RustyRaven

Even basic recycling of things like plastics is not done well.

Government using contractors as part of the system is fine, but not having a system at all seems to be the problem. Government should at the very least be setting up effective frameworks for management, recycling and disposal of all types of waste. Instead they set up a few guidelines and leave it to "market forces" and wonder why we end up with dodgy systems geared towards profit for company owners at the expense of the health and safety of the general public and the workers involved in the industry.

In the past decade or so in Victoria alone there have been: warehouses full of soft plastic being stockpiled, warehouses full of contaminated "mixed recycling" being stockpiled, warehouses full of toxic chemicals stockpiled and being stored incorrectly, a massive property being used as an illegal dump for huge volumes of toxic waste being secretly buried, an old landfill site leaking dangerous levels of methane into houses in a nearby housing estate

These are just the ones that were big enough to be in the media that I can remember off the top of my head. This is what "market forces" and weak regulations get us

I have about three possums per square metre where I am. I hear them carousing across the roof nightly, one lives (and raises baby possums) in the blocked off chimney in the bedroom, and I regualrly hear them disputing territory in the back yard. I recently lost a staring competition with a possum sitting on the fence outside my kitchen window. I've also had a possum come inside the house on three separate occasions.

I like possums in general, but I'd be very happy to have a few less of them around, I'm completely outnumbered and the garden suffers from their nibbling as well.

You are in the process of putting a diagonal line through the centre of our flag. That feels pretty disrespectful to me. No one was touching your rainbow until you started to extend it to cross out the flag.

Our society has a very messed up view of weight. You get the same sorts of comments about being sick - someone is really sick and it causes them to use weight and you will have a ton of people piping up with "I could do with some of that" type comments. People with severe illnesses get comments about how great they look because they have lost weight.

The other ones that annoys me is that when talking about food we use "healthy" to mean low calorie, and we call a metabolism that uses lots of energy "efficient" (would you call your car efficient because it uses more fuel?). Yes obesity can be a problem, but thin is not inherently healthy, and losing weight can be a very bad medical sign.