Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Adam Conover" channel.

Australian here - what sort of discussion do you think we had after our last majors fires in 2019? What do you think the MURDOCH media pumped out afterwards? AND YES we also have a housing crisis.
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I'm Australian. Say Wot ????
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AUSTRALIAN HERE - we have some experience with bad fires, the loss of life, loss of property and general mayhem of lives being ripped apart. After our last major fire season in 2019 there was the same sort of political misinformation campaign and a lot of it came from the MURDOCH media. Murdoch people made so many claims about arson that we ended up spending millions on a full public enquiry that investigated more than 30 of the major fires that season. YES we had over 30 major fires that season and in the end NOT ONE fire was found to be caused by arson, but there were a couple of inconclusive causes. The vast majority of fires in Australia are from lightning strikes and power lines where there's been insufficient maintenance keeping the power lines clear of trees. Another major factor was a shortening of the time period when we could safely burn-off of the fuel loads. Just as Adams recent guest Dr. Daniel Swain explained about California we'd had several good years of rain that caused a lot of growth followed by a drought which dried it all out. So the fuel load in 2019 was very high making those fires worse than usual. The other thing that the faux-media (with few exceptions) point out is that like Australian Eucalyptus trees the California scrub brush is high in oil content. The sap in those trees is a form of oil. So they don't just burn they literally explode when the fire gets fierce enough. In 2019 we had trees blast apart and shower the surrounding area in eucalyptus oil. Another thing the faux-media fail to highlight is the effects of an unusually high hot wind event. We knew in 2019 that it was going to be a day of high winds and it doesn't matter who's in charge they can't affect the weather. All you can do is hope to be prepared well enough with water, fire trucks, water bombers and people, that you can handle the situation.
7
Australian here - what sort of discussion do you think we had after our last majors fires in 2019? What do you think the MURDOCH media pumped out afterwards?
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Great comment - straight, simple and damn accurate.
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@shawn13mertle13 Here in Australia after the 2019 fires we had a lot of reflective discussion on people building houses in fire prone areas. There were people who DID SPEND the money to make their houses fire resistant. There's no such thing as fire proof in these areas but the people who did build fire resistant houses still had those houses AFTER the fires passed. They did a lot of really innovative things. - They built their gutter systems so that they would NOT collect leaf litter. - They sealed up all the spaces around overhangs so they would not collect litter and kindling. - They used treated timbers that made it hared to actually catch fire. - They built there own onsite water storage. - They cleared unnecessary trees and scrub around the houses. - They made it possible to seal the house so that embers could not come in and start fires inside the house. The people who did those things pointed out that NOT any one of those things saved their houses but collectively they saved their houses.
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@Texas.T Yeah and what logic does he hate Texas boy?? Does he hate that Trump lies about everything? or Does he hate the fact Trump only cares about how much money he can take from gullible clowns? or Does he hate that Trump hates ANYONE who can do math and think for themselves?
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I'm an Australian engineer (educated in America) and you are 100% RIGHT. Apologies for the rant but your point is as valid here and America as it is everywhere. I have been forced to look into economics because of a small project I had back in 2016. During that project I found out how badly managed Australia's energy sector is. For years I had heard how ineffective Australia's energy policies were. Its a common news story, but then I found out the details of just how bad it is. When I looked around I found the same or similar problem across most of the developed World. Its fairly simple. Ever since the start of the industrial revolution and even more so since the end of World War 2 we have needed more and more energy to grow our economies. America did Tennessee Valley, Australia did the Snowy River Scheme and others did their equivalent. THEN starting with Reagan and Thatcher ECONOMISTS like Milton Friedman stepped in and claimed that "governments were the problem" and free market economics was the solution WITHOUT ANY REAL UNDERSTANDING of how INDUSTRIAL societies actually function and are dependent on basic infrastructure working. Their solution was to privatise anything and everything because in their ideology the private sector does everything better. There was never any real proof to that claim it was just their opinion. What I have found is economists have NO IDEA how infrastructure needs to work so that businesses can function, make money, employ people and those people to have decent lives BUT THEY KNOW HOW TO SQUEEZE MONEY out of infrastructure. AND it has NOT mattered if it was American neoliberal capitalist economists, Russian socialist economists, European mercantilists, Chinese neomercantilists or any other variety of economist. They have all FUBARD their infrastructure because they're economists not engineers and its all falling apart. Here's some examples: America has over 30,000 bridges that need major repairs or outright replacing. China has wrecked over 25,000 rivers, streams and waterways which is why their food is full of toxins. Russia destroyed the Aral Sea. Britain has utterly wrecked their water infrastructure after selling it to Australians while Australians sold their energy infrastructure to whoever would buy it and its now totally FUBARD. And all economists can tell us is how great the FARKING stock market is.
