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This is fascinating. I wonder how much of this kind of crime focused on commodities is also related to contactless payments, and to the less and less cash circulating as part of retail (and thus vulnerable to becoming an object of theft)?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:11 PM on January 23, 2023

From a planning point of view, theft is a real effect, and that has driven major shifts in retail over the long term—the security of malls was one of their major attractions for small retailers in the late 20thC, since they could pool costs and share a lockable place, and street retail suffered accordingly. It's one of the competitive advantages enjoyed by urban fringe big-box retailers over local or 'high street' retailers, who, in places where perceived theft is high, are out-competed by other… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:56 PM on January 23, 2023

Yeah a quoll is absolutely an ‘oven gloves’ class marsupial at best
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:03 AM on January 20, 2023

A producer can be very hands on but it is not necessarily so

Indeed. Tom Clancy is listed as Executive Producer for the latest Jack Ryan TV series despite having been dead for nearly a decade.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:59 PM on January 19, 2023

Just for a moment, I urge those of you who are prison abolitionists, and who maintain a position against those disciplinary institutions of the State which serve a personal and general deterrent function, to hear me out on this
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:25 AM on January 18, 2023

And I try this ONCE at my desk and my BOSS wants to have A CONVERSATION about my PROFESSIONAL DEMEANOUR
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:23 AM on January 18, 2023

I was expecting something along the lines of Its Grim Up North but this is good too
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:53 PM on January 17, 2023

“Our daughter isn’t going to get Covid again,” I said. “She’s just not.”

…but: She is though. That’s infectious disease. And she’s going to be exposed to lots of other life hazards as well, say if she drives a car, works in a workplace, exists. And building up a framework for risk that seems to put moral sanction on people who fall victim (or in the case of this article who don’t do enough or the right things) seems to me unhelpful, at best.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:05 PM on January 15, 2023

I'd add here that the odd paradoxes of public health are at work here. Individually-simple things like 'wearing a mask' can be very difficult to enforce at scale, while at the same time their effectiveness is precisely at scale, rather than individual protection. The paradox is here as well in persuasion measures. An activity like the author is describing, starting with assembling information and presenting these lists of facts, accompanied by a stark take-it-or-leave-it proposal, can be very… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:33 PM on January 15, 2023

The reason it’s dangerous to compare COVID with HIV is that, before treatments existed and before knowledge of its mechanism, it was a disease with extraordinarily high mortality and even more extraordinarily cruel stigma. That stigma genuinely still attaches to it, as though carriers are to blame in some way to their carrying a virus, for their behaviour or their sexuality or their relationships or their addictions. Stigma has been the pretext for incredibly illiberal laws around the world, to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:10 PM on January 15, 2023

The other day I happened to be reading The KLF’s The Manual (How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way) and it struck me that apart from pop songs still being roughly 3 to 3’40” in length, everything else has altered so fundamentally about pop music that the document is very hard to understand history now. They are a different commodity, produced and listened to in a different arrangement, by different groups, by workers with different goals, and even like people pointing out bandcamp say, by atomised… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:57 PM on January 13, 2023

However that Post Malone sucks is a testable & objective fact
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:02 PM on January 13, 2023

are these girls actually in the army? Are the stunts real? Are their faces real? Is the war real?

[EXTREME BAUDRILLARD WARNING]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:38 PM on January 11, 2023

Beautiful e-girls with malign purposes luring thirsty young men with promises, eh

ALL THE IRISH PEOPLE: 🎶 and her hair it hung over her shoulder / tied up with a black velvet band 🎶
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:51 PM on January 11, 2023

🎶 and for recreation we went on a tramp / and met Sergeant Napier and Corporal Simp 🎶
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:31 AM on January 12, 2023

Gee!! I wish I were a man, I'd join the Navy!
I want you for the Navy
If you want to fight / join the Marines
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:51 PM on January 12, 2023

The wings aren’t upside down, it’s a swing wing, they retract for flight at higher Mach numbers and extend for landing
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:26 PM on January 11, 2023

How George Pell Won In The High Court On A Legal Technicality:

A jury found the cardinal guilty beyond reasonable doubt of five offences.

In doing so, the jury assessed the testimony and credibility of the complainant. They also considered the strength of the claims made by the cardinal about the timing of his whereabouts, who was with him at the relevant times and whether the offences could have happened.

The jury saw… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:50 PM on January 10, 2023

FWIW it’s the lecturer’s casual contract that is the critical thing here; plenty of academic teachers present material in classes that’s offensive, gratuitous, provocative or otherwise unpleasant. I’ve done it myself as a teacher, and have had arguments as a student after correcting a lecturer. That’s teaching, it’s messy and adult.

