Linkage

Every year Australians waste about 7.68 million tonnes of food — that's about 312 kilograms per person.

And Australia's supermarket duopoly could be making waste worse, according to peak vegetable grower groups.

"Our biggest customer is the rubbish bin," one vegetable grower recently told the ABC.

They said they didn't want to be identified for fear of retribution from Coles and Woolworths. 

In recent years, even as services like Spotify and Apple Music have dominated the music market, there’s been a resurgence in vinyl sales as people have seen the benefit of having a physical product: not just because you actually own it and can display it, but because it sounds better too. (It’s not just vinyl either; even CD sales are up.) I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing something similar with video.

There are already suggestions that 4K Blu-rays are filling a similar niche as vinyl for home video, with the backing of prominent directors. Asteroid City director Wes Anderson told The Wrap, “A good Blu-ray is sharp as a tack — and consistent. It always plays exactly right. It does not disappear from a cloud or platform.” Last year, Christopher Nolan put special attention into the Blu-ray release of Oppenheimer and encouraged people who liked the movie to buy it “so no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”

The physical disc doesn’t just mean it can never be removed from your digital library, but they also tend to come with bonuses like behind-the-scenes footage and it’s the best way to watch the movie: the visuals and audio will be higher quality than a more compressed version that’s streamed or downloaded. With the flaws in the streaming model becoming increasingly apparent, is physical media in for a resurgence?

Released Tuesday, the proposal dictates what kind of housing can be built, how much can be built and where it could go. It also would create a new neighborhood designation that allows more corner stores and restaurants to be built near housing, and implements the state’s new “missing middle” housing law to allow four to six homes on single-family home lots.

[…]

Changing single-family zoning in Seattle has been politically toxic in the past. Former Mayor Ed Murray proposed allowing missing-middle density across all Seattle neighborhoods as part of his 2015 housing plan. But he ultimately scrapped the proposal in the face of fierce opposition from homeowners.

Quirindongo thinks Seattle residents’ views on the issue have evolved over the past decade as the housing crisis has worsened.

“As people continue to move into the city and try to find a place to rent or a place to buy, it is really hard to do,” said Quirindongo. “So what is coming out of that is that the typical city resident in this town is interested in having more housing choices. … This plan is really trying to answer for the need that people are saying we need to provide for.”

Key Findings

• Referrals are stored within a national Prevent database, regardless of whether they meet the threshold to be reviewed by a Channel panel.
• Data is being held for a minimum of six years but can be kept for up to 100 years. The rationale for this minimum retention period is to consider the possibility of “re-offending” – even though Prevent referees have not in fact committed a crime. If there is no policing purpose for retaining data, this retention could be unlawful. Individuals are not necessarily informed that their data is being stored nor whether their data has been deleted after the six-year period or further retained.
• There appears to be a lack of oversight and parliamentary scrutiny over data sharing, processing and storage of Prevent referrals that are inappropriate for Channel interventions but which are managed by police-led partnerships. Once a case is managed by the police, national security exemptions can be applied to limit rights to rectification, access and removal. But the Intelligence and Security Committee does not deal with policing and the Independent reviewer of Terrorism Legislation does not oversee cases managed by police-led partnerships. This means that new counter terrorism capabilities are being built without Parliamentary oversight or legislative safeguards.
• The data of some Prevent referees is being shared with airports, ports and immigration services. This could explain reports that people who have been referred to Prevent have subsequently been questioned at ports and airports under schedule 7.
• It is very difficult for individuals to exercise their right to erasure and request data is removed because many will not know that they have been referred to Prevent. Even when they do know, the lack of transparency about data sharing makes it very difficult for individuals to find out all the different places that their data is being held.
   

We dive deep into a groundbreaking approach to solving the housing crisis by repurposing under-utilized big box retail spaces into thriving mixed-use housing developments.

What is your message, and not only to the president, but around the world, Dr. Sidhwa?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: I don’t think I would say much to Joe Biden. I think he knows exactly what’s going on, and I don’t think it’s important to him. I don’t think he cares if Palestinians are murdered like roaches and ants. But to the rest of Americans who have normal human values, they do care.

And, you know, one of the other things that Mark and I wrote in that piece is that the blood on the trauma bay floor and the operating room floor was dripping from our hands. And that’s — I think that’s accurate. Again, we provide the crucial military, economic and diplomatic support. Your viewers are no surprise to that. And that makes us responsible. If our support stops, the attacks stop. If our support stops, the occupation stops. It’s instant. It’s been proven a hundred times. It’s not hard to see.

And so, that’s what I would say to people, is if you want to stop participating unwittingly in these — in some of the worst crimes that I’ve ever seen in my life, then you need to organize, and you need to raise the cost to people like Joe Biden, because that is the only thing they care about. The U.S. is attempting to manage the Middle East with the system that it put in place since the Arab Spring. And the Palestinians are just kind of an annoyance to that system. They don’t want to — the U.S. doesn’t want Saudi Arabia to have its ruling family shaken, the Jordanian ruling family shaken. These are the — but we have to raise the domestic cost for these policies, which, like Mark said, are really, truly and genuinely genocidal in nature, that it’s dramatic.

So, I would say to people that, you know, you know what’s going on, so stop thinking about it all that much and just start acting. Go to your houses of worship, go to your community centers, go wherever it is that you go, and talk to people and say, “Look, let’s go talk to our congressman in person. Let’s demand a meeting.” If you’re a veteran, put your uniform on and go — I’ve had several veterans reach out to me — put your uniform on and go talk to your congressperson. Film it. Put it online. Do anything you can to embarrass these people and to make it obvious to the world that they are not acting with normal human decency in mind. They’re acting with purely cold, almost Mafia-like political calculations. And the only way that we are going to stop this is by raising the cost to them of doing so. That’s what I would say to people, I think.

Cities exist to create citizens. Not to generate economic gains (they do, but as a byproduct), or provide a home to the arts, entertainment or learning (again, byproducts), and certainly not to support a government (it’s a means to an end). I would argue that the real purpose of cities is to create a group of people who will take responsibility for their community. And it’s this willingness to accept responsibility that is the difference between a resident and a citizen.

Key points

•    Nuclear power does not currently provide an economically competitive solution in Australia.
•    Lead author of GenCost, Paul Graham, says updated costs for a key project in the US have been found to be very high.
•    The costs for small modular reactors (SMRs) could improve over time, but will be too late to make a significant contribution to achieving net zero emissions.

US airman Aaron Bushnell said the words “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal” before self-immolating in protest of the genocide in Gaza. That simple line has been reverberating throughout our collective consciousness ever since.

It seems like every day now we’re learning some horrible new fact about the US-centralized power alliance and the empire managers who carry out its malignant will for our world, because that’s just what our rulers have decided will be the norm for our species going forward.

Chris Lermanis is a keen amateur photographer who spent his weekends in the late 1960s and early 1970s photographing around the inner Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy, Carlton and Collingwood with his Pentax SV camera and 50mm lens.

He hand-processed the black and white films at home and made prints in the bathroom or laundry, which was temporarily converted into a darkroom. During this time the houses and factories were being demolished and the new housing commission towers built.

Lermanis recently started looking at his old prints and now has a book project planned.