Well that is their special skill, and their happy place.

Its pretty notable that almost all the smokers I know have moved over to black market imports. $2+ per cigarette means that a pack of black markets charged at $1 per cigarette make it far to tempting, and there is a big enough profit margin on them that people will bring them in to the country despite enforcement actions.

They haven’t been able to stop weed, or cocaine, or heroin or ice what makes them think they will be able to stop tobacco products, especially when there is a legal version of cigarettes and e-cigarettes out there that at first glance can be hard to tell apart from the illegal ones.

I also heard that there is a tobacconist who couldn’t get a license in my old home town, so they pivoted to selling novelty products above board and illegal cigarettes under the counter. The council basically posed them the option of stay in business and break the law or shut down.

I have written and rewritten my response here trying to find the right tone. I feel like we are closer to agreement here than might be immediately obvious. I think a lot of what we are seeing now is a result of 50+ years of people who find the idea of your republic distasteful seeking every method they can to erode it away. All the details are just components of this project, seems to me that MAGA is a result of years of stoking xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. Turns out if you spend decades laying the groundwork you can make the situation seem completely hopeless to a whole populace. I sincerely worry the long term goal is to perfect the formula for dismantling democracy and then start exporting it to the rest of the world.

Or I could be a fool, I don’t know and I don’t want to rewrite this again. Sorry that this was so rambling.

From my detached non American (but still a citizen of the planet so likely to get fucked hard by the way Americans vote) point of view, seems like Americans are continually letting perfect be the enemy of least bad. “Well since Democrats are kinda bad in these instances maybe we should just go fully fascist theological doom cult. That will force the Democrats to improve, or kill us all.”

“Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited.”

Its not working.

I apologise if my summary is too biased/inaccurate, tried my best to be as impartial and factual as I could while falling asleep on my phone at 4am.

Honestly not sure what to expect if a snap election is called, we can be a funny populace to call and a snap election leaves little time for political messaging to percolate, but also a commensurately short time to combat any poor messaging that gains a foothold.

I think Dean Winters (the Labor leader) may be unpopular enough to cause Labor some grief at the ballot box, but the Liberals fumbling is going to give the party a small lift. Labors stance that they won’t partner with the Greens will also cause them some grief.

I personally think independent stand the most to gain and will hold balance of power in whatever minority government gets through.

Gun to my head - Labor minority.

The stadium is a Lightning rod issue, but it is far from the only one.

Briefly we have had a Liberal government that is terrible at organisation and makes deals based upon cronyism, nepotism and or incompetence.

The state government has demonstrated that they are largely incapable of delivering any projects on budget and lack forward planning capability. For example two new high speed ferries were commissioned to connect Tasmania and Victoria to accomodate post COVID tourism increases. These ferries were constructed in Finland and were ready before the facilities required to berth them here in Tasmania, this has meant that we have had to pay a port in Scotland to hold on to them until we can get our side of things ready.

We have had a number of crises in our Public Health and hospital systems leading to extended delays for people seeking both emergency and planned treatment.

When it became obvious that the State government was unable to balance a budget they opted to institute a Public Service hiring freeze. Talked about instituting a government body to emulate the stated goals of DOGE.

The stadium is possibly the most politicised matter, our previous Premier got super focussed on getting a Tasmanian AFL team. After a lot of big talk AFL provided a pathway that a lot of people felt was demonstrative of them not wanting a Tasmanian team to go ahead, setting a requirement that a new stadium be constructed in a difficult/impossible location, with conditions that would potentially exclude its use for other sport and event types, with the state largely being the ones to bankroll a project that had a hopelessly optimistic budget.

Since there has been a yearning for an AFL team in Tasmania for a very long time the government and AFL are leveraging this to get people to back the stadium regardless of it’s feasibility.

All of this came to a head when the Liberals released a budget that would increase state debt to more than $10 billion by 2029. This would be a trigger for a bunch of state assets being put up for sale.

So the Labor Party leader pushed for a No Confidence vote, which has been successfull. By convention the Premier is expected to resign once a No Confidence motion has passed, but Jeremy Rlockliffe has opted to instead fight this by calling an election.

Now I really shouldn’t have started typing all this up at 4an. I’m going back to bed. Good night.

Yeah that’s a situation alright.

Oh yeah that’s what I mean, the trail of wreckage they leave as they get promoted out of the positions they ruin is astounding.

Yeah, just wait until the Australian electorate has a brain fart and let’s Sky News convince them to vote in spud head. He will get right on to climate change by “nuclear-ifying”* our power grid.

^ * “nuclear-ifying” is a term of art that should not be interpreted to mean any actual progress will be made towards nuclear power generation. Expect to see increased demand placed on coal and gas power plant, all hail Gina. Spoken and authorised by the Liberuhal Party… Oh and /s so it’s not elecgion interference ^

Oh it’s tragic. The kid is headed for a life of middle management, like I said he may or may not have been being honest. But he goes to the expensive private school that I couldn’t afford to send one of my kids to, let alone both. He will make the right connections and be part of the right social circles that details like not understanding his achievements won’t really matter.

