I am currently copping the extra levies out of principle.

I would rather pay the extra tax than be forced to entire the criminally corrupt public system.

The problem is that the runaway inflation (caused by corporate price-gouging) is resulting in increased cost of living.

I have been fortunate enough to receive a pay-rise that reduces the pain caused by the CoL crisis, but it has pushed me into a higher tax bracket.

And people had the nerve to name a Swimming Pool after him! /s

“don’t You worry about that…”

US self-entitlement.

the land of the free has always had a “more important than every other country” mindset which has infected their citizens with the same selfish mindset.

McCarthyism and subsequent witch-hunts have resulted in such an anti-socialist zeitgeist that it has morphed into an anti-social zeitgeist where any empathy for any other person is seen not only as a weakness, but as also being “Un-murikan”.

I don’t think microplastics are having that effect.

It could just as likely be the decrease in airborne Lead following the removal of Lead Paint and TetraEthyl Lead in Petrol has caused people to be much more aggressive.

They still have the brain damage from growing up breathing in heavy metals, but no longer have the soporific effect of heavy metals.

Bloody Jeff.

Sold all our Publicly owned infrastructure to private companies.

Now we have to deal with electricity resellers screwing us over and the government needing to fork out Corporate Welfare in the form of “Energy Relief” to line their mates pockets.

Polls are not Votes. Polls are not subject to the same scrutiny as Votes. Even in regions that have a traditional bias towards one party of the other, there can still (theoretically) be significant statistical differences.

For instance, what if the Mormon women also decided to vote along gender lines; they may informally poll Republican in front of their peers, but may vote Democrat in the privacy of the voting booth.

What if a landslide number of people who have never voted before all vote against the status quo. If they had never voted before, they wouldn’t have been included in any polling.

Whether this is a realistic scenario or not is irrelevant to whether it can be called until at least half the possible votes have been counted in favour of one candidate or the other.

I really would have thought that a few of the safe seats would have flipped, considering how deranged he is and how many old-school Republicans have come out against him and endorsed Kamala.

It just goes to show that their Democracy has been so corrupted by decades of abuse that their elections no longer function.

We just need to educate our electorate that we can”t “Throw away your vote” by preferencing a special-interest party above a Major party…

It is also how biased the US electoral system is to maintain the Status Quo.

Every time the Republicans get in, the cripple democracy a little bit at a time. When the Democrats get in, they don’t do anything to roll back the damage.

It has finally come to the Endgame for US Democracy.

All we can do is make sure that our elected officials are aware that it is not something that we want in Australia.

As @tinybreak infers, they may be trying to get people to leave so that they don’t have to payout redundancies.

If you take your LSL and AL, you can bypass all the issues. When you come back you will either be invaluable to them and be able to get a payrise, or they would have decided to issue redundancies after all and you can cash-in again. It is a gamble though.

Preferential Voting is only part of the solution. The second and third parts are Compulsory Voting (to ensure that everyone has access to democracy) and Education.

Here in Australia, we have a Preferential Ballot and Compulsory Voting. Election day is on a Saturday and there are readily available options for those who are indisposed on Election Day.

What we don’t have is an educated Voter base. A lot of people still feel that if they vote for a minor party first, they throw away their vote, simply because that is what imported media is inferring.

Our AEC needs to have an advertising campaign extolling the benefits of preferential voting, and the populace needs to understand that there are no downsides, except a few extra seconds of thought to fill out your ballot. Instead, the education comes in the form of “How-To-Vote” cards, published by the major parties, completely missing the point of a preferential ballot.

If it isn’t a complete landslide against the Fascists, it will be a loss to democracy.

Riva TNT2

But that Spectrum being used for 3G is beneficial. Not just for support of older devices but also increased, redundant coverage.

This purely Corporate Welfare legislation, which is going to backfire on the corporations when they realise they have to build more infrastructure to provide the same coverage.

It is going to be detrimental to product consumers because they won’t have the same amount of coverage. Also, the higher bandwidth of 5G is going to increase backhaul requirements which mean that the person calling 000 using VoLTE will need to compete with the person steaming 4K Netflix while playing CoD.

The only winners in the long-term will be the advertisers and data miners, who somehow manage to bloat a 4kB website to 40mB.

OK Looks like my little MS Surface is going to be running Linux.

It was the Telecom Oligarchs that kept the speed and infrastructure limited.

I really wish that Telstra had not been accepted into the NBN; In my alternate history, FTTH would have been rolled out in parallel to all existing corroded copper. The problem with my alternate timeline is that Telstra would try to push fixed 4G and 5G as their only option and oversaturated the MobileNet infrastructure… wait they are doing that anyway!

Some imported dual-cab utes struggle with the kerbs of drive throughs.

Only people who are serve no useful purpose in their organisation.

There used to be an insult for these people “shut up or I will replace you with a very small shell Script”.

I only know one person who put LLM to use. He used to write copy for advertising agency’s who wouldn’t actually read the copy before it was published. He eventually outsourced to India so he didn’t want to spend time writing something that no one would ever read. Eventually he used ChatGPT made some scripts to automate the whole process.

Only people who are serve no useful purpose in their organisation.

There used to be an insult for these people “shut up or I will replace you with a very small shell Script”.

I only know one person who put LLM to use. He used to write copy for advertising agency’s who wouldn’t actually read the copy before it was published. Once he even sent Lorem Ipsum text and it was published. No one noticed. He eventually outsourced to India so he didn’t have to spend time writing something that no one would ever read. Eventually he used ChatGPT made some scripts to automate the whole process.