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Australia is becoming a surveillance state

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Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#201

Post by throwawaylinux »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #195
throwawaylinux wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, yes it is neocolonialism. And it's easy to justify by saying "in a perfect world", but we don't live in a perfect world do we so that logic is just completely flawed. "In a perfect world we would do X" does not mean that doing X in the imperfect world we live in results in a better world. It is neocolonialism because it is extracting the most valuable and profitable resources of less well off countries for your…

Let's take doctors as a specific example. Suppose we take the Phillipines and Malaysia, they (together) have about 6x the population of Australia. They have the capacity to train a lot of doctors - and a doctor can have a great life in either of those countries. They can both also produce doctors more efficiently than Australia, partly due to living costs / ppp and population size, and partly due to Baumol's disease…

What you write doesn't refute the problem which is that countries like this generally have worse health outcomes, healthcare systems, they have fewer skilled workers to build their economies.

Skimming their best resources off the top can't be justified by some dry economic formula (if it happens to be correct) that just by pure coincidence results in a worse outcome for that poorer country and a better outcome for the wealthier one. Colonialists had all sorts of economic arguments too.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#202

Post by avh02 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #37
jjgreen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These vaccination records are there already anyway They are, in the UK attached to you NHS number for example. But the question is, how you you force the non-compliant to comply? Form the set-difference of the NHS and national DBs, hunt down and inject the non-compliant? Sounds a bit police-statey to me. Or make daily life dependent on showing your NHS number? Easy to fake, so we'd need NHS photo id-cards to get a co…

> Or make daily life dependent on showing your NHS number? Easy to fake, so we'd need NHS photo id-cards to get a coffee, ... sounds a bit police-statey to me ... etc Exactly, yet this is exactly what Germany, France and Italy are doing right now. You need the QR code which contains your name / DOB + Photo ID

Officially, they don't need your PII to validate your certificate: "The personal data of the certificate holder does not pass through the gateway, as this is not necessary to verify the digital signature" [1]

That said, I've not actually looked in to how these work... In Berlin at least, it's rare to get an ID check at a restaurant, usually someone just glances at your phone.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-re...

edit: further: "The CovPassCheck app processes the QR code only in the working memory of the smartphone and does not store any data." [2]

[2] https://digitaler-impfnachweis-app.apps.public.bfarm.de/en/c...

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#203

Post by ubercore »

marcusverus wrote: post #186
hestefisk wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is nicely said. I grew up in a Western European country where I was used to most people caring about big societal issues such as health, environment, civil rights and privacy. In most European countries there is real competition between newspapers and an, at least in some places, a tradition of democratic participation. Meanwhile, in Australia, the “free press” is effectively owned by Rupert Murdoch, the…

> the government needs to make voting for federal elections compulsory in order to get people to take a stance / have an opinion (yes, you will get a fine if you don’t vote!) This seems like such a bad idea. Ideally, the democratic process taps ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and allows a society to make reasonable decisions. But all human beings are not capable of contributing to good decision making. Roughly the 15% of peop…

I think your point here would be far stronger without the intelligence argument. I don't want to tell someone they can't vote because they didn't pass an IQ test threshold.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#204

Post by partomniscient »

1337shadow wrote: post #178
partomniscient wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Since leaving Australia (and started living in Europe) I have come to the conclusion that Australia is not a "real" country - it is just a continent owned by corporate interests that happens to also have people living on it. I haven't thought of it exactly like that, but I appreciate (whilst shuddering) your take on things. I basically see it in a similar way, that its a sinking stepping stone the UK was using to ge…

> I think it'll end up more like V for Vendetta. I also love to read this kind of parallel between fiction and reality. However, when you have some experience working in defense you find out reality is more like: there's real criminal to catch, real victims to protect and to save, it's not like we have any time for non critical stuff such as going after pacific dissidents, and controlling all the medias like in V wou…

We're going backwards.

I was mainly thinking of us approaching the 'state of the nation' in the comic/movie before 'V' etc. started fighting back. Not the whole interrupted broadcast attack part.

Things have mostly worked out pretty well for Keith Rupert Murdoch, although he's getting pretty old now. Unfortunately he is nothing like 'V'.

With regards to AML: You can't tell if you're making progress if you don't have all the pieces.

Your last paragraph is nonsense and your using it to justify your own identity. Your last sentence terrifies me. It means you have no idea whats going on either and have sold out or bought in to something you don't completely understand.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#205

Post by noduerme »

mc32 wrote: post #197
noduerme wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - but also Arendt's concept of the colonist as the superfluous man, unnecessary and having no accommodation in European society, basically getting offloaded for resource extraction to remote parts of the world and falling into tribalism and illiterate degradation. Happy thought there.

