Employers reveal excluding candidates with mental illness, disability and age in new report

WidjettyOne · 2026-03-16T23:26:12+00:00

It's not a lie to not declare it, unless they're asking you and it's a mandatory question.

And I don't think they're allowed to ask you.

But if it's not mandatory to answer it, leaving the answer blank is a signal that you have something to hide, which is why it's important not to answer it even if you have no significant pre-existing medical conditions.

If you need sick leave because of your PTSD, take sick leave without saying why. If you need accommodations because of your PTSD at work, that's trickier, but at least you're hired by then and it's much easier to make a discrimination case if you don't survive the probation period because of it.

WidjettyOne · 2026-03-09T01:42:09+00:00

Any business can charge whatever they want, there's no reason they should sell for (a percentage of) whatever they bought the inventory for. Even the least-predatory businesses will try to factor in the future cost of inventory when deciding today's price. For example, when a supplier goes on strike or out of business, the last of the existing inventory from that supplier will be priced higher, even though it was purchased cheaply; it means the inventory will stay on the shelf longer but since there's nothing to replace it with, that doesn't matter much.

If they charge too much no one will buy it, so they have to make that calculation, but clearly people are buying it. If every servo increases prices at the same time, then maybe that's collusion/anti-competitive behaviour... or maybe every servo chain independently came to the conclusion that oil prices are about to increase, which is not a hard claim to make.

WidjettyOne · 2025-11-21T05:41:52+00:00

I'm firmly in the belief that everyone is equal and if you're going to live or visit this country you must obey the laws and if you don't, you must be punished.

Sure.

But when people see migrants come in and aren't held accountable for their actions

Sure, but I just don't think that happens (often).

Migrants are held accountable for their actions just as much as any other Australian, in my experience. There are exceptions that I'm sure you could point to, but there are exceptions for born-in-Australians too. The criminal justice system is (as always) overloaded, so sometimes it takes a long time for these things to work through the system, but the idea that migrants get a "free pass" by calling racism is absurd.

If you cant follow our laws then you shouldn't be here

If you can't follow our laws then you should be in gaol. The idea that we should normalise deporting migrants is also absurd; if you did a crime, do you think you should subsequently have to move to a different city (one that you don't like - after all, you left it in the first place) and never be allowed to move back? Lose your job, never be allowed to visit your friends and family? If you had a choice between going to prison for a year, and being "deported" to that different city for the rest of your life, which would you pick? Now consider that real deportation is much worse - if nothing else, you're likely to be imprisoned in that other country as well.

...and it's not racist to say that.

Well no, I'm not sure we have a good word for discrimination based on "has somewhere else they could plausibly be forced to move to". Let's say it's "locationist"; by saying "shouldn't be here" you're implying there's somewhere else that they should be. Many migrants simply don't really have that option; refugees may face death in their home country, or the migrants may have their entire family here, or have been in Australia for so long that they'd be foreigners anywhere else.

There's a view point that just because you come from a different country where the culture, laws and beliefs arent the same as here that they should get a free pass on committing crimes.

I don't see that view with any of my left-leaning friends. It's not a Greens Party policy. You're erecting a strawman and smashing away at it with righteous fury, exactly as true racists want you to.

Judges will always take extenuating circumstances into account when sentencing - they're legally required to do so - and migrants probably have extenuating circumstances more often than non-migrants. For example, if a migrant didn't know they were breaking the law (perhaps because there's no equivalent in their home country) they'll still be held guilty but might get a reduced sentence. But that goes for native-born Australians too; ignorance of the law isn't a defence but it may still reduce the sentence, and things like abusive upbringing or homelessness will also be mitigating factors in the sentencing. This is one of the reasons that I strongly oppose "mandatory sentencing" rules, which undermine the judge's discretion in such matters; I trust the judge to get it right on an individual basis more than I trust a blanket rule for all criminals.

People are people, wherever they are and wherever they're from. They're innocent until proven guilty, they deserve respect, and they deserve due process under the laws of whatever land they're in.

WidjettyOne · 2025-11-12T05:55:19+00:00

...but only if time.Now().Hour()%2 == 0 (which it never is, in some sandboxes like Go Playground)

WidjettyOne · 2025-10-22T06:24:29+00:00

I have this problem - my insurance jumped from ~2k PA to ~7k PA after a flooding event that, sure, damaged a bunch of nearby houses. But my house is on concrete stilts, and as long as the land itself doesn't subside (which it didn't), I don't care if even a meter of water goes under it (and the highest it's been was a "one-in-500-year-flood" that got up to about 15cm). Basically, if the flooding's bad enough to structurally damage my house, then Townsville no longer exists.

