A thread on politics- have some balls and post

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MacMum said:
Piers Morgan has written a scathing article on America's gun laws.........but as he says, nothing will change.
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...in the comments under this article, most were from people in different parts of the world and condemning this atrocity and their gun laws. The responses from the few Americans was astounding..

..they truly are a dillusional, brainwashed lot of people, but the scary part is that so called intelligent people are all for the laws as well.

The statistics in this article are mind-boggling, compared to the rest of the world. You would think that would be enough for majority of Americans to realise something is radically wrong with their laws.

...as I've said before, totally screwed up place on so many levels.
 
Someone has retweeted a stack of condolence messages from US senators with a comment on how much each of those have received as political donations from the gun lobby. Hundreds of thousands going to politicians who protect gun access then have the hide to say how sorry they are to hear of such tragedy.
Politicians and law makers saying that tighter gun laws won't change these outcomes. Someone quoted a stat that this is the 273rd mass shooting, THIS YEAR. It is outrageous.

And you're right, Crimso there is room for compromise. Farmers and hunters here are still able to own firearms, but who the **** is hunting with a machine gun? Isn't it true that somewhere in the US, they repealed a law that prevented the mentally ill from having a gun? This Vegas guy apparently had 19 firearms in that hotel room.
 
It really does feel like the ship has sailed. I know we had a buyback here but we simply didn't have the culture or levels of gun ownership they have in the States.

Too late for gun control there, even if they had the will to do so. The whole country is packing.
 

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I can't believe how lax the security was in the hotel.
How on earth did he get that arsenal of weapons in there ?????
And how the hell was he able to buy so many in the first place :
It's tragic , but surely more could have been done to avoid it .
I thought with the fear of terrorism security would be so much tighter .
Guns , gambling , greed and dishonest politicians .
Bloody horrible .
 
Ceebee said:
I can't believe how lax the security was in the hotel.
How on earth did he get that arsenal of weapons in there ?????
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Go to any conference around the world, and more so trade shows and the like, hell even surfers with their boards in surf bags etc, and any one can bring anything into a hotel of an odd shape etc, so there is no surprise he was able to bring in a cache of weapons as he did.
 
America is a just too big. If a couple of shootings of 40-60 people don't force politicians into action then I don't think there is any number of deaths that is ever going to change things in my lifetime.

It doesn't matter if the president is someone like Trump or Obama, things just continue on as they always have.
 
*really* don't want to get into the pros and cons of the whole debate around guns in the US but when people talk about not understanding how people can want to be armed themselves there a couple of historical precedents that springs to mind.

The founder of the Mormons, Joseph Smith, and his brother Hyram were both murdered in a jail cell. They had voluntarily given up their arms and placed themselves in custody for their protection having been given assurances that the law/govt would protect them. Unfortunately for them the powers that be only disarmed the Mormon side and left the other guys armed and they rocked up and murdered them. Interestingly enough Joseph at the time was running for the presidency of the US. This was not the only time that the Mormons were screwed over by the powers that be in their early days.

The American Indians were promised time and again that if they lay down their arms and moved in to this or that area (or out of some area) that that was all they would ever have to give up and that Treaty XYZ guaranteed their safety. But settlers and land speculators have more votes than non-citizens and they felt their 'manifest destiny' calling, knew they were on 'the right side of history' and embraced the religion of progress and when the government decided that everlasting Treaty XYZ didn't matter any more and the next wave rolled over 'their' lands and they resisted they were crushed with hardly a thought for their humanity let alone that they might have had any right on their side.

When you are trying to understand why someone thinks the way they do it works best to try and think the way they do - read the next to paragraphs not as you yourself believe but imagine that this was your own world view - you may or may not agree with it but when you are asking 'why' it helps to walk a few paragraphs in their shoes...

When your average gun owning American looks around he sees cities filled with an underclass that seems to have no trouble getting weapons and a government who seems to approve of them acting in ways that seem to them violent and barbaric. They read about the police departments (and a bunch of other non-police federal agencies) getting outfitted like well armed swat teams and watch as supposedly 'independent' federal agencies like the FBI, NSA, IRS etc seem to be politicised and weaponised against the enemies of the liberal state. They watch as the media talks as truth things they know themselves to be false and they see unassimilating minority groups dumped around them by a state that seems to give them what jobs there are while talking about their own way of life like they would be doing the world a favour if they just all up and died. They sit and watch as any two bit judge seems to think that they have veto power over both the executive branch and the elected congress and they see how the ever growing federal bureaucracies seem to take more and more to themselves and make it harder and harder to live the way they always used to not to mention doing their level best to make sure that the sitting President that they voted for is stopped from doing anything they themselves voted him in to do. They see anyone who attacks them or their way of life praised and anytime one of them dares to reciprocate or fight back demonised and that that the rules that are set over them not get applied to those who are attacking them.

