That should put paid to the myth that Trump is ‘the antidote to all the wars’.

I always thought that the argument ‘no wars were started during his presidency’ was bullshit.

He was educated. Didn’t make him smart.

I’d say the entire Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison trifecta was terrible.

Abbott was definitely out of his depth as PM, he never stopped being the leader of the opposition and was always pugilistic, impulsive and didn’t think things through. He promised stable leadership but didn’t have his party under enough control to ensure it - probably because he sort of skated into the role because those who the party actually wanted didn’t make it. He got into power on the back of a campaign focused on debt and deficit, but had no policies to address it and I don’t think he ever intended to. He played his pet issues but was aggressively ineffective at everything else.

Turnbull was a devastating disappointment. Hated by his own party, only used as a more popular and sensible replacement for the ousted Abbott, but never having any party backing for his agenda. I’d say he flamed out, but he was never even on fire. Reneged on his promises and ambitions for fear of reprisals from his party - a spineless creature whose years in power were an absolute waste and a net loss for the country.

And then of course Morrison. A sociopath who bradbury’d into the role because enough people in the party room had the self-awareness to realise Dutton as party leader would be a disaster. Obviously Morrison schemed his way through that entire leadership crisis and lied whenever he opened his mouth, not least when professing his support for the embattled Turnbull. He was probably the most useless PM, out of the country in times of crisis and actively refusing to show leadership. Not to mention the shameful mishandling of the pandemic.

Collectively these three set back social, economic and political development in this country back by at least a decade. We’re all worse off thanks to the nine years of having these three clowns in power.

Howard was to Australia what Thatcher was to the UK and Reagan to the US. He ushered in neoliberalism and set the Liberal Party on an accelerated course towards right wing christian fundamentalism.

Riva TNT 16MB, brand name Elsa, card called Erazor.

Good on this kid for going to such lengths to verify his hypothesis and show a serious weakness in railway infrastructure. I hope he goes on to become a serious railway enthusiast and advocate for safe, efficient rail.

However, there are way too many factors in the number of derailments and safety incidents in US rail operations to pin them down to this one issue. Once the major operators embarked on a journey to squeeze more and more money out of the business, a lot of things happened. Trains became longer - excessively so. Used to be that a train 1.4 miles long was considered massive. These days they are the norm. Can you imagine a train so long that, in hilly terrain, sections of it are being dragged uphill while other sections are pushing downhill?

Reductions in staff, motive power fleets and maintenance have led to trains being badly composed, with loads being distributed in a less than optimal way. An old railway man once told me that the only time he broke a train was when he, in a rush and under pressure, agreed to attach a rake of fully loaded freight cars to the end of a train of empties. Unequal load distribution played a role in a number major derailment incidents, among them a derailment in Hyndman, PA, which required the town to be evacuated for several days.

ProPublica have a series of articles regarding rail safety, and specifically one about the dangers of long trains. So while the worn out springs certainly don’t help, they are only one of many things that are impacting rail safety, and probably not even the lowest hanging fruit.

That’s nice, but how does that help people who, to this day, can’t get any ‘NBN’ other than satellite?

By that token, I would also recommend the one-season X-Files spin-off ‘The Lone Gunmen’. It can come across as a bit hokey for the first few episodes, but they found their pace and it became really enjoyable. I don’t think it was ever meant to be more than a single - and, by then-current standards, short - season but I really enjoyed it. The show blended the comic relief of the three geeks from the main series with some more serious storytelling and even had an episode with a plot that resembled a later real-life world-changing event.

Devil’s advocacy is supposed to be, ultimately, constructive to the discussion. If that’s what you’re doing, then good on you. A lot of people just do it to throw a spanner in the works.

The only thing worse than people misusing the term ‘enshittification’ are people who criticise that but can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.

No, it’s not a meaningless buzzword. And no, it was not made up by nostalgic millennials. It would have taken you a mere minute of online research to figure that out yourself.

‘Playing Devil’s advocate’.

Mostly because most people who use it do so in glaringly wrong ways.

I suggest you read up a bit on how and by whom the term was coined and what it actually means. It’s by no means ‘vague’ and it is also a bit more than just repackaging and selling something already known. I suspect many people using the term aren’t even fully aware of what it describes and, crucially, what is being proposed to reduce the effects it describes.

Lucky Number Slevin

Man On Fire

Syriana

Equilibrium

And for some solid Australian cinema: Mystery Road

Because he has no plan to address the causes of crime, only a plan for harsher punishments. So he has no realistic way of reducing victim numbers.

No surprises here.

It still means that fewer young people commit crimes than what used to be the case. It’s not like people stopped having children. And if the youths who used to commit crimes are now adults who commit crimes, they no longer class as youth crimes.

If the Libs win, I hope they go full Newman again and get kicked out after one term. I’m not exactly enamoured with QLD Labor but bloody hell anything is better than the toxic Libs in this state.

If only you could see the ‘newspapers’ in Queensland, every other front page has ‘young crims’ scaremongering and they make it sound like Townsville and such are hellholes where people are terrorised by young criminals day and night without reprieve.

Weird how the LNP’s only answer to this is ‘adult crime, adult time’. Like, literally, zero policies on how to prevent youth crime, how to help children with better education and more perspectives for their future. Nothing. Just harsher punishments.

If a woman seeks abortion at that stage, it is almost guaranteed to be due to a condition that would seriously endanger her, the baby, or both, if the pregnancy was carried to term. Nobody just decides after 27 weeks that they simply don’t want the baby. In these cases, inducing to deliver the baby will likely not help the baby and it could still seriously harm the mother.

What this guy proposes would be, in most cases, indistinguishable from an abortion, but way more harmful for everyone involved. It’s telling that it is usually men who try to push these kinds of law.

Thing is, I am actually Gen X. Early even. And I look at the Boomers and see the generation who kept pulling up the ladder. They got free education and privatised it to make it expensive for us. They got free healthcare and privatised it to make it expensive. They got into the housing market for cheap and started using it as an investment and speculation vehicle, making it harder for each subsequent generation to get into it. They were pretty much the last generation in which it was possible to raise a family on a single income. Climate change is front and center of mind in my generation, we’ve known for over 30 years what’s coming. When you look at those who most fervently oppose climate change action - all old fogeys, and I say that being very conscious of the fact that I am approaching ‘old fogey’ status from the perspective of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

I can only imagine how todays teenagers and young adults feel…

Teenagers today were born in the aftermath of a global financial crisis, are seeing war after war after war, grow up with the knowledge that the world is going to shit and the older generations aren’t willing to do anything about it. They see everyone pull up the ladder behind them, the ‘fuck you I got mine’ mentality is everywhere.

And TikTok is to blame for their mental health?

Specific to subway surfing: I’m 46, and I know this stuff happened when I was a kid. There were no social media back then to show you, but somehow kids still these got stupid ideas. It seems like social media is just the new video games are the new comic books are the new heavy metal is the new whatever scapegoat society wants to use to blame for its own deliberate shortcomings in bringing up the next generation.