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Great quote.
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@MM-qp4pd Did you see the interview Adam had with Dr Daniel Swain recently?
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I've listened to a lot of Richard Wolff and YES he knows his stuff and is worth the time. HOWEVER - He's like an old scratched record. Its the same thing again and again. Also Sorry BUT NOBODY is going to do the Marxist thing again. The Russians, Chinese and others tried and it failed. it wasn't until the Chinese backed away and did some limited capitalism that they saved themselves. HOWEVER the Marxists are also some of the Worlds WORST environmental criminals. The Aral Sea disaster, stripping of the Russian Arctic forests and destruction of Chinese waterways are 3 of the worst environmental disasters in human history and there wasn't a single capitalist involved.
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@Hexanitrobenzene I've been on Steve Keens podcast 3 times and have repeatedly asked him to have Mark on. At the moment Steve's podcast is on hiatus which is a shame because it needs to be back on.
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AUSTALIAN HERE: In future if you are going to have people on who make claims about other countries can they just get their facts RIGHT. Is it just too much to ask they get the basics right. Nauru was a BRITISH not Australian protectorate and it was a British company that strip mined the island for phosphate. That had nothing to do with Australia. It was Australia that helped Narau get out of that hole with the court cases. It was Australia that helped invest the funds from the settlement with the British Phosphate company. It was Australia that helped set up their international banking sector which then helped rich Australians avoid tax. Narau DID NOT cede a part of their country to Australia for handling the illegal arrivals. That whole case of the ILLEGAL (and they were illegal) immigrants included a massive multi-national criminal people smuggling system that was insanely exploitive of the people trying to find a new home. In all the years since when people have complained about what Australia did we ask 1 question. WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE TO STOP THE CRIMINAL EXPLOITATION that was going on? Nobody ever has a practical answer.
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Its January 26, 2025 less than 2 years after this was posted and Trump just said he'd support a massive boost to AI. Yeaaahhhhhhhh. I have no idea which emoji sums this up 🙄🤥🥴😵😝
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AUSTRALIAN HERE - from the outside they do nothing different to every other non-conservative option in politics. THEY DON'T LISTEN and THEY DON'T LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES Go and watch a video of a lecture by Mark Blyth from July 2019 at McMaster U. (in Canada) during the Q&A after the lecture he was asked about Elizabeth Warren's policies. Its insanely accurate what he says. 1) He said Trump would win again if he didn't blow up the economy. Trump didn't blow up the economy COVID did and Trump botched the response and Biden won by default. 2) He said the strategy of the Democrats putting up candidates who they thought Republicans would vote for would NOT work especially if they alienated Bernie supporters doing it. Look what happened during the Harris campaign. It started with "we are changing to a new Democrat ticket" and then the DNC said "No you are NOT" and went straight to the strategy Mark Blyth described 5 years earlier, when they waved the Cheney's at them. Then you had people like Destiny openly tell the progressives NOT TO VOTE because we don't need you and we don't want you. Go watch the debate between Destiny and Cenk Uygur that David Pakman hosted. EVEN AFTER THE LOSS destiny was still holding onto blaming the progressives for the loss and admitting he told them NOT TO VOTE. HERE'S MY ISSUE 1) We (like a lot of other countries) now have to deal with Trump wo we know is a malignant narcissistic sociopath. 2) These Dum-o-crat campaign strategists and consultants work all over the world INCLUDING Australia and our Left (the Australian Labor Party) have used them in the past AND LOST (like in 2019).
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I'm an Australian aerospace engineer who did his degree at U. of Illinois in the late 80s. I was there when the Plato system was running and even used it. I was there when we go the first CRAY supercomputers but that was reserved for the postgrads. I just had to play with normal mainframes. In my final year we even got to play with what they then called an "Expert System" which was one of the fore runners of todays Ai. I am still stunned by what we have let the IT industry get away with. No matter how many times they screw up or fail the media just seem to let them get pass after pass. What really worries me is that at some point we'll put so much faith in this stuff we'll forget how dangerous outcomes from bad assumptions can be and we'll have a disaster there's no coming back from.