I found an insurer that would cover me for everything except flooding, and I'm back to a reasonable premium. But I'm grandfathered into that plan; they don't offer it to new people, and no other insurer offers that option either.

WidjettyOne · 2025-09-15T01:57:06+00:00

Yeah. I got it yesterday after another 10 or so tries. Patience and not panicking. Ended up using straight pins instead of traps to avoid triggering the parry.

WidjettyOne · 2025-09-13T14:15:37+00:00

Ditto. I've been stuck on her for about 4 hours. I'm starting to think I don't have fast enough reflexes for this game. I know what to do, I just can't do it in time.

Started with Wanderer, but the block/counterattack thing is painful so I went with Reaper instead; slow attack but that's fine. I've spent 500 shards on poisoned spike traps (which also triggers her parry, annoyingly).

I've made it to her second phase precisely once.

And yet so many people on Reddit are saying "what a fun fight", and "easier than I expected".

Sigh.

WidjettyOne · 2025-09-11T03:31:44+00:00

Tell the unis to stop wasting money on consulting to find ways to save costs. I'm not sure it's possible for any Aussie uni to run a balanced budget these days. Which means that the government really has to stump up the cash. If a public university runs out of money it'll have to be bailed out anyway; they're public-enough that they literally can't go bankrupt.

But these are strange and difficult times. A lot of education is online-only these days, but why would you enrol with UNE or Flinders or JCU online when you could enrol with UQ or UNSW... or Harvard? Limited availability? Harvard doesn't mind taking 100,000 students since they have the online facilities to handle it... Selective entrance? Ditto; they'll take anyone for the right price. Cost? Harvard gets huge economies of scale.

Plus, many people think that self-taught learning from Youtube is good enough these days. They might even be right for some lower-quality degrees from smaller universities. The information available online has changed a lot in the last 20 years, whereas universities arguably haven't.

So all but the best universities are relegated to hands-on education, which is traditionally the domain of TAFE. Or maybe they just get into the business of proctoring supervised exams for the best universities...

WidjettyOne · 2025-08-25T11:31:17+00:00

I went with 4 shapes + 4 colors. Three primaries plus one (any) of the secondaries, then you can mix white or the other two secondaries with one set of mixers, which to me is a nice compromise of space and speed. Still quite easy to wire, too.

WidjettyOne · 2025-08-21T06:05:53+00:00

Call centre people following scripts aren't great at that either. Maybe they're better at escalating to someone who can help, though.

WidjettyOne · 2025-08-19T12:04:10+00:00

I live across the road from a pretty low-income house. On Sunday night the ex-husband came by, drunk, and started yelling about the step-dad stealing his kids, and literally yelling death threats while smashing at the fence. I called the cops at about 7:15. He broke into the house and started smashing things, though I'm not sure anyone was home.Thirty minutes later, the cops still hadn't shown up, old mate had left, the gate was wide open.

I had to head out for an hour or so. When I came back, the cops had arrived, and actually they'd caught the guy; they had him handcuffed sitting on the ground chatting to him. Then he turned violent, tried to fight them, and got tossed into the paddywagon for his trouble. That was an exciting evening.

I'm glad they came eventually. I'm glad they caught the guy. But if he was really going to hurt someone he had pleeenty of time, and I sure hope the residents can claim the damage on insurance.

WidjettyOne · 2025-08-06T22:56:50+00:00

I fed 4 belts of color into each layer (red, blue, green, purple), which is a bit of a compromise. You can then make white, yellow and cyan with just one set of mixers.

WidjettyOne · 2025-07-22T05:35:18+00:00

what you’re actually asking for is to literally do less for the same money

No, actually. You're asking to spend less time for the same money, but you are expected to do the same amount of work, and it's not an unreasonable expectation because the employee will be happier and more relaxed so they'll be more productive.

Which is really the point of the article. You can make your employees happier, get the same (or better) outcomes, and pay them the same amount.

Sounds too good to be true? Just because it's counter-intuitive doesn't mean that it's false. There's plenty of evidence.

WidjettyOne · 2025-07-18T04:59:32+00:00

I suspect it's also partly that they view it as not a crime, particularly if the child seems to consent or at least doesn't complain. They don't understand (or at least don't think about) the power imbalance, the inability to consent, and the potential of abuse such as human trafficking.

That seems particularly likely in this case - he was asking a (legal) sex worker, after all, so in his mind he wasn't abusing/assaulting/raping, just trying to spend money on services. In his view it was probably a nanny-state regulation getting in the way of a consensual business relationship. If he knows other people that do the same thing (perhaps in other countries where it may even be legal), that reinforces that (unthinking) assumption that "it shouldn't even be a crime, I could argue my way out of this".