But to manage to have someone sacked over it, is, as they say, a huge dick move, and the potential for it is one of the reasons I am glad… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:44 PM on January 8, 2023

W/r/t maturity, there’s a distinction worth drawing between maturity that is broad life experience, which many students (who may be parents, veterans, mature age students and so on) may have in great amounts, and the intellectual maturity that comes with formal education. By definition an undergraduate is intellectually immature, that’s why they are studying.

The point of a teaching University is to provide a framework for that intellectual maturation, and it should… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:51 PM on January 9, 2023

There are other problems. Modern cars are very well sealed because manufacturing standards are very good; while that’s great for air conditioning and heating efficiency it also makes a car interior a steel box that floats. Wading depth is absolutely a function of the height of the cabin. A modern car with a low cabin floor will float very well, usually weighed down by the engine in the front. Flood-washed cars point upstream for this reason
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:46 PM on January 7, 2023

This is extremely detailed and a great deal of work has obviously gone into it, but I have to say ‘you are starting from a place of trust’ will leave the majority of journalists saying ahhh, hmmmm, then looking immediately to T in the index
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:08 PM on December 28, 2022

FWIW I’ve always felt Disney’s Jiminy Cricket to be one of the most enduring and horrifying villains in the mouse house Pantheon.

He’s an external conscience, a preachy Methodist little insect only Cronenberg in full body-horror could do justice to, but the horror is metaphysical: at the first sign of a hard decision in the film, what does a conscience do but abandon the protagonist to the machine! What a metaphor for twentieth century modern choices! Now that’s horror.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:05 PM on December 27, 2022

Look if tabletop games have a claim to be a form of literature—and I think they absolutely do—then the question isn’t whether they’re there for enjoyment per se, or for a human purpose beyond that, that can be participated in at many levels of which enjoyment is only one. Lots of people read (and enjoy!) novels with wildly unethical, even evil, characters and protagonists. And a mark of literature with depth is that the reader can even identify with them despite everything. When a theatre group… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:34 PM on December 26, 2022

Further: one of the most affecting pieces of art I have participated in, any art, hands down, is the computer game DEFCON, which is a cartoonishly abstract sim of nuclear war, but you inevitably, by the end of a round, have to reckon with what you have done. It’s chilling.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:38 PM on December 26, 2022

Further further: I had another conversation with a friend of mine who no longer gets invited to her other friends’ board game nights. She plays to win them.

The basic distinction she draws is that some people gather around and ‘play’ cooperatively in order to share an experience, bringing the mentality of a drama group (or an RPG), others being the mentality of sport and play to get the most points within the rules. Both are totally legitimate ways to ‘play’ though they… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:55 PM on December 26, 2022

Further further further I’d recommend Bret Devereaux, a professional historian and gamer, who has a blog which regularly reviews military games in extraordinary detail, outside their instrumental-teaching role and their game-play role, as actual games as literature. It’s a remarkable blog.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:32 PM on December 27, 2022

Years ago on a holiday I drove across the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge, where there are signs with a little tank icon and WARNING ARMOURED VEHICLES CROSSING. I had the thought that you had to stop for the little tanks in case you ran them over, like ducklings
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:57 AM on December 25, 2022

The epaulette shark's ability to walk on land and withstand low oxygen by switching off non-essential brain functions is part of what helps it survive

You and me both, ya little cut price shark mate
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:39 AM on December 16, 2022

First it's Luddism Club, then before you know it they're taking orders from Captain Swing
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:45 PM on December 15, 2022

The cultural/historical tidbit about spirits being related to trade networks and capitalism is the orthodox history of them, by the way. The economics of distillation, which need specialised equipment, and fuel and sugars and a grain base, only really make sense in a financialised way, that is if you're producing as a cash earner, or as an export, or as part of a large-scale Atlantic trade in sugars, which, well. But the notion that spirits are about packing the maximum drunkenness into the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:04 PM on December 14, 2022

Part of finishing the race is a mind-set that comes naturally to gifted executives: Every problem has a solution.

This is in the article almost as an aside but it seems to me to be a central to what's going on here. For most people maturity to adulthood involves understanding that the world is quite broken in lots of ways, that humans have limits, and there are many things that simply don't have solutions. Other things are compromises; one successful outcome will mean… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:25 PM on December 11, 2022

I’m gonna make certain requests of my guests.

