I may be slightly biased on that point, and we’re not without our own problems, but having a few more Australias around doesn’t sound so bad an idea. Oganise one in the northern hemisphere and we’d have a place for winter holidays and beach weather all year round that didn’t involve us having to travel overseas

Completely Correct! Give that man a kewpie dolll! Our High Court has determined that there is no right to freedom of speech but an implied right to freedom of political speech.

Australia is not the USA, and frankly, nor do we aspire to be. If the guvmint has determined that reducing access to social media will, on the balance of things, reduce the chances of harm coming to teenagers and younger, then it’s fine with me. I’m certainly not surprised at their rationale.

a trail of spectacularly poorly-thought out comments.

The 'Streisand Effect' is not going to suddenly entice tens of thousands on social media who aren't there already, because they're nearly all there already.

Some kids already try to hide that they're on it, and some others will now try to hide that they're on it. Yeah, so? They're not all going to do that. If, in general, numbers decrease and kids of impressionable age (KOIA) are fewer then the legislation will have served its purpose.

Step towards a surveillance-society my arse. It's a step away from one - removing Big Tech's ability to track and influence you until you're 16 is a good thing in that way. And in any case, the surveillance society (normally the term would be "surveillance state" but this is worse, as it's big corporations, who tend to be less law abiding than the government)) is already here - haven't you been paying attention? How long ago did Larry Ellison tell everyone to "get over it"? And if fewer kids are on social media then that's one less place that will be tracking them, huh?. As to the government here? They couldn't care less in general.

And your final what I would laughingly call a "point", that the so-called step towards a surveillance society being far worse than anything social media did to kids - tell that to the parents of those who committed suicide because of social media pile-ons. Got kids of your own?

You have it all wrong. Now it will be illegal for those miscreants to post their exploits, they'll have to stop and take up table-tennis or something.

Life will ultimately kill you, it's true.

But if you grow your way through life without the ability of thousands (or more) people you don't know beating down on you, you might have the time to develop the skills and (for most people) the resilience to shrug it off. The remark by Slumdog about social media being bad for adults too, and how being 30 or 40 doesn't make it any less terrible is a truly facile comment to make and completely ignores the differences between a tween or teen and someone who's grown up, had ups and downs, maybe even kids of their own, and the psychological defences they will have developed. To put it in the local vernacular: Don't Be Bloody Stupid.

"The Left", huh? Who exactly is "the Left"? Most people on the left hand side of the centre don't like VATs or GSTs (depending where you are) as they're regressive. They hurt the poorest people the most because they have to spend more of their income, they don't get the chance to invest it and let it grow.

Given Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", expenditures (mainly tax cuts for the rich) will be paid for by cutting medical coverage for those worst off, and firing most of the experts in government positions. It used to be regarded as patriotic to pay your taxes, now it's regarded as foolish.

No, I didn't get that because evidently I have a much better memory than you...

Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Victor Yushchenko; handing Buk SAMs to the rebels in the Donbas so they could shoot down MH17; invading Crimea. That's just a few I could remember while writing this (I did look up some of the spellings). There will be more (there's the infamous case of the Bulgarian(?) murdered in the west by an injection of Ricin, but that was in the cold war period so Soviet, not Russian). And plausible deniability drips all over a sudden pattern of internet cable breakages - if you can't see the pattern it's because you don't want to.

The Russians, and the Soviets before them, have a long track record of this sort of behaviour.

Why the passive-aggressive "I'm sorry"? Just come out and give us your opinion. Putting a flowery "I'm sorry" on the front isn't going to sugarcoat it for us, or make it any more or less correct.

There is an element of truth in that, in that some people write fluently and well, and others really struggle. However, the quality of the arguments you are making, or trying to make are also evident. And it can definitely be argued that if you can't support your argument in a written article, how are you going to support it in a work environment when someone higher-up asks you to give your opinion, or defend it? If you want to do well, then you will work at your writing. Those folks who do pre-semester writing courses? They're the ones taking it seriously.

Most courses that I've ever seen only used essays when they were appropriate. CompSci courses didn't use essays at all, and History was effectively nothing but. Might be different in the US. I'm all in favour of the old style of putting everyone in huge drafty examination rooms and making them sit there for 90mins or more to write an answer to a question they haven't seen yet.

Well, I'm not American, so I didn't vote ... but the latest numbers I have found are: Harris: 71,781,355 (48.1%) Trump: 75,084,955 (50.3%)

Anyone who voted for Harris was with 71M other people, they're unlikely to feel lonely. As for 'landslide' - Trump's margin over Harris was less than half of Biden's margin over Trump. Still a shellacking, but more a solid victory than a landslide.

And yes, the Democrats should have spent more time on making things better for day-to-day living, but they did manage a soft landing from an inflation spike that was inherited from Trump's inflationary policies coincident with the pandemic supply-chain crunch inflation. The US economy is - right at the moment - in really good shape. Let's see how long before Tariffs Trump can ruin that.

Actually - with enough money poured into solving the problem, arable land won't be a problem - just get several bulk-cargo ships full of soil from once-fertile but now overheated lands and ship it on down. You might need to give it some microbes or whatever, but just put Matt Damon in charge of that.

You would have to wait quite some time for it to be actually warm enough to live comfortably. Meanwhile, 65 years on from "On the Beach", Melbourne would once again be important, as the Heat Line moved inexorably southwards.

That may true or at least relative, but since Down Under is mostly empty anyway, we should all be able to fit on the above-water parts of Antarctica. We'd move from have the Red Centre to having the White Centre.

And then there's the quite reasonable viewpoint that while progressive policies might have outpaced societal comfort, they're unlikely to have done anywhere near as much damage to society as the consistent conservative push to suppress wages, balanced by elevating profits, and reducing income tax on the wealthiest. Inequality is so huge that it is a genuine threat to the stability of society.

Drop the name calling you prick. That's the behaviour since time imemorial - you want to vote for your side and you don't want the other side to get their votes. Human nature.

Of course, in a place where voting is optional, state houses rig gerrymander the districts, and they don't even have the grace to hold the election on a weekend, it certainly helps to not have your opponent's supporters vote.