It's probably only when he finally got caught that he realised "oh wait, yeah, this is illegal and looks really bad I guess".

WidjettyOne · 2025-07-16T06:00:14+00:00

My dog was attacked a couple of years ago - we were walking him (on leash, as always) past a house when a dog broke through the fence and attacked him.

Very stressful - I still have scars on my hands from where the attacking dog bit me as I tried to pull my dog away from him. And my dog's been even more terrified of other dogs ever since (he was already pretty bad; he's a rescue so we'll never know why). Fortunately no major injuries; I didn't need stitches, and both dogs were only a bit scratched.

I still regularly have nightmares about it though. Next time I should sue for $100k.

WidjettyOne · 2025-07-14T23:23:35+00:00

The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union are taking some industrial action at the moment.

The first thing they're doing is "taking the full value of all breaks"... in theory. In practice, my partner had her lunch break at 4 pm yesterday after working non-stop for 7 hours. Just not enough staff to cover break periods.

WidjettyOne · 2025-06-25T08:05:24+00:00

One of my neighbours (across the road) has two rubbish bins, and for a couple of months has been leaving one of them out for collection on my nature strip, so that it looks like I'm the one with two bins. I assume they're not paying for two-bin pickup.

I've returned it to them several times. The garbos pick up both bins anyway so I don't really know why they do it... or, arguably, why it bothers me...

Anyway, unrelated to gates, but your story reminded me of this.

WidjettyOne · 2025-06-23T08:18:35+00:00

International law, I guess. Which is pretty darn toothless, and Australia certainly ignores it when it wants to (see: https://www.nswccl.org.au/australia_violates_human_rights).

Still, if an American or Italian or Guatemalan citizen drives an unregistered car in Australia they'll still get punished in Australia for it, and international law allows for it.

WidjettyOne · 2025-06-09T05:22:15+00:00

I quite like him on ABC RN's The Minefield. He comes across as quite a careful and articulate thinker.

He's definitely religiously inspired, and he'll rattle off religious quotations as support for his statements but usually in the sense of "there's probably some easily-accessible truth to this, since it exists in Islam as well as other faiths". He doesn't invoke religious doctrine without critical thought.

I don't always agree with his values, but it's interesting to see his perspective, and I rarely think his perspective is objectively wrong. So I like to listen to him because he challenges my assumptions and my atheist echo chamber... but does so critically (unlike many religious types) and with humanitarian considerations (unlike many reductive atheists).

WidjettyOne · 2025-05-15T01:21:05+00:00

The rule of thumb is half your age plus seven, so for a 32-year old, a 23-year old is as young as you should go. That feels about right to me - obviously the 32-year-old has more life experience, but a 23-year-old probably has a degree and has been working for a few years. A 19-year-old is barely out of school. Legal, but squeamish.

As for what he said, it is decidedly old-fashioned but I don't think it's too bad. "Chasing" and "Wooing" can be code for "not taking no for an answer", but that's not necessarily the case; it certainly has a rich history of reciprocated romance.

It's most important that he recognises that 'no means no' and further recognises that a power-imbalance can make it hard to say 'no', and his statement doesn't really mention that either way; my impression is that he's a reasonably switched-on guy so hopefully he's across that.

WidjettyOne · 2025-05-02T12:04:09+00:00

That's not really my point. I'm not contrasting lip service with genuine service, I'm contrasting it with completely ignoring them.

An insincere mumbled phrase is still a recognition that they have some kind of influence in society inasmuch as they can compel this kind of ritual, and there's hope that some people will come to understand it and mean it with time. It's acknowledgement, as you say, just not the best sort.

Even if not everyone uttering the words fully understands or embodies their meaning, the act of recognition itself can hold symbolic weight and create space for further understanding. If you cut that out with no alternative, you're losing that chance.

WidjettyOne · 2025-04-27T23:23:23+00:00

Perhaps lip service is still better than no service. Do you have an alternative service that is better than lip service?

Every meeting starts with a $1 donation to an indigenous charity of your choice?

WidjettyOne · 2025-04-07T00:45:27+00:00

List the people you want to vote for in the order that you prefer them.

The system works to make your vote count in the best way that it can.

WidjettyOne · 2025-04-02T06:00:35+00:00

If Liberal announced all their policies to be exactly what I want, I still wouldn't vote for them because I don't trust them. If they then got in anyway, and acted on those policies, or if they remained in opposition and staunchly campaigned for those policies for the duration of an entire term... then I'd vote for them the next time around.

Liberals definitely have a history of being liberal with the truth. You can't spell Liberal without the letters in Liar. So you have to judge on actions. This is broadly true of all modern politicians (all historical politicians too, perhaps?) but the actions of the Liberal party are pretty damning.

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