What's on your mind?

[RelentlessOblivion]

3 hours ago, Dead1 said:

Open windows?

 

I have 2 heat pumps that have air cooling but we seldom use them.  Usually we open the windows and create drafts as well as close blinds/curtains that face the sun. 

I think that is the exact government policy!

SA is prone to hot, dry winds, opening windows seldom helps, closing. The blinds is something I already do. I was more annoyed about not being able to play any music while the power was out honestly..

[AlSymerz]

Solar panel and a battery will fix that.

[Dead1]

52 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

Oh yeah I forgot about that. Dictator Dan wanted to reinstate the Exploding Arsehole (SECV) and put us back on a single state system. Not sure what the new Premier's ideas are on that

While Victoria is in NEM, he can resurrect every electricity body in Victoria's history and it won't make a difference!

13 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

SA is prone to hot, dry winds, opening windows seldom helps, closing.

Tis why I love Tassie!

[FatherAlabaster]

30 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

Tis why I love Tassie!

Waitaminute, since when do you love Tassie? I thought it was an overpriced, corrupt shithole full of criminals and incompetent morons. Is that just bad PR you guys put about so you don't get more people moving there and spoiling the fun for the locals?

[AlSymerz]

35 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

While Victoria is in NEM, he can resurrect every electricity body in Victoria's history and it won't make a difference!

 

His idea was to remove us from that. It was a pipe dream, but it doesn't matter now anyway since he quit.

 

1 minute ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Waitaminute, since when do you love Tassie? I thought it was an overpriced, corrupt shithole full of criminals and incompetent morons. Is that just bad PR you guys put about so you don't get more people moving there and spoiling the fun for the locals?

You forgot the cold and shitty weather. Coming into summer and in the last few weeks Tassie has had snow, high winds and his weekend some parts look like they might get more than 100mm of rain, all while remaining under 20 degrees. Even Victoria isn't that bad!

 

[Dead1]

36 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Waitaminute, since when do you love Tassie? I thought it was an overpriced, corrupt shithole full of criminals and incompetent morons. Is that just bad PR you guys put about so you don't get more people moving there and spoiling the fun for the locals?

 

It is but I love the environment and lifestyle.  Remember I am a lazy incompetent moron too.  I like small country town living and the lack of hustle and business.  Poor access to healthcare, near non existent public transport, shitty roads and occasional lack of drinking water (some places you have to boil or drink bottled water), 50% functional illiteracy rate and bogans fighting on street are small prices to pay for the beauty and lifestyle.

The mainland is far worse with their heat, congestion and mass metropolises.   And they still get corruption and crime (eg my dad's car was broken in to twice in 6 months when he lived in Sydney)

 

All of Australia is getting more corrupt too - it's what neoliberalism does.

 

If I had money, I'd live in some isolated chunk of Europe though.  I am not Australian and the government even made sure I knew that I was not Australian earlier this year when they fucked around with my citizenship which I've had since 1985.  

 

Chunks of Europe still aren't afflicted by wokeism either.  

[RelentlessOblivion]

I’ll take a South Australian summer over the miserable weather down in Tasmania any day. Thanks. That being said, I do think we take the gold medal for a political corruption. In this country, can’t think of any other state where the premier rushed through a law banning protests, just because it was spoiling the view from his brother in laws mansion. At least we have world-class vineyards and lots of them. I’ll just drink until I forget I voted for him…

[Dead1]

Speaking of incompetence...

 

What do you do when you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on hospital beds that don't meet the specification and don't really work?

Why you buy a second batch of course!

And a year later you have to replace all of them with something that actually fits the specification.

 

This is Tasmania!

[GoatmasterGeneral]

6 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

You forgot the cold and shitty weather. Coming into summer and in the last few weeks Tassie has had snow, high winds and his weekend some parts look like they might get more than 100mm of rain, all while remaining under 20 degrees. Even Victoria isn't that bad!

That doesn't really sound too bad to me at all. I wouldn't want 4" of rain every weekend, but I'd be quite happy if it never got above 70° and stayed cloudy, cool and breezy all year round. It's the summer heat you guys have learned to live with that sounds miserable to some of us who aren't used to it.