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@lostbutfreesoul ITS A COMBINATION OF EFFECTS. It started with baby boomer Prime Minister John Howard giving a monster tax break to investment housing. THE CLAIM was it would have a lot of his generation investing their retirement savings into housing and expanding the rental market making it easier for younger people to save up for a deposit to buy their own homes. HOWEVER they also let foreigners buy into that market because that allowed the housing developers to build massive apartment blocks. What you also have to know is that Australia's population was 19 million in 2000 and is now 27 million. We have roughly 400,000 immigrants each year. Because we also run our version of neoliberal economics we have roughly 50% of our population living bellow the line where they can ever save for a house. We shut our manufacturing down and that made this part of the equation worse. There's also a fixed number of new houses each year. We only have so many builders and they can only build so many houses. So its essentially a fixed supply market of about 40,000 houses (from what I have heard). I don't know how many new apartments are available each year but when you're importing 400,000 people each year they simply swallow that up. The whole system is complex but its basically manged to keep the housing supply limited by matching it with immigration. That keeps the values going up and up and that helps developers and banks and arguably the 3 most influential lobbies in Australia are mining, banks and housing developers. So this system is loved by 2 of those 3 groups. Donal Trumps mantra is "Drill baby drill" in Australia we have 2 mantras. "Dig baby dig" for our miners; and "Build baby build, but no too much" for our banks and developers. Sorry for the length of comment, but you asked a great question and I hope that answers it or at least covers it enough.
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Its January 26, 2025 less than 2 years after this was posted and Trump just said he'd support a massive boost to AI. Yeaaahhhhhhhh. I have no idea which emoji sums this up 🙄🤥🥴😵😝
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I did aerospace engineering at U. Illinois in the late 80s when a lot of the foundations for the Internet and AI were being laid down. I was there when they still had the Plato system which was one of the Worlds first wide area network data base systems that the Internet was based on. Marc Andreessen went there just after I graduated and it when he and Eric Bina were there that they started on Mosaic which became Netscape the worlds first practical Web browser. We all knew BACK THEN this sort of stuff was coming. Many of us read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clark and other similar writers who all postulated and predicted where we are at know. They wrote a lot about the over dependence on what we now call "smart technology" and how it would dumb us down. That's a major them in Asimov's Foundation series and one of the central reasons why the Galactic Empire collapsed. There was nothing even new about the concept as human history is full of empires that rose on a foundation of being smarter than the other empires around them and then fell because they let there education slip and they fell behind their competitors. Why do you think the Chinese have been sending their best and brightest to the best universities across the globe? Think about how YOUR professors at YOUR university are now DEPENDENT on a computer to detect fraud that might have come from another computer INSTEAD of using their own skills, experience and knowledge. AI might not be an age of enlightenment or the next step forward for Western Democracies but the beginning of a New Dark Ages where the West simply collapses in on itself AND IT WILL START with our universities.
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Its January 26, 2025 less than 2 years after this was posted and almost a year since you posted AND Trump just said he'd support a massive boost to AI. Yeaaahhhhhhhh. I have no idea which emoji sums this up 🙄🤥🥴😵😝
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Hey Adam you could have saved us all 21 minutes and 25 seconds by simply saying: "Trump loves Trump and people who suck up to Trump while Trump hates everything else on the planet!"
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Aerospace Engineer here - Engineers have been trying for DECADES to explain to people what is and what is NOT REAL and most of you dolts prefer Hollywood fantasy and illusions and delusions to basic reality. Here in Australia we have been trying to tell people for over a decade that we need to get on and build new power stations to replace the older ones that are worn out, BUT NO, Elon comes along with his mega battery and we all get told to STFU. We tell everyone that its a BATTERY and it STORES power NOT GENERATE power, BUT NO Elon's a genius and we get told to STFU. We tell everyone its the same battery technology that's in their phone and that it will need replacing in a few years time, BUT NO Elon's a genius and we get told to STFU. Now Australia is facing an energy crisis that could break our nation and no matter what the engineers say the answer is, Elon's a genius. He's going to save us. SO STFU. Trust me when I tell you that many many many engineers are effing tired of Elon Musk. ALSO do no think that also equates to his people because among his engineering people are some very, very good people, but that's also how Elon gets to take credit for the things his companies do that work AND YES some of the things his companies do actually work.
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Australia here - from the outside they do nothing different to every other non-conservative option in politics. THEY DON'T LISTEN and THEY DON'T LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES Go and watch a video of a lecture by Mark Blyth from July 2019 at McMaster U. (in Canada) during the Q&A after the lecture he was asked about Elizabeth Warren's policies. Its insanely accurate what he says. 1) He said Trump would win again if he didn't blow up the economy. Trump didn't blow up the economy COVID did and Trump botched the response and Biden won by default. 2) He said the strategy of the Democrats putting up candidates who they thought Republicans would vote for would NOT work especially if they alienated Bernie supporters doing it. Look what happened during the Harris campaign. It started with "we are changing to a new Democrat ticket" and then the DNC said "No you are NOT" and went straight to the strategy Mark Blyth described 5 years earlier, when they waved the Cheney's at them. Then you had people like Destiny openly tell the progressives NOT TO VOTE because we don't need you. Go watch the debate between Destiny and Cenk Uygur that David Pakman hosted. EVEN AFTER THE LOSS destiny was still holding onto blaming the progressives for the loss and admitting he told them NOT TO VOTE. HERE'S MY ISSUE 1) We (like a lot of other countries) now have to deal with Trump. 2) These Dum-o-crat campaign strategists work all over the world INCLUDING Australia and our Left (the Australian Labor Party) have used them in the past AND LOST (like in 2019).
