I must get around to watching this video. I will say that I take exception to the thumbnail though: The Perth Metronet project finished up earlier this year, it costing $12.4 billion to roll out 72km of track.

On the surface, that comes out at about $172 million per kilometre. But, that is only part of the story. That money also paid for the construction/renovation of 18-23 stations, 8km of tunnels under the river for the new airport line, elevation of 5.5 km of track, removal of several level crossings, and a whole program to locally manufacture trains.

Just reducing the project to ‘dollars per kilometre’ would be super inaccurate for the overall result. But even then, that would be less than a quarter the implied cost of building a rail line in Australia from that thumbnail.

Despite my differences with senator Hanson (and boy howdy, there are many), I will respect that what you see is what you get with her. She has one trick, and she does it openly and honestly. She hasn’t tried hiding expenses, she stomps on people in her own party when they are caught out and doesn’t try to defend them. I even think she was treated a bit harshly in 2003 when she was imprisoned for electoral fraud. I have never begrudged her existence, nor the rights of the whackos who have repeatedly voted for her. I see value in her as a litmus test of that end of the scale in the electorate. Yes she is racist. She, she is frankly awful. But on the other hand, those things are not against the law.

These two have been associated with one another in the public mind for about 18 months now. There has been intense scrutiny on them since they went to the US President’s Halloween party last year. They’ve both spoken publicly about their friendship when asked about it. As to keeping it low-key, how much do we know about the friends of any politician? They didn’t raise it, but didn’t shy away from it either.

I actually worked with the Minister of Veteran Affairs 25 years ago when he was a uni student. While we not exactly close, I’d have called him a mate at that time (I haven’t heard from him since I left there in 2004). So there’s a little low-key disclosure for you. 🙂

Controversial take, but I don’t have as huge an issue with this. Senator Hanson is upfront about the gifts, it’s all in the open. She’s clear that Ms Rinehart is a friend and speaks to her about government policy. Gina is also pretty straight-up about her agenda and a desire to turn Australia MAGA. This influence is crystal clear. We (the public) are aware that this is happening and have the ability and opportunity to decide whether we will accept this relationship in our public figures (and vote accordingly). A straight-up transfer of money in return for senatorial votes would be corruption and a step too far. Yes, this friendship skirts that line pretty damn closely.

I have far more issues with billionaires influencing politics inside a veil of secrecy. We all know it is happening, but we don’t know for certain who those billionaires and politicians are, nor what policies they’re talking about.

I do have obvious concerns with the Gina/Pauline BFF thing, but I think the “secret mates” are a bigger problem.

I swear, it used to be better. When I first returned to Perth after living in Melbourne, the West Australian was a breath of fresh air. Yes, it still had its bias, but compared to the Hun and what was happening to The Age, it was actually pretty good.

It has shifted so far right in the last decade that it is unrecognisable to where it was. It’s been a slow process, with the changes amping up this year. I think that if you somehow took today’s editors & writers back in time a few years and produced a 2018 paper in today’s style, the whole city would be talking about the massive shift. But because the shift has been gradual, it isn’t spoken of. I recognised the changes in writing style as they happened, because I’d watched it happen to The Age around 2010-2015. It was the same.

Yep. I saw this budding industry getting off the ground last year and predicted they’d make a play to get involved locally in the Molly thread. My response to these companies would be the same today as it was last year. You can’t be 100% certain a kid isn’t getting past your systems any more than anyone else can. It’s also laughable that they think they have more resources to throw at the problem than the likes of Google or Facebook.

The bill would also allow eSafety to compel documents from social media platforms and third parties when investigating suspected systemic failures to uphold the ban.

On this front I think we’re covered, though I’m no lawyer. I never really finished compiling all the Molly responses, nor have I followed up with successive waves - but all the received responses were captured. We can produce these replies in court if compelled (and that’s what it would take). Yes, it is possible a kid is on the instance - though I have no idea why they’d want to be. I also doubt we’ll be targeted - we’re not big enough to rate a headline. They’ll go after someone like Whirlpool or OzBargain before they come at us.

Side note: I have accounts on both those sites, and neither has asked to verify me. Whirlpool makes sense, my account there is 20+ years old, but I was pretty late to make an OzBargain account.

Sure. I get why they’re drinking the Kool aid. But I don’t know what he’s complaining about. Did someone make a joke at the rich lady’s expense? Or point out that she gets a platform for opening her big mouth simply because she’s rich?

I’m missing something from this.

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Oh it’s WiFi, I wasn’t expecting it to receive the alert. It’s just that my test iOS device for all the other stuff I do (like 6+ Lemmy apps) isn’t much use for testing this thing as it didn’t get the alert.

Neat! I’ve never seen/used this setting before. Confirmed it is in there. My iPad didn’t get the alert, does iOS have a similar feature? Until just now, I don’t think I would have ever thought of a use for it.
“You’ve dismissed this notification, but if you want to re-live it for some reason - here it is!”

