Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "friendlyjordies" channel.

that is pretty much what they've been doing, yes.
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Properly speaking, if you'd not given him any legitimate reason to think you were carrying anything illegal or doing anything nefarious, that would be said cop doing his job exactly as he is supposed to. Or possibly just ignoring you and your bag entirely, I suppose. No real way to know which unless someone tried to nick the thing anyway.
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@orksy2935 Sounded an awful lot like he supports them about the same way I support NZ Labour: I don't particularly like them, I disagree with them about a lot of stuff, and they do some very stupid things that I'm very opposed to... They do sometimes get Some things right, and the alternatives are all vastly worse.
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@Beelzebubby91 you...ah... probably don't want one "like the USA" as such, given that it includes people who went to mental health professionals on the basis of 'I haven't done anything, and I want to keep it that way, please help me with that' (yes, thought crimes), or 'two children kissed and an adult pitched a fit over it', 'urinated in pulic while drunk once' and other things that really shouldn't actually put one on such a list.
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@redherring6154 I don't know about the specifics in Australia, but there's usually some rule about needing to hand over more than half the note at once so it doesn't magically become two notes. The banks will usually take some pretty destroyed notes so long as it's identifiably a valid note, as they essentially record that that note is destroyed and remove it from circulation. Shops, not so much.
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@ferretyluv Can be if the wind's right (no idea if that can happen in Melbourne), arguably. Particularly if you're not in the sun at the time. It's worth remember that humans have no capacity to detect the actual temperature of anything (including their own bodies), but rather detect how quickly their body gains or loses heat... so the actual air temperature doesn't have to be all that cold to Feel freezing, if conditions are such that you're loosing heat rapidly for one reason or another (which wind is very good at, especially 'lazy' winds). And, of course, that gain or loss of heat is then processed relative to whatever baseline your body is acclimatized to.
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To be fair, with the way party politics work out, resolving that sort of thing (beurocratic nonsense, be it caused by low level officials or highly questionable business decisions) is probably over half of a local MP's actual job.
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As someone with hearing and processing issues, the accent thing can be a legitimate problem. No good reason to care if the person is Indian (or anything else for that matter) or not otherwise though.
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Count Dankula is a spectacular storyteller. His political takes range from the 'understandable given his history, but still bad' to 'downright delusional'. Quoting him in support of any sensible position is very much the sort of move that gets people to tell you to stop helping.
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Both of those things could reasonably be expected to have an effect. A temporary one. In the latter case it should only affect products which are actually produced or shipped through places that are actually affected (though, of course, if everything's transported by truck, anything that affects fuel prices can hit everything pretty hard. Rather less so if it's mostly transported by rail, due to that being much more fuel efficient). But of course, any legitimate excuse for a one of/small price increse will somehow turn into a repeating/large price increase in practice.
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It's a thing in New Zealand, too... though until recently the NZ ones were called 'Countdown'. ... in mroe recent times the logo has been a "CD" that looks a lot like an apple... that is suspiciously W shaped. When I was a kid it used to just be their name with the "count" part in one colour and the "down" part in another. (their slogan is/was 'you can count on us to keep prices down' ... ... ... it's been rather questionable for quite some time, mind you.)
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@shazzymapatazzie3117 A LOT of people lie on the internet. Often for trivial, non existent, or utterly nonsensical reasons (and then there's the calculated and malicious examples). Particularly in youtube comments, for some reason. With the subsequently added details, your story is entirely believeable. Stuff like that happens more often than one might think. But as initially presented? Not believing it was entirely understandable, people tell stories like that all the time that turn out to be absolutely bogus and random people on youtube don't know anything about you as an individual (rather than a random character string that may or may not be trying to be words and which they have never previously encountered) to indicate otherwise.
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@frenne_dilley give you good odds that, like most such things, it made life much better who were on the wrong end of the problems with the previous system, while making it worse for those who were on the wrong end of the new system. That's the usual way of these things: does a great job of solving the specific problem it's focused on but a terrible job at not breaking adacent matters. (mind you, the way political nonsense tends to shake out, the alternative is not even trying to fix the existing issue, and which state of affairs is better comes down to the coinflip of whether the job was done properly and even then depends on whether you were in a demographic being hit by the problems of the old system or one being hit by the problems of the new system or never had to interact with either).
