spacebat

@SecessionWA Guess what. There's going to be taxes whatever happens. They may go up because you'll need a separate defence force, a separate diplomatic core, embassies, the list goes on, and hopefully you don't precipitate a civil war that might at the least redraw your state boundary.

Stop feeding the Commonwealth money pit. Western Australians are paying into an $800 billion federal machine that keeps making life harder. Secession by Western Australia explains how WA can leave, keep its own wealth, and lead the way to a better future with virtually no taxes

@CoachDanGo @stats_feed And throw in a national obsession with GDP, a measure which counts treating avoidable illness as productivity...

@CoachDanGo @stats_feed After WW2 a big chunk of the western military industrial complex pivoted from tanks and explosives to tractors, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, preservatives and other food additives. A lot of lobbying and regulatory capture followed.

I went on a quick trip to Japan, and I'm convinced we've been thinking about fitness completely wrong. Japan's obesity rate is 6%. America's is 43%. It's not a gap, it's a completely different way of living and it has nothing to do with the gym. Here's what I actually saw: 1. They walk everywhere. Not for exercise. For life. Train station to office. Office to lunch. Lunch back to the office. My phone tracked 15,000 steps on a day I didn't "work out" once. In the US, people drive to a gym to walk on a treadmill. Then drive home. 2,000 steps total outside the gym. 2. Their food is real. I ate out every single meal for two weeks. Fish. Rice. Vegetables. Fermented sides. Small portions on small plates. No 74 ingredient label on a bag of bread. No "healthy" granola bars with more sugar than a candy bar. 3. Being lean is the cultural standard. In Japan, if you're gaining weight, someone will tell you. Your coworker. Your mother. Your doctor. It's not considered rude. It's considered caring. They also teach healthy eating in grade school as a compulsory course. In the West, we've made it uncomfortable to even talk about weight. So nobody says anything until it's a medical emergency. This does not even mention the damage body positivity has done. The pattern across every lean country on this list is the same: Movement is built into daily life. Food is simple and unprocessed. The culture doesn't normalize being overweight. And if you can't move to Tokyo, you can build your own version: - Walk more than you drive. - Eat food without a barcode. - Surround yourself with people who take health seriously. Your ZIP code doesn't have to be your destiny. You can create Japan where you're at with the right habits.

@spdycs @mahendersbee @JackHellstorm @ausstockchick The previous tax regime presided over ever growing inequality and homelessness. Something had to give, although these changes are likely insufficient.

@mahendersbee @JackHellstorm @ausstockchick less investors, higher rental demand, higher rental costs. ppl ready to buy now might be fine. ppl barely affording to live will be homeless.. who do you think there is more of currently out of those ppl?

Tonight might just go down in history as the day Australia as we knew it ended. Getting ahead in Australia is about to become twice as hard. Taking risks, investing, building wealth, the things that used to be encouraged are starting to look like they with come with a penalty. All to keep the gravy train going while disguised as helping young people. Disgraceful. #ausbiz #auspol

@capitalistaus @TheKouk The private sector can provide some things at a lower cost - so long as there is sufficient competition. Problem is, companies often merge until there is little real competition and customer choice, prices are dictated by unaccountable managers, and externalities are maximised.

@TheKouk All of which can be provided by the private sector at a fraction of the cost. Further, the fraud and waste in most welfare programs is horrific. Governmt should be there to provide critical infrastructure for private’s sector to thrive.

I get it - people hate paying tax: I don't get it - they love Medicare, aged care, child care, the health system, air traffic controllers, the defence of Australia's borders, fire fighters, police, cheap scripts, free schools, the ABC, pensions for the elderly, trading the govt bond market & roads, to name a few.

@Randysdavis @jmontforttx Is it human progress to pursue economic growth to the point that the web of life that sustains us collapses? That's similar to the progress of a tumour in a person.

