politics – dangermouse.net

Election countdown: 5 days

Five days until the Australian election. But also our friends in Canada vote today. It’s a similar story in both countries, with both incumbents being left-leaning and before Trump returned to power in the USA polling behind their respective right-leaning oppositions. But Trump has turned around the fortunes in both countries, with voters in Canada and Australia shifting away from right-wing favour, and polls in both now predicting incumbent victories. But we shall see.

Today was busy, with three online ethics classes in the morning, followed by having a quick lunch at home before racing to the train to head into the university for my teaching stint there for Data Engineering. The students are into their four weeks of working on their assessment projects (after having the last two weeks off). So I need to patrol the room seeing what students are working on, answering questions, giving advice, and so on. I was surprised that some of the student groups hadn’t yet decided on the topic of their investigation, whereas some had almost finished writing their first report!

The weather was very rainy, and I got wet walking to the station to catch the train, despite using an umbrella, because of how heavy the rain was. This rainy weather is set to continue for at least the next week as well! When I got home this afternoon we had four umbrellas drying in the bathroom – even though I live with just my wife.

I made pizza for dinner. And then had two more evening ethics classes, to round off a very busy day.

Awful Australian politics

Maybe not what you’re thinking from the title. My wife has started watching the Netflix series The Residence. It’s set in the White House and there are various political characters, including one who is repeatedly referred to as the “First Lady of Australia”. It’s clear that the writers have no idea about how Australian politics works, because the spouse of the Prime Minister has no such title and no duties anything like the role of First Lady of the United States. Can’t they do even basic research to get these things right and not annoyingly wrong?

As an aside, our current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, isn’t married, being divorced from his first wife before being elected. He has a partner, and proposed marriage last year (while Prime Minister). Their wedding is expected to follow the imminent election, now just 11 days away. If he’s returned as Prime Minister, it will be the first time an Australian Prime Minister gets married while in office.

I suppose I have another story about politics. With the election very soon, the political ads are ramping up in all media. As has become usual, many of them are scare tactic ads aimed at making voters afraid of the other major party. And one of them which I heard again today is making the point that our Opposition leader wants to make Australia “more like America”. This is enough to scare Australian voters. “That guy wants to make Australia more like America” is an effective scare message to get people not to vote for that guy. And it’s working, because the Opposition is falling behind in the polls. That tells you something about our collective opinions on the US right now.

This morning my wife took Scully to work, so I had a morning free to go for a run, and took the chance to do another 5k. The weather was chilly, with intermittent heavy showers all day, but I managed to avoid them while running.

This afternoon I wrote up my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic, which is Antarctica. There are plenty of questions about why people are interested in Antarctica, who (if anyone) should be allowed to go there, live there, own it, use mineral resources, etc, etc. I did the first class this evening and it went fairly well. It’s always tricky doing the first class of a new topic, and not knowing which questions the kids will find interesting or have strong opinions on.

Tonight we had one kid who was pretty gung-ho in favour of letting people mine Antarctica, and two who were more concerned with protecting its environment, so that was interesting!

Australian election campaign ongoing

We’re getting towards the pointy end of the current Australian federal election campaign. Election day is Saturday 3 May, so just over 2 weeks away. It was brought more strongly into my consciousness on Tuesday when we drove over to Rose Bay.

While driving along the road to get there, I noticed that in that area there were election candidate posters attached to every single streetlight pole along the road. And also posted on many buildings and fences. it was a little surprising because it’s very different to what I’ve been seeing in the area where I live. Here there are only the odd handful of signs on people’s home fences. I walk down a street with maybe 50 houses on it, and one of them has an election sign. And there are no signs posted on any public infrastructure at all. So to go to a different part of Sydney and be accosted with hundreds of signs was a bit weird.

My electorate, which was won by an independent MP at the last election, has been abolished for this election. Residents have all been assigned to one of the three neighbouring electorates in a redistribution due to geographic population changes. The old electorate was marginal, with the independent winning by 2.9%, but my new electorate is considered a safe independent seat, with the current independent MP having won the last election by more than 10%. So I guess this seat is not being as strongly fought as some others across Sydney, possibly leading to the noticeably lower level of posters around the place.

This is a very unusual election, in that one of the most pressing issues for Australian voters is foreign policy, which usually features way down the list of relevant issues. This is caused by Donald Trump and the disintegration of the USA. Voters are worried about the economic impact of foreign trade with the USA being disrupted by Trump’s policies/actions, and about the status of our military alliance. Like Canadian politics leading up to their imminent election (28 April), we’re looking to see which prospective Prime Minister will be stronger in dealing with the USA. In fact there was a debate between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton last night, and in the ABC News article about it, the very first person mentioned in the article is… Donald Trump!

