Unfortunately Ukraine opened my eyes to a very painful truth. The protection of nuclear powers is worth nothing (including the US nuclear umbrella) and having your own nukes is everything.
If you don’t have an independent capability the nuclear powers destroy your countries youth, heritage and future in endless proxy wars. I don’t ever want that for my kids. I don’t want nukes either but having our own nukes is a lesser evil.
Family member spends all day every day recording and editing videos for youtube. Never finds an audience. Never gets promoted. The service is too busy pushing AI slop. All that video storage for the long tail of content with almost no views must cost a fortune. Meanwhile big quality youtubers seem to not be growing for some time like they have hit a ceiling. I think Youtube has been in decline for some time. Instead of fix it, which would require investment and ideas, I think they pull the usual bad US MBA style management practice and attempt to maximise revenues on the way down until they finally kill it.
I do not want to buy American phones, particularly Apple. I want to go back to card over phone. It isn’t really any less convenient to carry a sliver of plastic. My end game for mobile is degoogled android or Linux where I won’t have access to banking.
I think least cost routing is supposed to be available for traders or they can set their terminals to prefer EFTPOS. I think I read that some banks let you set a preference on the card but mine does not have anything in the app. I might need to contact them.
I pay my internet with PayiID. Also use BPay. Osko. A lot of ecommerce is restricted to US platforms. I would prefer to make NFC payments with EFTPOS but haven’t worked out a way to do it. Might have to research.
Norway is a petro state. Those EVs are green washing, paid for by exporting fossil fuel. Those EVs will all be broken in a few years and they will send them to land fill and buy another lot. Not half as smart as building public transport and liivible cities.
Australia could also be a petro state and own the profits from mineral extraction and invest it for our people but the risk of doing that is becoming addicted to fossil fuel revenue.
The truck network is privately owned and the big company owners are huge political donors. They will always oppose rail. We have road trains going through town day and night and the roads are getting years of wear in months. Privatise the profits. Socialise the costs.
There are huge bypasses and highway upgrades not far away costing millions and none of the road trains use them. They are tearing up the B roads because it’s the only route they are allowed on. It’s crazy.
The rail here was never fit for purpose. Installed a century ago and conditions were so bad it moved at a crawl. It could not compete with the massive public funding that goes into roads.
I agree with building near use. It’s better use of land as well to put them on the roof of buildings.
There are a lot of small scale solar installations on rural properties. I would guess it is often a question of supporting infrastructure and economics not political opposition.
Example of rural small scale solar on SA https://www.redmud.net.au/our-farms
From memory, suggest fact check, the French nuclear subs use less enriched uranium so require more frequent refueling. If the French agreed to give us access we would basically be acquiring nuclear technology to be able to maintain them ourselves. I think the US/UK lawyered their way around things. They provide more highly enriched fuel which is closer to weapons grade, and so more of a proliferation risk. However it goes back to the US for servicing very infrequently (10 yrs or something) and we claim we just operate the reactors and there is no technical proliferation? Or something like that. Like everything from the US I would guess the reactor tech is more like a rental with extensive T&C.
Converting the French subs to diesel seems to have been a source of problems. If we had been up front with France about the US/UK promising nuclear subs they might have been open to negotiation. We took the first offer like suckers. Typical Morrison.
Why can’t we make card payments without Visa in Australia? We need to ditch these foreign companies and develop our own or co-operate with peer countries. I ditched Paypal and Amazon but I still have to donate to Visa every time I buy a pie.
They have been getting fuel into the country and trying to support critical industries and combat price increases. There is a limit. We aren’t about to sanction the USA or start a war with them. Global oil prices aren’t something our government can control.
Whatever they do it’s going to end with fuel rationing I think. Odd and even plate days etc. Seen it all before. People forget quickly how vulnerable we are to disruptions in the global supply chain.
Cutting fuel excise is likely a poor decision conomically but there is a constant theme I see online, don’t know where it comes from, that this government does nothing. They are obviously doing a hell of a lot and perhaps more than they should. It isn’t being reported or understood for some reason.
