It make sense. If you want to own a big car you pay for a parking space. In SA they would prefer to make all home owners pay for a huge parking space regardless of if they want a big car or not. It’s better than having people dump them on the street but only barely.

In my opinion Malinauskas is a poor labor leader and mainly represents the shoppies and big business.

I believe in Japan, or Tokyo at least you have to prove you have a parking space to purchase a vehicle. This encourages the purchase of smaller vehicles or no vehicles. I guess that’s how the smart people get to 40 million without dieing from smog. Adelaide is a country town sprawled over a vast area. When I was younger I used to like living in he inner burbs but the sprawling outer burbs are a depressing wasteland. You are better probably off living in country SA if you can find work.

Adelaide is a very inefficient and boring low density city designed to serve the interests of low-effort residential property developers which is surrounded by huge housing developments served by islands of franchised box stores. The people there don’t want to change. They like the supermarkets shutting at 5pm on a weekend and would rather pay 4 times the price to buy essentials from a wage thieving petrol station. Let them have their big cars. You don’t need to live there. People have been leaving for decades and will continue to do so. It is a shame as the place had a lot of potential.

That was obvious.

Option 1: a nation of predominantly anti-intellectual xenophobes organically discover a foreign language community and embrace it or option 2: a bunch of influencers from an existing platform are recruited to promote a competitor to a bunch of addicts looking for another fix. Social and mainstream media universally promoted the incorrect narrative.

I wish US citizens didn’t look so much to authoritarian states like Russia and China when they have old friends who they worked and faught alongside for years. These friends have been happily enjoying the benefits of social democracy despite an onslaught of anti-democratic propaganda, much of it from US citizens and their media.

Which brings me to the other narrative that pisses me off. That Chinese media are a national security threat but Meta and X are not. Lets be real. It is all the same shit. Any organized effort to manipulate mass opinion: politics disguised as religion, social media, conspiracy theories, cults etc have the potential to derail rational political debate, elevate populists and hand the keys to a generalissimo and it always leads to mass graves. Left or right doesn’t change the outcome which is shit. We all have to take some responsibility to fight back against this influence. Engage with people who are sucked into this shit and encourage them to disconnect.

Most mobile/laptop devices should be encrypted by default. They are too prone to loss or theft. Even that isn’t sufficient with border crossings where you are probably better off wiping them or leaving them behind.

My desktop has no valuable data like crypto, sits in a locked and occupied house in a small rural community with relatively low crime (public healthcare, social security, aging population). I have no personal experience of property theft in over half a decade.

I encrypt secrets with a hardware key. They are only accessed as needed. This is a much more appropriate solution than whole disk encryptiom for my circumstances. Encrypting Linux packages and steam libraries doesn’t offer any practical benefit and unlocking my filesystem at login would not protect from network exfiltration which is a more realistic risk. It adds overhead.and another point of failure for no real benefit.

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I was a huge SpaceX fan from the early days so watched a lot of Musks presentations and interviews and noticed a lot of repetition and always felt he was strongly working from talking points combined with a reasonably good high level understanding of the topic.

He didn’t work as well off script and seemed to have stunted emotional development, not unlike a lot of internet age manboys raised on memes, video games and porn. It is difficult to reconcile his behaviour with an adult, father and manager of people and money. I suspect he has some seriously competent peiple around him like Shotwell who cover for his fuck ups.

IMO he probably is the kind of guy who can soak up stuff around him, turn it into a set of talking points and repeat it with the appearance of expertise. I think he may have had some cognitive decline due to age and lifestyle but I think he was a pretty competent bullshit artist in the past.

I am not an expert at anything but like many IT people discovered long ago that I can pick up most things in my general field with a bit of research. It is a dangerous mindset sometimes. There really is the feeling that with some basic undergrad math and comp sci and a weekend of googling you can understand quantum field theory and it’s totally delusional of course.

Unfortunately the fake it to you make it culture seems to have won. It doesn’t matter how crap you are, if you put yourself out there with confidence you will outcompete the quiet competent types. And when you get caught out there never seem to be consequences.

There is a whole world of obsolete stuff nobody will ever do with a linux system anymore. Terminal servers with lots of serial terminals or modems for a BBS. Making a fax server, IVR, digital answering machine for analog land lines. Using removable optical or magnetic media. Recording broadcast tv. SCSI, Firewire. It is interesting to imagine what from today will be obsolete in a few years.

Who the fuck buys shit off temu? Those sites are a dumping ground for products that don’t meet the already lax quality and regulatory requirements of our retailers. China can make very high quality products to equally high standards but where is the incentive when consumers are brain dead and buy mountains of crap instead of save to buy quality then look after it.

I don’t want to see the terminal emulator. No chrome. Needs solid emulation. That’s about it. Still using kitty and it’s got a good balance of stuff I use. I don’t really get the point of ghostty. These things are a bit like browsers, they just display the content and are interchangeable. People get super weird about terminal emulators and window managers.

I have been using Linux since the early 90s. I don’t know it all. I read man pages. I use -h or --help. I read the arch wiki. I read docs. I read source files and examples. Lots of reading. You will never know it all. There is too much information.

You need to know how to find information. It can be tricky. Knowing how to ask the right questions often requires you to know a bit of the answer.

Stumbling about trying to find answers is training the skills you need.

