Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Australians soon facing age checks when viewing adult websites 9 hours ago:
Haven’t seen much scrutiny
I’m pretty sure we criticised it pretty roundly in this Community (or other Communities on this Instance) back when it came out. But yeah, not much serious pushback from established media.
- Comment on [Video] Sky news called out for endorsing collective starvation of Palestinians 1 day ago:
Catbox is blocked at the dns level by some Australian ISPs. For the sake of privacy you should really change your DNS provider anyway. Quad 9 is a good choice and easy to remember. 208.67.222.222 isn’t a bad secondary option.
- Comment on ‘A fundamental part of growing up’: Why Aussie kids can’t swim any more 6 days ago:
We never had “swim carnivals”
Huh. I was overseas for the end of primary school and all of high school, but I do remember having swim carnivals when I was here in primary school. My school had its own 25 m pool, and so, from what I’ve seen, do a lot of schools in Brisbane’s middle and outer suburbs (I checked 7 near me and 6 did).
- Comment on ‘A fundamental part of growing up’: Why Aussie kids can’t swim any more 6 days ago:
Nice job justifying harassing behaviour.
- Comment on ‘A fundamental part of growing up’: Why Aussie kids can’t swim any more 6 days ago:
I was giving the article shit… Did you take that personally, I mean have you been imagining an argument between us this whole time…?
It doesn’t really matter to me whether you’re criticising me personally or the article. What matters is the quality of that argument. And it has, so far, been atrocious.
The headline is that kids can’t swim anymore
When the data suggests 4 in 5 can’t swim to an appropriate standard, that headline seems appropriate to me. It’s an overwhelming statistic, and as another user pointed out, humanising that by putting a face to it goes a long way to making the news digestible to readers. Your anger at this, and the fight that you have decided to pick with me for suggesting your anger is misplaced, is absurd.
You really need to take this down a notch, I am happy to continue this conversation and discuss our opinions,
Oh yes, the guy who responds to being called out for bad behaviour by stalking the person they’ve decided to pick a fight with and downvoting them in entirely unrelated threads, trying to play the “let’s all be civil” card. Give me a break.
- Comment on ‘A fundamental part of growing up’: Why Aussie kids can’t swim any more 6 days ago:
You came into this conversation with an argumentative tone, don’t put that on me. It didn’t even make sense. The article presents data and shares anecdotes that do a good job of personalising that data. Why are you accusing it of inventing problems when its data pretty solidly supports that. If you wanted to criticise the source of the data or the methodology by which the conclusions were drawn from the data, that would be one thing (and we could evaluate the merits of that kind of reasoning in context), but you didn’t…you just claimed they were presenting anecdotes that create fear unsupported by data, despite the fact that that couldn’t be further from the truth.
- Comment on ‘A fundamental part of growing up’: Why Aussie kids can’t swim any more 1 week ago:
Just present the facts and research
You mean facts like more than 4 in 5 teenagers don’t meet the basic expected minimum‽ Those stats?
- Comment on ‘A fundamental part of growing up’: Why Aussie kids can’t swim any more 1 week ago:
I don’t think the article was poor. @Noite_Etion@lemmy.world does, for reasons that seem perplexingly out of touch to me.
- Comment on ‘A fundamental part of growing up’: Why Aussie kids can’t swim any more 1 week ago:
They’re taking anecdotal claims and using them to personalise actual statistics.
40 per cent of children leaving primary school are unable to swim 50 metres, while only 32 per cent could tread water for two minutes – the national benchmarks for swimming and water safety in 12-year-olds
And that was pre-COVID, before lockdowns meant many children were missing out on learn to swim at key ages. Post-COVID,
39 per cent of year 10 students do not meet the 12-year-old benchmarks, while 84 per cent of 15- to 16-year-olds can’t swim 400 metres and tread water for five minutes – a basic lifesaving requirement and the benchmark for 17-year-olds
- Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 28 comments
- Comment on It turns out there is a Lemmy alternative with categories - anyone got stories about it? 1 week ago:
afaict Blorp is a Lemmy client. You know how on your phone, you can get to Lemmy through a web browser, but also through an app like Voyager or Jerboa? Well those apps, and the front-end of the website, are all called clients. And it’s also possible to have alternative web URLs that access the same server.
