagues actually kind of sad that universally hated but entertaining employee is leaving
(www.betootaadvocate.com)
There is a deep irony covering this by writing about it.. on Substack
Seems a bit too much lol
I agree - though it kinda feels a bit test-the-waters-y, like if it goes well maybe it'll become a recurring thing, or maybe similar "organized collabs" will happen with other gens etc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Headline question, answer no...
For what it's worth, the SEO headline is "Why high immigration has fallen out of favour in Australia" (i.e., a statement saying it has, not a question or a no), but I felt the question better represented the actual text so I changed it to the normal one.
It's disappointing that you didn't read this high quality journalism before posting 😥
“How exactly does one procure said insignia?” I hear you asking. “Surely, they’re kept under heavy guard in some sort of armored facility.” Nope. They’re available at your local Scout Shop for $2.99. “They’re at least locked in a glass case or hidden behind the counter, right?” Nah, they’re just kind of there.
I unfortunately can't find the article that discussed the idea, but someone (an economist? a think tank?) brought up the idea of raising/broadening GST, but then then just giving everyone a flat amount back. In their modeling it halved the net revenue from the GST change (though it was still a good chunk of money), but made it financially neutral for people at lower incomes.
Edit: Again drawing from uni-assignment-land, I really like the PBO's discussion of Australia's tax mix: https://www.pbo.gov.au/about-budgets/budget-insights/budget-explainers/tax-mix/characteristics-different-taxes
Chapter 3 in the PDF has a great discussion about tradeoffs of different taxes, with both Figure 3-1 (near the start) and Table 3-1 (at the end) having some great insights if you're not well-versed in those design tradeoffs (i.e., almost everyone). Here's a copy of that first chart for easier reference: https://fedia.io/media/a9/3c/a93ca8c1bc7fea26f47b9063d55a175d04c0a846d69a4a66d240808675841e34.webp
Of course efficiency (which this figure shows) doesn't mean equity (which the chapter also discusses), hence ideas like the flat offset to balance it out.
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For OP it's currently an embed of this image: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a376f402-ef52-4bd7-a3a8-a35cd68a2f1d.gif
(and yes, as mbin gang I also still just see a duckduckgo search link lol)