Linkage

The Centrelink officer on the end of the phone to Eve* was telling her she was dead. Eve, 74, who receives a carer payment, had called after she noticed an extra $3,000 from Centrelink in her 81-year-old husband’s account in May this year, and she was concerned they had been overpaid.

After calling multiple times, she reached someone from Services Australia who looked up her account history.

“As far as we are concerned you are deceased,” the officer said.

The $3,000 was a bereavement payment made to her husband. It was then followed by a letter to him apologising for his loss, and letting him know she had been overpaid by a small amount, that would need to be returned, and that Centrelink would be contacting her bank.

Within a few weeks, all her records were wiped, her bank accounts were shut down, her energy concessions for the Gold Coast council were withdrawn and she could not even book an Uber.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.

Standing at the helm of a 16-year-old startup, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, took a trip down memory lane—a nostalgic revisit to a 16-year-old blog that announced his startup idea, Acquia. Little did he know that his fancy trip would occupy the front page of Hacker News, garnering a hundred comments.

[…] 

The discussion concerns the merits and drawbacks of using Drupal as a content management system (CMS) compared to alternatives like WordPress. Several users shared their experiences, highlighting various aspects of Drupal's functionality, including its engineering and backend customization capabilities, upgrade challenges, and suitability for different types of users.

   "I miss Drupal a lot,"

jolted an old Drupal user who wished Drupal would win the CMS battle with WordPress. They feel nostalgic for Drupal's earlier versions and its low-code capabilities for creating custom CRUD apps. They mentioned difficulties with the transition to Composer and the challenges of keeping up with security updates and upgrades, ultimately leading them to explore other technologies like Python.

The key declaration was buried in the penultimate paragraph of an article by Yoav Zitun, the military correspondent of Israeli outlet Ynet.

It is the first known official army admission that a significant number of the hundreds of Israelis who died on 7 October were killed by Israel itself, and not by Hamas or other Palestinian resistance factions.

An Israeli police source last month appeared to admit that some of the Israelis at the Supernova rave taking place near Gaza that day were hit by Israeli helicopters. A second police source later partially walked back the admission.

Citing new data released by the Israeli military, Zitun wrote that: “Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF [Israeli military] believes that … it would not be morally sound to investigate” them. 

He reported that this was “due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities.”

Although “supply skeptics” claim that new housing supply does not slow growth in rents, we show that rigorous recent studies demonstrate that: 1) Increases in housing supply slow the growth in rents in the region; 2) In some circumstances, new construction also reduces rents or rent growth in the surrounding area; 3) The chains of moves sparked by new construction free up apartments that are then rented (or retained) by households across the income spectrum; 4) While new supply is associated with gentrification, it has not been shown to cause significant displacement of lower income households; and 5) Easing land use restrictions, at least on a broad scale and in ways that change binding constraints on development, generally leads to more new housing over time, but only a fraction of the new capacity created because many other factors constrain the pace of new development.

In an interview, Been said new housing development tends to have two effects, pulling in opposite directions. Increasing the supply of housing tends to lower its cost or slow the rate of cost increase, but new development often also brings new amenities to a neighborhood – restaurants, shops, better maintained parks – that push prices upward.

“Which of those two things is going to predominate is the critical question,” she said. “Under what circumstances would the amenity effect swamp the supply effect?”

It can differ depending on the particular circumstances, she said, while adding that across the breadth of studies that have been conducted, “the supply effect seems to be predominating.”

Because housing growth tends to come in places experiencing high demand and upward pressure on prices, Been said it’s not unusual to see rent increases in an area along with a development boom.

“You don’t know what the counterfactual is,” she said, referring to what would have happened to rents in the area had the development not taken place. One study cited in her report found that the average new apartment building lowers nearby rents by 5 percent to 7 percent “relative to the trend rent growth otherwise would have followed,” a change that the authors said translated to savings of $100 to $159 per month.

Future access to physical cash is now under a cloud, according to Australia’s primary cash transit company, amid a sharp decline in the use of notes and coins.

The Linfox-owned Armaguard has warned that its distribution operations are unsustainable due to falling demand, sparking emergency meetings with Australia’s major banks. The Reserve Bank, which prints and issues currency, is also involved in the discussions.

The concern is that if Armaguard, which has a near monopoly over physical cash distribution in Australia, were to reduce or cease deliveries, there would be an immediate shortage.

This would impact its major clients, including banks, post offices, supermarkets and other major retailers, which would curtail the availability of cash for the community.

Since the 1980s, Finnish governments had been trying to reduce homelessness. Short-term shelters were built. However, long-term homeless people were still left out. There were too few emergency shelters and many affected people did not manage to get out of homelessness: They couldn’t find jobs – without a housing address. And without any job, they couldn’t find a flat. It was a vicious circle. Furthermore, they had problems applying for social benefits. All in all, homeless people found themselves trapped.

But in 2008 the Finnish government introduced a new policy for the homeless: It started implementing the “Housing First” concept. Since then the number of people affected has fallen sharply.

And the country is successful: It is the only EU-country where the number of homeless people is declining.

Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901 Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. A year ago, polling suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to 40%. This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas disinformation campaign against climate policy. Opposition to long-overdue constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.

A job guarantee would go a long way toward helping people afford housing by locating living wage jobs in communities with cheaper housing. However, for the Job Guarantee to deliver the stability and prosperity we hope to see in a people’s economy, it should be paired with a guarantee of homes to everyone. Without a Homes Guarantee, real estate developers, mortgage brokers, and landlords will do everything in their power to capture the increased Job Guarantee earnings. Speculators who treat housing as an investment vehicle leave properties vacant to manipulate prices, systematically pushing people into homelessness. Lacking an alternative due to chronically underfunded public housing and a federal government legally barred from building new housing, many people have no choice but to rely on the private sector. Because the private sector has near total control over the housing stock, and housing is so fundamental to life, it is easy for speculators to bully people into paying more and more of their income. If we want our people’s economy to include quality, stable, community-controlled housing for all, we need the Homes Guarantee to provide an alternative to the speculative housing system.