So there’s ttrpg.network, which is the name of the instance and also where the default lemmy-ui is hosted. But there’s also old.ttrpg.network, which accesses the same instance backend, but has an alternative client designed to look like old reddit, called Mlmym.
To me, Blorp looks like another alternative front end to Lemmy.
- Comment on It turns out there is a Lemmy alternative with categories - anyone got stories about it? 1 week ago:
I made an account on quokk.au, though I haven’t used it much. If I were joining the threadiverse today, I’d probably look for Piefed rather than Lemmy.
- Comment on @jack_toohey on why the housing crisis is not caused by migration 1 week ago:
Median is an average. It would be helpful if they specified whether they are using mean or median, but median is the average usually talked about with respect to income, precisely because it’s much more useful.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
Oh yes, sorry that wasn’t clear. I’ve been talking about it for so long (even before the Gillard Government, I remember a fixed-price introductory period leading to a cap and trade scheme being what was described in my highschool econ classes as the best method for reducing emissions) I may have gotten lazy about explaining the terminology that’s become so familiar to me.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
Gillard was polling abysmally before Rudd took over
Yes. Because of relentless attack ads from the Murdoch media, and because Australians hate internal party division, and Rudd stoked that up every chance he got.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
I found it out when I was talking to a Greens member and I shared exactly the same viewpoint you expressed in your earlier comment. You can verify it by looking at the timeframe of the bill’s passage through Parliament.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
She certainly didn’t install ETS
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
Palaszczuk taxed the coal mining companies
Sure, but it wasn’t an especially bold proposal. And it wasn’t particularly central to either party’s election campaign, compared to things like cost of living, the Olympics, and “youth crime”.
she then put in a carbon tax
Not a carbon tax. A fixed-price period leading into a cap and trade scheme.
said carbon tax only lasted a few years
Still not a carbon tax. It lasted only a few years because the Government lost at the next election. Something that was greatly aided by the constant white-anting by Rudd after he lost the leadership.
Gillard’s scheme was actually working. It was world-leading legislation that actually reduced emissions while it was in effect. If Rudd had just been willing to compromise and had delivered that exact policy in 2009 instead of trying to act the Big Tough Guy and insisting it was His Way or the Highway (despite the fact that “his way” would not have reduced emissions for another decade from today), turning it into the political football that brought down both his and Gillard’s Governments.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
Labor conceded on that point immediately
They said they did. Then they presented the original version to Parliament again.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
The Greens’ behaviour on the HAFF was pretty objectively good policy. HAFF is a long-term project, not a quick win for homeless. The Greens stalled something that won’t pay off for years by a couple of months in order to make it better. And make it better they did. Including in the shorter term, by requiring it pay out a minimum amount.
By stalling it a couple of months, the HAFF was made better in both the short and long terms.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
Yup exactly. The Greens’ loss was mostly because the earlier Greens wins came on the back of Labor finishing 3rd and preferences going to the Greens. If the LNP finishes 3rd, preferences go to Labor and Labor wins. There was also a redistribution in Melbourne that favoured Labor pretty strongly. It’s one of the weird quirks of IRV and exposes a reason proportional systems like MMP (used in Germany and NZ) are better.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
Rudd
Rudd did it to himself by being pigheaded and refusing to go far enough.
Palaszczuk never really did anything stand-out brave. Her government lost because of the natural churn that comes with having been in power for 8 years, and because of global trends favouring oppositions.
Whitlam is definitely a good example. So would be Shorten, even though it was a bold platform from opposition that lost him a seemingly-unlosable election, rather than losing Government for bold actually-enacted policy.
I won’t comment on Fyles. I’m not nearly familiar enough with NT politics to say anything intelligent.
- Comment on France to sue Australian platform Kick for 'negligence' after livestream death 1 week ago:
Yeah same. I find it a little weird that none of the talk about it has ever mentioned it’s Australian until this incident.
- Comment on Australia’s government trial of age‑assurance tech to keep under‑16s off social media says social media age checks can be done, despite errors and privacy risks 1 week ago:
Here’s another thought about age checks. What if I just point to my Reddit account, now over 12 years old, and say “do you really think I was less than 4 when I created this?” And that’s a good enough age verification for everywhere else to go “yeah, checks out.”
