theroff

Will Signal block Australian IP addresses, or nix accounts that have a +61 phone number? I'd assume the former but if Signal and other social media platforms go for the latter it will be painful for Australian netizens.

I wonder if they're planning road diets on the surface. Maybe some bike lanes, bus lanes and wider footpaths.

(For the record I highly doubt that, but if such a wasteful project were to go ahead that would be the best concession IMO).

Hmm I don't usually chill my water but I heard that helps a lot. Might start doing that myself.

The taste is very noticeable unchilled. I noticed after rinsing when brushing my teeth. I heard the water was bad in the western suburbs and it was about 24 hours later that I started noticing the taste in Brisbane's south (I guess the water towers get filled at different times).

I've been double-filtering mine with a Brita water jug which removes nearly all of the taste.

Really good points. I like that the concept is saleable both as a reliability improvement for trains and a safety and capacity improvement for the road network (which can also include buses). Everyone's a winner.

There were gates put in place and bouncers to prevent people from riding straight through. You could still get off your bike, walk past the bouncer, and then ride to the next gate, which plenty of cyclists were doing.

Personally one of the issues is the casino bouncers doing traffic control. Even as a compliant citizen I have been berated and harassed by bouncers.

Even with a 10% pay cut the VC will be remunerated over $1,000,000 per year, even despite the university's poor financial performance.

Having worked at a university the waste is in plain sight. Vendor lock-in, consulting fees (especially with the Big 4), high executive pay, and compartmentalisation between professional and academic staff are high on the list.

In my area (different university) there was a constant stream of poor decision making. Moving to the cloud? Let's hire a consultant to tell us what to do, and then do it in the worst possible way, instead of using internal capabilities! I suggested that the contract include provisions for "best practice" as listed by the vendor (HashiCorp) but this was ignored. The consultant gave us spaghetti Terraform code and an inefficient, high cost subscription layout.

The professional and academic staff barely talk in my experience. Academics do their own thing as much as possible. Professional staff throw solutions over the wall, mostly because of the existence of the wall in the first place.

The university was looking at using "crotch sensors" (motion sensors under the desk) to measure desk utilisation, spending money on "smart" ambient sound solutions etc. in the executive building, and other high cost solutions looking for a problem, at the same time as freezing staff and threatening redundancies. I was denied training but offered access to an LLM subscription (GitHub CoPilot) along with other IT staff, because AI is the going buzzword being parroted by the executives.

The higher education sector seriously needs an external review... and a proverbial kick up the bum.

I sold my car last year and barely gave it a secomd thought (I still have access to a car on weekends). Money, environment and space-saving were all factors.

I don't think government should be in the business of subsidising driving (which is currently the case in multiple ways). Instead that money should be used to make public and active transport safe, convenient and reliable.

Absolutely. I think Victoria is the model to follow. I was more alluding to significant interstate investor activity in Qld perhaps partially due to improvements in Victoria's housing incentives.

Here's the actual paper of the technology (Prio) that it's based on.

Some problems stand out:

• It requires that the organisations (Mozilla and ISRG) not collude to decrypt the secret share (probably reasonable)
• The paper suggests registering end users to protect against Sybil attacks.
• The scheme requires the organisations to correctly withhold results from advertisers until there are sufficient results.

I'm not overly familiar with the tech stack but I'd be concerned about browsers using a persistent UUID to send impressions to Mozilla's API.

The biggest elephant in the room is that seemingly nobody wants the damn thing. It offers nothing to users, except maybe a good feeling inside that they're supporting AdTech. It offers AdTech less than the current deal where they can collect obscene amounts of personal information for targeted advertising.

Victoria also has a vacancy tax. It's good but downside is exporting would-be investors to other capital cities. It's almost as if federally-coordinated action is required.

Yeah, I usually follow the Greens and warm to MMT thinking, but using interest rates to improve housing affordability is just a really big misuse of a big lever with broad consequencess.

Now, they didn't talk about it at all in their media release and maybe it hasn't even been considered by Aus Greens, but a big theme in The Green New Deal in the US is looking at fiscal policies that may reduce inflation, like continuing to reduce dependence on petroleum through electrification and public transport infrastructure (every person who catches PT is reducing oil demand), and improving healthcare through universal healthcare like we do here. Of course construction may be the limiting factor when it comes to inflation, but a wartime-style focus on construction supply is basically what is being proposed by MMT proponents.

Back to Australia and the Greens, if they were talking about price stability and alternatives to higher interest rates I might be more supportive. I can think of another political candidate also calling for lower rates in the US - Donald Trump. The reality is that it's politically popular to deliver lower rates risking future price inflation.