18 casualties at Croydon park (2025), 57 at Bondi Beech (2025), and a rough survey[] looks like the period proximal before Port Arthur doesn't look much different than after.
The largest one before Port Arthur was Milperra, armed motorcycle gangs, which Australia is speedrunning into resurrecting through their boneheaded cigarette taxes that haved turned half of cigarette vendors into nodes of the black market.
Much fewer than USA, but the Port Arthur changes don't seem to have had much effect.
As noted, no poilcy is perfect or works forever .. hence the need to adapt as time passes.
Yes, we had decades without mass shootings and suppressed casual crime gun usage to near zero.
> which Australia is speedrunning into resurrecting through their boneheaded cigarette taxes that haved turned half of cigarette vendors into nodes of the black market.
Yeah, the taxes were smart and worked, continuosly increasing them to chase diminishing returns was not smart and once a threshold was crossed it spawned an entire new criminal network that had old school motorcycle gangs shaking their heads for crossing various prior "lines" ( family retribution, etc ).
> but the Port Arthur changes don't seem to have had much effect.
Aside from substantially less gun crime, deaths, injuries per capita than the US.
I wonder what they can really achieve in 5 minutes beyond sending the police to do a mental health hold on you? I always thought these lines in the USA were just ways to rat yourself out to get a mental hold (imprisoned, at your own astronomical cost) and then your civil rights (guns) revoked.
Having been imprisoned at a hospital, though not for mental health (falsely accused as drug smuggler by insane cops), I think I'd rather risk suicide if I were in such a state, rather than alert someone who would send the authorities.
No, I don't think that the establishment of crisis lines or putting more resources to work, will result in such an increase. It is a question of moving the funnel and allocating better resources.
The MH Crisis Line may prevent unfair arrests and jailings. It may prevent certain altercations with law enforcement. It may prevent, or at least accurately predict, domestic violence incidents and so forth. The problem with 9-1-1 is that calling for an Emergency resulted in the dispatch of armed police and/or paramedics and firefighters who were poorly equipped to deal with the autistic ADHD non-verbal manchild having a meltdown. Also, many communities are filled with hatred for cops and other first responders in uniform. Sending them can cause secondary incidents and violence.
So if you've got a Crisis Line with people equipped for mental health stuff, then you can send the correct responders. Many municipalities have already established teams like in a "Care Van" who can connect with citizens, establish rapport, and get them referred to services, non-violently, but really urgently.
That will make all the difference. Perhaps it will result in more, or fewer, involuntary hospitalizations, but it represents a solid funnel into those services and allocates more resources to deal with incidents that would only be exacerbated by armed and militarized police/fire/EMTs.
It's also becoming increasingly more likely to enter into college with lower relative and absolute high school performance.
Perhaps some wonder why they should try so hard in HS, when most anyone that graduates can get into college, and no employer is asking a college grad what their high school grades and scores were.
There was a time back in the 60s or 70s or earlier when anyone that graduated HS could get a decent job. And a time now where most anyone who wants a decent job, must complete college or trade school. The latter are increasingly becoming less correlated with HS performance. The importance of HS performance needed to succeed is regressing back towards what was needed back in the 70s or before, so long as you actually graduate so you can go on to further schooling. In the 80s -00's was a time where you where the ladder was shut off if you didn't go to college, but going to college was far more correlated with having the highest marks.
In an era of declining birth rates and thus fewer students graduating from high school, of course the third-tier private colleges are going to lower their admission standards in order to survive. In the long run this won't work because employers will eventually figure out that degrees from those colleges are worthless. But they'll keep up their grifting for a while, and leave a lot of mediocre students stuck with huge debts they can't pay off.
If you ask boomers they'll be far more likely to tell you dad was out working 16 hours in the oil field / carpenter for the housing boom or something like that. Mom has no time for you either, she is busy with the 4th baby. Kid gets a nice belting for bad behavior and other than that, be back before the street lights come on for a dinner conversation and then left to your own devices before bed.
I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.
The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.