How do you expect people react to something like that? There have been lots of people offloaded to far away places for resource extraction as you call it. People adapt to the demands. I think this is a borders on odd expectations of people. Going by this Irish and Chinese sent over for railroad building were superfluous people.

No, the British and French, Belgians, Dutch and Germans who went off to find wealth in the colonies were poor-er than their elder brothers who joined the landed aristocracy or the Church, but they were nothing like the Irish or Chinese who were deported or forced out by starvation. They went to the colonies with full rights - beyond the rights they had at home - to do whatever they liked. And in Africa especially, mostly what they did was rape, drink and degenerate. Which was what they would have done back home; that's why they were given one-way boat rides. That and the fact that the empires had so much money, there was no way to spend it in the home country. And so many sons there weren't enough places for them all in the bureaucracy.

But no, it's not expecting too much of people to think they might retain their civilization when they willingly and gleefully go take up ownership of a plantation in a colony. Frankly, the Irish and Chinese in America were far more civilized than the Boers ever were, because they had to be. The Boers just showed up somewhere they could act like petty gods over black people and they did, until they forgot civilization completely.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#206

Post by jlangenauer »

noduerme wrote: post #152
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to quote this bit for those too lazy to follow the link: Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.

This reminds me of Hannah Arendt's criticism of the Boers - which was sometimes taken out of context. She was just pointing out they had become a tribe of bush-wandering savages living off, but not improving the land, themselves. They had no incentive to improve the land; labor was cheap and their own lives were cheap, and they still have made nothing of the country. When I lived in Australia I was really surprised,…

I'm not sure what your problem is with using harnesses on roof work - it's basic safety equipment, and even with Australia's (very good) safety laws and (mostly good) safety culture, there's still around 50-60 people killed each year in the construction industry.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#207

Post by titzer »

L_226 wrote: post #66

Since leaving Australia (and started living in Europe) I have come to the conclusion that Australia is not a "real" country - it is just a continent owned by corporate interests that happens to also have people living on it. Corporate interests own the media, politicians, food production, education etc. and no one cares, because Life Is Good. Why expect anything to change, or people to care about strong democratic in…

My experience after having grown up in America, living in Germany 7 years, and then living almost a year in Australia, is that all those you write might be completely true, but even then, Australia is actually behind the United States in all the things you mentioned. Other than everything being redonk expensive, it's a Anglosphere paradise compared to the United States.

The US is decades ahead of Australia in terms of its descent into a corporate-owned shitshow.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#208

Post by vlasky »

L_226 wrote: post #66

Since leaving Australia (and started living in Europe) I have come to the conclusion that Australia is not a "real" country - it is just a continent owned by corporate interests that happens to also have people living on it. Corporate interests own the media, politicians, food production, education etc. and no one cares, because Life Is Good. Why expect anything to change, or people to care about strong democratic in…

Just curious - whereabouts in Europe have you lived and in your opinion, what are the best places for an Aussie expat?

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#209

Post by GekkePrutser »

shric wrote: post #99
b3n wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and get a QR code scanned at every shop, every restaurant How does this work for those who don't own a smartphone?

They'll provide a sheet of paper. For some reason since covid I always forget to bring my phone when going out in Australia

I will use the paper one too. I don't really trust the app.

With the previous covid detection apps (the covid API from Apple/Google) privacy was really a key design goal and I had no issues using that.

With these new QR apps (the EU CoronaCheck program) there was less of a focus on this. Part of that makes sense, as it's meant to identify the user's status it's not possible to be completely anonymous. But there has hardly been any info on whether the apps phone home. Also, the Apple/Google API apps from each country were almost all open source. None of that now. It's taken for granted that privacy is not a concern anymore, for some reason.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#210

Post by jlangenauer »

shric wrote: post #128
logicchains wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't expect you to understand, but in Europe, people actually care about their rights [1] That's a bit condescending. In recent weeks there were tens of thousands of people marching on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne to protest covid lockdowns and defend their right to free assembly.

Do you have a source for "tens of thousands"? I think it was fewer than 10k. Thankfully only 3,500 in Sydney out of a population of 5 million. Fortunately the vast majority of Australians aren't completely selfish and thoughtless. Nobody likes lockdowns. The government doesn't benefit from them, it's not lining some evil overlord's pockets.

I believe the governments in Australia do benefit from the lockdowns. I'm from Australia, but live in Germany, so when I look back home from here, I'm shocked by how deliberately the fear of Covid has been stoked and played up in Australia. Constantly in and out of lockdowns, daily press conferences about death and case numbers, no path out and no hope.

It feels to me that Australia will be a country suffering from PTSD once it finds a way out of the pandemic and impossible dream of zero covid.

(For comparison, here in Europe, the pandemic is largely over, and our vaccination wall is looking strong enough that even what's coming over winter shouldn't be too bad.)

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