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Yeah Nah? This poll is closed. |
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| Yeah Nah |
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122 | 53.51% |
| Nah Yeah |
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64 | 28.07% |
| Nah Yee |
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18 | 7.89% |
| No Yes |
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9 | 3.95% |
| Yes No |
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15 | 6.58% |
| Total: | 228 votes | ||
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CelestialScribe posted:I feel like Melbourne peeps have COVID PTSD or something. You can't enforce Stage 4 lockdown for a few cases, especially when the contact tracing is meant to be up to scratch now. Auckland did, and I don't think anyone would dispute it's been a better year for most New Zealanders than most Sydneysiders and Melburnians. The general line of thinking in Melbourne, after what basically felt like eight months in lockdown, is that you'd rather do a short and sharp lockdown out of an abundance of caution than wring your hands and drag your feet for ages and ultimately have to do a longer one, even if that's not the most likely outcome. A week or two of lockdown is loving nothing.
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Dec 31, 2020 02:07
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 10:55 |
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Thank you New South Wales for the gracious Christmas present re-gifted from America
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Dec 31, 2020 04:13
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Looking forward to more tantrums about it from Sydneysiders
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Dec 31, 2020 05:49
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The Artificial Kid posted:Well, if it cost everyone an average of 10c per day (which I think is a very conservative estimate), and went on for six weeks, that would be $22 million. How many cases will it prevent? That's very hard to estimate, but if we imagine that the current test-and-trace program is on track to eliminate the outbreak after another 100 cases, and the masks bring it down to 50 cases, then that's $500,000 per case. It's not a cost borne by the state so who gives a gently caress
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Jan 1, 2021 07:40
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The notion of running a literal cost-benefit analysis on masks, exceptionally cheap pieces of fabric that, yes, everybody in Sydney should have procured at some point through 2020, is bizarre. There are like six or seven valid arguments you could make against Sydney mandating masks before you get to back-of-the-envelope armchair policy wonk nonsense.
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Jan 1, 2021 13:13
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I don't disagree with any of that! I just find that arriving there from the argument that the cost is the literal $10 financial cost of buying a mask, rather than the cost being that it's an imposition on people's daily lives, is... weird.
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Jan 1, 2021 13:30
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It isn't the "masks aren't necessary yet" bit that's weird, it's that you're analysing it through a purely financial lens. The sensible arguments against imposing masks are that they're an imposition on people's daily lives, mandating something means enforcing it and marginalised community members are the ones most likely to be fined, most transmission occurs in venues where people aren't going to be masked anyway (restaurants and private gatherings) and they provide a security blanket which can make some people lax about other stuff like social distancing. (I don't necessarily agree with those arguments, but those are the arguments.) The negative consequences on the other side of the ledger are, if the virus gets out of control, it's an even greater imposition on people's lives as we go into lockdown and can also lead to hundreds or thousands of deaths and long-term illnesses. What isn't sensible is calculating the cost of masks as spread over the public as a whole in comparison with the ~*~Economic Impact~*~ of further cases and an outbreak growing, unless you're a policy wonk sitting in the Treasury basement with a calculator and a spreadsheet. I don't give a gently caress about the $20-$30 I spent on a bunch of reuseable masks earlier this year and I don't give a gently caress about Australia's GDP growth for the next quarter. I do give a gently caress about whether I can continue safely living my day-to-day life and visit family interstate again.
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Jan 2, 2021 00:35
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You can make a case for masks one way or the other in a situation like Sydney's, but what's weird is umming and ahhing about it for two weeks before eventually pulling the trigger. Just loving do it. If the cases fizzled out by Boxing Day and everything turned out to be fine anyway, nobody is going to whinge that you overreacted.
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Jan 2, 2021 01:55
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The Artificial Kid posted:Let's say it's only $200,000-worth of mandatory masking to avoid a case in the NSW contact tracing environment (maybe it's lower, maybe it's higher, I'm just picking a figure well below the bottom of my previous napkin maths). Now let's say on average we have to avoid 100 cases to avoid a death. That's $20 million per death avoided. The thing is, this isn't how we approach pandemic policy at all - or at least it hasn't been in Australia since March. It's one thing to say "we can spend X amount of dollars on anti-smoking ads and thereby save X lives." That is a completely normal and long-standing trade-off in typical public health discussions. But a pandemic is not a typical public health problem and Australia's policy is not about mitigating cases or deaths with carefully tweaked and financially considered measures in which you put a dollar value on every life saved. It's about achieving and maintaining zero community transmission because ongoing community transmission constantly risks snowballing into a broader outbreak which forces us into economically and socially devastating lockdowns. I can guarantee you that no jurisdiction is hesitant to mandate masks on the grounds that they feel that money (individuals' money!) could be more wisely spent. If there's a vexing financial angle in our pandemic policy, it's precisely where the trigger point should be to lock down hospitality and retail. Not a spreadsheet about how much masks cost.
