Alan Kohler said that trams clog up the roads,

I can’t watch the video at work, but yes - this is a dumb take. Trams don’t clog up roads, cars do. And that problem addresses the other criticism of trams as well: Trams are only slow when they are stuck behind cars. Trams are quite speedy when they have dedicated lanes/light rail to travel on.

So many people forget that trams and bikes pre-date cars on the roads. Somewhere around 100 years ago, people started to think roads were for cars, rather than cars being the newest things on the road.

Their marketing and public image is appalling. People equate them with the hardcore Greenpeace style warrior. Young people fixated on a single topic (environment) and willing to hurt the nation in furtherance of that topic. This is especially the case with voters over 40, who remember when the Greens essentially were like this in the 20th century.

If you sit down and go through their policies, not only are they in fact reasonable, they’re probably the best and most transparent party in terms of what they stand for. My only criticism of their platform is it’s a little vague on the how they plan to do stuff and some of it tends to be aspirational rather than achievable. Still, it’s great stuff.

But the percentage of voters who go through the actual stated policies of their choices are sadly in the minority.

This is wild and interesting! IT consultant is approached to make some reports. IT consultant makes reports with open information he finds online, embellishes his stuff by saying he spoke to KRudd, and just makes shit up.

Still goes to prison, not for espionage - because he didn’t steal any government secrets. But for State interference. His dodgy lies might damage the Australia/China relationship.

The reports were handed to Ken or Evelyn in person – sometimes at restaurants and cafes devoid of other people – in exchange for envelopes containing the equivalent of thousands of dollars in cash.

While the information was worthless, the jury accepted prosecution submissions that the relationship with Csergo and his contacts was valuable.

Ultimately, Smith ruled it was important to deter the wider community from being wooed into compromising Australia’s national security.

This is the part that is most interesting to me. You ask a consultant to consult, and offer them envelopes of cash for the work. Of course a lot of them are going to say “yes” and not ask too many questions. But you can be imprisoned for this - even when the bulk of what you are providing is stuff you can glean from government websites, reports and whatever you find online with a bit of personal speculation and fibs sprinkled in. Not actual government clearance stuff.

Ignorance of the law is not a defence and all that, but I wouldn’t have realised that what he had done is illegal. Which I suppose is the Judge’s point.

Flu shots are free in WA from May 1 - Jul 31.
So it depends on the state.

Given that Health is usually a Stare Government portfolio matter, this will come down to the state health departments. WA has an annual vaccine programme for the flu, I’ve been getting both Flu and Covid boosters every year for the last 3-4 years. I didn’t realise the federal government has been covering the Covid one all this time. I thought the state paid for both.

It sounds like the Covid Vaccine is moving away from the federal health department. That doesn’t mean the states (or some of them at least) might not pick up the tab. So ‘Australians could lose access to the free vaccine’ in some cases. But the article doesn’t specify which Australians, because they don’t know. It doesn’t come right out and say Australians will lose access to the free vaccine either - because again, they don’t actually know.

I hate articles like this. Ambiguous wording leading to probable fearmongering.

Wow, you’re not wrong. I’d never heard of him until your comment prompted a quick search. I guess this is more a Queensland thing, because even now knowing who he is, I don’t care much.

If his identity is officially suppressed, this can’t be brought up in parliament. That’s about the only reason I can see he’d maintain his “anonymity”.

Just open them and leave.

I also hate the self checkouts because of the cameras. They can’t handle anything reliably that isn’t ‘take from side a, scan, place on scale’. You do anything tricky like try scanning two of the same item and they straight-up accuse you of stealing a $3 packet of timtams.

I’ve only had the gate fail to be open on me once. I just opened it and left. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just theatre. They’re designed to be openable otherwise we have fire safety issues.

Unless I’m buying 2-3 items, I almost never use the self checkout.

I read an article by the Movember crew talking about algorithms and young men/teenagers. The bit that really stood out to me was the insidiousness of the algorithms. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like:

'Extreme content is seeded into their feed among games and sports and regular stuff. They don’t start out seeking this stuff, the algorithm brings it to them.

So a 14 year old kid saw this stuff on tiktok and started going down that path himself. I guess we should be grateful that 14 year olds are not subtle and clever. He’d have probably been flagged by Google for searching for dodgy stuff from his home IP.

We made jokes and memes when the Chinese started doing this and introduced their whole “Social Credit Score” scheme. And a decade later, here we are.

On the one hand, there’s a certain attraction to being able to tell someone who deservers it that they can’t come into your shops/restaurants/cafes again. Imagine being so obnoxious that you’ve been banned from Colesworth, Aldi, Bunnings, Maccas - you are prevented from entering any of their stores. As much as we dislike some of these stores’ practices, not being able to enter them at all would be a real hassle.