Sure, that’s giving up a little privacy by linking my Lemmy account with my Reddit account…but I chose the same username for a reason.
- Comment on Australia’s government trial of age‑assurance tech to keep under‑16s off social media says social media age checks can be done, despite errors and privacy risks 1 week ago:
What a load of bullshit. 6 should not be a concern that needs to be looked at. 11 should not even be possible. If it was actually done in a privacy-preserving way, no website would end up retaining any private user data.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 2 weeks ago:
We can’t rely on all parents to be able to do that
The truth is I don’t think the problem lies exclusively with parents. It probably does to some extent, but I genuinely think there must be something (and I use the nebulous “something” very deliberately. I have no idea what that something could be) in our broader society that is leading to the problem, for it to be so much more of a notable problem today than it was 40 years ago.
Regardless of the cause though, no, it isn’t a teacher’s duty to single-handedly fix the failure to bring up the kids right. When students don’t respect their teachers, and parents don’t respect them enough to back them when conflict does arise, it’s not even possible for them to do anything meaningful.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 2 weeks ago:
In my opinion this is a bigger problem than pay
100% this. I am not myself a teacher, but I’m very close to a large number of teachers, and I don’t think pay would rank in even the top 5 problems with the job. I’m not going to claim my list is comprehensive (there may be other equally- or more-important factors beyond the 5 I name), and it’s not necessarily in any particular order (except that each of these is more of a problem than pay):
- The expectation of using their own money to pay for classroom resources
- The time worked
- Class sizes
- Student behaviour
- Administrative burden/curriculum bullshit
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Teachers I know regularly spend their own money on stationary for their classrooms, on print-outs of worksheets, on posters and other educational decorations around the classroom. Some schools do better than others in this regard, but it’s not uncommon for teachers to be given “print budgets” which are wildly unrealistic with respect to how much printing they need for their classes.
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A common refrain from people opposing the increase of teachers’ pay is how short the hours they work are. This could not be further from the truth. In my job, I work 9–5 and never think about it outside of that. I have never met a teacher who can say the same. They bring it home with them, constantly, and it becomes even worse around report card time or parent-teacher meetings.
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Class sizes in Australia seem to have a limit or average hovering around 24–28 depend on age and state. That is much too large to be effective, and only adds to the amount of their burden with many of these other factors.
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Teachers should be able to spend their time teaching. It is not in their core job to manage the behaviour of naughty children. And yet all too often, that is what they are expected to do. The extent of bad behaviour in classrooms is a huge indictment on the parenting and on broader cultural/societal factors. And it is not fair to expect teachers to fix this, or to the other students to have their learning interrupted because of this.
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Being forced to teach to a curriculum can kill a teacher’s love of their subject and of teaching it. It can stifle their ability to tailor lessons to what works best for their students, which in turn kills their ability to inspire a love of the subject in their kids. On top of that, they’re often forced to do all sorts of useless administrative tasks
It all comes back to the same thing: that society does not treat teachers with the respect they deserve. Students don’t respect their teachers. Parents certainly don’t treat them with respect. The government screws them around on working conditions and classroom funding. Which is all so frustrating, because teachers are, bar none, the most important occupation we have.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 3 weeks ago:
Is PDA substantially different from Oppositional Defiance Disorder? Just based on the names they sound like exactly the same thing.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 3 weeks ago:
The first male teacher I had was when I moved overseas, in year 5, in the middle aughts. That’s a 3% chance of happening if teachers had an equal gender representation, and were spread equally.
Maybe it’s gotten worse since the 60s. Maybe not. Some of this is obviously going to be random or depend on the specific school. 1% across all of primary school and preschool is low odds, but enough that it could definitely happen to enough students that you might expect to run into one of them in your lifetime. But if it were an even spread, you’d also expect to run into someone who had had all male teachers.
- Comment on The Original Rules of Australian Football (1859) 3 weeks ago:
No passing
Passing yes, but only by punching the ball. No forward pass rule.
professionals must play the same as little kids and all swarm following the ball around the field
😆