You need to call up the Richard Mercer’s Love Song Dedications show. Yeah, you might think you’re above it but in secret, alone in your car, working back late in the office, you tune into the show. It’s broadcast late evenings, and Richard talks to his guests about their love and their song. Choose the right song, the one you know will speak to that special someone. Send a loving message with Richard’s honeyed microphone… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:57 AM on December 8, 2022

I am still after my David Simon style municipal and local-cultural drama about the corruption and union politics in Cloud City, as Lando Calrissian fights a losing battle to be independent of the Empire. Obviously the soundtrack would be critical
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:40 PM on December 3, 2022

I was curious about the numbers and the comparisons here. Australian east coast air routes are some of the highest trafficked in the world. But I was surprised by how little air emissions and indeed transport overall are in the most recent (2020) accounts:

Total of all economic sectors: 498.1124 Mt
Total for all transport, postal, warehousing: 30.0954 Mt
Road: 13.5562 Mt
Rail: 3.9016 Mt
Air/space: 6.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:02 PM on December 1, 2022

I guess I’d add that from the Australian point of view, the kind of contact with the outside world that has come in the later 20thC from airline travel, that being high immigration, tourists and visitors arriving, and our own citizens leaving to live and work in the rest of the world, has been one of the most powerful forces to break down the notorious parochialism of a very remote society. That’s not nothing either.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:43 AM on December 2, 2022

This is the grittiest reboot of Yogi Bear isn't it
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:39 PM on November 30, 2022

We know that number one ingested foreign body in children are coins

Given the massive shift to card payments, away from cash, since the lockdowns (at least in Aus) I wonder what will replace coins?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:14 PM on November 28, 2022

Yes, I can certainly see that algorithmic dopamine has something to these men but each of them also has a history and a context.

Donald Trump was always the kind of huge New York asshole who had a global reputation for his glass jaw going back to the disco era. Elon is just the latest and silliest of a history of Grand Male Engineers Solving Things With Willpower—everyone who knows engineers has met one, Elon is just richer and less serious. And Kanye, alas, Kanye is a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:41 PM on November 12, 2022

This is kind of fascinating and horrible. Australians can be the worst kind of snobs about our stable (read: complacent, constrained) culture of elections. Democracy sausage, ugh.

However! Another very different way to look at this is Australians (& to a lesser extent the British) choosing to look to the USA not as a horror show or an existential struggle, which is emphatically how Americans see their elections, but these tourists seeing US elections as a vision of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:30 PM on November 7, 2022

If you are reading this, you should get a blog
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:12 PM on October 30, 2022

W/r/t 'what happened to blogging' it's hard to omit the comments fields of blogs, which could be far more productive and entertaining, and community-building, than the blog itself. Centralised social media websites do do that interaction better, and with the unbeatable benefit that someone else has to keep the spammers and Nazis at bay—it could be incredibly tedious running one's own moderation.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:54 PM on October 30, 2022

I'd like to meet his tailor.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:47 PM on October 27, 2022

Will Menaker, co-host of the leftist comedy/politics podcast “Chapo Trap House,” says, “The seed of what would become ‘Chapo’” was planted when he first saw “UHF,” Yankovic’s 1989 movie about a man of dubious prospects who is given control of a marginal TV station...

What an odd thing for Menaker to say. It's as though he's identified the plot of UHF (about a TV station run by outsiders) and associated it with what he does (podcast, in the voice of an outsider) without… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:05 PM on October 26, 2022

This scratches an itch I didn't realise I had, and it makes me want to go for a very long motorbike ride this weekend.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:09 PM on October 24, 2022

⬆️
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:08 AM on October 22, 2022

Earlier this year I was in a car near Lightning Ridge, driving towards the Queensland border. There’s been a lot of rain this year so as well as flooding there’s huge growth, and all the birds are doing well. A memory I’ll have is being followed by a flock of emus, me in my hire car, them just keeping pace with me, at highway speed, for fun. Their fun. Playing.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:54 AM on October 21, 2022

It's a bit surprising to see Watters nowhere really getting to E.P. Thompson in a discussion about time and time-discipline. Who would have said, I think, look: it's true that outward forms of discipline like bells and periods in schools weren't designed as industrial-factory preparation (apart from any other reason, because a struggle about the measurement of time long predates mass production). What clocks, and bells, and monitorial systems have in common is that they stress one kind of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:13 PM on October 20, 2022

On behalf of all the Australians, let me just say; what the fuck is anyone doing cuddling an emu
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:06 PM on October 18, 2022

SNOOT
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:27 PM on October 18, 2022