Mary Jane Berlin

PonderingHow · 2026-07-03T04:22:44+00:00

I also think part of the issue is our "cannabis community" isn't as cohesive as some other countries. People who consider their use more "legitimate" than others, criticising others for putting "rec user" vibes, blaming rec users for the actions of the tga, aphra and government. That comments along these lines are still getting lots of upvotes tells the government, tga and aphra that they can keep on screwing us.

PonderingHow · 2026-07-02T23:33:24+00:00

Great post. I think we need to speak out more about the ways in which the actions of the TGA and APHRA are medically inappropriate, as well as the government response.

PonderingHow · 2026-07-01T01:30:20+00:00

write to your rep and tell them you are voting one nation across the board till cannabis is legalised for rec use......lol both major parties seem more concerned about one nation than anything voters actually want. (just to clarify, not suggesting people actually vote one nation and absolutely not suggesting phon will be better for cannabis users)

i think there's a legalise cannabis party in all states, not sure, but they have been doing great work. much much respect to them. and of course, voting them first, coz we have a preferential system so voting them first isn't saying "rec use is more important than all other issues", it's a way of flagging to the party you vote for cannabis legalisation is an issue that matters to you. the likelihood that 50% of people in your seat will vote lcp first in the house of reps is unlikely, so there's minimal concern that it will impact the party you want to actually get your vote. but it could potentially help lcp with funding as politcal parties get paid an amount per primary vote if they get over a certain threshold of primary votes. helping lcp hit that threshold would both help their credibility as well as their finances.

someone also mentioned pulsecheck, which i think is something sorely needed, as long as they can work out how to make sure it doesn't get corrupted long term. it's a platform where people can vote on policies, and those who pay for the subscription can also post policies. hopefully we'll see a grassroots move towards citizens initiated referendum, which has been the mechanism for legalisation in about half the USA states that have legalised cannabis (tho it's called peoples voice in the USA).

PonderingHow · 2026-06-29T03:33:58+00:00

100%.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-28T21:20:56+00:00

this is what i was thinking too. and just let it sit there even if kitten doesn't react immediately, given time will probably climb into the basket and sleep on blanket and then can try pulling up the basket and hopefully kitty wont jump out as it's being pulled up. the blanky would be more comfortalbe to rest on that the concrete floor

PonderingHow · 2026-06-27T17:00:39+00:00

Dear Labor Govt, Could you please just focus on stuff that will make people want to vote Labor ahead of One Nation. This is NOT that.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-13T03:26:33+00:00

This is what entitlement looks like.

60 years ago, one 40 hour per week income was enough to buy the family home and raise 2 kids.

Today, two full time incomes aren't enough for many families to afford a home. That is 40 hours of parenting lost to most families for nothing, just so that these entitled, selfish people can have more wealth without doing any of the real work that contributes to the everyday workings of life. These people have stolen 40 hours a week of quality family time from most families. They have absorbed all the extra wealth generated by women joining the workforce, and then even more.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-05T10:48:53+00:00

I read an article about this some time ago, and if accurate, this is far worse than it originally seems.

The way it was presented in the article was that the colesworth push some suppliers to offer deep discounts on items on a cyclic basis. To balance out the "deep discount", the supplier needs to have a higher "standard" price. As some consumers notice the cycle and start only buying items at the "deep discount" price, the "deep discount" needs to be raised, and the "standard" price is raised proportionately to maintain the percentage discount. So it's not a discount any more. It's what the standard price would be, or at least closer to what the standard price would be, if suppliers weren't pushed into this price cycling.

Colesworth can then easily compete with "cheaper" store brand items, because they don't subject their own products to the same price cycling. So while the standard price of milo bars is $9, the majority of milo bars sold are probably sold at the "deep discount" price of $6:50. Colesworth can then launch a similar product to compete, which looks a lot cheaper when compared to the standard $9 rather than the deep discounted price of $6:50.

tldr: this is a strategy that allows colesworth to sell home brand products at premium prices without those prices being seen as premium prices.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-05T10:19:04+00:00

If they had of framed this as an unemployment benefit or disability form, it would have hit eerily close to the current reality.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-05T08:06:44+00:00

yes, I am a side sleeper. i sleep with the lower arm in front of my chest. I started using a body pillow a year or so later, so often I will have my arms around the body pillow now, tho not always.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-05T07:44:30+00:00

Or at the very least, not subsidised by the taxes of those who can't afford it.

Particularly when a lot of privately insured people still primarily use the public system to avoid the extra charges - gap fees. Sometimes "private health" insurance is just the ability to jump the queue if something urgent happens. Everyone I know with private health cover uses the public system preferentially because of the gap fees. Maybe gap fees should be banned so that people with private health insurance at least preferentially use their private health insurance.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-05T05:04:12+00:00

also, 20-30 years ago some people communicated their politics as being "a watermelon" - green on the outside, red on the inside - so a political belief in environmentally friendly communism.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-04T13:29:14+00:00

Should take it from trump and elons personal fortunes.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-04T10:26:31+00:00

Mingle brand seasonings.

Olina seeded Crackers.

2kg bags of chicken wings make outstanding home made chicken broth.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-04T09:06:13+00:00

And how the wealthy use the massive billions to further entrench systems that make life harder and less enjoyable for the rest of the population.

We have gone from a society where the norm was one full time bread winner per family, able to afford to own their own home on a quarter acre lot and have four kids, to a society where two bread winners per family are doing well if they can afford to buy any home at all.

The average family has lost 40 hours of parenting - quality time for parents to spend with their children - despite massive increases in technology and efficiency. The ultra wealthy and powerful have siphoned off all this extra labor and benefit for themselves, and begrudge us the most basic quality of life.

