In The Guardian

The Australian Financial Review reported that NIB’s CEO has said that the insurer needs an increase of around that mark because “ultimately, we have to cover claims inflation like any insurer because if you don’t eventually you go out of business.”

While this might seem obvious, it ignores the reality that the main reason private health insurers might go out of business is because people hate the product they offer, and even with all the carrots and sticks designed to force people to take out health insurance, a majority of Australians do not want it.

Over six years ago I pondered if private health insurance was a con. In the time since, during which we have experienced the greatest health crisis in a century, nothing has really changed the answer.

Not only does it remain untrue that private health insurance takes stress off the public system, it also remains a fib to call it private – it’s a public system merely carried out in an inefficient manner to deliver a product most people don’t want and haven’t ever wanted.

In the late 1990s, after 15 or so years of Medicare, fewer than a third of Australians held private health insurance. Then John Howard decided that the private sector needed help from the public sector.

He introduced a surcharge to penalise higher income earners who did not have private health insurance.

The stick was not enough. Howard then tried the carrot: providing a rebate on your private health insurance. These rebates are quite pricey – the government this year will spend about $7.5bn on them.

It did bugger all – you literally could not pay people to buy it.

Slimy git.

Streeting acknowledged that the decision would not be welcomed by everyone but sought to reassure young trans people. He had met many of them since taking up his post in July, he said, and listened to their concerns, fears and anxieties.

In a message directly to them, and referencing having come out as gay, he said: “I know it’s not easy being a trans kid in our country today, the trans community is at the wrong end of all of the statistics for mental ill health, self-harm and suicide.

“I can’t pretend to know what that’s like, but I do know what it’s like to feel you have to bury a secret about yourself, to be afraid of who you are, to be bullied for it and then to experience the liberating experience of coming out.

“I know it won’t feel like it based on the decisions I’m taking today, but I really do care about this and so does this government. I am determined to improve the quality of care and access to healthcare for all trans people.”

Decisions were being taken “based on the evidence and advice of clinicians, not politics or political pressure”, he added.

Late last year, the company introduced a new framework to enforce an efficiency rate for picking of 100%. Workers who weren’t meeting the standard would be put into a coaching program. Some were directed to “stop all time wasting and non-productive behaviors”, according to warning letters seen by Guardian Australia. Failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action and even loss of employment. One worker described it as a “bullying” tactic.

Tim, who is over 60, said he was pushed to improve his rating. He got it to more than 80%, then 90%, then 100%, he said, but in his effort to work harder, faster, he was injured.

“You might get someone that’s … 20 years old and goes to the gym every day. And someone like me. I’m getting the average between him and me,” Tim said. “Obviously, I can’t keep up with him.”

“We’re going down the same path as Amazon,” said another worker, Ross*. “We’re not robots, we’re humans.”

It is impossible to read anything by Mehdi Hasan without hearing it in his voice. Fact.

Consider the record of recent weeks and months:

• Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
• Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
• Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
• The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
• Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
• The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
• The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”

How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?

Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have “refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions”. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself “persona non grata”.

A University of Copenhagen study discovered a strange phenomenon: the decision to buy a breed which has lots of health issues may in fact be deliberate. These dogs require care, and this in turn produces feelings of love and satisfaction in their carers. We stunt and cripple them in order to nurse them, in order to feel good about ourselves. Can this really be true? Well, it makes a warped sort of sense. Cuteness is what we often look for in dogs, particularly since the advent of social media. But this also means we select for creatures who, with their big heads, short legs or awkward bodies, give every appearance of being unable to fend for themselves.

[…] 

But it’s not just their bodies we’ve bent out of shape. We’ve also messed up their minds. Studies of pet dogs find problems such as anxiety are rife. No wonder. The point of owning a dog is to make it emotionally dependent on you. […] But this dependence also subjects our pets to huge stress when left alone, or when they feel that you are displeased with them, or unhappy yourself.

[…]

In a personal essay on the website Love Fraud, a woman writes about her sociopathic ex, and how his treatment of his dog mirrored his treatment of people he tried to manipulate. He loved teaching it tricks, she writes; he loved punishing it for bad behaviour, and most of all he loved its submissive, forgiving, dependent love for him. The pattern is that of the psychopath.

