knottedpaths.bsky.social
Non-sport tweets. Some planning, the rest random. For the sport follow @idlesummers
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I can't help but think that if America has not introduced the "Australian" secret ballot in the 19th century they'd reject it today. Exceptionalism as a guiding principle for (in)action.
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Hi Belinda. I help run a small cat rescue/charity: Sugar and Spice Cat Rescue. We'd definitely be interested in what your students can come up with
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3) Those dotted lines represent the 33% mark that guarantees a party is on the 2PP. As @benraue.com noted here (www.tallyroom.com.au/60638), the number of non-classic races increased from 3 in 2007 to 35 in 2025. If both parties stay below that 33% threshold the crossbench will get much bigger.
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2) From 2007 though, while the opposition primary has remained fairly steady, all of the swings back towards the government have ceased. Maybe the ALP can buck this trend in the future, but that's six elections in a row.
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This graph plots the major party vote against their two-party primary and shows a couple of interesting trends:
1) The ALP government of the 80s and LIberals of the 90s had big swings in their primary vote, but quite small changes in the opposition. Essentially, people judged the government
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Lastly though, if you follow the coloured lines towards Liberals on the x-axis OR Greens on the y-axies in 2028, all of these seats are very winnable on small changes in the vote (2-3%). Which brings me to the minor parties generally...
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What it shows is that the window to win from a 30% 3CP is extraordinarily small and it was a miracle the Greens won Ryan and Brisbane in 2022.
What it also shows is that the shift to Labor is devastating once Labor leads Liberals and that Greens need a vote north of 45% to win in those electorates
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What it doesn't show well is how precarious their position was in Queensland, in terms of hitting the window between Labor or Liberal votes being too high, and their vote too low.
The below graph should be read as a conversion from 3CP to 2PP based on different 3CP positions (the individual lines)
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I don't think it is a natural instinct to believe in equality before the law. We are cursed to relearn the lessons of Enlightenment religious wars that the State can do bad things to anyone and should be constrained.
But I think Americans, particularly, distrust the State and can support tolerance
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Agreed, by sadists I meant that there is no point in tailoring messaging to those who will never agree.
It speaks to the fundamental challenge for liberalism though, that people disagree with equality of all people (versus favouring family, nation, etc).
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I don't think this is quite right. The trajectory of public opinion shows that except for our sadists people accept things that fit their fundamental belief in themselves and their country.
I'd argue the message needs to be tolerance (as opposed to acceptance) though. Lean in to individual rights
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Assuming you are building it predominantly via immigration and university students: Ord River (or that general area with a proper port). Significantly closer to East Asia
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Their metric was safety of people in the vehicle so they optimised for the wrong thing. Closest analogy I can think of is over use of antibiotics
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I don't know that they are good counter examples for the issue of representation of local interests with large geographic electorates. But it is also arguably mostly a regional issue. I'd prefer 3 member electorates generally.
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The ability of local independents to earn HR seats has reduced my opinion on the desirability of full PR in the house, or even large multi-member electorates. It is hard to get wide support for local issues and local representation in a large electorate (admittedly a bigger issue in regional areas)
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Assuming NZ don't have a record of your Australian citizenship they presumably just treat you as an Australian?
Conversely "I'm a US citizen but only have an Australian passport and no ESTA" might be a dicey way for my partner to travel back
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Not as hard as you'd think. My partner has dual citizenship so she needs to exit and enter each country on the passport of that country. Easy enough to only remember one passport.
Confused the airline though as effectively she is two people
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Exactly! After many mishaps against unarmed noncombatants en route.
They put gun emplacements in Warrnambool. That fleet vs the Shipwreck Coast wouldn't have been a fair fight.
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Strong echo of all those gun emplacements from the 19th century to fight a potential Russian fleet which was not only mythical but based on performance were never needed.
