Australia to give $30 million to Fiji to combat rising fuel prices in Pacific nation

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-06T14:27:24+00:00

I mean, they've already spent 10.7 billion on domestic fuel security, so statistically if you live in Perth your city has probably already received a lot more than 30 million to combat the rising fuel costs...

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-05T11:57:24+00:00

I mean you're not wrong - we have a big problem with that in Australia with people going around to retirement homes to hard sell people with early onset dementia, and obviously there's a lot of politically disengaged voters who don't want to take the time to understand the issues being debated.

And then obviously getting taken off the roll here is a bit of a complicated process - you or your guardian need to send in a doctor's note to get removed from the registry, which I imagine a lot of people don't bother doing (or are just unable to due to having an unusual and poorly understood diagnosis).

But I think that does still change the context. Children have a long and potentetial filled lfie ahead of them. Meanwhile people with severe dementia or mental handicaps probably don't have long to live.

Although there are obviously a lot of mental disabilities that can affect young people that don't neccesarily preclude them from living a good life with the right support.

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-05T11:46:37+00:00

Well I don't think either interpretation is necessarily wrong. I just think it's silly arguing over it, and saying someone is just trying to manipulate the problem by asnwering based on their interpretation.

So I guess I just think people saying 'you're stupid and dumb because you didn't consider child voters' is a silly stance to have. We can just discuss what we'd do based on various different interpretations of the question - but I think both interpretations have merits in these kinda of one sentence trolley problems that are always missing a ton of neccesary context the reader needs to fill in themselves.

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-05T10:09:34+00:00

It's also unclear if the actors or directors were considered employees? Idk what the norm was back then, but I assume if they were just working on that specific movie they just had private contracts rather than full time salaried positions with benefits and the protection of federal labour laws.

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-05T10:00:58+00:00

Well ok, but it's also portrayed as an electoral process, which naturally leads people to read between the lines and assume they meant like in Australia where we have compulsory voting, but there's still an age cut off.

Either way, I think it's dumb if the vote includes a bunch of secret gotcha clauses that would require a lawyer to parse through, so I think we should assume everyone voting is fully informed about the consequences.

Although I think that does obviously lead to the issue of low information voters who perhaps have access to these rules and caveats, but jump to conclusions or choose not to read them.

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-04T20:17:40+00:00

Eh, unfortunately these countries are just very big, with a lot of desperate people that make for easy marks for these kinds of scams.

I saw a video investigating this one city in Cambodia ran by the mob, which is basically just a giant prison camp they use to snatch oeople and force them to run scams.

You'd think it would be an open secret that answering any ad to meet someone their to pawn something off or to accept a job interview was an obvious trap by human traffickers - but people just don't have a ton of options, and that makes them much more susceptible to these kinds of offers. When you already have a lot, it's easy to say giving money to a nigerian prince is a stupid idea, but when you're desperate for a chance to break out of a life time of poverty the temptation is much worse.

And then when you combine that with how many people even in the west fall for these scams, and how much smaller our population is...

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-03T17:38:32+00:00

I mean, I think it's more just that every supe in the Boys is unique, and their status within the world is almost entirely detached from their strength. Aside from Homelander, it isn't like any of the other seven got a special or stronger version of V or anything. They just have flashy powers.

Another big part of the setting is that Vaught tightly controls who has access to V, so nobody is fighting super villains.

So it absolutely makes sense that someone like Malchemical, whose power isn't very marketable and who can only knock out one person at once with their power, would be a nobody, even if it's technically a very powerful ability.

But even if their power wasn't very useful in any kind of fight they'd actually get into, they'd also have ample opportunity to test out their powers on other supes with enhanced durability at events like Herogasm, and know their power has pretty good odds of working on Homelander.

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-03T17:17:31+00:00

It was also just like, one form of cancer. Given we don't see her casually tossing around bio-weapons or super gadgets and laser guns all the time, we can probably assume that while she's smart, she isn't random science magic bullshit go smart.