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@ Yeah the thing that's going to need to be done, and its what we've had to face as well, is HOW do they rebuild. I know the subject of government regulations is a shitesandwich in America but you are either going to have to put in the basics or simply not build in these places. I saw Bill Maher's "New Rule" on dealing with the California issues and he whined about paying taxes. I have no sympathy for scum like him. They are so typical of celebrity media. They have opinions on everything and SOLUTIONS to nothing. Go watch the interview Jon Stewart had with Royal Ramey this last week. THAT'S what a solution looks like and there's other similar interviews here on YT.
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@meagantron6938 That podcast is called Steve Keen & Friends.
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I'm Australian but went to college in America. I did aerospace engineering but a bunch of my friends were pre-law and used to drag me into their discussions. So I got an interesting education in this minor 1 page document called the BILL OF RIGHTS which just might be one of the most profound single page documents in human history. Despite the fact it is currently being presided over by a pack of clowns let me remind all of America some of the things my classmates, fraternity brothers and others taught me about. The FIRST Amendment expressly prohibits the Government from restricting free speech and this nonsense clearly violates that. The SECOND Amendment (bless it cos it matters now) guarantees that the American population can protect itself from the Government going to far. Someone really needs to explain to Elon that some swords have 2 edges and the SECOND Amendment is one of history's greatest 2 edge swords. You guys need to realise that EVERY American has a right to arm and protect themselves 😉😉 The FOURTH Amendment which is about to become seriously big and was the one we most often discussed when I was in college because in the late 80s computer databases with everyone's information were starting to grow and there were genuine concerns over what the US Government could and could NOT get their hands on. This was largely stomped on with things like the Patriot Act. You guys really need to go and brush up on this one while you still can. The FIFTH thru EIGHTH Amendments are about making sure Americans are dealt fairly by the Justice System. You guys are gonna need this, so brush up on it and don't hold back when you need to kick back. The NINTH Amendment is gonna become your favorite or equal favorite with the FOURTH if you are willing to fight for it. This was one of the most important parts of the Roe-v-Wade decision along with the FOURTH. Go read up on it on Wikipedia because during the overturning of Roe-v-Wade and other case law the SCOTUS basically claimed the FOURTH and NINTH Amendments do not exist. The TENTH Amendment is kind a interesting because in a way it my be a way to Elon Musk and his muskrat legion to simply F⋃CK OFF ANYWAY I HOPE YOU GUYS CAN GET YOUR HEADS INTO IT and use the awesome gift your founding fathers entrusted you with to look after your nation and be wise with it and belt these clowns out of the park.
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AUSTRALIAN HERE - we have some experience with bad fires, the loss of life, loss of property and general mayhem of lives being ripped apart. After our last major fire season in 2019 there was the same sort of political misinformation campaign and a lot of it came from the MURDOCH media. Murdoch people made so many claims about arson that we ended up spending millions on a full public enquiry that investigated more than 30 of the major fires that season. YES we had over 30 major fires that season and in the end NOT ONE fire was found to be caused by arson, but there were a couple of inconclusive causes. The vast majority of fires in Australia are from lightning strikes and power lines where there's been insufficient maintenance keeping the power lines clear of trees. Another major factor was a shortening of the time period when we could safely burn-off of the fuel loads. Just as Adams recent guest Dr. Daniel Swain explained about California we'd had several good years of rain that caused a lot of growth followed by a drought which dried it all out. So the fuel load in 2019 was very high making those fires worse than usual. The other thing that the faux-media (with few exceptions) point out is that like Australian Eucalyptus trees the California scrub brush is high in oil content. The sap in those trees is a form of oil. So they don't just burn they literally explode when the fire gets fierce enough. In 2019 we had trees blast apart and shower the surrounding area in eucalyptus oil. Another thing the faux-media fail to highlight is the effects of an unusually high hot wind event. We knew in 2019 that it was going to be a day of high winds and it doesn't matter who's in charge they can't affect the weather. All you can do is hope to be prepared well enough with water, fire trucks, water bombers and people, that you can handle the situation.
1