quote:

The Intergenerational Report grants 11 mentions to climate change, arguing "governments must continue to plan for the economic and environmental effects of climate change". While it says there may be economic benefits to climate change, it says there may also be falling crop yields and increasing damage to infrastructure from extreme weather.

Senor Tron posted:

Anyone have any experience with being hired as a contractor?

GoldStandardConure posted:

Its funnier to believe that Pyne reads the thread, and gets upset everytime someome posts the Crying Pyne gif.

duck monster posted:

my stepdads beer posted:

What's the rules on unions in workplaces? Can a better union than the SDA start up in the same workplaces?

Lid posted:

The union alleges Ms Jackson spent more than $660,000 on personal expenses, including holidays, shopping and mortgage payments, as well as $1.07m in separate unauthorised spending. It claims the former national secretary misappropriated $350,399 through unauthorised expenses on her union-issued credit cards, including $170,554 on travel and holidays, $101,783 on shopping, $28,288 on food and alcohol, and $44,537 on entertainment.

The credit card expenditure includes more than $20,000 spent at Myer and David Jones (mostly in the two weeks around Christmas), more than $4000 on clothing and shoes and at children’s stores, more than $10,000 at a Jaguar dealership, and meals at “hatted” restaurants including $14,000 at Fenix in Melbourne in December 2003.

quote:

WHAT is it about women that makes them such prodigious whistleblowers?

Last week we saw Kathy Jackson, national secretary of the Health Services Union, refusing to back down to the jeering mob at the scandal-racked organisation’s annual conference.

She is fighting to clean up the HSU, and no amount of name-calling, shovels at her front door, intimidation and votes of no confidence will stop her.

“I’m going nowhere,” she said last week. “They’re not used to people telling them they’re doing the wrong thing (and) they’re trying to shoot the messenger.”

She is not afraid to take on the union movement’s entrenched male power elites - and the membership is quietly behind her.

There’s a lot at stake, with the Gillard government’s one-seat majority in the balance as police investigate Jackson’s HSU predecessor, Dobell MP Craig Thomson, over misuse of union funds - allegations he denies.

Jackson, 45, never saw herself as a feminist superhero, but her determination to stand up to the union is fast making her an inspiration to other women.

...

Like Brockovich, both women were single mothers, and both have suffered greatly as a result of their “ethical resistance”.

Jackson is still under attack and was hospitalised at one point after suffering a nervous breakdown. Sneddon lost her job and went through a period of depression.

“The way I was treated (by those who) shunned and vilified me in public and in private has eaten away at my confidence, my self-belief, my health, my ability to eat, to sleep and to support myself and my family.

“I ended up hospitalised for five weeks in a psychiatric facility, having lost the will to live.”

The toll on these women is almost unendurable. Yet they do endure, and inspire other women to speak out against corruption and abuse of power.

In the US, the role of women blowing the whistle on corporate misdeeds has been extraordinary - from Sherron Watkins at Enron to Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot in the Madoff fraud case to A.K. Barnett-Hart, the investment bank intern who first raised the alarm on the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

So what is it about women that makes them willing to risk all to do the right thing?

It can’t be that women are more ethical than men. But do they possess a special intuition to detect wrongdoing before their male colleagues?

Or is it the fact that in male-dominated workplaces they are less likely to be “team players” because they are excluded from the mates’ network and thus are able to judge ethical breaches dispassionately?

Are they less greedy for power and wealth, and therefore less afraid to rock the boat?

Or are they more in touch with the real world because they are used to running households.

Whatever the reason, the crucial role of whistleblower seems to be a burden women have long shouldered, from the tragic prophetic heroine of Greek mythology, Cassandra, to the triumphant Brockovich.

Long may they prosper.

Lid posted:

http://m.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-...325-1m7b7u.html

This is the dumbest thing.

quote:

She gained a significant amount of online notoriety in 2012, when she released a video responding to a Facebook comment that she should not be so judgmental towards other diets and that what people ate was "none of her business".

"When your obese brothers and sisters get stuck on the stairway on 9/11 preventing fit people from getting through and surviving you make it part of my business," Ratcliffe said in the video, which was published by US website Gawker under the headline, "Is this the worst person on the Internet?"

quote:

Freelee is Leanne Ratcliffe, a Queensland-born Adelaide resident whose date of birth is unknown because she prefers to say she was born in 2012, the year in which she adopted veganism.