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Jan 2, 2021 04:12
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The Artificial Kid posted:The entire premise of what I'm saying is that we can hopefully expect the contact tracing system to bring new cases back to zero as it did once before, with some fixed number of cases occurring along the way. I've acknowledged that that may not happen, and I said that if we think it won't happen we should just lock down now. See how it's possible to make this argument without putting it in financial terms? That's the only issue anyone has with what you've been saying.
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Jan 2, 2021 04:42
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The timing of the national anthem thing is still so loving funny. NSW and Victorian state cabinets rushing into crisis meetings, borders closing, tens of thousands of flights and holiday bookings cancelled, waves of dread rolling across the nation again, citizens glued to their TV screens... and Scomo's sitting down in his garden shed with his typewriter, trying out verses, the missus bringing him a cup of tea, maybe he'll go for a walk in the afternoon to see if inspiration strikes, etc.
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Jan 2, 2021 09:46
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woofbro posted:Honestly, in NSW I'd say people think Gladys is going a good job given the circumstances and are instead aiming at Andrews and Palaszczuk as poor handlers of the pandemic because of their trigger happy response to stronger border controls. I've learned this year that apparently Sydneysiders believe they have a god-given right to holiday on the Gold Coast, but after this year I'm fine with border closures even when the risk is minimal. Yes I miss my family, but when we were in lockdown I missed being inside other buildings, getting coffee, visiting friends etc much more. And a non-family-visiting interstate holiday is way, way down the priority list.
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Jan 3, 2021 02:02
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Solemn Sloth posted:It’s also completely disingenuous to compare a mask mandate with things like colonoscopy screening because the former is a cost which would not otherwise be available for an alternative public health intervention (apart from however many masks you decide to make freely available to people) Also colon cancer isn't contagious and doesn't have an effect (economic or otherwise) on anybody beyond a small circle of people around the patient in question, whereas, you know, I don't need to write this out. Vastly more people have been affected by lockdowns and restrictions than by actual COVID. Any calculus which is only taking into account "lives saved" is therefore immediately, obviously, flawed.
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Jan 3, 2021 04:47
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Is there an actual check-in app? I'm sick of writing out my name and phone number every time, but the Service Victoria app a) doesn't appear to let you make an account unless you already have one (neither does the website??) and b) has a QR reader that doesn't work.
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Jan 4, 2021 03:23
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hambeet posted:The Services Victoria app QR code works fine? I've used it a stack of times. I've tried it at two different places and it's unresponsive
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Jan 4, 2021 04:31
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hambeet posted:I helped set it up the QR codes at my work and had a bunch of staff at different offices test it for me on a variety of different phones, all using the Service Vic app (so we could screenshot to make a guide for admin to help clients.) iPhone, checkmate
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Jan 4, 2021 09:05
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https://www.theage.com.au/national/...104-p56rob.htmlquote:WA Premier Mark McGowan has given the clearest indication yet the state is opting for the elimination of COVID-19 rather than suppressing it. This is such a pointless battle of semantics. There is absolutely no definitional difference between elimination and "zero community transmission."
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Jan 4, 2021 09:41
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Seemlar posted:Elimination and zero community transmission are the same thing, he's actually advocating eradication but without openly saying it, probably to avoid the pesky question of "so does that mean a hard closing of our international borders" since that's the only practical way to get there even with vaccination No, eradication is when a disease is wiped out globally and will never return, like smallpox has been.