Another article on the election reports that Australian trust in the USA has fallen to very low levels, with a poll finding:

only 36 per cent of Australians expressed any degree of trust in the United States to act responsibly

And while we’re at it, I’m aware of three recent incidents where Australian travellers were stopped at the US border, detained for up to 36 hours, in one case in moved to a prison rather than just detained at the airport, and deported. Immigration lawyers are now warning Australians about the risks of travelling to the USA and advising anyone travelling there to use a burner phone, and print out bank statements and detailed itineraries to produce if demanded by US officials.

So while domestic issues such as housing affordability and inflation are on Australians’ minds heading into the election, foreign policy is playing an unusually large part this election.

Not much else to report today, it was a routine day of online classes and some time spent writing comics. I took a walk to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, as she took her in to work with her today. I got rained on along the way by a sudden shower. And I made pasta with a simple zucchini tomato sauce for dinner.

Completely forgot about yesterday’s post

Ooops! I intended to write a blog post yesterday, but I just completely forgot. It was a busy day. I had two ethics classes starting early at 8:00 am – an hour earlier than last week because of the daylight saving change on the weekend. This also meant that my 12:00 class—that I’d temporarily shunted to Tuesdays because it didn’t give me enough time to get into university for the Data Engineering lecture—could now be moved back to 11:00 on Monday. So I had that class too. Then I had one hour to take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on a train into the city and pick up some lunch on the way before the lecture.

This was the last lecture with new material, talking about complex systems and agent-based modelling. We have two weeks off now for the mid-semester vacation and then the Easter Monday public holiday, followed by four weeks of student project work tutorials.

When I got home, I made pizza for dinner and then had two more ethics classes in the evening, which chewed up the rest of the day.

Today we had some rain and cooler weather, which was nice. I wrote my new ethics class topic, on “Brands and Trademarks”. With some interesting questions like:

Should I be able to start a business called McDonald’s:
• that does shoe repair?
• that sells pizza?
• that sells burgers?
• if my surname is McDonald?
If I do start a shoe repair shop called McDonald’s, should I be allowed to advertise it with a red and yellow sign saying “McDonald’s”?

I also made some slides to show the kids with illustrative photos of businesses with modified names, and this took a while. So it took me longer to write this class than usual, and I didn’t get around to doing much else during the day.

Scully is finished her medication for her bloody poops last week, and seems to be fully recovered, so that’s good news. There was some other test the vet did which also came back negative. So we don’t really know what the problem was – probably some sort of gastro-intestinal infection I guess.

In other news, the Australian election campaign is progressing. Prime Minster Albanese is firming up in the opinion polls, while opposition leader Dutton is falling behind. At least part of this is the “Trump factor”, with Australian voters recoiling from conservative politics due to the destructive antics of Donald Trump in the USA. Dutton was initially a few weeks ago expressing a need for some Trump-like policies, such as reducing the size of the federal government, but this has backfired badly and he’s had to backpedal and change his tune. So if anything good can come from Trump, I’m hopeful that it makes Australian voters head for a more progressive choice, n the same way it appears to be doing in Canada.

Scully improving, economy not

Scully is doing better today, not having to poop five times like the past couple of days. Although she did wake me up before 6am for the first one of the day. Her blood test results came back negative for anything nasty, which is good. And she seems to be responding to the antibiotics and probiotic paste.

The other thing I want to comment on today is the insanity of the global tariffs that Donald Trump announced today that the US will impose on almost all other countries. The highlights (or lowlights), for posterity:

The weird magic numbers that they came up with on that chart for “Tariffs charged to the USA” are not actually tariffs in any sense of the word whatsoever. Many people have worked out where the numbers came from: They are the country’s trade deficit with the USA for 2024 divided by the value of US imports from that country.
Countries with a trade surplus with the US (such as Australia, whose calculation as above came out to a whopping -107%) are still getting slapped with a 10% tariff. For no apparent reason, even given Trump’s bizarre (and incorrect) notion that a trade deficit is a “bad thing”.
The list includes some sub-national entities, such as Norfolk Island, a part of Australia, which mysteriously got a contradictory 29% tariff despite Australia getting 10%.
Another part of Australia, the territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, got listed separately, with a tariff of 10%, despite it being uninhabited and having no imports or exports.
They also announced a tariff on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose only population is a joint US/UK military base. So effectively the US has announced a tariff on its own military forces.

