Tenderizer

Do you, perhaps, have a pro-speed bias?

Still, slower speeds in local neighborhoods makes a lot of sense. In Victoria it's 50km/h which is way too high even for normal cars.

Just use Qwant. They won't even LET you log in.

EDIT: I think Qwant may have some ties to the far-right. So maybe not Qwant. But I'm not gonna bother checking.

This seems like a really stupid solution and I have no idea what the government's thinking.

Can't be bothered.

You can't prove it, but you can evidence it. And in some cases you can prove it (we've proven vaccines don't cause Autism, for example).

Although this whole "produce studies" approach is such BS. The "do your own research" slogan is what got us anti-vaxxers (plus, and I can't stress this enough, I really can't be bothered). Expert consensus is how we should approach it. The experts know how to read the studies.

Produce studies saying to say it's not harmful, or be quiet. Social media is too new, and all the psychologists that know the implications are working for the social media companies to make it more addictive. We don't know whether social media is harmful, but there is ample anecdotal evidence of the three issues I raised. I should not I haven't actually looked for any evidence because who can be bothered using Google for a Lemmy (Reddit) argument.

In my experience, the type of engagement that social media encourages is not healthy in any way, and this is not on the level of books or movies (some video games fall into the same category though).

Or let's just go with privacy laws. Any information on engagement with their platforms should be depersonalized before use in content recommendation and ads. Users should need to manually select the criteria of content they want to see, rather than TikTok deciding they're autistic or something and doing that automatically. In practice though this'd probably just means there'd only be the trending page, but as long as it's useless (and we'd need to rely on human recommendations) then all's fine.

I read that as less of a "belief" and more of an "assumption". Most people don't think about paraplegic sex at any point on their life, so her assumption went unquestioned until she was prompted to by sex work.

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.

And the chemicals are far more (or less) toxic.

Banning new gas installations is an easy one. We should not be pumping gas into people's homes.

Wood fireplaces is a tough one. The ACT did it, but we don't burn wood for electricity and wood isn't as prone to leaking. The problem is that wood smoke is carcinogenic.

Sorry for the late reply, I wanted to think through my response and then I got busy.

The Greens could publicly behave with humility. As I said, the claim that "they don't show humility because it would hurt them politically" doesn't hold up if the Greens are being "slandered" in the press for lacking humility.

And as for the HAAF, a few points:

1. The Australia Institute is broadly untrustworthy. They're biased towards minor parties, or rather just anyone that'll give them attention. They're also closely tied to the now defunct Australian Democrats and those people would prefer if Labor was closer to the Liberals not just in practice but in ideology. Worst of all though, they're a think-tank. Think-tanks are, quite honestly, full of idiots. Policy-area experts, like those in the construction industry or those that work in social services, they're much more reliable than a bunch of upper-class consultants.
2. The HAAF was supported across the board by people who are directly engaged with vulnerable people, and they said it was especially critical that it be passed immediately. The delay was opposed by any organization that actually dealt with vulnerable people, and the resulting delay of 1-year resulted in less housing being built. Hell, considering the state of the Australian building industry I wonder if more housing would be built even if the Greens got all their demands after this delay.
3. The idea that it'd do nothing, that is absurd.

And on the double standard. The fact is the Greens would not be able to win elections without Labor. Labor could easily win elections without the Greens. You could argue that's because the system is rigged and that the system should be changed, but we're one of the best-performing democracies in the world. This isn't America where voting is optional, elections in Australia are fought in the center and Labor are much more palatable to the average Australian than some inner-city tree huggers who have never worked a day in their life. Maybe an Adam Bandt dictatorship would make the country better, who knows, but I sure as hell wouldn't bet on it.