Did pretty well, but I should hope so since I’ve seen his material before.

The advice really is catered for the lowest common denominator though (I guess one has to in this sort of article), so I’ll note that if you can actually swim you don’t have to float along passively once you’ve figured out which direction the rip is taking you. Swimming perpendicular to the current is a valid strategy once you know which direction that will be, as is swimming back in if a rip has taken you out (just choose somewhere the rip isn’t…).

Living on top of a shopping centre wouldn’t bother me in itself, though it’d lose points in my book if the operator had a controlling interest in the strata.

What would really cause me to avoid such apartments is the same thing that goes for apartments in general - I need somewhere secure to store my motorbikes and tools, and somewhere to work on things. An underground car space and a small chook wire storage cage simply does not work for this - I wouldn’t be able to work on my vehicles or use many of my tools, and they’d all get five finger discounted by the end of the first week. I don’t care as much about my actual living space (I can get by with small or old places) but being able to easily do stuff like pull my van into the driveway, weld up a copy of VW’s special engine support tool, and change the timing belt is pretty important to me and a big reason why I would prefer to avoid apartment living.

What’s wrong is that too much of our society is developing a moral panic about carrying knives. It doesn’t help that the knife in question is black with an angular design and therefore scary looking to the pearl-clutchers despite being something that appears to be an reasonable everyday carry.

The article says they were searching people at Central, which isn’t even an unreasonable place to have a pocketknife on you. I’ve carried my pocketknives through Central plenty of times without even considering not bringing them.

I just read the ABC version of this article, which has some zingers from the comedian I think are worth quoting:

She said the lawyers told her she was “damaging” breakdancer Rachael Gunn’s brand, and joked, “She doesn’t need me to do that”.

“They also said I wasn’t allowed to do the dance, because she owns the kangaroo dance. That one did puzzle me. I mean, that’s an Olympic-level dance. How would I possibly be able to do that without any formal breakdancing training?”

Your comment and post only just appeared today (3/12) for me and other people not on lemmy.world, it’s an example of an annoying federation delay between lemmy.world and aussie.zone (the instance where this community is hosted). Currently it appears to take about five days for actions to filter through from lemmy.world due to this delay, so for example if you were to reply to this comment other users viewing from lemmy.world would see your response right away but it’ll take ~5 days for me to receive it.

This has been an ongoing issue for months unfortunately, and does lead to situations like this where posts/comments are seemingly ignored by the broader community. As far as my understanding of the matter goes the problem comes down to the Lemmy software sending actions one at a time and lemmy.world being a big (and active) enough instance that the posts/comments/votes its users generate simply cannot send fast enough through to a lot of other instances. The output level is at the point where the extra milliseconds from being physically further away from lemmy.world’s hosting location makes a noticeable difference in how far behind an instance falls in receiving lemmy.world actions, and aussie.zone is hosted about as far away as one can get (hence the large delay that has built up).

One of the most recent versions of Lemmy has apparently included a way to fix the issue but lemmy.world is still running several versions behind (0.19.3 when current is 0.19.7). Sadly this delay will continue until either lemmy.world updates to a version which can send multiple actions at once or people slow down with posting/commenting/voting on lemmy.world (not an ideal solution, given I want the fediverse to continue being popular). In the mean time if you want to keep up to date with aussie.zone communities the only option I can think of is to use another Lemmy/Kbin account - an aussie.zone account is one way but using basically any instance that’s not lemmy.world should work.

I have yet to try it out myself, public transport doesn’t really work for my commute down here so I only catch it once in a blue moon. I did hear that the new system wasn’t particularly functional on launch - one does expect a few teething issues but ideally you’d get more minor ones instead of the system straight up not working for people.

The destruction of tender plants and evergreen trees by fire and the nurturance of plants that are tough and high in oils seems like a recipe for fire.

One problem is though that in much of Australia* we’ve had tens of thousands of years of people modifying the (presumably biased towards flammable to start off with) environment through repeated fires, so we already have an awful lot of vegetation that’s adapted to a regime of regular fire.

