Nath
@Nath@aussie.zone
- Comment on ‘Betrayed the trust of Australians’: ANZ bank pays record $240m fine for widespread misconduct 5 hours ago:
I’m in this class action. I’ve been paid $236.81. Yay, I guess?
I was truly hurt when this happened to me 20 years ago, but now $236.81 goes nowhere near as hard. The most egregious thing ANZ did would be to take my account(s) into negative balance with fees, and then charge me $36 overdraft fee per account on going negative - then charge me daily compound interest on each negative balance until I realised that my account was in the red through actions that weren’t my own and costing me heavily.
While I recognise that I’m in a far better place financially to when this happened, this payment feels token at best. I don’t even remember what this number represents in terms of what damage was done to me as a percentage. But I’m moderately certain I lost more money than this to ANZ fees at the time than I’ve been compensated for.
- Comment on Hit-run driver Jake Danby spared jail time by NT Supreme Court after describing victim as an 'oxygen thief' 6 hours ago:
Does Mastodon give you the context of the thread or just that one comment? Because in context, I was saying in the past century. I absolutely agree that this was going on before that.
- Comment on Hit-run driver Jake Danby spared jail time by NT Supreme Court after describing victim as an 'oxygen thief' 7 hours ago:
I have absolutely no idea how you can read the words “scandalous” and “cultural genocide” and think I was defending anything. I was saying that comparing the worst of government policies to literally rounding up every man, woman and child and outright murdering them is damaging to your argument. They are terrible failures in policy, but they are not comparable to Nazi policies.
the state banning racist hand gestures, and nazi flags is going to solve anything.
What exactly do you propose the government do instead? We can’t lock people away for what they think. We can only prosecute them when they do something like hate speech, waving Nazi flags or doing Nazi salutes.
- Comment on Hit-run driver Jake Danby spared jail time by NT Supreme Court after describing victim as an 'oxygen thief' 9 hours ago:
Australia still treats its native population horribly.
Fair. Though this has been steadily improving and continues to improve.
Nazi style horribly.
No. While this was once true, it has not been true for about a century. Even the scandalous Stolen Generations, which was effectively an attempt at cultural genocide, was approached with the intent of improving the lives of Aboriginal peoples. The worst Australian policies of 50 years ago were not about rounding up and mass-murdering aboriginal people. If you throw Nazism around everywhere, you dilute the word. There is plenty of room for criticism of Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people but don’t go overboard or you weaken your argument.
Nazism is illegal here:
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/…/105773522
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-04/…/105732982
www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/pm/…/105727024But it is also present and we are fighting a war against it:
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-01/…/105722068Every single piece of news about the aborigines has been bad for decades,
You probably only see the stuff that makes your feed globally and yes, there is plenty of news that is bad. But there’s lots that isn’t as well. The last piece of news I read before this article was about Cathy Freeman being inducted into Stadium Australia’s inaugural Hall of Fame list. Here: have some news that is nicer:
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-16/…/105777908
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-04/…/104653506
www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-28/…/103896464
www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/…/103458314
www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-04/…/102810296with little or no social assistance in any way.
Again, let me correct you here:
…gov.au/payments-and-support-for-indigenous-austr…
www.niaa.gov.au/our-work/grants-and-funding
…gov.au/…/indigenous-australians-health-programme
www.indigenous.gov.au/grantsLook, I’m not saying we’re perfect on this front. Hell, I don’t even think I’d go so far as to say we’re good on this front. But we’re trying, ok?
- Comment on Australians soon facing age checks when viewing adult websites 1 day ago:
The irony for is I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the cause they’re pushing for this legislation. I don’t think Social Media access to kids is healthy. Hell, I don’t think Social Media access to adults is healthy. I remember when the web was read-only for morons. I’d love to go back to those days. Once any idiot could put their drivel online, they did.
I think some sort of online test/license would be a better solution. Show people the sorts of lights and shiny they’ll experience online. Teach them about misinformation. Teach them about verifying sources and checking websites for whether they are trustworthy. Give them an exam and if they pass, they can have a license to go online. Make everyone go through that and if you can pass it at 15, good luck to you. If you fail it at 50, sorry - the web stays read-only to you until you can get it through your thick skull that there are people out there who lie. Not everything you read is true.