 

17 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Waitaminute, since when do you love Tassie? I thought it was an overpriced, corrupt shithole full of criminals and incompetent morons. Is that just bad PR you guys put about so you don't get more people moving there and spoiling the fun for the locals?

 

Deadly has fallen in love with a romanticised 1960's/70's version of Tassie he's conjured up in his head. He fantasizes about living in the Tassie from that 35 year period before he was born but after the war, because that was their hey-day before all the commercialization and incompetence and corruption and immigration and criminal element had worked their way all the way down there. Progress in other words, which he sees as anti-progress.

Out of the way places like Tassie tend to run a good decade or two behind a lot of other more typical places as far as the 'evils' of the modern world are concerned, which tend to creep into more populated urban and suburban areas first for obvious reasons, before they spread all the way out to the more remote locales. So all the changes and modernization and urbanization and overcrowding most of the northeastern US underwent in the 70's and 80's as the country moved into the modern era that guys like you and I are used to and take for granted because we grew up in that world, are still a bit more novel to him and he doesn't like it, he'd much prefer to turn the clocks back at least 40 years.

I noticed a similar thing when I went to New Zealand with my wife who had been here in the states with me away from her homeland for 5 years. As her dad drove us around the north island she was shocked and upset (and he was as well) about all the changes and new commercial shopping or housing developments where there had been farmland 5 years before, and the increased traffic on the highways and just all the normal downsides of modern civilization that we take for granted living where we do.

Which is not to say that we necessarily think all these changes are so wonderful or a big improvement or anything, it's just that living where we do we've had decades longer to accept the fact that's just how the world is now. (Maybe not now that you're up in rural backwater Vermont obviously, I meant during all those years when you were in suburban Boston and Brooklyn) This urban sprawl and congestion and pollution typical of the northeast US will reach most places eventually I suspect. But in a lot of these more remote places they're not ready to embrace all this shit just yet because they thought they'd be insulated from it for a lot longer than they were.

But he has also said many times that he prefers the weather down there in Tassie to the extreme heat of mainland Australia because it stays more temperate down there most of the year. Auckland NZ's very similar, it doesn't ever get much below 50° in the winter and the average temp stays just under 70° in the summer. Compare that to like where Blivvington lives in South Australia where average summer temps are routinely in the 90's and record high temps are over 120° and you can see why Deadovic likes Tassie.

 

[Dead1]

3 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

I’ll take a South Australian summer over the miserable weather down in Tasmania any day. Thanks. That being said, I do think we take the gold medal for a political corruption. In this country, can’t think of any other state where the premier rushed through a law banning protests, just because it was spoiling the view from his brother in laws mansion. At least we have world-class vineyards and lots of them. I’ll just drink until I forget I voted for him…

Tasmania's government has been trying to ban protests for some time.

 

One of our premiers, Peter Lennon did actually try to change planning laws to fast track a pulp mill.  This was after the company that was building the pulp mill renovated his house.

https://tasmaniantimes.com/2006/03/good-morning-mr-lennon/

Bizarrely this is not considered corruption.

Though NSW takes the cake - they've been stuck in a Rum Corps mentality since 1789 (noting Australia was only colonised in 1787).

 

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

5 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

Speaking of incompetence...

 

What do you do when you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on hospital beds that don't meet the specification and don't really work?

Why you buy a second batch of course!

And a year later you have to replace all of them with something that actually fits the specification.

 

This is Tasmania!

So what are you gonna do with them, have a yard sale or sell them on Guntree or something? 

[Dead1]

31 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Deadly has fallen in love with a romanticised 1960's/70's version of Tassie he's conjured up in his head. He fantasizes about living in the Tassie from that 35 year period before he was born but after the war, because that was their hey-day before all the commercialization and incompetence and corruption and immigration and criminal element had worked their way all the way down there. Progress in other words, which he sees as anti-progress.

 

 

I don't think it was all ideal.  There was a lot of bad stuff and a lot of horrific shit.  But there was progress ie things were improving (even if it involved blood and tears ala Civil Rights Act in US).  And not just Tasmania but also rest of Australia, the USA and west in general (only UK was in a state of malaise which started in 1945 and has continued ever since).

