Norman Swan apologising for behaving exactly like you expect Norman Swan to behave.

https://twitter.com/guardiannews/status/1592656644659363840

After acknowledging that he helped screw up Australia's vaccine rollout by causing Astra Zeneca hesitancy, and then performing posthumous COVID diagnoses on Kimberley Kitching and Shane Warne, a wise head might decide to take an introspective sabbatical to get some perspective.

For some people, it's important to lean-in to a gnawing sense of low level anxiety; to gain social validation by being the person responsible for issuing the warnings. During my lifetime, the low-level anxieties have included nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse, economic collapse (multiple times). They eked two entire decades out of terrorism, including several wars that included their own little fear-based ecosystems.

Silly airline story: Last year, Cathay closed their Australian base. Few hundred pilots plus flight attendants, caterers, freight handlers, etc lost their jobs.

Some were offered transfers, though. #avgeek In the airline industry, outfits like Cathay are dream gigs. They only fly international in big jets. Their smallest aircraft is an Airbus 330. A pilot flying charter in Piper Navajo or Cessna Caravan hits the big league with Cathay, straight onto the flight deck of a heavy. /2

Hi, everyone.

Just briefly: Speaking as a man here. Cis, hetero, one Y chromosome, he/him pronouns, the kind of person the Daily Telegraph knows is male.

Li'l secret: (whisper) We all know sexism is bad. All of us. No mystery, no drama, we know it's shit. /1 We even see systemic sexism, the kind that's built into the fabric of society and which well-regarded feminists say is hidden, but needs to be exposed. It mostly doesn't really need to be exposed, that's giving us too much benefit of the doubt.

We already see it. /2

I've never seen a photo of Lex Greensill until now, and my god he looks the part. @trashfuturepod abc.net.au/news/2021-03-0… For those who've never heard of him before: Lex Greensill specializes in "supply chain finance."

What does that mean? /2

For years now, I have been saying that the ALP's problem is that it has no idea why it exists; And with no underlying values to inform its direction, it defaults to, "Everyone keeps voting Liberal, if we're more like them they'll vote for us too!"

"Hey look! New front bench!" /1 Across those years, leader after leader, election loss after election loss, I've pointed to places where the ALP's deliberate premeditated failures have served Liberal policy: Welfare cuts, creation of concentration camps, tax cuts, making strikes illegal, the list goes on. /2

It's incredibly hard to become a customer of @Telstra so you can give them money. They absolutely despise money, and do everything in their power to erect as many obstacles as possible in the way of a normal person establishing a billing relationship with them. First: "I'd like to buy a 4G WiFi hotspot please."
"Umm, we don't have any. Maybe try K-Mart."

Are you serious? You can't sell me a mobile broadband service, and you'd prefer me to go to a department store. Okay...

So here are things that are 100% true in Australia right now, which you can use to adjust your understanding of the Prime Minister's behavior. /1 1. Whether or not a State border is open is the exclusive constitutional purview of the State in question. If Queensland or Tasmania or WA want to keep closed, that's their prerogative, and the Feds don't get a look-in. /2

There's been a lot of verbiage about whether the COVIDsafe app works. There's one aspect that's been missed, though. /1 To date, COVIDsafe data has been accessed more than 300 times, and it has not yielded any contact information that hadn't already been yielded by manual contact tracers. /2

Avgeek story time.

Three and a half years ago, I was in the USA, and a mate who lives there, whose day job is flying the big orange firefighting AirCranes everyone calls “Elvis,” invites me for a Saturday of flying in his RV-8. So Rob flew down from his house in Oregon to pick me up at Palo Alto, California, and we nipped off to his friend’s house, on an airpark near Fresno.

This is absolutely not @murpharoo’s best work. Right out of the first paragraph she’s presenting #robodebt as a “mistake” rather than a deliberate strategy. Also exemplifies a press gallery fetish of prioritizing voices of authority figures over facts. theguardian.com/australia-news… @murpharoo It’s funny because @murpharoo often says the facts are important, but she spent four years missing that basic year 7 maths says #robodebt averaging could not POSSIBLY be right, but maintained a “deep respect” for institutions doing it regardless.

There’s something that troubles me about the likes of @AmyRemeikis (and occasionally @murpharoo and others) reacting to parliamentary politics as if it’s “batshit insane.” It isn’t, and it lets some genuine bad actors off the hook to pretend it is. @AmyRemeikis @murpharoo I know it’s a kind of syntactic shorthand, but it’s still wrong. The people involved, and the politics they’re pushing, are completely sane and not at all batshit.

When I first switched to the #NBN, I was sceptical. HFC doesn't exactly have the best reputation, after all; Who wouldn't be? There was also the fact that @NBN_Australia delayed my rollout for a year over HFC quality issues. Hmm... Installation appointment day rolled around and ... nope. Nobody turned up. No phone call, no SMS, no nothing; I had cleared by calendar of meetings and stayed home for a day on the expectation that I might not have internet access, and NBNco was a no-show. Not a great start.

This morning’s ridiculous tweet from @albomp is emblematic of @AustralianLabor’s inability to advocate for anything “good” because they’ve abandoned any semblance of moral authority on basically every serious issue.

https://twitter.com/AlboMP/status/1191119614727483392

@AlboMP @AustralianLabor The ALP can’t advocate for a freedom to protest, because ALP Premier Palaszczuk showed them exactly what the ALP thinks of the right to protest in Queensland Parliament last week, and ALP Premier Andrews used the police in Victoria to double down. Albanese has nothing to say.

Why is your network so fundamentally hopeless, @NBN_Australia? Why, when *your* Arris cable model resets several times per day, do you need RSPs to do the legwork for investigation and fault-finding? Why don't you have your own telemetry about how bad your access network is? #nbn @NBN_Australia You, @NBN_Australia, have a complete holistic picture of your complete HFC cable network plant. But you let repeated long-run faults linger basically forever, shunting the responsibility back on RSPs, when it's OBVIOUSLY your problem to fix, your fault.

11 Sep 2019 was last month. 18 years since the twin towers and Pentagon attacks, American teenagers can now legally join the armed forces to get shipped off to the Middle East to avenge acts that were carried out before they were born. Semper fi, motherfuckers. /1 In the next few years, the last World War 2 veteran will die. At that point, there'll be nobody alive in the United States who has personal experience of fighting in a war they've won. /2

We have a neoliberal consensus in Australia. Both governing parties want low taxes, privatisation, restricted govt services, user-pays, and a tax and transfer system that rewards capital. The two major parties differ mostly in who they hate. The Libs hate trade unions and immigrants. The ALP hates trade union _members_ and unemployed people (traditional party of workers never had anything to offer people who don’t work). Both hate refugees and disabled people.

Important question, @TimWattsMP: in 2019, Information Technology is absolutely crucial for interacting with civil society, including government services. But govt agencies, using 1990s thinking, have outsourced it (incompetently) as “non-core business.” How will your govt fix it? @TimWattsMP There is no longer any realistic expectation that the govt can reliably and competently deliver services, because it all relies on poorly executed outsourced IT, and the APS is too de-skilled to manage the contracts (so they sometimes outsource contract management — poorly!)

Many years ago, @qantas used to run cadetships where they trained new pilots in airline ops in exchange for several years of bonded work. Now trainees pay for it themselves, owing Qantas up to $150k in VET-FEE debt, effectively paying for a job. australianaviation.com.au/2018/08/pilot-… @Qantas As a result, airline careers are pretty unattractive now. No 22 year old wants a $150,000 debt hanging over them when they’re not financially established and don’t even have a guarantee of work. So @qantas has been running out of pilots.