They feel their voices are silenced, their government is their enemy, their institutions are corrupted, their laws are getting twisted against them, their beliefs belittled and betrayed and that the very essence of the county that their forefathers bled and died to make free is in danger of going down. If that was what you believed ... would *you* be handing in your guns and trusting the powers that be to keep promises they don't even pretend any more to make?
 
God what a senseless tragedy. The sheer scale of it is what boggles... and it could have been so much worse. Nutters are always going to kill... but the numbers are beyond belief for something so easily carried out by a single man.

The issue for a lot of Americans is not actually gun control itself - although there is a large chunk of people wedded very strongly to that argument alone. It's more about government control and intervention in their lives, a lack of trust and it all being a huge conspiracy to erode their civil liberties.

A client of mine and his family spent some time in Texas not along ago and despite being off the land here and surrounded by guns all his life he was shocked at the access to and volume of weaponry in every day life. One place he visited the property owner had semi automatic pistols on his hips, semi automatic rifles in his ute, and a whole arsenal in the house. It was a scene he said was repeated over and over to varying degrees.

So he asked quite a few about this issue and the response was pretty universal. They thought we were soft and let the government walk all over us with our buyback and they would never let it happen there. The government already had too much control, there was no way they would let them erode anymore of their rights and invade their lives even further. The guns were just the start - once they got them off them how would they stop them going even further? They spoke about their own government like it was the enemy destroying their lives. It was conspiracy and paranoia tightly bound. I've heard others say similar from various visits over there.

If that really is their logic then nothing will ever change.

Someone tweeted that in September in Chicago alone 270 odd people were killed and 500 odd injured from shootings. I think I saw 12000+ so far this year across the States.

They've become so used to it it's now all lip service. And yesterday gun company share prices rose like they do after every tragedy.

I don't like the government invading my life like it is at the moment either but bloody hell I'm sure as hell glad they do at times. It's a very very small price to pay to live where we do.
 
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/b...n-penalty-rates-pay-deal-20170922-gyn67y.html
This sort of exploitation is not uncommon in the labour market. The imbalance in our labour laws, which significantly favour employers over workers, has lead to situations like the one described in the article. We now have a labour market where wage theft, award stripping, bogus trial periods and the use of dodgy labour hire companies are rife. All this at a time of record household debt and stagnant wages growth. These are the fruits of labour market deregulation and the free market.
 

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This nbn is an absolute shambles.

Max speeds of 100mbps under perfect conditions. If I went home and did a speed test on my net now it would be 117mbps. What a joke that I have to transition into this rubbish.

Apparently speeds will be much lower than 100mbps as well.

The government had a chance to transform the way we communicate, do business, educate, innovate and host 64 player multiplayer servers and dropped the call in a big spot.

The more I read up on it the more it infuriates me.
 
My sister-in-law got hers connected last week....not one drama yet, everything went as they said it would, was all connected within 4 days.

She says the speed is quicker, but funnily enough her husband says it's not, so we reckon there can't be much difference if they differ in their opinions of it. Surely it would be very noticeable if it was lot quicker...
 
Here is the great logic. Everyone is forced to go onto the copper network. So people who have fast Telstra cable on whatever the current lines are will be forced onto the copper network and will potentially pay more for an inferior product that could be up to 1/40 of the speeds they currently get.

Madness.
 
MacMum said:
My sister-in-law got hers connected last week....not one drama yet, everything went as they said it would, was all connected within 4 days.

She says the speed is quicker, but funnily enough her husband says it's not, so we reckon there can't be much difference if they differ in their opinions of it. Surely it would be very noticeable if it was lot quicker...
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Speed can be hard to judge if you are just doing web browsing and streaming.

Downloading large files is the best way to judge, or using a speed test website.

I have had NBN for about 3 weeks now. At some times it's blazingly fast and I get close to 100mbs a second.

