I'd say, rather than conscription, have mandatory military training. It would convince more people to consider a career in defense and expand our ability to rapidly increase our standing army in a real war scenario. Assuming the volunteer army model is indeed untenable.

We collectively need far fewer people to have driver's licenses in this country. Being part of the minority that can't drive is harder when that minority is smaller and so less resourced. Although in some ways, with fewer people who can't drive competition for jobs (especially entry-level) that don't need a driver's license may be lighter.

Even Trump's allies don't know what's going on ... does he even have allies? I think it's just El Salvador, Israel, Hungary, and Vietnam. Israel is the only one who they seem to tell anything.

Just take the Japanese approach, require proof that your garage is big enough before selling you the car.

I think the harms are real. They're not exclusive to children.

There are three categories of harm:

• Radicalization, as the algorithm deliberately feeds you bad takes from your political opponents and good takes from your political allies, to keep you engaged.
• Overstimulation, the YouTube Kids channel Cocomelon is way too addictive for kids. This isn't exclusive to social media, and YouTube Kids apparently has an exemption.
• Addiction, social media eats into hours upon hours in kid's days. Time they could spend with their family/friends or processing their emotions, instead they're being numbed out on their phone.

I think we should ban algorithmic recommendations (or strictly limit them), ban the practices of Cocomelon, and ... I'm not sure what we can do about the addiction thing (humans are super prone to addiction). I'd also ban smart-phones in schools, kids should only be allowed flip-phones/brick-phones.

That phrasing comes from a channel that calls the Teals "not-shit". The imported narrative that "both sides are the same" gives license to the conservative working class to vote against their economic interests, but frankly speaking the Labor party is broadly made up of people who genuinely care but are faced with a corrupt system operating under American global dominance.

We have it quite good in Australia, for the most part. It could be SO much worse.

If we're so concerned about the South China Sea, we can give Taiwan or Japan diesel subs. It's not like the nuclear subs would be of much use to us anyway if they're on the other side of Indonesia.

Although I can't imagine an Internal Combusion Engine sub being at all stealthy, so I'd hope there's some kind of third option.

They couped Whitlam and Rudd for trying to tax the mining corpos, can you imagine if Albanese tried to shut down Pine Gap.

The accounting newsletter my uni made me sign up to had an article criticizing this from the SMSF association.

Their key complaint is "unrealized capital gains" which is ... real estate basically. You can tax shares and they can just sell a few, "unrealized capital gains" only makes sense if you're using your super fund to evade income tax as a property investor. These elites, even the obscure accounting newsletter elites, know full-well what they're doing.

Sure, privatize the railroads. That going well is the norm, not the exception. /s

No, it's not the angle. The sun's orbit isn't exactly symetrical, it's a bit lopsided. In January the sun is about 5% closer to earth.

In the Northern hemisphere this is during winter, so it's the best of both worlds. In Australia though it's the reverse. We get extra dim winters and extra bright summers.

Be careful of the summer sun.

The sun isn't always a fixed distance from earth. It's closest in January, which is winter in America but in Australia that's summer. So they should be ready for hot summers with a high risk of skin cancer.

There's probably more to worry about in the tropics (invasive species like kane toads and fire ants especially) but I don't live in the tropics so I'll leave that to someone else.