That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!
Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.
Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.
And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.
As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.
Same boat mate - Aussie govt employee myself who has access to flex. Personally I felt it was better when I was working for an NGO and they always gave me the choice between being paid overtime or banking it to flex later. It was nice to get the extra cash when I needed it and extra leave when the time came too. That should be the standard the employee should have the choice between OT or extra leave.
I think a good way of calculating their sentence should be in lost Franc-years. That is, calculate all of the lost wages they didn’t pay and force them to serve as many years as that amount would make in minimum wage. If they paid one staff member 1/12 of the minimum wage for one year, then that’s 11 months of gaol. If they paid 10 staff members 1/12 of the minimum wage for one year, that’s 9 years gaol. Take from them (in time) what was stolen from their workers. That’s the only way they’ll understand what they’ve stolen, because they have no value of a dollar, rupee, euro or franc.
I’m with you here, mate. My workplace went 100% remote during COVID and has only gone back to mandating five days per month back in the office and honestly? I think we’d do better with a mandated two days in the office and three days at home per week, mandating days where our team can all work together. I’m a social worker in an intake/assessment/referral position, and I desperately miss being able to look over my shoulder and debrief my case or gain some peer consultation on how best to manage the case I’m on. The one day I’m in I’m almost alone and gain barely any benefit from being in the office.
We have a fair few physically disabled colleagues, for whom I’d recommend a no-limits flexibility working arrangement that works for them, but for those of us who are physically able I think a 2/3 split would work far better. Our attrition rates have gone right up since COVID despite previously having some of the highest retention rates in our Department, and I can’t help but think that some of that is due to us being isolated while needing to rely on one another from time to time.
It’s really sad these days that “my algorithmic feed didn’t show me an article about this thing” has become equated with “no one is talking about this thing”. So many of us live in our little bubbles but still think that it’s fifty years ago and we all read the same three newspapers. We get fed different content based on what we consume; that’s a fact of modern media. If you want to know what’s out there, you need to search for it.
I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.
Yeah I’ve never really bought into the whole ‘but they’re the only stable choice’ argument as that’s the exact thinking that leads you to a two-party system. Multiparty rule is far better than majority rule in my opinion as it represents far more discrete circumstances simultaneously. Personally I’m in favour of scrapping parties altogether, but that’s a far deeper rabbit hole.
That’s interesting, because “the apple doesn’t/didn’t fall far from the tree” is a known Anglophonic saying that basically means that a child turned out a lot like a parent (gender not necessarily specified). I wonder if one is a calque of the other.
…does the chicken’s power level need to be over 9000 in order to be safe to eat?
There are differing schools of thought regarding the vast amount of deities in Hinduism. One school, which is what most outsiders are aware of, is that each god is individual from one another and they have varying domains, powers and relationships, much like the ancient Roman and Greek gods. Another school suggests that all of the different gods are expressions of a singular God, much as how Christianity has the Holy Trinity who are three separate beings (Lord, Jesus, Holy Spirit) that are also simultaneously one being.
You’ll find that oftentimes outside of the context of a puja or a religious holiday Hindu people will often just refer to ‘God’ rather than a specific deity e.g. “Thank God” rather than “Thank Durga” or “God is watching over you” and not “Ganesh is watching over you”. I’m not sure if this reflects their school of thought on mono/polytheism or is just language simplification, but from what I’ve gathered from Indian communities here in Australia the ‘many gods; one God’ idea seems to be pretty prevalent.
donated blood for a few dollars
If they were paid for it then it’s not a donation - it’s a sale. They sold their blood. I get that that sounds weird, but it’s accurate. That’s why in Australia it’s illegal to give any financial or other incentives for blood, so it truly makes it a donation.
His work is important to study from an historical perspective in order to see how psychology grew into what it is today, in the same way that it’s important that we learn about outdated concepts like tabula rasa and phrenology in order to better understand what is correct. The fact that he applied so much of his own subjective thoughts to his brand of psychology shows us how we, as potential future psychologists, also have the same capacity to search for confirmatory evidence and eschew disproving evidence in search of a theory. He’s a great example of what not to do when it comes to psychology.
I’m often torn when talking about how to vote in US elections because you guys have to balance ideology with the need to be pragmatic far more due to the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system. The only way that Democrats get a serious signal that they need to move left is by voting for far-left candidates, even those who aren’t on the ballot, but that runs the risk of handing the election to the Republicans.
Y’all seriously need some Ranked Choice (RC) voting. I have never once voted for a major party number 1 in any election I’ve participated in, and that’s never caused my vote to be ‘wasted’ like it can be under FPTP. Mandatory voting would really help too - it would expose the fact that Republicans only make up around 30% of all people and they’d never be able to govern outside a coalition ever again.
I firmly believe that if the US got rid of the primary elections and implemented both RC and mandatory voting, we’d be nearing the end of Bernie Sanders’ second term right now.
It’s also not an exclusive situation: that is, selling to the Global South doesn’t in any way impede or prevent their sales in developed nations. It’s just an extra source of income. Sure, they’re making less money per unit sold, but less extra money is better than no extra money. Aggressively marketing to these countries also helps prevent local companies from creating their own competitive products, which protects Nestle’s global dominance interests.
Suffice to say that the list of reasons they would want to do this is long while the list against is very short.
Particularly nuclear fusion, which doesn’t generate long-lived radioactive isotopes as byproducts of energy production. Nuclear fission still has a place to be sure, but once we crack the dilemmas with fusion all bets are off when it comes to generating huge amounts of clean energy.
Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.
That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.
Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!