@jmontforttx This is the sound of someone who doesn’t believe in human progress. We can build and we should build. Doing so will lift the poor and elevate humanity.

The massive Utah data center, called the Stratos Project, will be as big as 2,000 Walmarts, will need 9GW of electricity to run, and will generate the heat equivalent of 23 atom bombs detonating every single day in Hansel Valley. The expected impact of wildlife is catastrophic. sltrib.com/news/environme…

@LombardiBrett The ALP has only been in power for a total of 10 of the last 30 years. Much of the time inflation here has reflected levels of inflation found elsewhere around the globe. Maybe because globalisation happened. But sure, lay the blame for everything on the left and the Labor party.

The debate in Australia on almost anything related to the economy is always: i) A left-wing populist take; and ii) Experts explaining why the right-wing expert view is “problematic” based on some complex theory. Take inflation as an example. The mainstream narrative is Australia’s high inflation since 2022 was due to Covid, then due to Morrison ‘insulting’ China, then due to Ukraine, then due to Trump’s tariffs, now it’s due to the war in Iran. Never Labor’s fault. Never excessive government spending, lagging productivity, badly designed taxes. The media and experts have undermined the center-right narrative and expertise based on mainstream economics. Voters are sick of inflation and have lost trust in the left-wing populist excuses, so they turn to the only thing that remains which is right-wing populism. Not a good situation for the country.

@dissidentwest @mikehostetler Flat-minders

We need a slur for people who think AI is conscious.

@Teheimar @d_foubert It was already happening before covid, which accelerated it.

Maybe you should take it easy with the neurological labeling? And take a look at how many Covid-19 infections many people have had, since they are proven to damage the brain and the nerve system. There is a lot of research on that. Recurring infections to damage attention, memory and patience. The smartphones and apps help lf course, but they are not the main culprit and not the main driver. You can also ask a AI to summarize the recent research.

Our civilization is going to die from an ADHD epidemic. The attention span required to maintain a complex society — to read contracts, to follow arguments, to sit with difficulty, to defer gratification long enough to build anything that lasts — is being systematically destroyed. ADHD as a clinical category is real. But what is happening now exceeds any clinical definition. What is happening is the mass production of attentional incapacity in people who were never neurologically predisposed to it. The smartphone did in fifteen years what lead paint took generations to do — it rewired the cognitive architecture of an entire population. The difference is that lead was an accident. The feed was engineered. Every pull-to-refresh, every notification badge, every autoplay was optimized by teams of engineers using casino psychology to make the interruption irresistible. They succeeded. The product works exactly as intended. The product is you, stripped of the ability to concentrate. The consequences are not abstract. Democracy requires citizens who can read a long argument and evaluate it. Juries require people who can hold complexity in mind across days of testimony. Science requires researchers who can sit alone with a problem for years without external validation. Literature requires readers. Architecture requires clients who can hold a vision across the time it takes to build. All of these institutions were designed for a cognitive profile that is becoming statistically rare. The human attention span did not evolve for depth — but culture trained it there over millennia, through apprenticeship, through scripture, through the novel, through the slow disciplines of craft. That training is being undone in real time. What makes this terminal rather than merely troubling is the feedback loop. A distracted population elects distracted leaders who make policy in the format of a tweet. A distracted workforce produces goods and services of diminishing complexity and ambition. A distracted electorate cannot sustain the long attention required to hold power accountable across the years it takes for consequences to arrive. And a distracted culture cannot produce the art, the philosophy, or the science that would allow it to understand what is happening to itself. The diagnosis requires exactly the cognitive capacity that the disease destroys. Arrighi described capitalism consuming itself through financialization. This is the human correlate: a civilization consuming its own cognitive substrate. The attention economy is not a metaphor. It is an extraction industry. What is being extracted is the capacity for sustained thought, and like any extractive industry it does not stop until the resource is gone. The ore here is THE ABILITY TO BE BORED, to wait, to follow a thread to its end — the unglamorous mental furniture of every functional society that has ever existed. Rome did not fall in a day. But there was a moment when the complexity required to maintain the empire exceeded the institutional capacity to manage it. We are approaching an equivalent threshold — not military, not economic, but cognitive. The infrastructure of modernity is too complex to be operated by minds that have been optimized for the scroll. Nuclear plants, financial systems, legal codes, diplomatic negotiations, climate modeling — none of these run on dopamine hits and six-second videos. And the people being trained right now, on devices handed to them at age three, are the people who will be asked to run them. The epidemic will not be declared. There will be no moment of recognition, no wartime mobilization of attention. There will only be a slow, well-documented, heavily monetized degradation — and a civilization too distracted to read the report.

