I thought this bit made an excellent point
non archived link
It was around this time in 2020 that the US was helping Australian firefighters with a catastrophic surge of blazes during what became known as their Black Summer. If the same thing happens this year, both governments will be in an impossible situation.
Maybe not this year but one year soon this WILL happen. We voters aren’t taking any of this seriously, so neither are our politicians… be prepared.
After literally going through Black Summer (fire all around us), we moved to a place of zero bushfire risk in rural Tasmania. Even smoke triggers my partner who fought in those fires for 4 months, no pay. Hard to pay the bills
I guess what we need is nuclear submarines /s
I remember reading about the implications of overlapping fire seasons a while ago. Pretty terrifying stuff honestly. I think it was back when Bill Shorten was proposing a big investment in firefighting.
I’m really sorry you had to experience those fires up close, that would have been horrifying to the point of being life altering. Tasmania is a beautiful part of Australia at least.
We still aren’t even close to repairing all the damage from Black Saturday, let alone being at the point of ‘recovery’.
I do disaster relief and our organisation is at operating at its limit to cover everything that hits us every year.
I can’t imagine how our infrastructure is meant to cope with more of this happening more often.
I can think of two things that are utterly verboten yet will force us to do some soul searching.
One is to repeal every law across the board that requires businesses to keep delivering growing profits. Those laws have done their job splendidly and are causing harm as their expiry date goes farther into the past.
Two is, repeal every law across the board that requires parental leave, daycare rebates and such other things. You just cannot continue to congratulate those who bring infants into this gas chamber of a planet.
What laws to have instead of these two? What to do with our own lives after repealing these two laws? I don’t know. I’m merely hoping that the collective intelligence of 8 billion aided by AI and whatnot will see a way forward after these roadblocks are removed.
I’m merely hoping that the collective intelligence of 8 billion aided by AI and whatnot…
Okay, two things. Firstly, AI is causing a massive acceleration in the damage we’re doing to the climate. It is incredibly power-hungry to train those models. Secondly, AI is, in fact, incredibly bloody stupid. It is not “intelligent”, and in essence is just a rebranding of what AI should be for marketing purposes. It’s not capable of novel ideas, nor does it try to be.
Please for the love of all that is good in this world could people educate themselves on how terrible AI actually is.
💯 I used AI as a placeholder for any tools or methodologies we might use
I believe the majority of our growth comes from immigration. If we penalize Australian parents I expect business would demand the government offset a lower natural birthrate with higher immigration. Removing hard fought benefits for Australians would likely only make kids and parents lives miserable and create more inequality and social problems.
Developed countries tend to naturally adopt low birth rates even with fair allowances for parents and care givers as the financial and lifestyle sacrifices are still relatively large. The natural birthrate in Australia also gets a boost from immigration and would likely trend lower if we weren’t running a huge pyramid scheme.
Australia alone cannot repeal those laws and expect to make a scratch if that. I was referring to every government across every jurisdiction all over the planet. I doubt that low birthrate would be seen as being so painful when businesses are not required to keep delivering growing profits every quarter.
No civilization ever studied is known to have survived its own localised climate catastrophe or some other catastrophe. Every one of them either perished or, accepted the limitations imposed by land, air, water and lived within those limits. We might want to look inside ourselves for refusing to accept this.
Taking hard won gains from working people isn’t going to be popular. Most developed countries like South Korea, Japan and part of Europe already have low enough birth rates already to the point of concern about sustainability of their aging populations.
Let’s lift the poor out of poverty and give them access to birth control and social services so that they have choices and all the evidence suggests they will choose quality over quantity and smaller families or careers over large families.
Working people fought for centuries for the conditions we currently enjoy only to have them eroded by crap like the gig economy. We should not give up parental benefits as well. We should give up waste and extreme consumerism not nurturing families.
