One topic that often gets discussed when it’s near election time is whether clubs and societies should be “political”. Some organisations are limited in what they can do, for example in some jurisdictions religious organisations can theoretically lose their tax exempt status if they advocate for one party. In practice any organisation that has a […]
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There has been a lot of discussion recently about the concept of a Basic Income (Wikipedia), largely due to the efforts to change the Swiss constitution to provide a Basic Income [1]. The concept of a Basic Income is that residents get a fixed payment without having to be sick, disabled, looking for work, or […] There’s been an ongoing news issue related to the NSA that I’m not going to directly comment on, Charles Stross has one of the more interesting comments about it [1]. One of his major points is that any success at government secrecy relies on the type of work environment that existed 40+ years ago. Corporatism […] Seven hours ago I was handing out how to vote cards for the Greens at the 2013 Australian Federal election. I was hoping that either we would have a Labor/Greens coalition or an outright majority for Labor. Unfortunately we got a Liberal majority in the lower house and it looks like some extreme right […] Today I was in the center of Melbourne and I saw two stands run by Muslims advocating their faith. They had a selection of DVDs and brochures to give away and seemed friendly enough for anyone who wanted a chat. I think that this is a good thing, if the majority of the Australian population […] Brianna Laugher wrote a blog post about the speaking stack used in the free software activism BoF at LCA 2013 [1]. Occupy Wall St uses what they call a progressive speaking stack – this means that white men step back in the queue and people from marginalised groups step forward [2]. During the free software […] Rusty wrote an insightful post titled “What Can I Do To Help?” about reactions to new ideas [1]. He suggests that people make an effort to have a positive approach when someone talks about a new idea, it’s quite common for people to point out reasons why the new idea might not work out which […] Care2 has an interesting article about people being offended by a picture of a poor Afro-American boy using an iPad [1]. It seems that people object to poor people having what is in many ways the greatest educational tool available because it can also be seen as a status symbol. I wonder if one of […] After a lecture at LCA 2011 included some inappropriate slides there was a long discussion on several mailing lists about the issues related to this. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in question [1]. Of course the matter didn’t end there, at LCA 2012 I was drawn […] I own two mobile phones at the moment, I use a Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod [1] (Android 2.3.7) for most things, and I have a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 running Android 2.1 that I use for taking photos, some occasional Wifi web browsing, and using some applications. Comparing Android Hardware The hardware for the […] |
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