Cartoon posted:

I think kid_holding_severed_head.jpg is still in front but...

Bifauxnen posted:

Gee, it sure is awful how impressionable children are, and how they'll believe just about anything you indoctrinate them with early, no matter how horrible and wrong.

Thank God we only indoctrinate them with good things, like our Judeo-Christian heritage!

SBS posted:

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/08/11/pm-denounces-barbaric-image-child-holding-head

The boy, wearing a cap, checked pants and a blue shirt, struggles with both arms to hold up the head in the picture reportedly posted on the Twitter account of a Sydney man who is now an Islamic State fighter.

The shocking photo, taken in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, is believed to be that of Khaled Sharrouf's son; posted with the words, "Thats my boy!"

Mr Abbott said the picture was further evidence of the barbarism of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as ISIL or ISIS.

"I believe there are more photographs in newspapers in Australia today of the kind of hideous atrocities that this group is capable of," he told ABC radio on Monday.

Defence Minister David Johnston said he was disgusted by the picture.

"I'm obviously revolted," he told ABC radio.

Senator Johnston said it underscored the importance of the government's proposed counter-terrorism laws.

However, he stressed it should not be taken out of context and condemned the picture as a "shocking misrepresentation" of Islam and Muslims.

"I'm very upset about this sort of thing completely colouring our view of Muslims," Senator Johnston said.

"The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving and peaceful people."

The picture is one of several photos posted by Sharrouf, who security agencies believe travelled to Syria with his family. One shows Sharrouf also holding the decapitated head.

Another photo shows Sharrouf dressed in camouflage fatigues and posing with his three young sons who are holding guns, the flag of the Islamic State behind them.

They appear to be aged around four, six and seven, News Corps Australia reports.

Sharrouf, a convicted terrorist, is wanted by Australian Federal Police over crimes in Syria and Iraq, which include the shooting execution of a captured Iraqi official in the desert outside the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Gough Suppressant posted:

Um, doesn't front paging a child holding a severed head breach some kind of publishing standards?

Gough Suppressant posted:

publishing standards

hooman posted:

Jesus gently caress those corporate datamining stories are loving scary. I'm cutting up my loyalty card and buying everything with cash from now on. loving hell.

i got banned posted:

I don't think enough love is being given to Palmer for his Universities should be free comment.

quote:

The restaurant industry is encouraging members to automate and outsource as much as possible to save money in the face of “unsustainable” labour costs.
Restaurant and Catering Australia will on Monday release the results of a survey showing wages and staff on-costs, including payroll tax and training, account for about 45 per cent of business expenses for members.

Amethyst posted:

Why would you listen to any of the populist nonsense that comes out of Palmer's mouth? Guy held a presser with Al Gore before turning around and repealing the carbon tax, while at the same time stymieing any future attempt to legislate an ETS. He inexplicably added india to the list of countries which must have an ETS before Australia. Nice one Clive, the planet will thank you for that one.

Do not trust Clive Palmer.

Amethyst posted:

Why would you listen to any of the populist nonsense that comes out of Palmer's mouth? Guy held a presser with Al Gore before turning around and repealing the carbon tax, while at the same time stymieing any future attempt to legislate an ETS. He inexplicably added india to the list of countries which must have an ETS before Australia. Nice one Clive, the planet will thank you for that one.

Do not trust Clive Palmer.

Amethyst posted:

Bullshit scare tactics. We may accept robo bank tellers and robo supermarket cashiers, but replace your waitstaff with touchscreens and see how it flies in the market.

Haters Objector posted:

http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/unsustainable-labour-costs-crippling-restaurant-industry-20140811-102n9d.html


Captains of Industry are mad that the greedy plebs are costing nearly half of their business expenses.

Behold the future of Job Creation:

quote:

“We’re saying outsource everything you possibly can,” RCA chief executive John Hart said. “Whether that’s taking reservations, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the restaurant, laundry."

Soviet Space Dog posted:

Unless there are robotic kitchen cleaners out there all of those are just as labour intensive whether you outsource or do them with our own staff, and frankly once you include all the costs of setting up the outsourcing and the profit of the supplier it could easily be more expensive. Which means he sounds silly, until you realise its just a coded call to combat organised labour.

quote:

“There are also job-rich and job-poor locations,” he said. “Take Sydney, for example. Where all the people are who want jobs is out in the west, where all the jobs are is in the east and you can’t get transport from the east to the west at 1am in the morning when you finish a shift. The reality is that we’ve got an incredibly gaping skills shortage that we now estimate will be about 85,000 by next year. If we don’t bring in people from overseas, we’re not going to be able to give jobs to local people.”

quote:

“There are also job-rich and job-poor locations,” he said. “Take Sydney, for example. Where all the people are who want jobs is out in the west, where all the jobs are is in the east and you can’t get transport from the east to the west at 1am in the morning when you finish a shift. The reality is that we’ve got an incredibly gaping skills shortage that we now estimate will be about 85,000 by next year. If we don’t bring in people from overseas, we’re not going to be able to give jobs to local people.”

Freudian Slip posted:

Amethyst posted:

but replace your waitstaff with touchscreens and see how it flies in the market.

Soviet Space Dog posted:

So the problem is where people live thus bringing in people from overseas will fix this how? Are native Australians allergic to living in east Sydney? Maybe they should be pushing for superior nighttime public transit or paying their highly important staff with the skills to fill that gaping shortage enough money to have a car?

SynthOrange posted:

China Red in Melbourne's CBD already does this. Still plenty of staff around to cart food around and clean up and take orders if you dont want to use the menu.