Online, the idea that autism and ADHD can coexist is so widely accepted that it has spawned its own label – “AuDHD” – and a groundswell of people who say they recognise its oxymoronic nature, perpetual internal war and rollercoaster of needs. There are tens of thousands of people in AuDHD self-help forums, and millions more watching AuDHD videos.

Some of those videos come from Samantha Stein, a British YouTuber. “The fact that you can have both [autism and ADHD] at the same time is kind of paradoxical in nature,” she admits. “You think: ‘How can you be extremely rigid and need routines and structure, but also be completely incapable of maintaining a routine and structure?’”

[…]

Other AuDHDers give colourful analogies to describe the epiphany of diagnosis. Before the discovery, I’m told, it’s as if you are trying to fit in and be a horse rather than celebrating the fact that you’re a zebra. It’s like being trapped in a maze in the dark, then suddenly the lights are on and now there’s a way to navigate out.

More than a dozen academics and students who spoke to Guardian Australia, most on the condition of anonymity, said the universities’ financial reliance on foreign students over many years had hollowed out academic integrity and threatened the international credibility of the sector.

Many said the rise of artificial intelligence was accelerating the crisis to the point where the only way to fail a course would be to hand nothing in, unless universities came up with a coherent institutional response.

A tutor in an arts subject at a leading sandstone university said in recent years the number of overseas students in her classes – who may pay up to $300,000 in upfront costs – had reached as high as 80%.

“Most can’t speak, write or understand basic English,” she said. “They use translators or text capture to translate the lectures and tutorials, translation aids to read the literature and ChatGPT to generate ideas.

“It’s mind blowing that you can walk away with a master’s degree in a variety of subjects without being able to understand a sentence.”

Won't somebody think about the children? Well, in the face of certain poverty, at least all these kids won't be exposed to the vanishingly small risk of eventually regretting trans health care. F***ing hypocrites.

The Labour leadership has told you who it is, over and over again: it is time to believe it. Keir Starmer has suspended seven Labour MPs because they voted to overturn a Tory policy which imposes poverty on children. Sure, another tale will be spun: that by voting for the Scottish National party’s amendment to abolish the two-child benefit cap, the seven undermined the unity of the parliamentary Labour party and were duly disciplined. But that is nonsense.

[…]

It is hard to imagine Starmer is unaware of the fact that Osborne devised the policy to stoke public hostility towards and create a Victorian caricature of the undeserving, overbreeding poor. No decent society punishes children for choices they have not made and parents should not be punished for having more children. In Britain in 2024, kids turn up to schools with bowed legs and heart murmurs because of malnourishment, but a vast cost is also imposed on society as the scarring effect of poverty produces lasting lower productivity and employment levels.

Starmer knew this when he told the BBC almost exactly a year ago that he would retain this wicked Tory policy. He made the commitment to sound tough. Contrast with how he genuflects before powerful interests such as the Murdoch empire. By endorsing the two-child benefit cap, Starmer decided to gain partisan advantage, rather than fix an injustice afflicting his country. Party first, country second. Or rather, to be specific: playing politics with the lives of our most vulnerable children.

The general election did not allow for the full expression of people power. Rather, we saw a rejection of the political establishment, leading to a loveless landslide; this election saw the second-lowest turnout since 1918 and the smallest combined vote share for the two main parties since 1945. Public discontent with a broken political system will only grow as the government fails to make the real change that people expect.

That energy needs somewhere to go. It needs to be channelled. It needs to be mobilised. That’s why our campaign will organise with those who have been inspired by our victory to build community power in every corner of the country. Once our grassroots model has been replicated elsewhere, this can be the genesis of a new movement capable of challenging the stale two-party system. A movement that offers a real alternative to child poverty, inequality and endless war. A movement that provides a real opposition to the far right – one that doesn’t concede ground to divisive rhetoric, but stands by its principles of anti-racism, equality and inclusion.

I have no doubt that this movement will eventually run in elections. However, to create a new, centralised party, based around the personality of one person, is to put the cart before the horse. Remember that only once strength is built from below can we challenge those at the top.

But it's okay, because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances would reflect last week’s figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.

[…]

In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”.

They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.