Long term it would be bad. High prices help hasten energy transition and energy independence but the collapse of the Libs has left a very dangerous power vacuum.
Hopefully Trump dies of natural causes or gets the 25th soon and the disruptions in the gulf ends.
Meanwhile Labor needs to be seen to be doing popular things to keep the fossil fuel and billionaire funded populists to 20%
Government is always about finding a balance, not being perfect.
Oh, I wish public education in SA was funded properly. The costs to parents are good but schools often get shafted. Particlarly capital works like new buildings. The difference between a rural public school and one of the favoured city schools or a private school are still huge. They probably do what they can with the revenues they have but there is a lot of federal money going to private schools that could be redirected to state public schools where it would make a huge difference.
Our public school fees have been reduced to almost nothing under South Australian Labor. And we get a sports voucher for the kids sports. None of it means tested. And low income families have school cards.
Unfortunately private schools are clearly still over funded and very influential in politics. I am sure they lobby heavily to keep public schooling slightly underfunded to push kids into their schools. Our premier is a Labor Right SDA Catholic bro so they aren’t getting their public funding cut.
I don’t mind making moderate voluntary contributions if they are being used for desirable but non-essential things. They are a trap if they are being used to fill a hole in state funding. Schools in poorer areas end up becoming highly disadvantaged.
Many older ICE vehicles can be modified to use LNG which we practically give away. We also have plenty of oil but we mothballed or closed most of our refineries as they were too small in scale to compete internationally. We had a vehicle and parts industry here and we still have some people who can make parts for ICE vehicles even if we don’t have the equipment to do it at scale anymore.
Based on that I think if it went Max Max here it is more likely someone would be driving a 100 year old guzzoline powered Ford Falcon than trying to keep an EV running past 10 years.
All the value of the vehicle is created overseas so I don’t see the sovereignty argument. We are a net energy exporter. Energy independence is only one aspect. How are people going to get parts for their BYD when the US starts a war with China?
EVs have their advantages and disadvantages. They are all effectively disposable and don’t have a good recycling story so I think there is a huge amount of green washing. We need to adopt EVs to reduce emissions but they are terrible for the environment in other ways. Better to focus on public transport, urban planning, e-bikes IMO.
I think I can be both in the same day.
The EV parts and supply chain is all foreign and there aren’t enough options for “dumb” vehicles which aren’t dependent on software services and updates. A home grown ev running on open source software would be brilliant. As it is I would prefer to drive my decades old ICE vehicle smaller distances and less often and use other forms of transport to fill the gaps.
Local community run childcare has its north facing roof absolutely covered in pv. Has been like that for many years. Every homeowner and business that can afford it does the same around here. Small scale PV installs on non-productive bits of farmland as well.
We don’t get many power outages. I am not sure if batteries make economic sense everywhere currently. Their time will come I am sure.
I guess a lot of childcare around the country is dodgy commercial operations where they are pocketing all the government grants while their buildings fall apart. Perhaps we should get rid of those and have more community run operations they would put profits back into improving the care and facilities including capital investments like solar.
Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.
Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.
I am in Australia. Searches on local content and niche tech subjects don’t do very well compared with other engines. It might be lack of tuning more than index and I am sure it will improve. Latency might be due to lack of local servers or resources or my choice of browsers but Qwant breaks all the time. It runs a lot better if I keep ad blocking on. Noticeably faster and more reliable though still high latency on the first result showing. If you turn ads on to support smaller companies you immediately get punished. Ad supported businesses aren’t compatible with good quality service unfortunately, no matter where they are based.
It is amazing that Google was so usable for so long really. Their search people must have fought hard to balance out product quality against the demands of the money people for a long time. I think every service that follows in Google’s footsteps will inevitably repeat all their mistakes.
I recommend trying Qwant, Ecosia and others though. It is my default browser search at the moment, mostly because it isn’t US based. It might be all you need.
How long do you stay on a platform before the outreach to new people is outweighed by implicit support of the platform?
It’s a tough call. It is difficult to reach out to outsiders and talk to them but it’s the only way to have a conversation with them.