In peak periods though, like Friday nights it slows down a lot. Presumably because everyone in the suburb is watching Netflix.

I don't know enough about the technology but hopefully it can scale as more people come online or it is going to get very very messy.
 
TheBrownDog said:
Speed can be hard to judge if you are just doing web browsing and streaming.

Downloading large files is the best way to judge, or using a speed test website.

I have had NBN for about 3 weeks now. At some times it's blazingly fast and I get close to 100mbs a second.

In peak periods though, like Friday nights it slows down a lot. Presumably because everyone in the suburb is watching Netflix.

I don't know enough about the technology but hopefully it can scale as more people come online or it is going to get very very messy.
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Isn’t it partly dependent on providers. So a provider might buy enough bandwidth for 10 people and then sell it to 100 people. That is why they are saying the NBN is charging too much and the cost of that in real $ and speed is simply passed onto the consumer.

(I’m also a complete novice)
 
Elixuh said:
This nbn is an absolute shambles.

Max speeds of 100mbps under perfect conditions. If I went home and did a speed test on my net now it would be 117mbps. What a joke that I have to transition into this rubbish.

Apparently speeds will be much lower than 100mbps as well.

The government had a chance to transform the way we communicate, do business, educate, innovate and host 64 player multiplayer servers and dropped the call in a big spot.

The more I read up on it the more it infuriates me.
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I was on cable getting 125 or so dl speeds but now I'm on the hfc nbn and getting 96 down. The 30 Mbps loss is more than made up for with the 38mbps uploads compared to 2.5mbps. Actually being able to use all my cloud storage is a godsend. The coalition screwed it up by mandating minimum speeds of 25mbps instead of the 100 that was originally intended, but them talking about 4g/5g broadband being a threat is because they didn't give fibre to everyone and they wasted billions of dollars recommissioning the copper network that Telstra was happy to see the back of. Telstra was ready to let the copper rot in the ground for nothing until Malcolm gave it worth again and not only were they going to get paid a shit load for it they no longer had to worry about the sunk maintenance costs ever again.
 
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Caiphus said:
I was on cable getting 125 or so dl speeds but now I'm on the hfc nbn and getting 96 down. The 30 Mbps loss is more than made up for with the 38mbps uploads compared to 2.5mbps. Actually being able to use all my cloud storage is a godsend. The coalition screwed it up by managed minimum speeds of 25mbps instead of the 100 that was originally intended but them talking about 4g/5g broadband being a threat is because they didn't give fibre to everyone and they wasted billions of dollars recommissioning the cost network that Telstra was happy to see the back of. Telstra was ready to let the copper rot in the ground for nothing until Malcolm gave it worth again and not only were they going to get paid a shit load for it they no longer had to worry about the sink maintenance costs ever again.
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Plot twist. So my speeds are comparable to yours. Does that mean I am likely on ‘hfc’ and when the nbn comes in I can expect similar?
 
If you go for a 100mbps plan you will. I don't have a bad word to say about going with MyRepublic. I'm paying $60/month for unlimited 100/40 NBN and haven't had a problem. Although getting a customer service call answered takes about 20mins on hold compared to their sales department in about 3-5mins, but that is pretty much standard.

The NBN might be rolling out marginally quicker under the coalition but the original vision is so heavily compromised that their version is really a poor imitation. The need for speed probably isn't as great as what was originally forecasted (yet...) but the amount of concurrent traffic through the proliferation of online streaming platforms means that the backend is under a much heavier load than anticipated and a lot of retailers just are skating some pretty fine margins there which puts their networks under pressure during peak loads. Most of what people blame on the NBN is really the fault of the retailers over-promising and under-delivering.
 
Also, I have noticed real world download speeds from torrents and steam being the same or even higher than when I was on cable.
 
I'm a My republican too, not fibre or copper connect but connect to one of those towers. I doubt I'd get anywhere near 100 whatsies, probably around half that, & sort of recall the lady I spoke with telling me they have constant hassles with the network not being able to supply the speeds they need. Had one problem only, the rooftop,receiver got confused about which tower it was connecting to so didn't connect to any of the three closest. By the time I got through to the help dept, as you say 20 - 30 mins on hold, it sorted itself out before they had to do anything for me. $60 unlimited keeps me happy though.
 

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A thread on politics- have some balls and post

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