There’s only so much bewildered headshaking one can do in response to this madness. And not only is it uneducated and random, it’s going to actively destroy the US economy, as well as having negative effects on everyone else. As one of my friends put it in a group chat today:

It’s a bit like when a bunch of countries [implemented] sanctions to punish Russia so other countries can’t trade with them without penalties, except the US is doing it to itself.

I just have no more words I can add to that.

Finding a new Path, and Working Carriages

Friday was online games night, and one of my friends was again running a Pathfinder roleplaying game for us. The previous session was a one-shot to test out the virtual tabletop and playing online, but last night was the beginning of an ongoing campaign. I had a fresh first level character, a halfling druid named Osric “Stormy” Mossfoot.

The general setup was that the PCs all came from separate areas around a village and were there for their own purposes. I was investigating a vague feeling that something wasn’t right with the forest. We met our fellow PCs by taking a common interest in assisting a distraught young woman who was lamenting breaking up with her boyfriend, after a night-time tryst in the forest, where they witnessed some mysterious motes of light rising from the forest floor. This seemed to have affected the young man, changing his personality and causing him to ignore the woman.

We investigated his house, which turned out to be the home of his parents, wealthy jewellers, who were almost alarmingly welcoming. They said he’d got up that morning and headed off east. The only building to the east was an abandoned church, which we poked around in enough to determine that the ground floor and cellar were both so dust choked that clearly nobody had been in either for years.

We convinced the young woman to accompany us into the forest and show us their trysting spot, ominously named “Nana’s Grave”. As we approached, we had to fight a few shambling zombie-like creatures, overgrown with vines. And as I used one of my druid spells, we witnessed motes of light rising from the ground! With the zombies defeated we approached nana’s grave itself, only to find a six-foot deep hole in front of the headstone. There were also a couple of other similar combats. The woman mentioned there was an abandoned cottage that belonged to Nana nearby, and we took a look there. There was nothing on the ground floor, but we found a trap door leading down to a dark cellar… And there we paused play for the evening until next session!

Early on Friday I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Fresh figs were cheap, so I got a pack of those, and when I had some later they were really delicious. And I had four ethics classes during the day before the gaming.

Today the weather forecast was dismal, up to 90 mm of rain, with very heavy falls. I went for a 5k run anyway, in the steady rain around 9am, since I hadn’t done a run for two weeks because we were in New Zealand last weekend. It was cooler than other recent runs, so actually not that bad. Just very wet.

After a shower and changing into dry clothes, my wife and I drove over to Carriageworks Farmers Market, braving the rain with Scully. This market is fairly fancy, with a lot of stalls selling “gourmet” produce and foods. I got a trout and horseradish pie to eat for lunch, and a strawberry cheesecake babka as a sweet treat afterwards. We also bought some vegetables, including some special “Queen May” potatoes for roasting up for dinner tonight.

Along with the potatoes we roasted sweet potato, pumpkin, and some spiced chick peas. And just steamed some broccolini to go with it and provide some greens.

The rain eased off after lunch too, rather than intensifying as we expected. So we managed to take Scully for an evening walk without getting too wet – it was a very light sprinkle by then.

And in other news, the Prime Minister called the next Australian federal election yesterday. We go to the polling stations on 3 May.

Cooler after hot weekend

Not much to talk about today. Thankfully that cool change came through after midnight and dropped the temperature a lot. Today was much more pleasant and comfortable.

I did some ethics classes online in the morning, then headed into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was about data presentation, including tables and graphs.

While there I saw posters up on noticeboards about an anti-Donald-Trump protest rally to be held at the university on Thursday. I don’t know how many people in the USA are aware of this, but people in other countries are organising anti-Trump protests – that’s how awful him and his actions as US President are. And I’ve got to say, a lot of us are wondering where are the protests in the USA? Why aren’t there millions of people cramming the streets? Why haven’t New York and Washington and Los Angeles ground to a halt? Because from here it looks like Americans are okay with the destruction of democracy and society there.

I know a lot of Americans aren’t okay with it. In fact probably all of you who might be reading this. But, like, why isn’t anything happening about it? We’re over here in Australia boycotting US goods and organising protests, and the USA is just radio silence.

More photos from Tokyo: Shibuya

Friday night was online games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning. I order non-perishable stuff online for pick-up since it’s quicker, but I select fruit and vegetables by hand when I’m doing the pickup after some bad experiences with the produce that the supermarket picked for me the first few times.