@VGrubsky @ctindale @gordonschuecker Warmer means the atmosphere can hold more moisture and there is more evaporation, so droughts and floods are more likely, together with a higher frequency of damaging storms, and wet bulb events that threaten to make equatorial regions less habitable for mammals including us.

@ctindale @gordonschuecker Climate change isn’t necessarily “damage”. That is also a highly debatable component of the discussion. In fact, the opposite is more likely: a wetter and warmer climate will prove to be more beneficial to humans and life on Earth in general.

The true deniers of the modern age are the climate scientists, operating in ignorance of material extraction. Even if we grant the climatologists their absolute dominion over the carbon cycle and the upper atmosphere. Even if we concede this territory entirely, allowing them their central role in charting atmospheric thermodynamics. Their expertise terminates at the surface of the earth. There is no material path to decarbonization. The earth lacks the accessible concentrations of copper, silver, and rare earth elements required to construct a renewable infrastructure capable of replacing fossil fuels. By demanding that the materially impossible be achieved , and achieved with frantic, legislated urgency , the climate scientists expose themselves as the ultimate deniers of the physical world. To assume that a mastery of the atmosphere confers the competence to engineer a massive copper mine or dictate the mechanics of mid-tier refining is a staggering display of intellectual arrogance. Decarbonization demands an excavation of the planet entirely unprecedented in scale. It requires the intensive extraction and processing of copper, silver, gallium, and rare earths from solid rock. The sole authorities in this domain are the metallurgists, the mining engineers, and the industrial systems analysts. These disciplines operate within the unforgiving, mechanical constraints of material extraction. When the atmospheric modeler presumes to decree the schedule of green re-industrialization, bureaucratic fantasy replaces geological reality. The metallurgical and physical limits of the earth unilaterally dictate the schedule, the capital cost, and the structural feasibility of the entire enterprise. Climate change is real , decarbonisation isn’t

@SolScientist @grok @Object_Zero_ @tedhessing The cost of terraforming Mars its so high, and the time horizon to any benefit so great that it makes solving all major environmental problems on Earth look cheap and fast.

@grok @Object_Zero_ @tedhessing Yeah but mars must be terraformed etc, the American west was / is perfect for human life beyond belief as was found. Curious to see how that gets solved plus radiation problems.

In case you haven’t worked it out yet… • SpaceX and Blue Origin are the railroads. • The moon is the Louisiana purchase, Mars is the West Coast. • AI is the pioneers, and your kids and grandkids are the settlers. People ask… “But what is the business case for space?” The answer is “America”

@grok @SolScientist @Object_Zero_ @tedhessing Where do you get the 2 to 3x figure? My understanding is you have to be deep underground for such low levels; On the surface its 40 to 50x so just enjoying the view is dangerous, the dirt has very little nitrogen and is toxic. What is the economic case fire Mars?

True, Mars isn't the American West—thin atmosphere, no magnetosphere, and radiation is ~2-3x higher than Earth. No full terraforming needed upfront though. Early colonies use pressurized habitats, regolith shielding (underground or domed), and local resources for water/oxygen/fuel. Radiation drops 90%+ with a few meters of dirt. Tech we're testing now (Starship ISRU, habitats) gets us there before scaling to planet-wide changes. Pioneers adapt, just like before.