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Jan 5, 2021 03:46
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crepeface posted:it's rhetoric to distinguish wa's policy from nsw's hotspot lockdowns because he's under pressure to drop the border. honestly, the way Gladys 'we must live with covid-19' Berejiklian has been approaching zero community transmission, it's probably useful to use a term that's not watered down. I mean, it's all rhetoric. Every state and the feds have agreed on "zero community transmission" as a goal and what McGowan is really arguing about is the extent to which he can make his own decisions to keep his own people safe until that's accomplished nationwide. He's as savvy a politician as anyone and he's cracked the word "elimination" out very deliberately, he knows how to play to the audience to position himself against the east coast. That's not necessarily a criticism; I'm a sandgroper originally and have plenty of vulnerable family members in WA. I'd vote for him in a heartbeat. The Artificial Kid posted:It's fair to talk about elimination from a particular time and place. I mean smallpox isn't actually eradicated. On a long enough timeline it will get out of a lab somewhere. The thing everyone wants to know is when they can stop viewing all other human beings and the world outside their front door with suspicion and sadness. Yeah, they're different terms with different technical meanings, but like most people I wouldn't have known that before 2020. Where McGowan is wrong is saying that the rest of Australia isn't also aiming for elimination, because it is, it's just that Morrison and Berejiklian and Andrews are allergic to the word itself. I suspect the reason the federal government (and I'm sure it was the federal government) pushed for the national cabinet to agree on "zero community transmission" rather than "elimination" was a) to distinguish themselves from the people's poet Jacinda Ardern, since they didn't adopt this strategy until it turned out after the border closures in March that it was in fact eminently achievable, and b) to avoid people becoming lax after "zero community transmission" is achieved, because elimination is only a temporary state which can forever be breached, which is quite understandable; Hazzard was not wrong to talk about an "avalanche of complacency" in December. A is political, B is practical, and both of them are fine - state bickering and all, I'm enormously relieved to be living in one of the few Western countries where we take this thing seriously.
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Jan 5, 2021 09:01
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It really loving sucks that the outbreak had to happen right before Christmas just as people are moving around the country a bunch, leaving us primed for both viral spread and stranded holidaymakers. Like, gently caress you COVID, you couldn't just do this in mid-January?
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Jan 6, 2021 07:20
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The Lord Bude posted:I particularly like the bit where the only valid forms of ID for proving you're old enough to buy smokes are 1. A passport or 2. A drivers licence or proof of age card issued by an Australian state or territory. So if you have an overseas drivers licence and you try and buy smokes you're poo poo out of luck unless you've got your passport on you, at least in QLD. This has happened to me the other way round trying to buy booze in the US, and it's so loving dumb given that in both instances you can legally drive using that license - so why shouldn't you be allowed to use it as proof of ID?
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Jan 6, 2021 23:35
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Compare and contrast: https://twitter.com/AlboMP/status/1346929529198055424 https://twitter.com/ScottMorrisonMP/status/1346949911237914625
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Jan 6, 2021 23:49
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Solemn Sloth posted:Because it's not reasonable to expect a random bottle-o worker to be able to confidently verify a drivers licence from a different country under threat of a $20,000 fine if they get it wrong? Hmmm yeah fair enough. I was sulky about it because I had to trudge back from the brewery to the hotel for a kilometre in the rain to fetch my passport.
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Jan 7, 2021 02:27
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hooman posted:Thanks for this, it was the phrasing that shat me, you can describe Australia's approach to rollout as cautious without describing other countries as cutting corners. This is the bit of the thread that sums it up best: https://twitter.com/peripatetical/status/1346036320750202881
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Jan 7, 2021 09:34
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I mean as far as lockdowns go doing a three-day just-in-case lockdown to prevent the situation from getting out of hand and having to do a long one is, definitionally, the opposite of a "massive" lockdown
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Jan 8, 2021 00:07
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dr_rat posted:Hopefully with tightened restrictions quarantining/flight staff well get less and less of this sort of hotel breach stuff. I've seen at least one epidemiologist say Australia's first in line for vaccines should be air crew, hotel quarantine workers and hotel quarantine security guards.
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Jan 8, 2021 08:15
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:That will only help if the vaccines provide sterilizing immunity which isn't known at this time. Yep and that's definitely a concern, though I'd say that even if it merely prevents illness/symptoms that would be useful - being symptomatic makes you more likely to spread it.
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Jan 8, 2021 08:33
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froglet posted:I have to wonder why are people like this. If ever there was a time to kick back at home, play video games til your eyes turn square, and eat frozen pizza for 3 days, this would be it. I also always found it puzzling when people did this after March/April, now that we know that no matter what you're always going to be allowed to go to the shops, but it only takes a little bit of "panic" buying to upset the supply chain and I don't think it's "panicky" at all to say, hmm, maybe I want to go to the shops as infrequently as possible if there's a virulent new strain of COVID circulating. The Lord Bude posted:To be clear, although I reserve the right to have a nice cleansing sook about it, I endorse the mask wearing requirement 100%. Yes, this was also the case in the four-month Victorian lockdown, unless you were jogging or cycling. Though at least for us it was winter. Even as it was warming up in September/October I was finding mask wearing starting to become uncomfortable.
