fizzle

China is everyone's biggest trading partner.

Call us a "puppet state" if you will, but we're not as far up Trump's ass as a lot of other allies.

blatant bots posting really crappy AI images

I don't think I've noticed this ?

What would be the motive of someone creating a bot to post bad AI images?

Exactly. So many users are obsessed with how to get more users or whatever, but these are the best days of the fediverse.

If only where was a way users could alert mods and admins about suspicious accounts.

I don't think that's feasible. Imagine for-profit corporations being responsible for nuclear reactors floating around in international waters. I don't trust them with diesel certainly not nuclear.

It's easy to underestimate the maintenance requirements. Australia, UK, and US just signed a treaty to develop and produce nuclear subs. It's a big deal. It's going to take many decades and 100s of billions of dollars before UK and Aus have the capability to build and maintain nuclear subs.

Because money obviously, but not the way you seem to think.

For the last 150 years, there's been loads of the stuff more or less lying around. It doesn't require much effort to bring to a usable state, and a cup full can move you, your wife and kids, your dog, and your car to the top of that hill in the distance.

Until very, very recently that's been a pretty unbeatable deal.

Now we're just building out the infrastructure and developing the maintenance skills. We're in the midst of a transition.

Sorry bro. Not gonna happen.

Australia and NZ really have to stand together just because of the geography. Australia is critical to NZ's security. If a superior force conquers Australia, then NZ wouldn't be able to resist in isolation. Logically then it will always be in NZ's interest to stand along side Australia.

Similarly, Australia needs a bigger more powerful friend to stare down our neighbors like Indonesia and bullies like China. That friend has been the US for the last 70 odd years, and with AUKUS that alliance will be greatly strengthened.

In any conflict since the dawn of time people have wistfully hoped that their own clan or tribe or city or country could stay neutral, but the reality is that to maintain your neutrality you need to be strong enough to defend yourself without assistance.

Fair enough.

In the metric system this is isn't really a problem because the math is much easier to start with.

1 hectare is 10,000 m^2^, so a depth of 1m over 1 hectare is 10,000m^3^, or a depth of 1cm is 10,000m^3^ / 100 = 100m^3^.

I can kinda see how, if one were inventing a system of measurements, relatability might be important.

However, predictable units, magnitudes, and relations between scales like distance, volume, and weight is also important.

I guess the two attributes relatability and predictability could be seen to oppose each other?

I mean a "barrel of water" is easier to imagine than 100L of water, but only if barrels are an object you're familiar with.

However, the predictability of the metric system allows you to imagine a container with a volume of 100L even if no such container really exists.

This honestly seems like the weirdest unit of measurement I've encountered.

I guess that if you don't generally follow a pattern of x-unit = 1000 y-unit then at each magnitude you just need to make up some completely new thing.

"This acre-feet thing is too small to measure the volume of water required for our hyperchad-datacentre. We need a new unit, like 1 hyperchad-datacentre of water."

God that sounds horrific. I had no idea.

In my city it would be outside the Library, which happens to be "the town square", on the main street.