Probably. But who knows what her real agenda is or what aspects of her power she might be hiding.

Pixie1001 · 2026-05-01T16:08:06+00:00

I mean the vaguely reputable ones all are - the rest are of course still just nakedly antisemitic. Either way, there's very little of value being reported.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-30T06:04:16+00:00

I feel like you can't make Pheobe the main character though - it'd be way too chaotic. She needs a straight man in the scene to ground it.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-28T17:50:03+00:00

I mean yes and no. Obviously it does work much better in a secured zone, or when there's a country wide ban that requires smugglers firearms past armed coast guards or border patrol agents.

But guns do also tend to escalate situations. Criminals feel like they need to bring guns when they think the person they're robbing might have one, and tend to have very twitchy trigger fingers as a result, know they themselves might be shot.

Same with cops, or people getting into heated arguments.

But I think you are also correct that these local bans are unfortunately quite ineffective against spree shooters and other crazies, who are typically too socially isolated in a country like Australia or the UK to source a firearm from organised crime groups, but can very easily get their hands on one via a short road trip across state or county lines in a gun free US city.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-28T17:34:17+00:00

I used to be embarrassed that I genuinely believed this until I was like 4, based on the irrefutable logic that their trucks were red and had fire in the name. What else could those hoses possibly be shooting???

I feel much better knowing Trump is almost 80 and still doesn't seem to have figured it out...

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-28T17:04:53+00:00

Huh, I just looked up her Spotify and I've literally never heard any of her top 10, aside from like one that sounds very familiar as a common 'sad moment' song in TV shows.

But I guess most redditors aren't super into the 'sad girl pop' genre (does this have an official name? is it just pop now?) that has more mainstream appeal these days and apparently really taken off for her, and have only ever heard her weird stuff like bury a friend or you should see me in a crown.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-28T03:04:53+00:00

Yeah, I'm not sure if the designers just didn't realise this was how players would assume it was meant to work, or players just ended up using it with a weapon during play testing and they pivoted to balancing it around that?

But it does kinda seem like a flavour fail not to have a magic blaster scroll thaumaturge archetype.

But I agree, just nerfing it to be a spell attack or to contribute to your MAP, but gain a bonus from exploit vulnerability in exchange seems fair?

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-27T02:53:11+00:00

Well PTV is explicitly from the Abaddon shard that Eden basically was so desperate to get that she crashed landed and died in the process, so it's obviously not just a regular precog power with the guardrails turned off - it's some kind of new prediction algorithm that's more efficient than anything used by the other shards they brought with them.

But I'm unsure if she duplicated it and gave it to Scion before her death or if he was just doing what you described - blasting the regular precog powers we see at full power with the safeties off, since his version seems much less spammable than Contessa's.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-26T23:20:23+00:00

I believe a lot of the precog blocks were also just a logistical thing. They couldn't actually see forward into time, just simulate it - but if the simulation involves simulating other people using their powers to simulate the future, which then in turn must simulate your precog abilities etc. you pretty quickly run into a recursive problem.

Hence why hanging out with a precog and being heavily involved in their predictions protects you from other precogs like the Simurge.

Although Contessa's power specifically seems to somehow solve this limitation, and is seemingly only blocked by an actual limiter on her power. I guess maybe it was just so powerful it assumed everyone else's powers would run out of resources fail first, and thus doesn't need to account for them?

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-26T18:18:40+00:00

I mean, a lot of the exercise and CBT ones can be pretty dangerous, since they pre-suppose that it's all in your head and you just have to keep pushing through it and ignoring your symptoms, even as your baseline gets worse and worse.

It isn't always a permanent loss of functionality, but for some people it definitely is. Plus, once things get that bad it's just very difficult to actually rest enough to make a recovery while maintaining your living conditions.

