Have always said this. My preferred deep fried crumbed pub protein is a massive Weiner Schnitzel with gravy.

A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.

Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.

Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.

This policy is not genuine. The intention is to delay or destroy fossil fuel alternatives to protect fossil fuel investments. If it creates political division and an impression of leadership then it is icing on the cake. I would expect the coalition to become increasingly divided if this was ever realistically pursued. Coalition voters do not want to foot the bill for this idiocy. The market has already voted. Renewables won on time to market and ROI.

For context I am not opposed to nuclear power generation at all. There has been a lot of misinformation about safety and waste for generations that has poisoned debate and I would like to see a more rational debate. I think it irresponsible for countries like Germany to turn away from nuclear and create huge energy security issues as well as increased emissions.

Carbon emissions are a global problem and each country has a responsibility to address it as effectively as they can. We can support nuclear power by supplying uranium and it doesn’t matter for carbon reduction if the reactors are in Australia or overseas.

Our construction costs are very high and we don’t have local expertise. Our research reactor was designed by Argentina. As much as some of us would like to see nuclear power come to Australia it is fantasy economics.

It makes no economic sense. Fucking idiot.

I think we are more or less on the same page within the bandwidth limits of online conversation.

Australian courts can’t enforce their orders directly outside Australia. That is just a fact so there is no point even entertaining it except to incite a mob that doesn’t know better.

The only way such things happen is through international agreements. IP and CSAM are just about universal. I don’t think many services would refuse to take down revenge porn so that is something else that doesn’t seem controversial.

Musk seems intent on turning his plaything into 4chan. Any normal large media company would likely have complied without the tantrums. Anything to get attention I guess.

We might be a bit ahead of the curve with respecting adult victims of crime. Not always a bad thing. We were ahead on tobacco packaging, plastic money, HPV vaccines and other things. The US still can’t adult when it comes to sensible gun regulation. I don’t think we should apologize for trying. This is the rule of law in a moderately functional liberal democracy and couldn’t be further from authoritarianism. It is an overreach for sure but Musk has been aiming for Mars for years.

It is reasonable for courts and legislation to have powers to protect victims of crime and their families from distribution of images and video of their suffering. It is a secondary victimization. How far that protection should extend is up for public debate. Our courts have a limited jurisdiction and it is just a matter of fact that we can’t enforce our domestic laws outside out borders anymore than an autocracy can suppress foreign reporting of their human rights abuses as much as they may try.

We broadly have two fairly obvious sets of international agreements that can get material taken down through most of the world. The first is child abuse material and the second is IP infringement.

Be a 24 year old Aussie battler with a part time job. Copy a Japanese manufacturer’s shitty kid’s game. You now owe $1.5 million dollars. Copyright is enforceable in practically every jurisdiction we care about.

Find the person who took the video, fairly compensate them for the rights, then issue a DMCA notice to Twitter. Job done. Censorship already exists. It is called IP rights and is enforced internationally through treaties.

I think we could have an argument that on the scale of stuff that should be censored to stuff that shouldn’t, protecting adult victims of violent crime seems like it should fall somewhere between child abuse and IP rights. It is a straw man argument to lump it in with the censorship demanded by authoritarian states.

It might be better to legislate more power and enforcement capabilities to regulate social media companies. Many of them are close to monopolies in their niches and their network effects make competition almost impossible.

I do believe there are areas where it is more ethical and efficient for government to operate services (eg policing, public hospitals, emergency services, schools) but I don’t believe social media is one of them.

I believe Musk would censor anything that upset an authoritarian regime if it aligned with his business/political interests. I don’t believe his arguments are in good faith.

Attempting to enforce the laws of our country against foreign companies that operate here is fair game. We have some leverage. We can have a debate domestically about if we think this should be enforced or not.

Personally I don’t see a problem with protecting victims of crime, their families and community whether it be child abuse material or graphic video of violent crime. I struggle to see a public interest or freedom of political speech angle that would justify a reasonable individual or company ignoring a sensible request to cease distribution.

Not all censorship is equal nor all enforcement mechanisms. We need more freedom here to criticize public figures as our defo laws are bonkers. Also the government should not attempt to apply wrong-headed technical impediments that would have unintended consequences because they don’t have sufficient expertise or the foresight to understand such actions.

Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.

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I made an effort to only use Firefox because browser diversity is important for the web. It can be rough sometimes when things like.chromecast only work.via unstable extensions but I persist even on mobile.

I suspect the Mozilla corporate structure and leadership needs to be reviewed. They don’t seem to know where they are going and get sidetracked.

Things like lack of good cross platform support for passkeys (fido2/ctap stuff) is going to hurt them even more as people won’t be able to use Firefox to login to many sites on Linux where there is currently no blessed platform libraries for this. Unfortunately stuff like that is going to drag me back to Chrome for some stuff which handles this fine on Linux.