Of course, this would probably be just as unpopular as the approach the government is taking. Eh. I don’t have all the answers.
- Comment on Australians soon facing age checks when viewing adult websites 2 days ago:
I haven’t seen email mentioned in the legislation. I suppose you could interpret Gmail/Hotmail etc as web sites you make accounts on in order to interact with something public. But that’s a stretch and it wouldn’t cover all email.
Email would suffer the same issue as Lemmy. Even if you have a perfect way of verifying users that is accurate, you couldn’t stop a kid setting up a mail service on their homelab.
- Comment on New NAPLAN results demand better deal for public schools 1 week ago:
To an extent, this is true. It is certainly possible for a kid with drive and intelligence to excel at any school. The issues more arise from the other variables - if your kid is attending a school in a low socioeconomic area, there is a decent chance that the cohort do not prioritise doing well in class. Suddenly kids not only find themselves among peers where studying is not a priority, they find themselves disincentivised to do well so they don’t stand out.
If instead your child attends a school where it is socially acceptable to study and do well in class among their peers, they do.
- Comment on New NAPLAN results demand better deal for public schools 1 week ago:
For Primary school it is less of an issue. What you do at home is more important than which particular school they attend. Read to them every night, have them read to you every night. Do spelling exercises each week. Be careful about what TV you put them in front of (Numberblocks good, Youtube bad) etc.
For High School, we went with the “move to good school catchment” method. It has worked out well for us, but damn is it expensive.
- Comment on The age assurance technologies under-16s could face amid social media bans 1 week ago:
If I’m being truthful, I did sit down one day and make Steam accounts for my kids when they were little. I love the idea of their mates asking about their Steam accounts with 10+ badges. They were 5 and 2 at the time. They’ve also had their Google accounts (family Google Workspace email) since infancy. Yep, Daddy is a nerd.
I didn’t however make them Facebook, Reddit, or Tumblr etc. Daddy isn’t crazy.
- Comment on The age assurance technologies under-16s could face amid social media bans 1 week ago:
I wonder how that will work in reality to older people?
Google/Steam/Microsoft: “We need you to verify you are over 16.”
Me: “Seriously? I’ve been buying stuff from you on credit card nearly that long, and my account was created over 16 years ago.” - Comment on Thousands of Australians call for neo-Nazi leader to be deported to New Zealand 1 week ago:
Agreed. It’s lazy and doesn’t address the actual problem. He’s getting followers - and it’s not like he’s going to their houses and recruiting them in person. They’ll follow him online from New Zealand as readily as they follow him in Australia.
He’s a home-grown matter now, we grew him, we should be dealing with him. Besides, I like New Zealand. I see no need to inflict him on them.
- Comment on Australia’s government trial of age‑assurance tech to keep under‑16s off social media says social media age checks can be done, despite errors and privacy risks 2 weeks ago:
I’m stuck on one (“Age assurance can be done”). My oldest is turning 14 in a couple of months. It’s a weird age: I think several of them could fool an AI that they’re over 18 (they’d fail instantly as soon as they spoke to an actual person), while half of them look the same as they did five years ago. I have a little faith in AI as being a reliable way to tell age.
Personally, I have always looked a lot younger than my age. It sucked when I was a teenager/early 20’s, but it has been awesome for the last couple of decades. I don’t know that I’d have passed an AI check at 20. I certainly failed human checks: I was routinely ID’d everywhere I went until I was about 30.
Then point four goes and says:
We found a plethora of approaches that fit different use cases in different ways, but we did not find a single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments.
Translation: this really is not simple at all and we shouldn’t have opened the report saying it was doable straight-up.
It sounds like they’re expecting the emergence of an age verification industry here. They list a pile of companies already who appear prepared to step into that role. You somehow identify to companyX that you are over 18, they provide you with some form of token and you can then use that token to be allowed to make accounts on sites. It’s not clear who funds companyX’s operations, however.