Anyway, I normally buy an orange every week to go into a fruit salad that I use to top my breakfast muesli. But oranges are seasonal and when they’re not in season here in the southern hemisphere, like now, Australia imports oranges from the USA. But with all of the recent stupid/evil things that the Trump administration is doing over there, I decided it would be a good idea not to buy anything from the USA where I can avoid it. I’ve been keeping up with the news especially about Canada, how Trump threatened to annex Canada, and the resulting widespread disaffection with the US and boycotting of US goods by Canadians.

Trump hasn’t threatened Australia as directly, but he did in the past week initiate high tariffs on Australian imports. Which in economic terms makes no sense whatsoever, since Australia has a fairly large trade deficit with the USA, so any reduction in trade is only going to hurt the USA more than it hurts us. Probably exacerbated by the fact that politically savvy Australians like me will boycott American products, and because of the imbalance in trade even a small percentage reduction in Australian imports will have a much larger relative effect on the US than the relatively small amount of exports we make to the US. Most of our exports are to Asia, so Trump’s tariffs aren’t even really going to hurt us very much. It’s just crazy that he’s bullying a much smaller economy in a way that actually hurts the US more than us.

But hey, the more countries that stand up to this monster, hopefully the faster we’ll get to whatever action it will be that eventually stops this freight train to madness and starts returning the USA to a normal country.

At lunch on Friday I took Scully for a walk and got some fish & chips. It was a warm day, but thankfully my favourite lunch spot overlooking the harbour now has new tree growth near the seating to provide some shade.

After some ethics classes I had dinner with my wife up at the local Greek restaurant. It was a sultry evening, and dining al fresco is kind of nice, though honestly it would have been nice if it was a little cooler. We’re having a mini-heatwave covering Friday and the weekend. Overnight minimum temperatures are around 24°C, with high humidity around 90%. Today we had 32°C maximum, and tomorrow is forecast to be 37°C.

This meant my 5k run this morning was pretty awful. It was 25°C and 82% humidity at 9am, and my running was really sluggish. I recorded the slowest time I’ve run since 2021! I fear tomorrow morning will be even worse.

Today I stayed inside as much as possible, working on Darths & Droids, and some more photos from my trip to Japan. For dinner I made fusilli alla norma, with roasted eggplant cubes and a tomato sauce.

Today I processed photos from Shibuya on Tokyo. The famous Shibuya scramble corssing:

Shibuya Scramble Square, the building on the top of which is the Shibuya Sky observation platform:

A view of Tokyo from the top:

Looking north to the centre of Tokyo with the sun going down:

Major urban redevelopment plans

I said yesterday nothing could prevent Australia from losing the first cricket Test to India, and that was borne out today. India won by 295 runs, a massive victory. So India take a 1-0 lead in the series, with four games to play. It’s very hard to see Australia coming back in any way, so comprehensive was the thrashing.

Today, the New South Wales government released plans for redevelopment of several zones around Sydney, including an area close to where I live. There’s already some major construction work going on very close to us, which I’ve mentioned before. Several blocks of single detached houses have been demolished and construction is underway on apartment blocks up to 15 or so storeys tall.

Here’s a render of the full development proposal. (© State of New South Wales, released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.)

The white additions are buildings already approved and/or under construction (including the ones I mentioned above). The blue buildings are the newly proposed developments, including the semi-transparent tower in the foreground. Almost all of these sites currently are one or two storey buildings, so it’s a huge increase in the height of buildings in the area. The plan says this will add 5900 new homes (all apartments, I think) to the area. I guess that’s about 15,000 extra people living in the immediate area.

Oh, and some of our favourite places are slated for demolition and redevelopment under this plan. Our favourite pizza place. A slew of other restaurants we’ve frequented over the years. I don’t think there’s any chance this won’t go ahead. Government plans at this stage tend to be inevitable.

I guess we just have to live through it and see how it turns out.

New content today:

Yeah, that happened

Much of the day I had the TV on with updates from the US election. Enough said.

I spent time composing Irregular Webcomic! strips with the photos I took yesterday. I took Scully for a walk at lunch and had some fish & chips, sitting in my favourite lookout spot overlooking the harbour.

The day was hot and the air was a bit grey with pollution unfortunately. We’re supposed to have two more hot days, around 30°C or a bit over, before a cool change for the weekend.

I also started the marking work for the university image processing final assessment reports. I need to get those done in the next week or so.

New content today: