Yes, all sex he has is transactional. He’s not seducing anyone.

Here in Australia, my kids learn mandarin in primary school. It’s our biggest trading partner and there is a high number of Chinese immigrants here. No different to learning Spanish in American schools.

When everyone is looking for new trading partners, the only person missing out is the person declining to trade.

You mean like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-with-us-working-visa-detained-insulted-deported

You’re missing the point. This anecdotal evidence is where it did happen and is verified by the media It’s painting a patter of vis refusal for online criticism of Trump.

There is lots of anecdotal evidence of people who have been critical of trumps on social media being denied entry, including high profile cases.

Yes, but the data isn’t being used to silence criticism, like in the USA. However, that just goes to show how important privacy laws are in principle, not just based on who’s in power. Who’s in power changes.

Chin tried a mini trade war with us after Covid. It didn’t go well, but burned trust. So, this is not surprising. It didn’t burn trust on anywhere the level America is doing right no, so diversifying is a good plan.

Labor, who are in government have been pretty milquetoast, so they were rising in the polls. Even as preferred prime minister for Dutton, the (conservative) libs leader. However, as it became clear an election was to be called imminently, Dutton has dropped significantly in the polls. It seems like a grass is greener situation, but as people check out the other grass, they realise it’s just green paint on shit.

It probably hasn’t helped that they linked themselves to trump in the past and have recently tried to fawn over musk in the hopes he would fund them. I think, similar to how Canada is rallying with nationalism against trump and the libs there had a turnaround in fortunes. However, the situation the USA is less real here as we don’t trade as much and the tariffs don’t really affect people, just billionaires, who were already unpopular.

I’m quite surprised by this. I grew up in Ireland. There is no swimming lessons in school. My kids who are growing up here had lessons for most of their lives, except where not permitted during covid. They also do nippers.

Most other kids I know do swimming lessons (privately) weekly ongoing, whereas I grew up learning to swim with weekly lessons in bursts of a few weeks. Nippers is less common unless you live near a surf club.

I’m sure it’s dropped as the article suggests, but I’d say it dropped from a high starting point.

I think it’s a valid point that the concern being raised about tik tok is just as valid with other apps, both from Facebook or Twitter etc and from overseas apps. People are happily giving up their data and don’t see a distinction in how it is being used for disinformation by different state actors. It’s all misinformation.

People are apathetic to the risk, but also don’t see the risk for foreign government snooping as significantly higher than internal snooping.