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@TheEthiopian1987 If you're looking at an actual globe, sure. Every flat map involves some distortion that renders comparisons between things that are different distences from the equator.... off... as a sid effect of not being a sphere.
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@elif6908 The 'clear tax write off' charity is a ... significant thing in the USA (mind you, my understanding is that such charities don't tend to solicit donations from the public, the system is quite forgiving of the tax dodging shenanigans of the wealthy, not so much of major fraud). Rather less of one in places that have better rules (that are actually enforced) regarding what does an doesn't count as a charity.
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Unions are a useful counterweight to corporations (or even rich individual owners, but the regular legal system usually has an easier time witht them than it does with corporations), but they also have their issues and need kicking back into line (and sometimes splitting up) periodically when they start getting too powerful... ... ... of course, the corporations need the same treatment under the same conditions, and reach that point more often. New Zealand's rather well known for having pretty solid worker protection laws and systems in place and being generally progressive-left-ish on the whole most of the time, so it might be rather surprising to learn that unions here are VERY limited in what they can legally do, with most of their more powerful methods of forcing their desires on employers actually being flat out illegal. ... This after decades of restrictions on them being reduced. Turns out when you shut down the entire country's economy for an extended period over whether or not a single freezing works will hire an extra worker whose sole job is to clean the Other workers' tea mugs so they don't have to use a few seconds of their break doing it themselves, you become rather... unpopular. It says something when the strike breakers are widely considered not to be the bad guys in an event like this. But yeah... people kind of liked not having the economy implode entirely due to all international and a substantial chunk of internal trade being shut down (in a country where the economy at the time consisted almost entirely of exporting food and raw materials (mostly mutton and wool at the time, I believe) and importing Everything Else)... and as bad as that sounds, the specifics actually made it worse. Basically, your unions have to be kept in line just as much as your corporations, media, religions, and political parties do. They're all necessary (well, any given union, corporation, political party, etc. might not be, but entities of those types are), but they're also all power structures, and entities which can come to weild disproportionate amounts of power to the detriment of both citizenry and state. Consequently, it is necessary that they be kept in line by well writen and well enforced laws and regulations... and thoroughly kicked into submission when they start causing damage rather than fixing/preventing it.
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Depends how you count them... or more accurately how you define them. If you go by contiguous land mass above water ignoring human engineering projects it's ... Pretty sure it's number 3 actually... Ok, I'm pretty sure the only defintion that doesn't also include every single island in existence as ca 'continent' where Australia doesn't come last is the one where you use tectonic plate boundaries as the defining factor... at which point It actually IS very high up the list (I won't say first, because I believe there's a few others of similar size and I can't be bothered looking up the numbers) by way of being entirely on a single plate that has all of it's boundaries out in the ocean.
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@ChrisSmith-bh2hg Should probably fact check this (I can't be bothered), but under all that ice? Supposedly Antarctica is actually a bunch of islands rather than a single landmass.
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if by 'and now' you mean probably decades ago at this point. It's been a Long time since the movies were delivered to theaters on actual film rather than on discs or as digital files at this point, and that's entirely seperate from how the movie was created.
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@andrewntoth1 well, they don't hurt the exporter Directly, though the resulting reduced sales don't exactly help said exporter either. Same with the importer, and everyone else in the chain. Fun extra bonus: the US dollar is loosing value as well due to all the shenanigans. this has... functionally the same effects as tarrifs do on things sold to the USA. But it makes things sold By the USA more competitive! ... ... except the USA doesn't actually export all that much physical stuff, it turns out (that trade deficit existed in the first place for a Reason), and tariffs on importing the materials needed to make the things it does export drive Those prices up too, wiping out the advantage they Should have. And, of course, a very large portion of the cost of buying anything from the USA is Shipping Costs, which ... Well, last I saw Trump was introducing... I think it was some sort of tax? on any ship belonging to a fleet that contained any ship that was made or registered in China. China, for reference, builds most of the worlds' ships, and is also one of the easier non-sketchy places to register a ship (where ships are registered has basically nothing to do with who owns them and what they're used for in practice, only who gets to handle the legal and financial proceedings in the event that everything goes wrong). So if that goes through Shipping Costs on goods going to and from the USA, already Very High depending where you live, Also go UP... all great fun.
