I think fear drives the majority of our choices, in both positive and negative ways. I love hearing people talk about how it impacts them.

Oh, come now: 99 problems, & getting hitched still 1…!?!

As the boomers get older, aged care will become a key economic issue. Automated systems will also become more sophisticated. We will have to make ethical decisions regarding what industries should be open to the disruption of automation.

As a constantly-lapsing vegetarian, I am interested in both the science and philosophy of meat. I know many others are too.

The flaws in our Australian law system, reflect the inequity on a world basis. If Australia, a relatively new country, that has a fresh start, is already in a conundrum with it’s inefficient and biased laws, then what hope is there for transparency and justice on a world level? To illustrate, I lent a friend $45,000 for a mutual project. They refused to pay it back, admitting they just spent it. We made a signed legal contract and I have a bank paper trail. Also, a witness who verified his actions signed an affidavit. Yet, this is not enough for me to retrieve my money or for them to go to jail. This person, continuously cons others with small amounts of money, so that legal fees make it unviable to retrieve the lost money. It is clear that I was conned and that they are thief, yet the justice system has no effective recompense for these serious situations. This person should be in jail and working to pay for my loan. I tried going to the local court and followed the procedure of a small claim. After the sheriff failed to find him, nothing could be done. This is a ludicrous system that fails to protect the vulnerable in our society.
I believe there is a long overdue overhaul of our justice system, which protects the unjust, provides extreme wealth to the judiciary and fails to facilitate justice.
I tried Legal Aid, etc and they were unable to assist me.
What do the great thinkers think?

Most of today’s global problems originate in the competitive foundation of the current economic, political paradigm. We will never realise humanity’s highest goals unless we learn to start from a different place in thinking about the “system” we live within.

In the mid 1970’s I heard a bureaucrat [Bob Lansdowne] argue that social change came from shifts in compassion or compulsion-he was discussing our relationship with Indonesia and argued that compassion was in short supply. He was suggesting that huge disparities in income and wealth in an increasingly open and global environment were a recipe for instability and conflict–and that we should be afraid of the consequences of failing to address it. His concern is even more relevant today.

It is a critically important question.

Viewed from an economic perspective, does the arts suffer from something similar to the military-industrial complex, minus the extreme violence? It seems like everyone in the arts think that more funding will fix all our problems. I was thinking of this in the light of ever growing artistic output and too much choice that the inner city life has to offer, and the idea that art is like violence in the sense that it will continue to be practiced impulsively by humans regardless of funding. To me, what seems to motivate reasonable decisions and priorities as governments struggle to allocate resources justly is the education and learning environment people have access to rather than the size of our arts or “defence” budget.