I’ve worked for that sort of guy across industries and business, they do fine.

That’s fair. I never actually subscribed to Reddit, I was wary of social media after a brief time on Facebook where I realised it was harming my mental health. Plus I was friends with a bunch of strippers, a lingerie model who did a shoot with Playboy the year before I became friends with her, and a super exhibitionist gay guy I worked with… Result was I needed 2 Facebook profiles and swapping back and forth all the time was too stressful.

Which is a long way of saying that Lemmy is my first social media in more than 10 yearsnand I am not sure how I feel about downvotes as I don’t remember ever having recieved one.

Or if he absolutely has to have a 1 hour response time sounds like a hiring someone to do admin might be the best way to stay competitive.

Had a chat with my kids friends while dropping them at home, they were talking about a kid who got busted using ChatGPT for some schoolwork. When I jokingly asked one of them how he avoids getting caught he admitted he uses it for “first drafts” then rewrites the whole thing in “his own words”. A bit of drilling down and he admitted it takes him longer to write a short paper with ChatGPT but it’s easier because he doesn’t have to think of what to say, just how to change the words.

If he was being honest the irony of the dumb kid rewriting the idiot boxes responses so he doesn’t get caught is just… Getting the article off Wikipedia and doing the same thing would have a similar result… Only with less faffing around and environmental impact.

I allowed NSFW posts because I used to get some truly random shit coming up back when I lurked Reddit that way, so when I got Boost for Lemmy I thought I would do the same. Reddit had a much better ratio of weird and wacky vs onlyfans ads. Lemmy unfortunately only seems to have OnlyFans ads.

I kinda miss some of the bizarre ARAD topics, or shower beers or borderline brain melting confessions.

Do any of these rhetorical questions ever get replies?

They are already complaining about the hole in the budget illegal tobacco products are leaving, how on earth would our economy stand up to losing the addiction tax?

I get a really slimy vibe from this RFI group. Kinda reminds me of the NIMBY groups that go around blocking mobile phone sites.

I remember talking to a planner once about the mobile phone blocking efforts and he was pretty scathing about what he had seen, some of it genuinely people who had an axe to grind based upon Facebook radicalisation, but a lot of it seemed to have deeper financial motivations from some of the organisers.

He told a vague story about a guy who kicked up a big stink with a proposed tower for highway coverage in a rural area, that is until the site was relocated and he found out afterwards that the secondary site selected was owned by a relative of the guy kicking up the stink who made bag off the bush block that was suddenly worth more than 15 times its previous value.

I fully endorse research and feasibility studies with an eye towards minimising environmental impacts, but if the alternative to these projects is continued reliance on coal and gas I suspect that the long term impacts are far more likely to be worse by not going ahead with the OSW.

Of course I would prefer that the development were done by a domestic company rather than foreign investors, but it seems we don’t really do massive infrastructure domestically any more.

I guess what I was trying to say with my rambling 1am slightly drunken screed, is that all of us swim in a sea of ignorance. I sure as hell do, I know little to nothing about mining, a lot of farming practices are completely unknown to me and the logistics used to coordinate the delivery of healthcare at a national level are frankly mind boggling (I live in a country with a somewhat functional healthcare system, ignore this example if you live in the US).

The biggest thing, IMHO, that seperates me from a lot of the younger (and older) people I meet and interact with, is that I am happy to say “I don’t know.” And if it’s important I can and will go and find out how it works, at least well enough to approach the cliffs of competency and decide if it’s worth the effort to scale them.

I cannot tell you how many topics I have learnt enough about to decide to eat the steak and declare that “Ignorance is bliss.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do so while betraying my colleagues to the agents yet.

Maybe the writers at Games Workshop pulled a bit of prescience out when they did their exercise in hyperbolic projection of trends across 38,000 years.

Or maybe it was influence of the warp and Tzeentch…

I am not arguing in any way that there should be some basic competence required of everyone who uses tech, in the same way that despite my aversion to cars I know how to change a tyre, check and top up my oil, feel the windshield wiper resevoir and check the radiator level. It is incumbent on me to have that knowledge as a foundational level of being a driver and car owner, and yes I am aware that there are a number of drivers who do not know these things, but that is another discussion.

I think that far, far more important than all this is teaching critical thinking, media literacy and scepticism. A grade 11 & 12 (I’m Australian so not sure how closely that maps but 17-19 year olds) health teacher I was talking to recently told me that more than 80% of her students admit to recieving the vast majority or all of their health information from TikTok. It genuinely does not matter if they understand the finer points of say file system structure, if they are uncritically listening to a shitty AI voice over a video of three people doing a synchronised “dance” telling them that oranges cause shin splints.

If our society, not just a segment of it, was taught to understand what media is, how it interacts with culture, and how rich people use it to establish and maintain control. That control from a ruling elite via newspapers, or TV, or the Internet is IMHO far more responsible than anything else for the state of your country… And my country… And the world. With that in mind I put my effort into trying to get my kids to research things for themselves and to look for the hidden motivations behind the facade of everything they do.