IMO the only truly difficult part of self hosting is mail delivery because you end up at the mercy of big stupid companies (eg Microsoft) that don’t give a shit. It is possible and possibly advisable to use a paid service for delivery and let someone else deal with the bastards.

With a bit of research and a methodical approach I think just about anybody comfortable setting up other linux network services should be fine. I am very lazy and have been doing it for 2 decades. I like being in control of my own mail store. I choose to do my own delivery and the only persistently difficult provider is Microsoft’s free email offerings which I care about about as much as they care about running a reliable mail system for their users. They seem to penalize infrequent low volume senders. I have always been signed up to their spam monitoring bullshit and have never had a negative report but they don’t seem to communicate there so you can be blocked and nobody knows how or why. They blocked most of my hosting provider once so I routed my outgoing email with correct dkim, spf etc from a server hosted elsewhere. Easy to do with Postfix.

There isn’t much to differentiate ISPs anymore. It used to be a huge benefit to have unmetered, low latency game servers, streaming radio mirrors, usenet feeds, IP phone services and ISP email. Internet offered a huge amount of extra value through the dialup, ISDN, ADSL1, ADSL2 era. They offered IPv6 early which was interesting to a techie early adopter and were rolling out ADSL2+ in some exchanges and wireless systems. I stuck with Internode for a long time because if your system just works there isn’t a lot of incentive to chase other providers who are more or less the same. In the NBN era they were a bit slow to deal with congestion a couple of times and I ended up moving to Superloop. I don’t know that Superloop are anything special but that is kind of the point these days. The industry is commoditised and as long as their network and billing is competently run all the NBN resellers should be fairly comparable.

I am moderately pro nuclear but the coalition is not. They are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry (as are some in the ALP) and their fake fascination with nuclear is entirely a delaying tactic to prolong the value of fossil fuel investments. Renewables have been getting all the investment and R&D and that is reflected in the declining costs and ease of deployment. Nuclear has stagnated and the economics and time to market suck. The fossil fuel lobby is not threatened by nuclear which won’t take business away from them in Australia. Send uranium to France where they have a mature nuclear industry and restart reactors shut down by fools in places like Germany. Meanwhile lets ramp up our deployment of renewables and shut down more carbon emitters.

Whatever your political leanings, unless you are a billionaire with huge fossil fuel investments they aren’t looking out for us, our families or our country. They represent people like the Saudi royals and Adani not us. They care about local coal jobs about as much as Thatcher did and our kid’s futures even less.

Raising rates is a legit proven way to combat inflation but there have to be more nuanced approaches available. Economic thought seems to have stagnated more than wages. Wage earners with dependents have been going backwards in a big way.

If they want to take the steam out of spending by the investment income class then perhaps they should be targeted specifically instead of making it harder for working families to feed and cloth their kids. We could look at increasing taxes on the wealthy, reducing tax evasion and negative gearing. But no, lets hit the people who will hurt the most who have barely any discretionary spending to influence. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Indigenous disadvantage is a huge issue and I don’t want to trivialize it by comparison to less important topics but as far as these constitutional referendums are concerned there is some commonality. Both seek to add recognition and self-determination for Australians that are far more appropriate for current and future Australia than was anticipated in a document written near the height of the British Empire.

Parliament can legislate indigenous consultation and although it isn’t as resilient as a constitutional change it can achieve much the same outcome for now. We have gone as far as we can legislatively to become an independent sovereign nation and the replacement of the head of state with an Australian citizen is the last obstacle to assert our full nationhood.

Realistically both were going to be lost outside the inner cities. Neither are going to give a No voter cheaper beer and smokes. As long as we have a regional divide in economic status and education, conservatives have an almost insurmountable advantage. Racism might have played a role in the Voice outccome but it is just one of many buttons for a disinformation campaign to exploit.

Passing referendums is very difficult in Australia. People are easily scared away from change with emotional arguments unless there is a very clear message and benefit and I think the voice proposal was lacking. The only reason I voted Yes was to show solidarity with indigenous Australians and to oppose some of the ugly characters and lies coming from the No campaign. Try as I could reading the Uluru statement and other supporting arguments I couldn’t get excited about it and I can understand why people on the fence would reject constitutional change.

The government should put as much as they can into legislation and be satisfied and I think we should move on.

Unfortunately I think this result has huge lessons for the republican cause. I suspect there won’t be a republican referendum this decade now.

I saw several older people around town take up cycling once the law was changed to allow adults to cycle on footpaths. They change between surface based on their capabilities and perceived safety as everyone should. Look out for yourself first and worry about obeying laws designed to kill people second. Cycling on paths has its merits for all ages though it can still be dangerous due to driveways etc. The commonwealth should force universal adoption to bring the backward high road fatality states up to standard. Until then mass civil disobedience is the way.