Thread:
Fish farming has been copping a justified PR battering in Tasmania over recent years.
The local industry likes to set up shop in delicate wilderness areas and dump epic amounts of toxic crap into the water. Think of the worst stereotypes of industrial pig farming transplanted into a marine environment. They’re also fond of exterminating competing marine life (e.g. seals) and tend to be careless of the health of their fish stock.
Most of the fish farmers were removed from the Tamar ages ago, but there is one remaining. It’s about a third of the way to Launceston, at the southern end of Long Reach. I go there fairly often to watch the seals that hang around it.
Today:
This is what Coober Pedy usually looks like:
Thanks to recent flooding, it now looks like this:
Yeah, I remember that name from “The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert” - what a diff!
Apparently now up to something like 70,000 dead 5kg salmon.
Cooler weather today though, so hopefully that will help.
Five hundred tons of rotting fish.
Consensus I’m hearing is that Labor managed to take a wedge attempt, neuter it somewhat (using LGBT people in a shitty way, granted) and then have the bill blow up in the Liberal’s face because it wasn’t bigoted enough.
I’m not sure if I give them that much 4D chess credit, but at least that POS bill isn’t going through anymore, and the ALP isn’t smelling as bad as the Libs are right now.
That’s the ALP spin on it, yeah.
C1, D2, D3 and E4.
I wouldn’t underestimate the extent to which a substantial faction of the ALP genuinely support the bill. The heirs of Santamaria still have a regrettable amount of influence.
The amendments that caused the Coalition to temporarily shelve it did not come from the ALP, btw.
In many ways, the NDIS is Australia’s parallel to Obamacare. A hyper-bureaucratic punitive nightmare designed by people completely disconnected from the reality of the end users.
Actually, many disabled folk are eligible for Medicaid in the US. I and my son have it and it has nothing to do with Obamacare. BUT…I also have no income. I’ve known people who’ve sold off as much as they could of a sick/disabled parent’s assets so they could have the state help cover the costs of being in an assisted living or other type of care facility because of the prohibitive cost of having them there.
If you’re poor, they try to help you stay afloat. If you have money, they want you to be poor.
Yet another expose in the USA today about CIA domestic surveillance.
OTOH, before y’all get too smug:
…and if you think that’s all a thing of the past, you’re just as daft as the people who are now acting shocked that the CIA might dare to spy on Americans.
Well, I wish they’d dose me with some good hallucinogens!
or maybe I’m considered a demi-pseudo-threat to the American way of life (which, if said threat getting rich & screwing your neighbor, I s’pose I am…)
I didn’t mean parallel in the sense of “this is how people with disability access care”, but parallel in the sense of “this is the thing trumpeted by the nominally-left party as a great humanitarian achievement when it’s actually a severely inadequate bureaucratic shitshow”.