On the other hand, giving employees the power to dispatch that sort of judgement on someone would obviously come at risk of being abused. You’d have people banning their exes, school bullies or for just any random reason.

Supermarkets started with exit gates and bagging-area cameras.

Fun fact: Those gates are decorative. You can just swing them open.

“Are you banned for life from all supermarkets if you walk out with a pack of chewing gum?” he said.

Here’s the other side of the coin: I do believe stores should be able to deny people with a history of shoplifting. My concerns with the technology have to do with my privacy - and to the devices being accurate or abused. I don’t really have sympathy to people who have genuinely done something to earn a ban. If everyone did the right thing, they wouldn’t have any excuse to try introducing this technology in the first place.

But that doesn’t mean I want the stores to be able to intrude on my privacy using “safety” as an excuse. I don’t trust that safety is the real driving reason behind this technology.

I think this whole topic is a beat-up. There is nothing here to debate. For a start, the talk should not be about “smart” glasses. Most of the glasses under debate are not smart at all. Just a camera that can be turned on or off. Simple technology that is not capable of any sort of smarts - certainly not blurring faces.

I genuinely don’t see how we can legislate these things. They’re out there and from a legal standpoint, are no different to any other camera you can buy. Even forgetting the ‘smart’ adjective and making the talk about glasses would be limiting. You can get cameras embedded into hats, necklaces, broaches/tiepins. Say you make all these illegal, how do you define them? Cameras you wear? suddenly the bodycams worn by the kids at Woolies or police are illegal. Go-Pros attached to your head/chest are illegal.

What if you have a shirt pocket, and the top of your phone is sticking out and recording. Are you going to make phone cameras illegal? I think this horse has bolted.

So an entire federal government department spends millions and millions of dollars to collect all this information for it to not be used?

You are incorrect. ABS data informs education departments routinely. Again, please do at least a minimal amount of searching before you plop onto the Internet and just confidently say random shit with authority.

https://www.abs.gov.au/methodologies/schools-methodology/2024

https://www2.education.vic.gov.au/pal/srp-core-student-learning-allocation/guidance/rural-school-size-adjustment-factor

Location measures will be updated with the release of new ABS data every 5 years. The last ABS data survey was completed in August 2021 and implemented in 2025.

It was an example. A simple data point anyone could understand. But as I haven’t convinced you yet, let’s take it further…

What of the three-year-old population in Kensington? They aren’t at the school yet but will want to be next year. Or the couples in their late 20’s who are married? Several of those will want to send kids in ~5 years. How will you learn how many of those are in the area?

town planners would conduct a thorough review and actually ask stakeholders, like local residents, parents, other schools, etcetera.

Sure would be useful for those town planners to have some useful statistical demographics from the last five years to refer to for this review, wouldn’t it? What if they had multiple snapshots of Kensington every five years over the last 20 years or so? That data would be super useful for conducting a review. They should do a survey of the people in Kensington to get that data!

Here is a moment’s critical thought:
“Mr. Sandringham of Kensington believes this primary school in his area is not needed. He wants to buy the land that school uses and develop it into apartments”
“How many primary-school kids live in Kensington?”
“How should I know? Should we do a survey?”

What other means would you propose to figure out the answer to this question? And that’s just the first example to come to mind. Census data informs everything like this. Roads, hospitals, parks, public transport infrastructure, shopping centres, hell even businesses use population sample data to figure out where to put a branch based on whatever metrics they need.

I mean, at least do a cursory check of the ABS website before you plop onto the Internet and pretend to know what you’re talking about.

They have incredible historical value. I got into genealogy a bit when mum died. People simply don’t turn up in official records all that often besides birth, marriage and death. Census data fills out that middle, nicely.

We do need to have faith in the ABS protecting our data for 99 years. But yeah: 99 years from now I will have no need for anonymity any longer.

There are ARIA award categories for songwriters and performers.

If you make your song with AI, you are neither.

Last year I was going to prank everyone with some fake-but-plausible ads on the site on April 1, but I got busy and never got around to it. This year I just outright forgot. I’ll get around to it one year. 🤫

If AI wrote it, they aren’t the artist.

This is such a no-brainer move from ARIA - if it weren’t for anything AI getting press right now, this would hardly be worth a mention.

Signs you hang out on this site too much. 😀
“I don’t get any ads”

I’m reminded of the Sarah J. Maas Throne of Glass series. I got to the end of the series, and really enjoyed it. I get to the online reader reviews and it was a real eye-opener! It was all women, and all they were talking about was who was shacking up with whom. Nothing about the plot. I don’t know whether this series spawned the “Romantacy” genre that is now totally a thing, but yeah - I sort of missed most of that, being caught up in the actual story.

It was as though the Wyrdkeys, the Valg, the war and all the kingdoms coming together to fight for a better world were just a backdrop for everyone to hook up.