Sounds like ARMA, walk for an hour and get shot from God knows where. Just like real life!

As others have stated, we explicitly don’t have free speech in Australia.

We also don’t have any laws requiring political campaigns to be truthful. And as we saw, the day after the vote was done. All the leaders of the “No” campaign flat out abandoned indigenous people and explicitly said they wouldn’t be fronting a new referendum for recognition in the constitution without the voice. A promise they made repeatedly.

The leader of the opposition who spearheaded the no campaign has been called a fascist by his peers. And once commented that if elected he would do away with parliament and elections if he could.

It doesn’t matter. 63% support among indigenous folks is still a landslide.

You’re not arguing in good faith though. Accusing someone of racism like that. So you can go fuck yourself for all I care.

80% indigenous support polled prior to the campaigns starting. After a relentless campaign of misinformation courtesy of Murdoch. The actual number that voted yes was 63%.

In regional Aus, there is a popular, free-to-air, 24/7 Murdoch-run news outlet, Sky News Australia, not to be confused with Sky News. It is right of Fox News, closer to OAN.

Yeah, usually if I get stuck in my head I’ll just go work in the garden. Bit of sunshine and toil usually gets me unstuck.

Over 63% of indigenous people voted in favour of the voice.

You are repeating propoganda.

Australia is way more racist than the US. And more right-wing.

The US just doesn’t have compulsory voting, which means a minority of nutjobs can dictate politics. And even then, Trump lost.

Australia has compulsory voting and voted this way lol.

US is going through a labour organising revolution right now. While unions are left in the cold and experience dwindling power in Aus, even with the Labor party in power.

Yeah, folks are super reasonable compared to other social media sites, for the most part. The occassional nutter isn’t propped up by some PR company bot net to drive engagement so they just end up downvoted into oblivion.

It’s refreshing.

Yeah I’ve got arms like an orangutan. Despite the amount of stuff I’ve smashed my watch 5 pro against it’s still scratch and scuff free.

Block me too, cheers.

Seems like the entire Western world is dealing with a rise in anti-social behaviour on the roads since the pandemic started.

We have a family premium plan and I still got this message. Guess I’ll cancel YouTube Premium now…

I get most of the content I want via patreon anyway now.

A big problem in Aus is the industry culture. They don’t care about using technology to improve results. They only care about cutting costs, even if the final product doesn’t meet the previous standard.

And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically. Because studios play silly buggers to weasel out of paying VFX companies what they are due.

From what I hear, even DNEG is in trouble, and were even before the strike.

It’s a race to the bottom it seems.

My honest hope for the film industry is likely the same as yours. That we have smaller productions with access to better post due to improvements in AI-driven compositing software and so on.

But it’s likely that a role that was earning $$$ before is devalued significantly. And while I’m an unabashed anti-capitalist, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what this sudden downward pressure on income can do. Cost of living increasing while wages shrink is an awful combination

I’m 35, left a six figure job, folding my company and starting an electrician’s apprenticeship. To give you an idea around what my views about AI are. And of course this is as an Australian. We have a garbage white collar work culture anyway.

I think there will be a net improvement. But I worry that others will fail to adapt quickly. Too many are writing off AI as this thing that already came and went, but the tools have just landed, and we don’t yet have workflows that correctly implement and leverage these yet.

There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.

But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.

In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.

AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It’s not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.

I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn’t overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.

I worked in environmental analysis and projection for a mutli-national engineering company and I have bad news.

It’s a very dystopian realisation.

Something was done without the consent of your parents or yourself that has a lasting impact on the rest of your life.

I just hope we hold those responsible to account. This was researched in the 90’s and the scientista that worked on it were muzzled.

You can read about that here:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/a_warning_by_key_researcher_on_risks_of_bpa_in_our_lives

How do you explain vastly decreased rates of child abuse vs vastly increased rates of various disorders? This isn’t my area of expertise but it is my wife’s.

It’s kind of an a known at this point that there is something environmental affecting us. Given the number of recent studies, (check my post below) and the ramping interest in BPA/BPS and ~100 similar compounds, I advise watching this space.

One of the OG studies that raised the alarm.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6946218/

Recent study into specific harms.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0289841

https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2023/10/new-study-suggests-a-link-between-a-plastic-additive-and-autism-adhd.html

As more research is done, it’s going to end up being the lead exposure of our generation. (If I was to make a judgement call now)

Weird downvotes, I guess we love.3M and chemical coorporations now lol?

I’d go ahead and say the cause is likely related to BPA/BPS compounds in plastics. And the exposure of pregnant women to those compounds.

But ya know, that’s just me.

Edit: lol at downvotes, this is newish research. A lot of new information has landed literally in the last week. I sincerely advise keeping an eye on it as research ramps up.

I’ve posted a couple of papers below, one old, one new. As well as a link to an article that does a good job of summarising where our understanding is currently at.

In Australia we are currently voting on a constitutional amendment. It would create an advisory body that represents first nations people. It’s super basic, doesn’t really cover how it will work, because they can’t really even work on that until the amendment passes.

But presumably it will allow them to directly advise government, rather than through the spiderweb of community leaders, NGOs and whatnot that exist now, and provide some structure for Aboriginal representation in parliament

The sheer amount of disinformation circulating is staggering. I was lucky enough to really avoid most of the drama, until I went and had a look this past week finally.

What interested me, was rather than the usual short posts and snarky racist comments, of which plenty exist. These long diatribes were dominant, on places like Reddit and Facebook.

Then it struck me, they all sound like they were written by the same person. Not just a little, if you had removed the names and pictures of the users, I would have flat out assumed it was the same person.

We have opened Pandora’s Box. We don’t need “AGI” or whatever, this is plenty enough to do us in.