Kegslayer posted:

Yeah a lot of casual Asian places have already done this for a while and it's pretty common practice in Asia. Its just easier for staff not to have to hang around and wait for you to order and it saves on menus.

Most if not all yum cha places in Asia don't even use the trolleys anymore.

Splode posted:

It's worth noting that a touch screen like this doesn't really remove jobs, just reduces the duties of the staff. It doesn't even shorten their shifts.

An automated waiter is still a long way off. A fully automated restaurant isn't impossible but it'd resemble a factory rather than a restaurant and would still require staff for security.

It would also cost unthinkable amounts of money to design and build and require extremely expensive workers to maintain it.

Basically "WE'LL AUTOMATE EVERYTHING" is a dumb threat, because if it's possible to automate they would've done it already.

SynthOrange posted:

Hmmm, some sort of factory? What if we could get the chefs to prepare food and put it on some sort of... rotating conveyor belt? Crazy I know!

open24hours posted:

That doesn't make a lot of sense. There are lots of businesses out there that could adopt new technologies but choose not to for whatever reason.

I don't think automated fast food is really that far off, I can imagine food courts filled with these things.
http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/chennai-based-food-box-gives-packaged-food90-secs_1054970.html

open24hours posted:

That doesn't make a lot of sense. There are lots of businesses out there that could adopt new technologies but choose not to for whatever reason.

I don't think automated fast food is really that far off, I can imagine food courts filled with these things.
http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/chennai-based-food-box-gives-packaged-food90-secs_1054970.html

Tom Westland, Crikey posted:

The neverending echo chamber of Chris Kenny's prolonged Twitter farewell tour

When Chris Kenny decides to share a typically consequential piece of prose, he sits down at a desk to type a newspaper column. This column, through the power of a sophisticated, high-tech logistical distribution system, can reach an astonishing approximate of 110,000 readers each weekday.

In days of yore, scholarly types would communicate with the little people only with the greatest difficulty. Peasants toiling in the fields could pass through their allotted time on the planet quite insensible of the well-tempered wisdom of the Chris Kennys of their age. But no more! Leveraging the power of the revolutionary "newspaper" distribution system, Chris Kenny may communicate with the masses unmediated by priests or royal censors. Phrases like "the modern media environment", "mainstream concerns" and "substantive debate" may be delivered directly to readers with an immediacy that is both intoxicating and frightening. Can Johannes Gutenberg have understood the heft and import of his invention? Can he have imagined how the printing press would give birth, first to newspapers and then almost teleologically, to the mass distribution of Chris Kenny columns?

But this revolution, though it has undoubtedly democratised access to Chris Kenny columns, comes with its dark side. Chris Kenny columns, by virtue of their stupendous reach and unarguable influence, have become echo chambers. The opinions of Chris Kenny are circulated and amplified within these columns until they become almost caricatures of opinions that Chris Kenny might hold. They become self-referential and self-reinforcing to the point of solipsism. On no topic is this more evident than on Chris Kenny’s conviction that Twitter is an "echo chamber".

"The echo-chamber derision often directed at Twitter is, in fact, the reality," he wrote on Saturday. Sharp-eyed readers might observe innocent similarities with the sermon Kenny delivered on the affaire Alan Jones in 2012, which he thought exaggerated by "the echo chamber of Twitter". This sentiment resonates harmoniously with an opinion Chris Kenny ventured last August: "Labor continues to dominate in the youthful, green-Left echo chamber of Twitter." Or again with the idea that came to him last November, that Labor "was urged along by the usual media cheer squad, amplified by the echo chamber of social media". In March, he described the problem thus: "The unbearable lightness of Twitter, as I have explained previously" -- (!) -- "helps skew political commentary to the lunar Left by providing a green-Left echo-chamber". It was in that March column that Chris Kenny announced his decision to retire from Twitter. He is now on what we may only presume to be a prolonged farewell tour.

In his article on Saturday, Chris Kenny explained the terrible cost of this echo chamber to what we may very well be forced to describe as the national debate. Newspapers would prefer to publish sober analysis, but they are forcibly conscripted by Twitter to fill their pages with ephemera:

"Every 24-hour scandal sucks up news coverage and column space that otherwise might be turned to the budget debate, for instance, or indigenous recognition or education reform."

Indeed, with the pages of our newspapers crammed full of cheap tattle in this way, it is only columns like Chris Kenny’s in which the serious business of fiscal consolidation may be thoughtfully masticated. "As [the Prime Minister] seeks to conscript the media and the public into a serious national debate about budget repair and economic reform, there are no easy answers," Kenny warned gravely, going on to outline a series of thoughtful arguments about the need for -- but no, confound it all, he had run out of room!

That’s what’s so insidious about the Twitter echo chamber, you see. Not only does it refuse to talk about the very important matters facing Australia, but somehow (who knows by what underhand methods) it prevents Chris Kenny from talking about them as well.

Endman posted:

Oh look another reason capital owners should be executed.

Where do they get off talking about outsourcing and automation when they're already stealing the overwhelming majority of the profits due to their workers?

"Oh no I have to steal slightly less of the profits of someone else's labour under these minimum wage increases."

Freudian Slip posted:

The last line of that article

quote:

“There are also job-rich and job-poor locations,” he said. “Take Sydney, for example. Where all the people are who want jobs is out in the west, where all the jobs are is in the east and you can’t get transport from the east to the west at 1am in the morning when you finish a shift. The reality is that we’ve got an incredibly gaping skills shortage that we now estimate will be about 85,000 by next year. If we don’t bring in people from overseas, we’re not going to be able to give jobs to local people.”