I’m not reading all 160-odd pages of this tonight, it’s advisory at best. I’m still totally stuck on how you’d stop a 14 year old from installing an off-the-shelf Lemmy container into his/her homelab and started using it. And that assumes the report is right and do have a perfect way to verify everyone.
- Comment on Australian film and TV industry calling on content quotas to revitalise struggling local scene 2 weeks ago:
Bluey. Not even kidding, this is a TV show all about Australia and Australian culture disguised as a kids show. Sample episodes to watch: “Cricket”, “Stumpfest”, “The Decider”. There - that’s 20 minutes of TV that you can watch with or without kids and have a great time.
My wife loves the Phryne Fisher murder mysteries. She’s read every book multiple times and likes the TV adaptation.
- Comment on Australia was once the gold standard for gun safety. Experts say it’s losing control 2 weeks ago:
They specified that these are functional firearms and not collections. I’m no expert on this, but apparently collectable class of firearms are meant to be disabled from being used somehow.
- Comment on Australia was once the gold standard for gun safety. Experts say it’s losing control 2 weeks ago:
What a beat-up. Australia is still the gold standard of gun safety.
the number of gun licence holders per capita has gone down as Australia’s population has soared, there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the crackdown.
What a way to word it for maximum alarm. Let’s break that down:
- Number of gun license holders per capita is lower.
- There are more guns in Australia today than there were at our lowest point ever.
So far, I’m ok with all that.
That’s because the number of guns each licence holder has is going up – gun owners now average more than four firearms for each licence.
In WA, gun owners are now split between suburban and rural. In a rural setting like a farm, I’m comfortable that a gun owner likely needs more than four guns for assorted tasks. In suburbia, I am not comfortable with any guns in the home, but the law has come in with a maximum of five.
In Sydney New South Wales firearm register data shows that there are more than 70 individuals who own more than 100 firearms.
This one is difficult to defend. I don’t know what the maximum number of guns to own should be, but I see no way to justify 100+ guns. Nobody needs that many. I’m also unsure how to read this sentence: Is the register in Sydney, New South Wales? Or is it saying that the individuals are in Sydney according to the New South Wales register? I would read this statement as “In Sydney, the New South Wales firearm register says there are 70 individuals…” which means the people are all over the state, but the register is in Sydney. And it also makes the sentence super-dooper misleading.
Even accounting for all the rage-bait, the biggest difference we have is that our guns are all registered. If you find a gun in the street, Police can look up who owns it, that isn’t so easy in USA.
- Comment on Australia’s gun lobby says it’s ‘winning’ the fight against firearm control as numbers surge 3 weeks ago:
I’m not really sure what “winning” in this picture is. I wasn’t aware there was a contest going on about this topic. I remember having a discussion with someone on this site a few months about gun control, my perspective mostly boiled down to “I don’t think about guns much”. I do remember being surprised that even after the laws coming into WA that it was still going to be possible to have handguns in suburbia - I thought they needed to be kept at the shooting club.
In May a group of national shooting bodies met in the Australian capital to discuss how best to respond to what they describe as a “growing attack” on firearm users, and the need for a unified position. The group met again in late July.
The lobby is alarmed especially by new firearms laws introduced in Western Australia, which have – among other measures – limited the number of guns that an individual licence holder can own.
If five guns isn’t enough for you in suburbia (rural people can have more), I’m not really sure you’re the sort of person I want to see licensed to own firearms in the first place.
“Politicians are going to pay attention because politicians respect numbers, and the last thing they want to do is to irritate big blocks of people.”
Yeah - the number of firearms owners is totally dwarfed by the majority of people who are happy that guns/shootings aren’t an everyday thing in Australia. You want to see a block of irritated people, start changing this fact.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 3 weeks ago:
I think money is a huge part of the reason. I never even considered a teaching career because teachers don’t get paid enough.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 3 weeks ago:
This has been our experience since 2017: no male teachers until High School. The youngest kid has a 30% chance of getting the school’s one male teacher in year 6 next year.
- Comment on Recycling alone won’t limit the scourge of soft plastics in our everyday lives 3 weeks ago:
Reduce
Reuse
RecycleRecycling has never been plan A. Avoid plastics as much as you can. Reuse them as much as possible when you do get them. Finally, recycle.
