The first thing I played when I bought mine was Losing My Religion - so much fun to jam out to some REM on these beautiful lutes. Looks like you’ve got yourself one sexy sounding songmaker right there!

Did you buy freebase or salts? And what mg/mL did you dose at? I still use my reusable vape and dose my own and have dosed both freebase and salts - what MalReynolds says is the truth. The salt has a much lower throat-hit, which has allowed the disposable vape companies to jack up the mg/mL to 50+ which is just fucking insane territory. A friend of mine dosed his own with nicotine salts at 50mg/mL to compare and it gave that exact head spin you’re talking about. It’s a combination of the dosage and use of nicotine salt that does it.

Uhhh, no. That’s not how RCV works at all.

Let’s say there are five candidates - A, B , C, D, and E.

Let’s assume candidates A & B are the most popular.

Personally I choose to rank them as C, E, D, B and then A.

Out of all of them, no one gets over 50% of the #1 vote. Whoever gets the lowest #1 vote is knocked out first. Let’s suggest that this is C. All of their #1 votes and therefore my vote is then transferred to E.

Let’s suggest that after this there’s still no one who has over 50% of the vote between the other four candidates. Let’s further assume that candidate E has the lowest resulting vote after the first round of knockout. My vote is then transferred to candidate D.

Out of A, B, and D, let’s assume none of them still have over 50% of the vote after this redistribution. Let’s further assume that D has the lowest vote of the three. My vote is then transferred to B.

Given there are only two candidates left, one will have to have a majority. That candidate wins.

Under RCV, as long as you mark every box with a preference your vote can never ever be wasted. It will always end up with a candidate that wins or one that loses, but it cannot ever be exhausted and therefore meaningless.

Many people with vaginas have a lot of sex that makes no babies

Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.

That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.

Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!

The reference is to Rupert Murdoch; a man who hasn’t been Australian since 1985 when he gave up his Australian Citizenship to become naturalised as an American. He created NewsCorp which became the Fox Corporation; one of the most politically viable and mainstream news sources of the 20th and 21st centuries in the US media landscape.

The revocation of the word ‘mate’ just honestly shows that Americans are so very alien to the concept of immigrants that even an Anglophonic immigrant who’s been a US citizen for almost 40 years still isn’t somehow ‘American’ if their slang hasn’t been fully naturalised as well.

That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!

Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.

I guess it depends on your definition of ‘major’. I think in a pluralistic democracy, any party that represents 10+% of the population meets that criteria. Of course, from the perspective of a two-party system 10% doesn’t seem like much, but it’s significant enough to have held the balance of power many times since the Greens came into existence in the ‘90s.

I dunno, if I suddenly grew a vagina I might want to use it.

Labor’s rules that prevent backbenchers from crossing the floor are frankly undemocratic, outdated and just generally against the Australian concept of a ‘fair go’. These words are gonna taste awful coming out of my mouth, but that’s the one thing the Libs have over Labor. At least they allow crossing the floor for backbenchers.

bleugh

Good on Senator Payman, she’s honestly a hero in my book. I wish I was a Westerner so I could vote for her again when she comes up for re-election. The idea that she should be beholden to the party line because she was a member of the party when she was voted in does a disservice to everyone who voted for her but don’t agree with literally every single policy they put forward (read: every single person who voted for her, because no voting bloc is a monolith).

Shame, shame Albo. Shame. Do better.

Monotremes FTW

Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.

Original source: https://facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2656977204337311

Denis Lushch - ‘The Bullshit Weaver’

It bugs me that this image has been altered and reproduced so many times without crediting the artist. It’s a wonderful political cartoon and very pointedly aimed at Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp.

I don’t know why the text on this was altered just to remove the word ‘mate’ - that’s obviously Rupert Murdoch pictured in the middle.

Original source: https://facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2656977204337311

Denis Lushch - ‘The Bullshit Weaver’

• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
• Super Paper Mario
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
• Paper Mario: the Origami King

Depending on your definition of ‘sidekick’, these may also count:

• every Mario Party game
• every Mario Kart game
• every Mario & Sonic Olympics game
• Super Smash Bros Melee, Brawl and Ultimate
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

There might be more I’m forgetting.

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.

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.

I’ve not seen a comparison of $/kWh of rooftop solar versus solar plant in the Australian context for the life of the panels, factoring in degradation; posited increase in efficiency of solar PV over a given period of time; individual cost; governmental cost; overall cost; and net benefit to the individual based upon specific usage. If you have those statistics available, please share them.

In the meantime, our rooftop solar is kicking goals and scoring some serious points while our government still debates whether or not to open a new coal-fired power plant. Individuals in Australia are investing not only in their own potential reduced power bills but in moving towards the next generation of Very Low Input Cost power generation that reduces environmental impact significantly.

I personally have an array of 24x panels that generate an average of 72kWh per day. I’d love a home battery to prevent selling cheap renewable energy during the day and then buying expensive power at night, but they’re still prohibitively expensive and at least I’m doing my part to decarbonise the grid while I wait.

What are you doing about your personal power consumption to decarbonise the world?

Edit: I bought my home with the solar panels already intact. I did not pay for their installation, nor have I needed to pay for any maintenance on them. My direct cost for accessing renewable energy has been $0 and I’ve gained significantly from them since then. This is pretty common in Australia these days.