Now we're regressing.  The homelessness, drug epidemic, increasing wait times at emergency, lack of doctors, 50% functional illiteracy, lack of housing unaffordability, lack of access to affordable healthcare, increasing congestion, stagnant wages,  declining public transport etc attest to that.

These are tangible things too, not nebulous concepts of bad.  

That's not just Tassie, that's Australia, the US and large chunks of the western world.  Basically around late 1960s something broke in the west and especially the English speaking world.  Not talking about hippies but in the thinking of the elites.

And things that should have got better haven't eg you still have massive race riots in US (but also now France and elsewhere).

I actually want things to change for the better - eg not having to walk by new homeless encampments on my lunch because the former homeless have access to affordable/subsidised and decent housing.

 

 

 

Quote

But in a lot of these more remote places they're not ready to embrace all this shit just yet because they thought they'd be insulated from it for a lot longer than they were.

 

We shouldn't embrace regression.

Ideally we should fight it like people in the past fought for it, but the people are too drugged with consumer manna to give a fuck.

26 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

So what are you gonna do with them, have a yard sale or sell them on Guntree or something? 

Well turns out no-one else wants them cause they're shit!  😁

2 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

You forgot the cold and shitty weather. Coming into summer and in the last few weeks Tassie has had snow, high winds and his weekend some parts look like they might get more than 100mm of rain, all while remaining under 20 degrees. Even Victoria isn't that bad!

 

I like cold and even wet.

 

It was 24 or 25 today - intolerable!

[AlSymerz]

34 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

That doesn't really sound too bad to me at all. I wouldn't want 4" of rain every weekend, but I'd be quite happy if it never got above 70° and stayed cloudy, cool and breezy all year round. It's the summer heat you guys have learned to live with that sounds miserable to some of us who aren't used to it.

 

Yeah but you're weird!

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

1 hour ago, Dead1 said:

Tasmania's government has been trying to ban protests for some time.

 

One of our premiers, Peter Lennon did actually try to change planning laws to fast track a pulp mill.  This was after the company that was building the pulp mill renovated his house.

https://tasmaniantimes.com/2006/03/good-morning-mr-lennon/

Bizarrely this is not considered corruption.

Though NSW takes the cake - they've been stuck in a Rum Corps mentality since 1789 (noting Australia was only colonised in 1787).

 

Corruption is right across the board in Australian politics, kind of the reason I can’t take it seriously in our country.

 

[AlSymerz]

Until it's proven those laws are actually stopping normal, lawful and civil protests then the way it's being portrayed is bullshit. It's been four months since those laws were changed and they were changed to stop the extreme fuckwits from taking things too far. So far I can't find anyone whose been arrested or fined under the new laws, laws which protesters vowed to break.

We need those sort of laws in Victoria. In the past few years we've had fuckwit protesters vandalising public and personal property as they marched the streets. We've had people blocking streets for hours because cars are polluting the world. We've even had deadshit cunts pissing on the Shrine Of Remembrance in protest to lockdowns. If laws gets those idiots fined or locked up I'm fine with it.

In the last few months Melbourne as seen protests for the Yes Vote, the No Vote, and both sides of the Gaza conflict and apart from one dickhead who let off a flare in the middle of the crowd not one of those thousands of people would have been locked up or fined in South Australia because the protests were lawful.

 

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

4 hours ago, Dead1 said:

 

I don't think it was all ideal.  There was a lot of bad stuff and a lot of horrific shit.  But there was progress ie things were improving (even if it involved blood and tears ala Civil Rights Act in US).  And not just Tasmania but also rest of Australia, the USA and west in general (only UK was in a state of malaise which started in 1945 and has continued ever since).

Now we're regressing.  The homelessness, drug epidemic, increasing wait times at emergency, lack of doctors, 50% functional illiteracy, lack of housing unaffordability, lack of access to affordable healthcare, increasing congestion, stagnant wages, declining public transport etc attest to that.

These are tangible things too, not nebulous concepts of bad.  

That's not just Tassie, that's Australia, the US and large chunks of the western world.  Basically around late 1960s something broke in the west and especially the English speaking world.  Not talking about hippies but in the thinking of the elites.

And things that should have got better haven't eg you still have massive race riots in US (but also now France and elsewhere).