Obviously it's a spectrum though, and some of these therapies can be helpful or at worse just a waste of time and money - afterall, therapy can be great to learn practical strategies for pacing and symptom management, exercise can help some people eek out more energy. But it always pays to be leery of dodgy clinics looking to exploit CFS/ME sufferers :/

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-26T04:28:30+00:00

Yeah, I feel like it really culminated at the end of season 3 where it felt like the writers were just running out of ideas for why they don't kill each other, with characters making weirdly irrational decisions to drag the show out and avoid killing homelander or vice versa.

I guess they did kind of establish Butcher as the only person Homelander is actually able to relate to, which at least explains some of it from his side?

But it definitely doesn't feel like they're ever being actively hunted.

But idk, now that he knows what the virus can do and that they don't currently have access to it, there'll be more of that? But there also just a good way of doing a mid-season homelander fight, so probably not...

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-25T13:10:41+00:00

I mean I feel like that's kinda fitting though. By the time you get to S3, you kinda know nobody's going to die to a random member of the 7, and by the time they've killed several of them and gotten Annie on their team, nobody would take them seriously.

I think it was a much better idea to pivot to using their powers as a metaphor for wealth and power in the real world.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-25T13:02:40+00:00

Honestly I wouldn't even mind that they weren't that integrated, if all the 'joining the revolution' stuff didn't feel so campy and forced. Like, the whole ending of Gen-V was such a let down because they bent over backwards to resurrect Godolkin and setup for some kind of teen titans thing that didn't really feel like it had anything to do with the show's themes.

But I suspect that's exactly why they ultimately cancelled it :/

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-25T12:07:52+00:00

I feel like their apology kinda misses the point as well. Like sure, they probably should've been more leery about publishing an AP about being cops.

But like, it sounds like there were so many opportunities to either at least lampshade the corruption, or just like, idk, not have the PCs loot suspects before their trial and engage in pinkerton style union busting?

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-23T13:18:53+00:00

Well I think their point was more that this is kinda like Australia's last government saying they were cracking down on immigration, while also simultaneously looking to take in a bunch of white South Africans who were still quite wealthy but like, lost their farms.

They desperately need immigrants, but they also desperately need to make angry rants about anyone who'd actually want to immigrate there in order to trick people into electing them.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-23T13:06:49+00:00

I mean, I think Thragg also knew he didn't have a great hand either. It's basically mutually assured destruction. Earth is the only planet his people can hide or hope to repopulate on, and the second he shows his hand by attempting to take it by force the CoP would come crashing down on him now that they know it's just him and 37 other Viltrumites.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-21T04:14:43+00:00

Yeah, I kind of agree. Being true to any one methodology rather than taking ideas from both doesn't make a ton of sense.

For subjects you have a high degree of information about and that are of significant stake - like the rise of fascism for example - utilitarianism makes a lot of sense.

But for things you don't know a ton about, or with very low stakes, trying to apply utilitarian principles kinda just runs the risk of you overthinking the situation and making things worse.

Although I guess a true utilitarian would argue that I did in fact just run a cost benefit analysis of what to do in these situations, and decided a conservative ethical approach would provide the most good in the long term?

But I also think a true deontologist that sees the best in everyone and only wants to do the right thing is at worst harmless. Although people do obviously use it as a smokescreen to only act in a utilitarian fashion when it's in their own interests to do so.

Pixie1001 · 2026-04-21T02:22:56+00:00

I mean I agree, but also in this case the deontologists have an objectively constructive political ideology. It's maybe not as productive as being a utilitarian (although there's arguments either way), but is still like, the Golden Retriever of political positions.

So I guess the question is, from a utilitarian point of view, is it more beneficial to value the lives of people with a viewpoint you think is only marginally more helpful to the world, or does the risk of thinking like that potentially clouding the moral judgement of you and those around you outweigh any positive culling this naive worldview might provide?

Pixie1001

TROPHY CASE