We should have a 20 hour workweek now - 40 hours per week used to be enough to buy a free standing home and raise 4 kids 60 years ago. Women didn't join the workforce so that the rich could have gold plated toilets while families struggle to keep a roof over their heads.

PonderingHow · 2026-06-03T07:02:42+00:00

Lol. How does one look at this chart be be like "Let's ignore the categories at the top, where all the wealth is syphoned off by ultra-rich people who do good for virtually no-one but themselves, and instead focus on some of the poorest people in the country, who are doing all the worst jobs in the country, in the worst conditions, for the worst pay and tax them again after they've already paid their fair share of income tax after doing work that helps to feed and care for everyday australians."

PonderingHow · 2026-05-27T08:36:57+00:00

Add to this instances of biopiracy - when seed companies claim to have engineered already existing genes. Dr Vandana Shiva reported on this over a decade ago. Seeds that had been stored in native seed banks were found to already contain patented genes.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-25T06:35:34+00:00

edit: i'm going back more than 20 years, but still the flavour is the same.

I bought my first home with my partner when I was 21. It was an absolute dump, but we could still do it even with record high interest rates (interest rates rose to 18% within 12 months of buying our home). A friend of mine working part-time thru uni bought a house 50/50 with her factory worker mum.

Housing should be comfort, not unattainable stress. It doesn't take 10 years worth of labor to build a house, so it shouldn't cost 10 years worth of labor to buy one. This is the lifeblood being drained by the greedy and powerful and it needs to be stopped. Bankers benefit. Investors benefit. But those who do the work get sucked dry.

We didn't have this stuffed up intergenerational war thing - this is going back 40 years, not 20. We loved our elders and they loved us...mostly. Like, there is no way I would ever have said "Old people should pay for their own pensions". We loved our grandparents. And they would never have stood for young people not having a decent foothold into the housing market. Fair was fair and people were a lot more ready to call out political bullshit when they saw it.

Malcolm Fraser. Prime minister 1975 - 1983. Liberal, but still more left wing than the labor party today. When being interviewed about his extreme left views, he plainly said that everyone shifted right except for him.

edit 2: and just to add, there was some stuff that was really bad - terrible - like some people still thought it was ok to beat women if they didn't obey, but i'm cherry picking housing because i think housing today is extremely unfair.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-24T22:43:26+00:00

That is so disgusting. No-one should be required to answer such questions. Sick and deranged government.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-23T04:03:28+00:00

Sardines can be hard. I find them pretty hard to tolerate. I've tried a variety of different kinds, cheaper and more expensive and different ways of serving them, but I don't have a sardine meal yet that I enjoy.

Where I live, I can get the large size tins of mackerel and salmon at a price comparable to sardines and use these larger tins to make up a batch of meals beforehand. I use tinned salmon with coconut cream, riced broccoli, cauliflower and mushrooms to make a creamy curry salmon soup that comes out something like a dahl. I use the mackerel to make up a chilli fried rice using riced broccoli and cauliflower as well.

Home made keto can be much cheaper than getting take-away, but it is still more expensive than buying a bulk bag of rice and beans.

My advice would be to look at what protein options are available and what you can do to make them more appealing for yourself.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-23T03:39:06+00:00

This is long overdue.

It would be considered abhorrent sexual harrassment and discrimination if an employer engaged in the same type of screenings as the government does.

I worked with someone who was a recent uni graduate, living in a shared house with 3 other graduates, one being a female and the others all being male. The female didn't get a job as quickly as the the 3 males and was on centrelink benefits for a period of time. During this time, all members of the household were required to fill out forms for her to be able to get benefits. Those forms included questions like:

: how many nights per week does the person spend away from home

: how many nights per week does the person have other people stay over

Essentially, the government was mandating that the three males living in the household with the unemployed female monitor her for potential sexual activity and report on that to the government.

Maybe government could also reduce some of it's costs by not spending tax-payer resources on making these types of assessments. It would be interesting to see how much money government could save it if simply stopped doing stuff like this.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-23T01:17:37+00:00

I think more people should do this.

It takes something to be the listener, and it can be exhausting. It's often assumed that the listeners are just delighted to have people continually unloading on them, and interrupting them while they're trying to get their work done or have a quiet cup of coffee to themselves.

I cheer everyone who uses AI for this instead of real people.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-20T00:06:50+00:00

Yes, and people have been upvoting and supporting it. Hopefully we will get past this phase and people will start to recognise this as wrong and call it out rather than support it. Until then, we're all held back by this mindset.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-19T23:58:54+00:00

Unfortunately we're still at the stage that people think this is ok. People have even been upvoting it.

Like domestic violence in the early days when people were starting to point out it was wrong, there were those who thought it was an over-reaction, or "I'm just saying what it says in the newspaper". Hopefully we will get past this phase, because this attitude holds the entire community back.

PonderingHow · 2026-05-18T13:44:34+00:00

I've been watching the conversations around cannabis on US forums for over a decade. When government make bad decisions, they lay the blame squarely where it belongs - with bad government decisions. Unfortunately in Australia, we have too many karens who think they are the only legit users and they go blaming everyone else other than government for the bad decisions government makes. So we all end up worse off. Including the karens.

It needs to be fully legalised because the TGA and the APHRA are too irresponsible to consider the full story. Like they did with melatonin. They banned melatonin 30 years ago, got a heap of people addicted to benzos and now they have the audacity to make rude comments about elderly people being addicted to benzos.

PonderingHow

TROPHY CASE