* Exceptions that come to mind are rainforests and alpine areas, which must not have been burnt often since the vegetation in these places doesn’t cope with fire well.

Judging from stage one and Sydney’s light rail efforts I’m sure we can make 2km of track take at least a few more years, then after that we can spend a few more years thinking about plans for stage 2B instead of doing that while building 2A…

The idea of like having to put on a comedicly overwrought accent to make a machine understand you is 👌

I’ve tried this to good effect before when I got my current motorbike helmet headset - the voice commands on default settings worked much better when hamming it up with an American accent like one was trying to audition for a part in a Western. Luckily though I ended up finding out that Cardo also trained a British accent option in the settings, and that works a lot better if you want to talk like a normal person.

There are a few actual streets like that in that suburb - I had a look to see if I could find the location of the photo and I think it’s Ganges St.

Thanks :)

I’ve clicked around a bit this morning and so far so good, so all might be well again after your changes.

I looked it up and their normal charge for dogs is $395 while the normal charge for cats is $195 (rabbits normally $80). Pretty steep prices but I guess vaccinations (plus desexing if necessary) and housing/looking after the animals adds up quickly so they need to get enough back to keep operating.

Edit: Also still a lot less than what you see many dog breeders selling dogs for - I’ve looked occasionally and you see people wanting thousands of dollars for a puppy.

The same argument that won the gay marriage plebiscite - people should be equal under the law and, by extension, our constitution.

Last year, Australia showed how unengaged and racist this country remains by refusing to insert an Indigenous advisory voice

Convenient that the author forgot to mention that the very person they’re writing about was a vocal No voter. You can say many things about Lydia Thorpe but politically unengaged is not one of them, and while she might be a little bit racist it’s definitely not against Indigenous people.

I’ll also note that the Tent Embassy had a giant banner hung up urging people to vote No, guess they’re all politically unengaged and racist…

Yes, it makes sense that they’d be the first to lose seats to another non-major candidate. Another possible factor is that the Greens lost protest vote value due to being known as part of the incumbent government - that’s going to attract less of the votes from people who want something different (but aren’t going to vote for the Libs).

That’s pretty much what I was expecting; the Liberals getting enough seats for a majority would have been quite surprising so it was really a matter of how close Lab/Lib would get and who Labor has to negotiate with. I am not surprised that Labour’s primary vote is middling considering it’s been two decades in power, the fact that they still hold power is a real testament to how badly the Libs are received in this town.

The rise of independents is interesting, and I can’t say I dislike a shift away from party based politics. How it turns out is obviously going to be more variable though - I will be curious to see if they retain their seats after a term.

The smartest thing in any of my vehicles is an aftermarket Android Auto unit so I can’t speak from personal experience, but there are various things such cars can do where the connectivity could be useful. Three I can think of are notifications/video of things happening around the vehicle at the time of occurrence (a la Tesla Sentry mode), being able to remotely start the vehicle to give the air con a head start on a hot day, and over the air updates for bug fixes or possible new software features without having to go near a mechanic.

Part of the problem here is that the things that can invade privacy do have genuine use cases, it’s just that you can coopt them to also gain information. For example even the seemingly hard to justify internal cameras could have a genuine safety use by watching the driver for fatigue symptoms. If effective this would save lives over a car model lifespan, so you’re balancing obvious privacy issues against the idea that such inconvenience is worthwhile if it saves a life (a sentiment more typically seen in speed limit debates, but applicable here too).

They tried other designs first but it was found you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd…

I do think there is something to be said about being wary of modern cars in regards to security. I wouldn’t trust manufacturers as far as I could throw them when it comes to actually making secure systems - particularly when you’re dealing with remote connection capabilities. The focus on China is convenient for the US but I wouldn’t trust their systems either. Ford in particular has been concerning recently by patenting a way of ad serving based on user data a normal person would consider private (such as conversations within their cars). It doesn’t even take the OEM being malicious to be a problem, they only need to miss a security hole…

According to a news article I just read this morning gets the record for coldest spring morning ever recorded in Canberra, so you could say it was pretty chilly.