I actually want things to change for the better - eg not having to walk by new homeless encampments on my lunch because the former homeless have access to affordable/subsidised and decent housing.

We shouldn't embrace regression.

Ideally we should fight it like people in the past fought for it, but the people are too drugged with consumer manna to give a fuck.

Well turns out no-one else wants them cause they're shit!  😁

I like cold and even wet.

It was 24 or 25 today - intolerable!

To be clear though I'm not saying I'm cool with all these problems you're bringing up, I probably agree with 90% of your takes on them. Progress has certainly stagnated and in many cases things have regressed quite a bit as you say. We're worse off now than we were 40 years ago in so many areas, especially economically. I'm just saying my world has been this way for so long where I live, that I've come to see it as just the way things are and maybe I've given up to some extent in my old age and become a bit numb to a lot of it.

Not completely numb though, as a card-carrying Bernie Bro I still get angry on a daily basis about the wealth inequality where we have the top 10% owning and controling 70% of the wealth, and the bottom 50% just 2.5%. The gap is ever widening and it's ravaged what's left of the middle class, creating a massive underclass of working poor, many of whom are literally one or two paychecks away from homelessness and destitution. 

This is such a difficult time for young people to have to come of age which obviously concerns guys like us with 10 year olds very deeply. We'd all like to see things change for the better, but my country has shifted so far to the right over the last 40 years to where the obstructionist neocon minority are in control, that I find it difficult to envision a scenario where all or even some of these things could change in a significantly positive way.

I'm sure it must suck ass to live in some out of the way place like Tasmania and watch your local world becoming more and more like America as your country adopts more and more of our big city social and economic ills each decade. If I didn't have a 9 year old to raise I could easily see myself becoming one of those disgruntled guys who checks out of mainstream society and lives way out in an off the grid cabin in the forest somewhere. As long as I had my internet connection so I could hear new metal I'd be just fine living like a hermit in the woods, like a leftist counterpart to Varg Virkenes.

 

[Dead1]

Great post Goatmaster.

[JonoBlade]

7 hours ago, Dead1 said:

I don't think it was all ideal.  There was a lot of bad stuff and a lot of horrific shit.  But there was progress ie things were improving (even if it involved blood and tears ala Civil Rights Act in US).  And not just Tasmania but also rest of Australia, the USA and west in general (only UK was in a state of malaise which started in 1945 and has continued ever since).

By "malaise" do you mean stagnant or apathetic? The Attlee government came in in 1945 which was an unusual situation where the population actually voted for its universal best interests. Churchill had just won the war, yet lost the election.

The policies at that time were quite radical and served the greater good. I wouldn't call that stagnant. 

"Most historians argue that the main domestic policies (except nationalisation of steel) reflected a broad bipartisan consensus. The post-war consensus is a historians' model of political agreement from 1945 to the late-1970s. In 1979 newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rejected and reversed it."

I blame TV and advertising....for everything. 

It's only with watching the Rugby World Cup on ITV that my 13 year old daughter has been exposed for the first time to mass advertising and the brain melting intellect vacuum that is reality TV.  Otherwise, we only ever watched streaming services and BBC from time to time. BBC still has no advertising. 

I find television in Australia and New Zealand to be utterly unwatchable. I also once turned on a TV in a hotel room in Detroit and threw up into the waste basket.

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

I see the Tasmanian sent his weather my way, take it back please… 12°C with the wind chill factor is not what I signed up for. please…

[FatherAlabaster]

8 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

I see the Tasmanian sent his wife on my way, take it back please… 12°C with the wind chill factor is not what I signed up for. please…

Did you say "weather" or something, or did Dead actually send his wife to you?

[AlSymerz]

If she's only 12 degrees and chilly I'd be sending her back.

[RelentlessOblivion]

26 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Did you say "weather" or something, or did Dead actually send his wife to you?fuck, I hate speech to text, can we all just agree that never happened?

 

[Dead1]

On 10/21/2023 at 12:10 AM, JonoBlade said:

By "malaise" do you mean stagnant or apathetic? The Attlee government came in in 1945 which was an unusual situation where the population actually voted for its universal best interests. Churchill had just won the war, yet lost the election.

