Well that's terrifying

Edit - this is in DuckDuckGo, which has an option to enable App Tracking Protection (Android only feature). In the past hour it's blocked hundreds of attempts from Google to track my data from non-Google apps. I won't tell you what the data is because it's genuinely horrifying, but you can find it in the thread below.

1. Replace workers with AI.
2. Now instead of wages you pay a company for AI services.
3. Despite the likely decline in quality of the work, suppose you become dependent as a company on this service. Suppose you make it work.
4. AI is heavily subsidized by venture capital, its priced lower than the cost to provide the service to attract early adopters (and to lock companies like you in.)
5. Inevitably the AI bubble bursts, AI services jack up their prices.

How is paying rent better than wages?

I regularly see conservatives (and even some progressives) overseas attack Australia’s “compulsory voting” system as backwards, wrong, even authoritarian. And then there’s the preferential voting system rather than first past the post.

But shit, election times for me (even when candidates or parties I vote for don’t win) are a great reminder about how damn good our system is.

The joy of compulsory voting is the onus it puts on the government: if you make voting mandatory, the government HAS to enable every voter having a chance to vote. Is it perfect? No system is, but it’s pretty damn good.

And preferential voting rather than first past the post. The joy of that is that your vote continues to count even if your preferred candidate didn’t win. Instead of Jimmy Bumblefuck representing the “Make Donkeys The Australian National Emblem” party winning because they got 20.5% of the vote and that was the highest primary vote, you keep allocating preferences *that were assigned by the voters* when someone didn’t get a clear majority, until someone *does* get a clear majority.

And don’t get me started on the bloody joy of the Australian Electoral Commission: independently running the election, independently sorting out seat boundaries all the time. The fact that a sitting MP, regardless of whether they’re a government minister, an opposition minister or any other independent can suddenly find themselves without a seat because the boundaries have been redrawn to take into account population shifts as neutrally as possible is just the way democracy should work.

Australia: we fuck up a lot of things, and there’s a whole lot we can do better, but we actually get elections pretty right.