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Jan 9, 2021 03:41
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Missed this before - I'd only seen epidemiologists advise it, but the government confirmed a couple of days ago that border/quarantine workers will be in the first round of vaccinations, which seems like a very good idea to me: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/press-conference-australian-parliament-house-12
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Jan 10, 2021 01:40
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Can't find the quote online but heard it on the radio - he want as far as to say something like "all protest is unacceptable." This is it. This is the best the National Party has to offer.
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Jan 12, 2021 01:53
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nocturama posted:I heard that too. What the gently caress? Wedged in there somewhere was an equivocation of "whether it's BLM or the Capitol protests," and I think he meant to say violent protest, but even that of itself - that level of poo poo communication - is a marker of how unfit he is for the top job in any capacity. It's sort of amazing that because of this century-old political coalition, every Liberal PM is obliged to have some poo poo-for-brains weirdo country bumpkin as his deputy. (Or it would be amazing if it weren't for the fact that we've had at least one poo poo-for-brains weirdo city slicker as PM in recent years.)
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Jan 12, 2021 03:00
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Zenithe posted:When people finally are forced to know who you are by chance because you are leader of the vestigial party, you have to get all those Hot Takes out while people remember you exist. Man's on a schedule. Not sure you can describe them as vestigial when the Liberals very rarely manage to get a majority in their own right
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Jan 12, 2021 23:43
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Wizard Master posted:I often wonder what happened to the Chaser boys but then I realised there’s no longer a market for them - these days their irreverent brand of satire would be indistinguishable from real news. "Fibre-to-the-node vaccine," that's the stuff, that cutting-edge, timely, finger-on-the-pulse satire that made them so indispensable in the past
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Jan 16, 2021 06:24
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Alize Cornet seems like a nice girl who accidentally stirred a hornets' nest, so this is more about Melburnians, but it remains really weird to me that eight months of lockdown - while it did suck - is more easily characterised as "suffering" than, say, what happened in France, where 70,000 people are loving dead https://twitter.com/alizecornet/status/1350827468215648263
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Jan 17, 2021 23:58
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Sulla Faex posted:should australia become a republic? discuss Yes. Sign it into law around, say, January 10th, so that we can change the date while keeping Australia's national day in the hottest part of summer and also setting up a Christmas-NY-national day string of public holidays. We so easily could have changed the date already if those dipshit founding fathers hadn't decided to bring federation into being on a day that's already a holiday.
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Jan 22, 2021 01:04
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JBP posted:You don't need to be in the Commonwealth to play the games. You also don't need to have the Queen as your head of state to be in the Commonwealth (most Commonwealth countries don't).
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Jan 22, 2021 07:23
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If you'd like another reason to despise Court: while her homophobia is more well-known, equally damaging is her long-standing patronage of Drug Free Australia, a somebody-think-of-the-children "secular" lobby group (that just happens to have a board stacked with current or former pastors) which is probably the country's foremost anti-drugs lobby group and regularly gets invited by various state parliaments to have its views heard on issues like pill testing, injecting rooms, etc. https://drugfree.org.au/construction/index.php/about-dfa/our-patron
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Jan 22, 2021 09:43
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BrigadierSensible posted:For those of you not wanting to celebrate Invasion Day today, instead try celebrating Indian Republic Day! A majority of countries in the Commonwealth are republics. I think there's only like 15 or 16 of us left who are still Commonwealth "realms." Wasn't there something a while ago where they wanted to change the law so that the throne could go to an eldest daughter but every realm had to agree and in Australia that meant all the attorney generals had to agree and SA or somebody was holding up the process? That was pretty funny
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Jan 26, 2021 01:30
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Haha of course it was him. The proto-Tony
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Jan 26, 2021 04:16
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 10:55 |
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EoinCannon posted:All my extended family live in Ireland and I spent a few months there a few years ago with thoughts of moving there or England but the weather is pretty rough if you've grown up in Australia. I'll maybe look into it again in 10 years or so. England is a deeply classist failed state run by neoliberal reactionaries and is a far more institutionally mean-spirited place than Australia. Pretty much every lovely policy the coalition tries to implement here is already well underway in the UK. Ireland I think is cool. In fact it would appear to outrank us on the HDI index now! You have to pay to see a GP though. Eediot Jedi posted:The thing wasn't a documentary. Fantastic stuff from the SBS journo in this piece: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/tony-abbott-bemoans-virus-hysteria-and-health-despotism-as-he-questions-impact-of-covid-19-rules quote:"Thanks to the pandemic, we're now told to form orderly and socially distanced queues - as if we were English." quote:He also hit out at "absurd" rules like compulsory face masks while driving in a car alone which featured in Brisbane's three-day mini-lockdown.
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Jan 26, 2021 05:35
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