Every month? Isn’t that super annoying?
What if there were a genuine emergency on the first Monday of the month? A lot of people would dismiss the alert assuming it’s routine and not even read it. That’s if they hadn’t outright disabled the alert in the first place because of spam.

And it stopped far sooner than I expected. If I were upstairs wearing headphones and the phone were downstairs, it is very plausible that I’d miss the alert entirely.

Affecting so many brands, many of whom pride themselves on sourcing from Australian growers. I suspect it’s a subset of the growers themselves (or a single supplier) behind this, rather than the brands. It is too much to believe that 30 brands all sourced from some Chinese supplier independently. I would love to find out how far this rabbit hole goes.

In the slim chance that someone from whatever department is responsible for this reads about the user experience of Australians:

You better keep these emergency alert messages to be super simple sentences like “Danger Will Robinson!! Evacuate now!!”.

Because once you hit “ok”, the message is gone. No retrieving whatever it said.
If there had been emergency phone number or radio frequency in there and I missed it, I can’t get whatever the alert said back. That seems stupid to me.

Oooh - here’s a nuanced take: I’m tentatively a data centre advocate. At least the data centre of the sort in the article’s pictures. That’s a NextDC data centre. Those are different to all the AI ones being spawned recently.

The way NextDC works is they take all server racks that used to live in business’ server rooms and put them together in two locations (Most cities have two for redundancy). Such data centres have been around for decades. We had a data centre in Perth in the mid-90’s, though it was tiny/basic by today’s standards - today that organisation is called IIA and has data centres in every Australian city.

For the first 20 years of my career, every place I worked had a server room. Even tiny businesses had a token server somewhere in the building handling shared files and maybe company email. Today, that stuff is all hosted in data centres. All the Cloud buzzwords you’ve been hearing about for the last 15 years or so? Data centres.

The reason I advocate for these is they are more efficient. By sharing the infrastructure like power and water in one location, they use less overall than they used to when spread all over town. Because business pay a lot for every single rack they rent, they reduce their footprints as much as possible. That goes for the amount of power they draw, and how many racks they can get away with. When you own your own server room, you think nothing of having 15 racks of servers. When each rack costs tens of thousands per month to be located in a data centre, you get super efficient about using as few as possible.

This very site runs on data centres. Multiple vendors: Cloudflare, Amazon, couple of others. Though for all I know some of them are in the same physical data centre.

The headline however is about AI data centres, and yeah - I’m no advocate there. There’s a gold rush at present to build immense infrastructure so that some businesses will be ready for demand that simply is not coming. Some AI will stay, but they are building orders of magnitude more infrastructure than is needful right now.

Edit: I just saw on the NextDC site that ChatGPT is going to host their Australian servers with NextDC. Sooooo I dunno what I think about that. At least they aren’t building more data centres in Australia?

Our secret is two-fold:

1. The site is run by a couple of tech nerds with full-time jobs. This is not done for financial gain. We both think the other does all the work on the site. 😃
2. The biggest cost of these sorts of services is usually labour. And we get that for free.

You already replied/donated in the last nerd update post.

I’m glad it was noticed. 🙂

With the info upfront that I have zero issue with this: I disagree. The ones near home go off with each wedding, which is once or twice on a Saturday and for the service on Sunday.

During the week, I’m in town - where there are at least two cathedrals and one of them has rehearsals one afternoon a week where a team ring their bells for half an hour and they do it again for several minutes on Sunday, though I’m rarely around for that.

Plus we have assorted clocks around ringing away every hour (one goes off every quarter hour). And to add to the soundscape, there’s that Mr Whippy example I gave where that blasted pink van will roam all around for way longer than half an hour.

We’ll gloss over the vehicle noise, but that’s a constant as well.

So yeah, I have no issues with another religion adding to all that. And if someone does, then we introduce something to affect everyone.

I don’t know where the nearest Mosque to me is, I don’t get these calls. I do get bells from a couple of churches in the area, but yeah - not for 15 minutes. Do they really go that long? I can see an argument against that.

I’d get behind a standard that outlined how long a bell/prayer call can go for and how frequent/loud it can be. Something everyone needed to abide by. Everyone. Even Mr. Whippy or anyone who wanted to make a sound above a certain level. Regulate frequency and duration for all and I’m good.

But don’t single one religion out. That’s messed up.

Intelligence has never been a requirement to be in politics. And I mostly give the dumber things politicians say something of a pass. But, ministerial roles are meant to meet a minimal threshold of smart. This isn’t some random nutjob who found herself representing a seat, she is the bloody NT minister for trade and business.

For a minister to be coming out with stupidity like this, makes the entire government look bad. You are supposed to give cabinet positions to the better representatives. If this is the best person for that job, it makes me sad for NT.

Churches have been ringing bells in Australia for 200+ years, why are we complaining when it’s a mosque all of a sudden?

I’m not much fussed about either calls to prayers or church bells. I find this double-standard annoying though where one religion can do it without criticism but not another.