eureka

afaik, 'cooker' has risen as a slang term for the wackier conspiracy theorists:

From Wiktionary:

5. (slang, Australia) A person who makes or uses illicit drugs, especially methamphetamine or cannabis.

7. (slang, derogatory, Australia) A person who is cooked in the head; a crazy person.
8. (slang, derogatory, Australia) A conspiracy theorist, especially one who is involved in politics.

Reminder: no out-of-area ('absent') votes in this election.

Council elections may not the be most exciting I find them much more interesting, because while my vote is still statistically negligible, it's much more powerful than in a state or federal election. So less popular choices have a higher chance of competing.

Unfortunately* it feels like most of my local candidates have almost identical policies, so my second and third preferences might as well be a coin flip. At least I know who's going last.

lol - what abuse? He said these things in an earnings presentation, probably to board and investors.

Attempting to (softly) control other peoples' basic freedom, and their social life while at work, restricting them and alienating them from anything outside the office. The problem isn't their choice of words, nor that they admitted it to investors.

Maybe the way I'm saying this sounds melodramatic, that I'm jumping to the extreme case and assuming the worst. But those worst cases happen regularly, and these are the warning signs - when the owners want increasing control over workers to extract more profit, to "get the best out of them". Those employee pain points are social life: the company wants a childcare centre, a restaurant and a gym because "I don't want them leaving the building.", "I don't want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that costs." They could have lied and said they did it to improve worker wellbeing and get the best out of them, to reduce the travel-time needed, or any other seemingly innocent reason.

This attitude makes the universal truth clear, a board and investors see their workers as a resource for extracting maximum profit. It has to be that way, that's how they compete and survive. And it alienates workers.

And I don’t see any evidence anywhere that his people are enduring shit jobs.

I didn't say they were. I don't know their conditions. I'm refuting the common attitude that workers are just free to leave when they're being abused.

outrage reporting

You have a point. They said the quiet part aloud because their audience didn't need the propaganda bullshit they would have told other people. And so, they admitted an outrageous truth which, well, is pretty normal among businesses. The journalist is taking a quote and shining the headlights on them. But, they are not inventing a fake problem. There's no ethical justification for saying they don't want people leaving the building to enjoy a walk and a coffee on their break. Employer exploitation of workers is a real issue in society at large, it deserves attention, and this outrage is an opportunity to give it the attention it deserves.

As the one calling the shots, he’s entitled to run the business that way.

Legally, sure. But I don't care whether someone is legally allowed to be abusive, it's still abuse, and their abusive attitude towards workers earns outrage.

And sure, employees can probably leave legally, but if we allow this abuse to be normalized then there won't be another place to go in the industry. There is economic asymmetry at play, it's not viable to just leave a job whenever it treats someone badly. There are only so many jobs available and the market is increasingly moving towards monopolization in many industries.

People don't just work in shit jobs because they haven't considered leaving. They have legal freedom, but they are not empowered to leave without ending up somewhere just as bad or risking unemployment. So even if no-one is forced, they're inherently pressured, and that pressure is enough for them to accept abuse in order to keep themselves and their families off the dole. We need to create a society with an economy where people aren't subject to the whims of their employers.

Seriously, watching that interview is a little painful with all the interrupting to try and railroad the conversation, and attaching weird attacks and assertions to make loaded questions, or rather, framing a claim as a question. I haven't seen it so bad outside of Faux News in the US.

Glad to hear Max got a quick mention of the Green Bans of the BLF in.

Seriously, shame on the opportunistic people who bothered giving her a platform.

It's a sharp reminder of the industrialisation of art as entertainment, more than as expression.

Crosslinking: https://aussie.zone/post/12573641

Are the AFP employees (coppers) aware they are the wrong people to be handling this? They had an opportunity to help this kid, and instead just accelerated a terrorist operation until they could punish the victim.

Yep, I was going to point out that a decent amount of tech roles had an expectation of WFH long before 2020.

Seriously, I've had a union organiser lament that WFH was making it hard to work with a certain part of the company. You can't just set up a lunch or coffee meeting if everyone is in on different days (it's not a co-operative role).

Eh, while that hypocrisy is real, your post didn't really describe the situation. When it comes to 'terrorism', in the past few years and much of that article, ASIO have consistently been talking about neo-Nazism (particularly the NSN). Neo-Nazis are not anti-capitalist nor a minority group defending themselves (they are a clear aggressor). And of course they're bad for liberal democracy/capitalism and too foolish/idealistic to work alongside capital like 1920s fascists, instead desperately resorting to lone-wolf terror acts (to try and incite a nonsense 'race war'), so yes, they're being readily branded as terrorists, and correctly - they are explicitly aiming to promote terror.

As for the other cases being discussed like the Wakeley stabbing, I don't see how that's in the self-defense of a minority group. As far as I've seen, they're not attacking fascists or CEOs, or trying to enact systematic change. There's right ways to do political violence or self-defense, and these cases don't seem to be them them.

"This is the new thing, people will go to violence with little or no warning, and they [have] little or no planning in some of these that I've talked about," he said.