The head of the CCA is literally a former NSW Liberal Party Treasurer, so I have my hopes that this story of partisan bias will be dismissed by any serious media (there’s a lot of unserious media in our country, though).

The real danger to the independence of the CCA is politicians making threats against the Authority and its staff because they don’t like its findings.

Ideally this sort of threat could be referred to the NACC, but they’ve shown themselves to be pretty pissweak so far.

Even people who don’t really have a Union

Nearly everyone is covered by a union, and if your union isn’t a fighting union, you should join it and start building militancy in the rank and file! (If you work in retail or fast food make sure to join RAFFWU, which is the fighting union, and not the SDA, who are shit.)

there are lots of other community groups that can be joined or created.

But yeah, joining community groups is also something that can help, but think about groups that are building alternative societal infrastructure that could support movements in exercising their power (e.g. feeding striking workers) or exert power themselves.

Something overlooked far too often though is just the fact of joining a political party itself. Helping to change and shape its direction from the inside.

I actually think this is - to a significant degree - a trap. It’s such a drain of time and energy for the benefit it can yield, compared to unionising workplaces or community organising.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

😆 Should we make a [email protected] ?

You’re arguing with a roleplay account 😂

So… what do voters ?

Build union power, specifically rank and file power

Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer this. How many days of data are you prepared to lose? What are the downsides of running your backup scripts more frequently?

Europe is closer to China than us. Why aren’t the Brits, French and Germans doing this?

Australia is slightly closer to any part of China than Germany is, but Australia is much closer to the Paracel Islands (Germany is about 9000km, Australia about 4000km).

The rest of your comment is spot-on, though. There’s no way we’re getting those nuclear subs.

Yet another case of China aggressively placing its territory near American military assets. They must be stopped 😡😡😡

I assume the BBC has a crack team of censors for operating the bleep button.

Fucking morons.

It seems a bit weird to me because the loans and repayments do affect finances, making them directly relevant to loan assessments

This article touches upon some more technical aspects: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/labors-plan-to-help-young-voters-with-student-debt-secure-a-home/elrkd1n69

It is understood that APRA will update the debt-to-income reporting definition so that HELP debts are no longer treated as debt for reporting purposes.

The shift would ensure student debt would no longer be treated like an unsecured loan, previously placing it in the same category as credit card or buy-now-pay-later debt.

I think it’s reasonable that HECS-HELP debt shouldn’t be treated the same as credit card debt. With the indexing changes (it’s now indexed to the lower of CPI or WPI) a HECS-HELP debt is never going to grow in real terms.

It’s only really relevant to consider the effect of the HECS-HELP repayments on net income, where it is functionally just a modifier on your marginal tax rate.

Both the ABC article and the SBS article are kind of ambiguous on one point:

ABC:

Updated guidance from financial regulators APRA and ASIC, made at the request of Treasurer Jim Chalmers, will also tell banks they can disregard HELP repayments when assessing an applicant’s ability to service their mortgage if they are due to pay off the debt in “the near term”.

SBS:

APRA will advise banks to exclude HECS repayments from serviceability assessments if they expect a borrower will shortly pay off their debt.

The ABC says “also” in that passage, which is weird - if they’re ignoring the debt altogether, then why do they have to mention this qualifier about “if they will shortly pay off their debt”?

Maybe it’s in reference to the sort of idea that I was talking about? That banks won’t consider HECS-HELP as ‘debt’, only as effectively a higher tax rate, and that they shouldn’t even take that into account if someone is only going to have that higher tax rate for a couple of years until the HECS-HELP is paid off, then it should be ignored entirely?

You can run deepseek-r1:8b (one of their reduced models) on a Raspberry Pi 5, though it is slow: https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-on-your-raspberry-pi-5

I imagine any Win10 computer that anyone is still using at work would be considerably more powerful than an RPi5, and should be able to run r1:8b at a more comfortable speed, and possibly r1:14b.

You can find guides online for system requirements for the various models, though I wouldn’t necessarily trust them, as they may have been targeting better speed of response than you care about. Once you’ve got ollama set up on your machine, it shouldn’t be much hassle to just try a few of the smaller distilled models yourself and find which one which has a quality-to-speed ratio you’re happy with.

Not sure i’ve articulated the knub of the issue i have with this case yet. I think i’m close, but apologies if this seems a bit indecipherable.

No doubt someone’s said it in a pithier way, but you get the point across!

If I can’t leave work at the end of the day and escape the consequences of climate change, why should Meg O’Neill be able to leave work and escape that she is causing it?

No surprise that a judge would work to reify the legal abstractions used to insulate powerful people from their own actions. You get the feeling that when they say “the premier”, they’re thinking about themselves 😆

I wish they had at least named the problem as the TPM 2.0 requirement, and also noted that it’s not really necessary for MS to add that requirement.

It’s probably also too much to expect the ABC to mention that you can just install a Linux on these computers and continue using them. They at least sort of give a nod to that idea when they quote that “The best form of e-waste recycling is actually reuse”.

There’s possibly a silver lining (a very slight one given how depressing the immensity of the unnecessary waste) that Linux users may be able pick up some useful second hand hardware for free if businesses are going to be throwing it out.

Self-organising within the rank and file membership is so important for building and maintaining militancy. People within the formal union bureacracies simply have different incentives to the rank and file.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Roman_emperors_murdered_by_the_Praetorian_Guard

‘The Hague Invasion Act’

While I was looking for a Christ the Redeemer keycap (posted pic in another comment) I came across another statue keycap that is even pointier than the one in the original post:

source: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1830835231/statue-of-liberty-keycap3d-printing

It looks like someone has done it at some point! Though with a blocky head and in bronze colour for some reason. It turned up in image results and looks like it is from a deleted Etsy listing, so it’s not available any more.

There’s plenty of Christ the Redeemer 3D models available (eg. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3636051), which should be pretty easy to adapt to keycap for anyone who can do 3D modelling.