Yes. When I was ten I had friends ranging from age eight to fourteen that I regularly hung out with, and older people in their forties or fifties that I would drop by when I saw them outside to learn things from. There was a hierarchy of responsibility in our group where the oldest kept track of the ones younger than them, and those kids kept track of the ones younger than them. Beyond that we had no supervision because everyone knew someone who disapproved of something and would tell their parents, whether that be my same age peers disapproving of cursing or the eldest kids disapproving of everyone going to someone's house uninvited. That risk of strain on the friend group kept everyone in line.
Nowadays parents are very strict about the age gaps between their kid's friends, especially with how older kids usually know how to get into risque stuff online. They aren't exposed to differences of opinion and ability as much in real life, and that somewhat hinders their development. There's nothing that can teach you patience like trying to calm down one of the younger kids so you don't get kicked out of a friend's house during the basketball game. Just like there's nothing that motivates you to get better than your six foot two friend intercepting every single pass to your receiver.
And this isn't even getting into the hobbies, interests, and skills kids can learn just by watching adult neighbours. While this year I'm seeing more people outside doing things, for a long while everyone was inside. That meant there weren't older people outside working on cars, tending to their gardens, preparing their boats for fishing season, or just sitting around talking about activities from the past that might be interesting. Kids are more likely to take an interest in a new activity if somebody they know does that activity, because that person is much easier to ask questions and directly show problems to. If they see something online it will probably be a momentary passing interest that they'll forget by the end of the day because once that video's gone so is their interaction with it.
The voucher system is seen as an attack on IEP / special ed children, since public schools rely on distributing money away from the general population of students and into special ed and IEP students who, by various measures, can consume 3x the amount of money per student. They need lots of non-special-ed students to subsidize the special ed ones at the current levels.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
The smaller tractors now mostly use a hydrostatic transmission instead of a clutch[]. You just move a plate that changes the mechanical advantage of the engine powered hydraulic drive. It's basically another set of hydraulics but for driving the tractor.
It's 'easy' if you have inside connections with the planning and zoning committees and utility companies. I recently developed a property worth about $250k for about $100k. The building process itself is relatively cheap (land + cost construction way cheaper than value of a finished property) and straightforward, everything else is not.
The only reason why I was able to get it done as a random person was because I used a non-commercial loophole to not have to get the inspections that are used as hostile clamp on disfavored competition, and the utility companies that could have charged me a gazillion dollars saw that I was just a guy with a family and took pity on my situation (they are used to dealing with large commercial developers) and gave me the easiest out at every opportunity.
If you are a favored developer you can get things done as easily and almost as cheaply as I did and make vast profits. If not you are fucked and you barely break even because either government workers, or government franchised utility monopolies fuck you at every turn. I lost count of how many times I basically saved $20k-$30k because someone decided not to fuck me that day over some inane detail that in the end doesn't actually make any meaningful difference (the only time I got unlucky -- a utility worker made me redo a survey which cost thousands and then LOLed later that I never needed it, eventually it turned out this person was literally just making shit up which is an astonishingly common tactic when some asshole just wants to delay dealing with you. I was only able to fire this utility company because I was on the border between two monopoly lines which created an unusual point of actual competition, and the next one used a ton of creativity to get the same thing done for relatively next to nothing).
Okay so basically the problem is a system of overly complex rules that don't serve any purpose besides cementing the current influence zones. Creating a state-owned company to navigate these rules won't make the whole process cheaper, only changing the rules themselves will.
Because government bureaucrats need to be let in on the take to make it worth their time. Graft is how that gets done. Otherwise they usually just stonewall housing.
Paying $1 to government shills and corrupt capitalists for every $1 spent on actual housing is still a hell of a deal compared to not being able to build anything, which is the status quo in many locked up parcels. A moral standoff and resting on your principles of not funding graft sounds nice, but doesn't accomplish anything.
>Paying $1 to government shills and corrupt capitalists for every $1
And then some forensic accounting happens and a paper is published citing that government built homes cost twice as much as privately built, and the program stops.
It doesn't seem to stop all the other graft-ridden wasteful parts of government.
Personally I despise the idea of public housing, but once something is there, it becomes easier to develop. There has to be some way of enticing all the factions stopping housing with productive greed rather than anti-productive greed. If public built housing gets something where there was nothing until the first paper gets published or whatever, maybe it's worth doing a deal with the devil.
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