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@honkhonk8009 Straight up misinformation is, amusingly enough, the founding mission statement for Fox News. It's entire existance has always been about muddying the waters so badly that no one can tell who is and is not telling the truth, on the basis that most people will respond to such a state of afairs by Giving Up on figuring it out and just going with whichever line supports their pre-existing biases. Turns out that works out a lot better for the Republican Party over there than factual reporting does.
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@basillah7650 shockingly enough, a single payer, government run system actually results in the medicines costing less in the first place than they would otherwise... and then the tax payer covers a decent chunk of that reduced price, yes... of course, the specifics of the systems vary from place to place, but in most of them you either don't need health insurance on top of your taxes, or it's quite a bit cheaper and pays out a LOT more reliably than in the USA, and either way it's not tied to your Job, so you can, if need be, quit without losing your coveage (though, of course, you may eventually run into problems paying your premiums, depending on exactly how that works where you are). Amusing quirk of the US health system: half the reason so many things cost so much is that the insurance companies screw over the health care providers just as much as they do they customers, so the health care providers jack up the prices so that the times they can manage to nail the insurers to the wall and get them to actually pay up cover all the times said insurers just flat out refuse to pay even when they absolutely should. ... yeah, if the insurance companies weren't such scum bags many parts of the American health care system would be Cheaper... on paper. In practice it wouldn't actually be that much cheaper most of the time because the insurance companies would actually be paying 4 times instead of paying 4 times as much once (which might affect the polices and payments of individual customers in some fashion). Oh, and apparently quite a few places, in at least some parts of the USA, will actually give you a discount down to something much closer to what the particular service they provide Should cost if you pay them directly, without involving the insurance companies (and presumably before you leave the premesis), because they don't have to deal with that whole mess. ... of course, for larger and more expensive matters that's not much help, but for the lower end of things it can be a big deal.
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I'll give you good odds plenty of stuff will change... it'll just mostly be behind the scenes stuff that you'll see little or no direct effect from unless you happen to be part of the specific target demographic for that particular change, and any indirect effect will take years to propagate through the system. That's usually how such things go. By which point odds are good that Australia will have managed to elect a right-of-centre government who will have set half of it on fire again (the effects of breaking things tends to propagate faster than the effects of fixing them).
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Honestly, I suspect it doesn't actually matter who gets elected, it's more that right before an election it's too late for the current government to Start doing anything about them, and then after the election, well, having been seen to have fixed the problem (by way of the supermarkets lowering the prices again), the party in power gets most of the benefit they were going to get either way, and the problem is now less bad and so drops down the priority list again... I suspect the supermarkets have got pretty good at judging how far they have to reign it in to drop far enough down the list that the government never actually gets around to them due to all the other, more urgent problems they have to deal with. But the supermarkets can't Quite get away with doing that Every election, or that would become an issue that needed dealing with in its own right... so they pick the ones where, again, bigger problems will dominate the campaign. Or something along those lines. Because, honestly, a National government is always going to favour the supermarkets over the general public unless it's got to the point where food riots are looking likely, so you'd expect a different pattern if it was about getting a favourable government in rather than just exploiting the electoral cycle to make a quick extra buck.
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@thecashier930 A lot of things about the USA look suspiciously like a diet version of things you see in old footage of Soviet and Nazi indoctrination techniques when you stop and think about it. And it's mostly stuff that just gets accepted as 'normal', rather than the things that the more politically deranged will attach such terms to on the basis of said thing not aligning to their particular flavour of radicalised insanity.
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@LRM12o8 Not sure if you're trying to make a joke or legitimately unfamiliar with the practice of treating vehicles as if they were people when talking about them. While almost universal regarding ships, it's far from unheard of for other vehicles... or other machines and devices of particular significance, for that matter.
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@billdoggonejones Remember that most such people haven't actually read the book at all, they just vaguely recall hearing it mentioned in semi-related contexts in the past.
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'Airportd' was almost certainly a typo of 'airports'.
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Counts, going by the pattern you set up there.
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@InsanityPlusOne To be fair, a lot of the shops still have 'countdown' written on them, last I looked (I'll admit to not usually paying a lot of attention) I figure changing the lettering on the building is expensive and a pain to organize. Till recepites and such have been changed though. And, of course, they've had that weird hybrid CD/W/apple logo for a while even before they changed it.
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