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Jacobs's thing was diversity. Anything that reduced diversity was bad: government demolition for housing, dedicated financial districts, university campuses, etc. Anything that improved it: like maintaining a mix of older and smaller buildings was good. Widely misinterpreted though.
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Absolutely! And not obvious why as these things are self replicating.
Some of it will be business trying to be in with Labor from the 80s onwards.
But I also wonder if the invention of the corporate box drove it. The choice between a branch meeting and the footy isn't a hard one.
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Who they represent and who they run for office reflects their members. The underlying issue is that over many decades (since the 80s probably) the party stopped being a place to make connections with private enterprise. The old school literally died, leaving the cookers. The party is a hollow brand.
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Fall of Singapore probably. But also that was the last time we switched.
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It also has enormous holding costs because that process takes forever on top of a process that isn't fast. The larger the percent of costs land makes up the higher your planning timing risk becomes
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The saying "Just because you threw rocks in your harbour doesn't mean I should throw them in mine" comes to mind.
The bigger concern should be buttressing ourselves against economic downturn contagion.
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Ukrainian farmers who jail-breaked their John Deere tractors are entering the chat.
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You can probably take from that that Wayme has achieved a step change in reliability within their sandpit. It took 5 years to get something running, 5 years to transition away from a safety driver, 5 years to scale up to now. But they need to keep that trajectory to avoid support dominating costs.
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There is an old saying in Comp Sci that the first 90% of development takes 90% of the time and the last 10% takes 90% of the time. What it really says though is that every sigma improvement in reliability to scale takes the same development time as getting a propotype working.
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Back in 2007-2013 I played with Senate plots that used 2-party on the x-axis and minor on the y-axis. Allowed me to plot quota lines as well as points where they were guaranteed second or third place.
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I maintain that the weakness of the centre left in recent years is they don't know who they want to represent and therefore don't end up representing anyone.
Both AUS and UK rode dissatisfaction to power but who wants to vote for "we won't change much of anything but we'll govern better"?
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My impression is that they learnt that doing something to fix the problem gave oxygen to the story. Better to bore the media out like Morrison did: there is no problem and there is no story. Make them write about that every day.
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To be honest as a citizen of an ally I'd be more worried about downturn contagion than doing damage. Joining an economic suicide pact seems counterproductive.
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It's funny because the circulation is actually terrible because of a pinch point on the bridge.
I don't disagree with this, but I think a better mix of land uses and orientation of buildings would have fixed the problem.
The stadium forecourt is a nice pocket park, but also a residential dead-zone
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I think you are underestimating the challenge of crossing the regional rail, metro rail and Wurundjeri Way in this claim. Realistically the only extra crossing is steps (like Bourke) from Lonsdale which is more on DFO than Stadium. But the bigger issue is that La Trobe is still largely undeveloped.
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And the way those policies were created and used is not always aligned to her work:
Community influence, yes
Diversity of uses, no, even in city centres they are largely single use
Density, arguable, depends where
Diversity of buildings, sort-of, but for heritage, not typically for economics 3/3
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She also influenced things in areas where people used her ideas in places she didn't. Death and Life is fundamentally about economics (or so she claimed in "The Economy of Cities").
Lot of urbanism, but it wasn't the point. It is also about cities, not suburbs (noted on an early page of D&L). 2/3
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This is why Jacobs is a complex figure to assess. D&L was written in 1961 and is basically an extended rant on post-war urban policy.
We live in her world now, the fundamental aims of urban planning shifted because of her influence. So you can't critique her without pissing on your own shoes. 1/3
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This is an uncharitable reading. We spend a lot of time these days creatively designing solutions to meet stakeholder needs. Jacobs is referring to 1960s planning that often didn't even try that. The quotes are because the 60s idea of a "trade off" was reductive, not creative.
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I'm more intrigued by the idea that because Erdogan is a problem the solution is to get a major regional military power to exit NATO and push them towards creating a continuous north-south alliance with your most hostile adversaries.