The policies at that time were quite radical and served the greater good. I wouldn't call that stagnant. 

"Most historians argue that the main domestic policies (except nationalisation of steel) reflected a broad bipartisan consensus. The post-war consensus is a historians' model of political agreement from 1945 to the late-1970s. In 1979 newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rejected and reversed it."

 

 

I mean stagnation. 

 

Attlee government certainly did bring about some positive reform (eg NHS)*.  But Britain was struggling economically even in 1950s despite other western economies booming.

In some ways  Britain didn't stagnate, it collapsed  - empire largely dismantled by 1960s (mainly a good thing), industrial might started declining in 1950s and was crippled by 1970s (bad thing), social welfare system (eg public housing) also stagnant by 1970s and since in decline (bad thing).  In fact public housing in Britain peaked in 1967 and then declined massively in 1970s and collapsed during Thatcher era.

 

*I know a few Brits and the NHS is very much a hollowed out thing according to them these days.  

 

 

  

 

 

[JonoBlade]

12 hours ago, Dead1 said:

I mean stagnation. 

Attlee government certainly did bring about some positive reform (eg NHS)*.  But Britain was struggling economically even in 1950s despite other western economies booming.

In some ways  Britain didn't stagnate, it collapsed  - empire largely dismantled by 1960s (mainly a good thing), industrial might started declining in 1950s and was crippled by 1970s (bad thing), social welfare system (eg public housing) also stagnant by 1970s and since in decline (bad thing).  In fact public housing in Britain peaked in 1967 and then declined massively in 1970s and collapsed during Thatcher era.

*I know a few Brits and the NHS is very much a hollowed out thing according to them these days.  

It is.

One beacon of good news is that Tory control is collapsing. It is a zombie government at the moment. However, the opposition must be nearly as incompetent as the government itself for it to have taken this long. 

In politics you seem to have those that are blatantly out for themselves and those that are slightly less blatantly out for themselves. Hopefully, we will soon enter an era of "slightly less blatantly out for themselves" in Britain that will marginally improve conditions until the next swing around. 

I think the British electorate will be convinced to leave Earth next, because some twat will paint it on the side of a bus as a good idea. 

[Dead1]

9 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

One beacon of good news is that Tory control is collapsing. It is a zombie government at the moment. However, the opposition must be nearly as incompetent as the government itself for it to have taken this long. 

In politics you seem to have those that are blatantly out for themselves and those that are slightly less blatantly out for themselves. Hopefully, we will soon enter an era of "slightly less blatantly out for themselves" in Britain that will marginally improve conditions until the next swing around. 

 

We're the same in Australia.

There are simply no more competent politicians from the perspective of being good leaders and administrators.

However in the past the public service managed to hold up the strain of incompetent politicians and governments. 

But professional public service is destroyed in both Britain and Australia.  The system of appointment is now much more politicised and career public service has been replaced by careerists and corrupt opportunists who weave in and out of private and public sectors to advance their careers at the expense of good policy development and implementation.

Deregulation, privatisation, a propensity to over complicate, hyper-individualism and associated entitlement and the modern media have also helped this.

I saw the last of the career public servants retire in my department in early 2000s (many through lucrative voluntary redundancies).

Their replacements have often been terribly incompetent, nepotistic and sometimes corrupt.  Things are now significantly worse than when I started in government in 2005. It's become a vicious circle of decay.  And the results are obvious - wait times for elective surgery are worse (often years), wait times to be seen at department of emergency have been getting longer and longer, ambulance banking is now common and ambulances are often unavailable due to be banked (ie patient waiting in ambulance outside of hospital due to hospital being full). 

 

This is why I find GGs and Al's attitude of "it's just change" and "things are much better than you say" irritating. It's not good change and things should not be deteriorating, they should be improving.

 

 

And how Americans can be happy with the "progress" of their country is beyond me.  Eg this cartoon referencing an area in Pittsburgh (part of rust belt).  But that's across the US.  The US minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 since July 2009.  And many people aren't even paid that as they collect tips.  

And that $7.25 per hour is 40% less than value of minimum wage in 1968 in today's dollars.

In other times such actions would have led to the toppling of governments by violence force.