I think it helps if you have a programming background and IT support experience. Not just because you will understand more concepts and terms but because you have already developed some of those skills but some people come from other backgrounds and pick things up really quickly because they have well developed research skills.

The only software I have paid for in the last couple of years are games. The licensing is still crooked but they are ephemeral entertainment so its not like they control your life.

The problem with commercial software isn’t the price. It is the lock in. They have you by the balls whether you pirate or pay so I don’t pirate as it doesn’t address my main issue with closed source software which ismt price but control. I prefer to adapt, sometimes live with less features and use free and open source.

Its hard if you have to work with others which is the whole network effect BS, everyone is on Reddit and shitter so why aren’t you. If you can work independently though you can get a lot done and have more control.

Exactly.

I wonder what their reaction would be to a tv show where a bunch of CEOs were forced to compete to the death to entertain the masses.

Would that get a McDonald’s merch tie in? I think seeing private healthcare and fast food CEO’s being mown down by machine guns in a battle royale would be a real crowd pleaser.

What is the point of saying it if the press won’t report it?

There were probably extenuating circumstances after 2019 but I have no idea what was going on under the Hockey and Morrison treasuries. Hockey might have been disinterested but Morrison was a disaster. They kept on taking on more debt and where was it going? Not increased services for taxpayers. Mates? Waste? Corruption? Who knows?

Our percentage of government debt to GDP still isn’t too bad in global terms. Even under the coalition while it was lax management and dodgy deals it wasn’t going to break the nation.

It was certainly going up under Gillard but very notable the massive outrage in the press ceased as that continued and considerably worsened under successive coalition governments. Extremely biased press coverage and complete dumbarsery from the Australian public to accept the media spin when the debt figures are public record.

Wasn’t the original Squid Game a social commentary, a critique of inequalities created by capitalism in South Korea kind of like Parasite? Anyone else think it completely went over the heads of Mr Beast, Netflix, McDonalds and most of the viewers?

They inherited a bit of a mess thanks to covid, the global economy and the previous government. Inflation seems under control but I think they could still be punished by the many people who are struggling. Also they have created divisions with unions and other traditional supporters that are going to be an ongoing issue. The ALP are on some dangerous ground blessing some unions over others depending on factional support and politics instead of the interests of workers. They shouldn’t take anything for granted.

A huge amount of power resides with the ultra wealthy who own the media platforms. Musk could go on the attack as he thinks he is God-Emporer of the world now. Murdoch will be hostile. Industry groups will be funding campaigns. Foreign governments and corporations will be funding anti-democratic, divisive politics to weaken us. They will need to work very hard and be very creative to get their message across in this environment.

I think we could very easily wake up to a Dutton government with the labor machine shaking their heads in disbelief. A huge proportion of the population get a completely different algorithmic feed of what is going on in the world and then they all form their echo chambers and it takes over the work place and community. The ALP will need to get out in the community and see how broken the information environment has become.

And for the people who think Albo has been piss-weak on some issues, the reality is the ALP can’t piss off the wrong people because of the above. They are going to have to sit in the middle, placate big business and fossil fuels and nibble away at stuff and be content with being the coalition-lite. Put a minor party or independent above them if you don’t like it but this isn’t the time to walk away.

Donkey votes are crazy in Australia with a preferential system. Just rank your preferences. All the bad parties are not equally bad. You owe it to yourself, your family and your country to put them in order. Your competition is some ignorant fuck who is going to put the worst team first because they hate everything and everyone. No point whinging when they win. You can at least counter their vote.

No but there is an ideological basis for free software though it is firmly based on practical experiences dealing with the consequences of close source devices.

Red Hat and Ubuntu are business. Debian and Arch are communities. Some of the smaller distros are basically that one guy in Nebraska.

People promote them for various reasons. An IBM employee will have different reasons to the supporter types who latch on to a distro and mascot like it was a football team. Now football, there is a religion. Its all ritual, nothing they do has any practical use, people congregate once a week and in some parts of the world it turns violent.

When the deb users start committing genocide on the rpm users I’ll call it a religion. Until then its just a bunch of anime convention fans arguing about their favourite isekai.

It will be 35 years way too soon. I can’t remember the last time I compiled a kernel let alone what exactly I was doing with a computer in the early 90s.

Its weird that most of the world runs on Linux outside of desktop and we still have these discussions. I didn’t know what a distro was in the beginning. It was a Linux kernel and gnu user space someone had compiled to get people started. If the disk sets had a name I didn’t know or care.

I have been using PayPal increasingly for online payments. Not sure why. I have heard old stories about PayPal but Honey seems really bad. Its basically a given that any fintech company are going to be dodgy scammers but PayPal seemed almost grown up and respectable. Guess not.

There will always be the hoarders. You can’t collect everything on any sort of wage/salary and live. If you have a compulsion then piracy is a reasonably harmless past time. You aren’t depriving anyone of income for something no normal person could reasonable afford.

For regular content consumers it is simply free market economics working. Companies innovate and offer great products and value and they take people away from the black market. Then the companies get greedy, form loose deniable cartels and start fixing prices prices at higher levels and cutting quality and consumers go elsewhere. They want the profits from a free market but don’t want to play the game and compete on value and quality. Sucks for them. The government grants them a legal monopoly on monetizing their IP but it doesn’t give them a clue on how to build successful businesses.