I had a little chuckle-up myself

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.

Same boat mate - Aussie govt employee myself who has access to flex. Personally I felt it was better when I was working for an NGO and they always gave me the choice between being paid overtime or banking it to flex later. It was nice to get the extra cash when I needed it and extra leave when the time came too. That should be the standard the employee should have the choice between OT or extra leave.

I think a good way of calculating their sentence should be in lost Franc-years. That is, calculate all of the lost wages they didn’t pay and force them to serve as many years as that amount would make in minimum wage. If they paid one staff member 1/12 of the minimum wage for one year, then that’s 11 months of gaol. If they paid 10 staff members 1/12 of the minimum wage for one year, that’s 9 years gaol. Take from them (in time) what was stolen from their workers. That’s the only way they’ll understand what they’ve stolen, because they have no value of a dollar, rupee, euro or franc.

I’m with you here, mate. My workplace went 100% remote during COVID and has only gone back to mandating five days per month back in the office and honestly? I think we’d do better with a mandated two days in the office and three days at home per week, mandating days where our team can all work together. I’m a social worker in an intake/assessment/referral position, and I desperately miss being able to look over my shoulder and debrief my case or gain some peer consultation on how best to manage the case I’m on. The one day I’m in I’m almost alone and gain barely any benefit from being in the office.

We have a fair few physically disabled colleagues, for whom I’d recommend a no-limits flexibility working arrangement that works for them, but for those of us who are physically able I think a 2/3 split would work far better. Our attrition rates have gone right up since COVID despite previously having some of the highest retention rates in our Department, and I can’t help but think that some of that is due to us being isolated while needing to rely on one another from time to time.

It’s really sad these days that “my algorithmic feed didn’t show me an article about this thing” has become equated with “no one is talking about this thing”. So many of us live in our little bubbles but still think that it’s fifty years ago and we all read the same three newspapers. We get fed different content based on what we consume; that’s a fact of modern media. If you want to know what’s out there, you need to search for it.

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 would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.

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:

• Ad
• Suggested Subreddit
• Ad
• Suggested Post
• Post from subscribed feed
• Ad
• Suggested Post

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.

Or a Sikh trans woman. Or a cis woman with very active facial hair follicles. I mean, it could be so many different people.

We’re biochemical foundries. It’s pretty damn cool.

Yeah, if “toxic + toxic = toxic” made sense then table salt would be extremely dangerous.

Sodium = extremely volatile and usually explosive metal when interacting with water (more than half of what makes us)

Chlorine = gas at room temperature that can kill you in minutes at concentrations of 1000ppm or more

Sodium + Chlorine = Sodium Chloride = delicious table salt that makes food yummy and helps power our neurons

Yeah I’ve never really bought into the whole ‘but they’re the only stable choice’ argument as that’s the exact thinking that leads you to a two-party system. Multiparty rule is far better than majority rule in my opinion as it represents far more discrete circumstances simultaneously. Personally I’m in favour of scrapping parties altogether, but that’s a far deeper rabbit hole.