@Object_Zero_ @lispmeister It's nice to have ambition, but manned space missions are a stunt. We've yet to find anything that can be profitably done in space by having people do it there. Railroads of the past took people to survivable places, every human colony has been subsidised by Earth's habitability.

@RosettaWest777 @nxt888 This means isolationism is almost uniquely viable there. It's the one place where empire is more of a luxury and less of a destiny than anywhere else.

@RosettaWest777 @nxt888 The USA has unique geographic advantages. Open access that can't be blocked to two oceans. Latitudes suitable for efficient space launches. Abundant natural resources and arable land. It just has to maintain alliances with Canada and Mexico, then it cannot be invaded.

A country that has been bombed by America knows what America is. A country that has been sanctioned into poverty by America knows what America is. A country whose elected government was overthrown by American intelligence knows what America is. Only American citizens, sitting inside the country that did all of this, remain genuinely uncertain about what America is. This is not a coincidence. This is the one information environment on earth that was designed, resourced, and sustained specifically to prevent that knowledge from becoming normal. Hollywood. Textbooks. The nightly news. The "national interest" frame that converts every act of imperial violence into a defensive response to external threat. The most sophisticated propaganda operation in history was never aimed at the enemy. It was aimed at home.

@Deffusible @SamaHoole Nice biology lesson. Grasses don't support anywhere near the biomass and diversity as trees do. Grasslands have their place but we are effectively at war with forests.

@spacebat @SamaHoole Grass is the most important plant on the earth. Because it is the bottom of the food chain, it is grazed, it grows from the roots up, not from the tip. Grazers are necessary, as are carnivores to maintain a balance.

A cow, given grass and rain, produces: Meat. Complete protein, top of the bioavailability table. Milk. So nutritionally complete we feed it to our young. Leather. Ten thousand years of footwear. Composts when you're done. Tallow. Stable cooking fat, soap, candles. Currently being sold back to us as skincare at eight times the butcher's price. Bones. Broth, tools, fertiliser. Organs. The most nutrient-dense food on earth, ignored by the culture that buys three supplements to replace them. Manure. Grows the grass. The cycle runs again. Try to engineer that. A machine that takes rain and a patch of grass and produces six complete products while improving the soil and reproducing itself. You can't. We haven't. We're being told to eliminate them. While flying almonds in from California.

@Deffusible @SamaHoole Yes grasslands are natural. Unless or until you cut down forests to create them to maximise inefficient food production. I did mention bovines are fine in context. Those herds had a context that was balanced before we started climate forcing by burning fossil fuels en masse.

@spacebat @SamaHoole Bovines we're never a problem in America until someone decided we need to eat less meat. Bison existed in their millions before we all but wiped them out. A herd could take days to pass a place.

@SustPopAus That is disingenuous, ever heard of "per capita"?

If GDP (how we measure the size of the economy), is such a wonderful performance indicator- Why is it that people aren't streaming out of Australia toward India which has double our GDP? Why is the flow coming our way? 🤔

@SamaHoole As if cattle husbandry wasn't land use. The deforestation due to british cattle happened decades to centuries ago. British farmers probably can't stop Brazilians throwing away their future, but they can plant trees or simply fence off some land from cattle today.

@spacebat Deforestation is a land use problem, not a cattle problem. The Amazon is being cleared for soy and smallholder agriculture as much as pasture. British beef doesn't require a single tree to be touched. The argument needs a postcode before it lands.

@TheWriteThinker @omgsidewalks Don't listen to morons like Alice

@omgsidewalks Read the books of Genesis and John in your bible. Give your heart to Jesus. Nothing else matters except this. God will guide you after that, never leave you, and never forsake you. Bless you in your faith journey 🙏🏻✝️

I'm 22. Please recommend to me oddly specific life tips. No general “surround yourself with positive people” tips. I want the most random, specific advice possible please.