We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.
Labor is the largest single party in the Lower House. The Liberal Party has (almost) never gained a true majority. The National Party, with whom the Liberal Party coalesces (known in Australia as The Coalition or the LNP) is our current major opposition, and they only hold that position as a coalition. The Greens regularly poll between 9-12%, which causes our Federal Senate to end up giving them a significant amount of power. We also (thanks to changes a recent government made) have a significant crossbench made up of The Greens, minor parties and independents. Our current senate (and most previous Senates) has many potential ‘kingmakers’ (including previous AFL legend David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and others) which mean that governments can’t pass legislation without courting those outside their party.
To the outsider it may seem that we only have two parties, but in our context we understand it to be more complex than that. Many Australian jurisdictions have known minority-government, government-by-coalition and Lower House government tempered by Upper House diversity which tempers the passage of legislation.
Like I said, it’s not a perfect system (and pretty far from direct democracy) but we sit in this interesting position between the absolute Two-Party System of FPTP jurisdictions and other systems that produce 5+ parties that need to form government together. Our system is far from perfect, but it’s not terrible.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.
In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.
RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.
If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.
I misremembered and have edited my post above: the unit stupidly doesn’t wear bodycams at all.
However, the tactical police units who stormed McKenzie’s home and shot him did not wear body cameras.
Under previous questioning, one of the senior constables involved said, “obviously the tactical guys wanted all body-worn switched off”.
Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame asked one of the tactical officers why the unit does not use body-worn video.
Officer T1 said the team did not want tactics being given out and “inadvertently it always seems to get out on social media”.
https://9news.com.au/article/83310510-9e0e-44a3-84b0-5bd275dce9af
In the NSW (Australian) emergency services, there’s now a division that’s been slowly rolling out called the PACER (Police, Ambulance, Clinical, Early Response) program where Police can have mental health clinicians who are based with them attend to a call to provide immediate advice, support and mental health therapy in some cases. It’s still a pilot program at the moment but where it has been rolled out it’s significantly reduced mental health presentations to hospital at the very least. I’m keen for statistics to be seen around reductions in arrests or charges, because I think they’re likely to follow.
Thankfully Police shootings in NSW are generally pretty rare, but they still happen. Recently (2023) a 95 year old woman using a walking frame and wielding a knife was tasered by a cop and died a week later from her injuries, and back in 2019 a man was executed by three shots to the back while having a psychotic episode after officers disabled their bodycams (edit: I misremembered - the cops that stormed the house weren’t wearing bodycams at all). We don’t have it as bad as some do, but it’s still not a great situation.
Although we in Australia are pretty frickin arse-backwards and conservative about stupid shit, I do have a lot of faith and hope in programs like PACER. I just hope it can be expanded and become mandatory statewide, but the cynic in me says that’s not likely. As someone who’s had to call Police for a relative’s mental health crisis before, I can definitely understand the fear.
I always used to use a 3PA that had no ads or recommendations, just my own curated sub list, and I honestly loved that. There were definitely echo chambers but things worked well for me as long as I stayed conscious to that. Then when the APIpocalypse happened I browsed reddit on the web and in their official app for the first time in almost ten years and just noped right the fuck off.
At one point in my feed it went:
Like, only 1/6 items were things I had actually asked to see. It was atrocious. Default reddit is absolutely cancer now, and I really struggle to empathise with people who are still using it vanilla without any extensions or domain changes.
I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.
I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?
Or a Sikh trans woman. Or a cis woman with very active facial hair follicles. I mean, it could be so many different people.
Welp, looks like it’s gonna be yet another Ubisoft cash-grab. Yay.
I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t have been. I’m pretty sure the rules around what is kosher and not were set a few thousand years before infant formula was invented, and so if it wasn’t kosher then literally every Jewish person would have been breaking Jewish law until they could move onto solid foods.
Where I’m from, some people will still use feet/inches only for heights of human beings (weird, I know), but the most common response is in cm. For instance, if you asked me how tall I am I’d say 173cm, but I would say it like “I’m about a hundred and seventy-three” or “one-seven-three” - you don’t really have to say the units. Much the same as you’d say “I’m five foot seven” and you don’t need to specify “inches”.
That’s interesting, because “the apple doesn’t/didn’t fall far from the tree” is a known Anglophonic saying that basically means that a child turned out a lot like a parent (gender not necessarily specified). I wonder if one is a calque of the other.
…does the chicken’s power level need to be over 9000 in order to be safe to eat?
Yeah, I’d almost say it’s an essential purchase. I buy a fair few online titles and I’ve found my 128Gb SD to be a bit lacking. I’m considering upgrading to a 256Gb or 512Gb but they’re still too expensive at high transfer rates.
If you have to choose between capacity and transfer rate for an SD card for a Switch, go for transfer. I had an old slow card and that was abhorrent for load times and stuttering on games that were stored there.
His work is important to study from an historical perspective in order to see how psychology grew into what it is today, in the same way that it’s important that we learn about outdated concepts like tabula rasa and phrenology in order to better understand what is correct. The fact that he applied so much of his own subjective thoughts to his brand of psychology shows us how we, as potential future psychologists, also have the same capacity to search for confirmatory evidence and eschew disproving evidence in search of a theory. He’s a great example of what not to do when it comes to psychology.
I recently bought an adjustable clip to clip the Switch (sans joycons) to my Pro Controller and it’s super comfy for long periods of gaming. I’ve also seen people use 3rd party joycons that are shaped more like the Pro Controller handles which seem comfy too.
You’re right, the base Switch isn’t all that comfy for long periods of play, but there are both ways around that and it can also be played docked, which I think are redeeming features.
Further to this - it doesn’t download cart data to the Switch/SD card, but it does store save data, update data and DLC data on the Switch/SD card. So while BOTW may not download its whole 10Gb onto the Switch, you may end up with a few Gb in other data that’s locally stored.
The Switch design is an evolution of the Wii U controller, which itself was evolved from the the lower screen design of the DS, which itself was modelled on the old Vertical Multi Screen Game and Watches from the 1980s.
Have a look through all of Nintendo’s consoles and you’ll see the lines of inspiration drawn from generation to generation.
And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.