Apparently I’m hopeless, they all just sound “Australian” to me. I didn’t even know there was much state-by-state difference lol

This is now becoming incredibly tangential to the original post, but the comment thread reminded me of the time the hacker known as “Alex” uncovered Tony Abbott’s passport and phone numbers, who reacted pretty well to it: https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram/

And then Tony Abbott just… calls me on the phone?

Mostly, he wanted to check whether his understanding of how I’d found his passport number was correct (it was). He also wanted to ask me how to learn about “the IT”.

He asked some intelligent questions, like “how much information is in a boarding pass, and what do people like me need to know to be safe?”, and “why can you get a passport number from a boarding pass, but not from a bus ticket?”.

The answer is that boarding passes have your password printed on them, and bus tickets don’t. You can use that password to log in to a website (widely regarded as a bad move), and at that point all bets are off, websites can just do whatever they want.

He was vulnerable, too, about how computers are harder for him to understand.

“It’s a funny old world, today I tried to log in to a [Microsoft] Teams meeting (Teams is one of those apps), and the fire brigade uses a Teams meeting. Anyway I got fairly bamboozled, and I can now log in to a Teams meeting in a way I couldn’t before.

It’s, I suppose, a terrible confession of how people my age feel about this stuff.”

Then the Earth stopped spinning on its axis.

For an instant, time stood still.

Then he said it:

“You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”

This was possibly the most pure and powerful Australian energy a human can possess, and explains how we elected our strongest as our leader. The raw energy did in fact travel through the phone speaker and directly into my brain, killing me instantly.

When I’d collected myself from various corners of the room, he asked if there was a book about the basics of IT, since he wanted to learn about it. That was kinda humanising, since it made me realise that even famous people are just people too.

Haha, that was Turnbull? It really sounds more like an Abbott thing to have said!

Headline question, answer no…

For what it’s worth, the SEO headline is “Why high immigration has fallen out of favour in Australia” (i.e., a statement saying it has, not a question or a no), but I felt the question better represented the actual text so I changed it to the normal one.

I unfortunately can’t find the article that discussed the idea, but someone (an economist? a think tank?) brought up the idea of raising/broadening GST, but then then just giving everyone a flat amount back. In their modeling it halved the net revenue from the GST change (though it was still a good chunk of money), but made it financially neutral for people at lower incomes.

Edit: Again drawing from uni-assignment-land, I really like the PBO’s discussion of Australia’s tax mix: https://www.pbo.gov.au/about-budgets/budget-insights/budget-explainers/tax-mix/characteristics-different-taxes

Chapter 3 in the PDF has a great discussion about tradeoffs of different taxes, with both Figure 3-1 (near the start) and Table 3-1 (at the end) having some great insights if you’re not well-versed in those design tradeoffs (i.e., almost everyone). Here’s a copy of that first chart for easier reference: https://fedia.io/media/a9/3c/a93ca8c1bc7fea26f47b9063d55a175d04c0a846d69a4a66d240808675841e34.webp

Of course efficiency (which this figure shows) doesn’t mean equity (which the chapter also discusses), hence ideas like the flat offset to balance it out.

Some related reading from The Conversation that I liked when I was doing exploratory background reading for some related uni work a few months back:

• Let’s tax carbon: Ross Garnaut on why the time is right for a second shot at carbon pricing (Oct 2024)
• Researchers analysed 1,500 climate policies to find what works. These are the lessons for Australia (Aug 2024)
• Australia now has a $70 ‘shadow price’ on carbon emissions. Here’s why we won’t see a real price any time soon (Apr 2024)

I thought it was particularly funny how the first of these articles is saying that it is/was a good time to try for a carbon tax again and that the alternatives are essentially inadequate, while the second one says:

[…] Importantly, they found most emissions reduction relied on a mix of policies. The results point to a way forward for Australia, where an economy-wide carbon price is currently politically impossible.

I don’t think I made use of that juxtaposition in my assignment but now I can use it to write a comment which four people will read :'D

Whether the author of article 1 is right (it’s close to a silver bullet policy and is politically feasible) or whether the author of article 2 is right (it’s both not a silver bullet and politically impossible) I don’t know.

Huh. Well this went from “something to look into next week” to “Oops, it’s finished already”.

Hah, I was much the same. I went to check on it last night / early this morning and realized I had straight up missed the whole thing.

Looks like there wasn’t much interest this year.

I wonder how much of this is less activity in threadiverse in general vs less interest (or less promotion of?) Canvas this year. As a random data point, last year I remember seeing Canvas promoted several times in my feed leading up to the event, but I think this year I only saw it here and maybe once in !fediverse@lemmy.world.

It’s not really the important takeaway, but I’m kind of surprised it’s coming from the AMA tbh

Ngl I kind of assumed we would’ve just made them out of something biodegradable and food-safe because it seems insane to use them otherwise

p.s. here’s the intended link for people on platforms that don’t support those types of edits: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/29/calls-for-australia-wide-crackdown-on-real-estate-ads-that-use-ai-to-hide-faults-and-lure-in-renters

That was honestly very disorientating lol

Is this what people who get motion sick playing games feel like?

I guess posting here we’re mostly part of the terminally online crowd; it seems likely to be true that for this demographic if we spent 50-90% of the time we currently spend reading social media and news on instead reading books or meditating or something it would probably improve our lives (without ever interacting with the the part of the pyramid where a lot of people are struggling over more fundamental needs). Idk.