You’d be amazed at how much you don’t need to recycle when you don’t get it in the first place.
- Comment on More AZ issues 19/8/25 4 weeks ago:
Possibly. It’d be a terrible way to get that data if so. You could just spin up a Lemmy instance and federate with all of Lemmy far easier than trying to scrape all the web front-ends. Also, we try to fly under the radar from the Internet a bit. We opt out of Google searches, Amazon, Apple and GPTBot for example.
While our data is all human-generated (attractive), we’re a pretty small userbase. There are shinier web sites to scrape than us.
- Comment on Kate Chaney: By increasing the GST to 15%, we could make the tax system fairer for younger Australians 4 weeks ago:
I don’t believe it. They pitched the GST to us in 1999 as “You’ll receive more money in your pay packet and that will offset the 10% GST”. Sounds a lot like this.
I was making about $35k in 2000, and that extra money? It amounted to about $18/week. Needless to say, it did not go far at offsetting the 10% on stuff.From this experience, I learned that governments are like people when it comes to getting paid: Nobody ever asks for a pay cut.
If they’re changing tax laws, it’s to end up with more money at the end. Taxes are never cut, they’re shuffled around in a way to make the government more money. - Comment on Films and video games have age classifications. Should books? 4 weeks ago:
And I do inform myself on a case by case basis. My starting point is the classification of the media (I automatically permit all games/shows/movies that are PG without the kid needing to come to me for consent). The movie Robocop is a great example here. That movie is about a cool cyborg blowing away bad guys, it’s not that bad in your memory having seen it decades ago. You notice that it has an R rating, and you think harder about why that might be. Then you remember the early scene of the human cop’s death and go ‘Yeah fair enough’.
Now, I can reach this same point by re-watching the movie. But that takes a couple of hours. And the kid is asking about watching the movie now.
But that’s all classification. I see no issue with classification. I’m not really sure why you do other than there are policies that lead to censorship based on classification. If we’re talking about censorship, we’re talking about things that are illegal. I don’t want to go all straw-man, but there are things that we pretty-much all agree are not ok (eg child exploitation/abuse, Rape/snuff, revenge porn). Removing all censorship makes everything legal. I don’t think you’re wanting that any more than I do. But if we agree that some content needs to be illegal, then all you’re arguing about is what that line is.
But none of that was my point. My point was that classification is not the same thing as censorship.
- Comment on Films and video games have age classifications. Should books? 4 weeks ago:
If there’s a policy that says ‘content of X classification is not allowed to be distributed to the public’, then you are against that policy. That’s not the same thing as classification.
Classification is not something that mattered much to me until I had kids. But now that I do, it is vital. I personally vet individual games for the kids. For example I allow Zelda, Minecraft, Prince of Persia, Hogwarts Legacy but don’t allow Witcher, Assassins Creed or Red Dead Redemption, yet.
Do I think these games should be censored? Not at all. But, the classification informs parents whether they should be letting their 10-year-olds access that sort of material.
- Comment on Films and video games have age classifications. Should books? 4 weeks ago:
I think classification is important. That said, I’m not so concerned with books. While I don’t want my kids reading First Law Trilogy or Throne of Glass , that sort of content also isn’t really accessible language-wise to them. In that way, books tend to self-classify themselves with the level of language found within.
Reading between the lines of this article, I think “Emma Hussey, a digital criminologist and child safeguarding expert at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute of Child Protection Studies” is probably more concerned with the normalisation of LGBTQ characters in modern fiction. She specifically said “Just because there are cartoons on the front, [it] doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be developmentally appropriate for a 12 to 17-year-old”.
Translation: ‘We don’t like the Heartstopper books because they’re teenage love stories all about gay boys’
- Comment on Films and video games have age classifications. Should books? 4 weeks ago:
Ratings and classifications are not censorship. I rather enjoyed the movie 300, but my kids aren’t ready for that sort of content yet.
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 4 weeks ago:
Ironically, your local library. If you don’t already have a membership, change that.
The ABC listen app also has some audiobooks.
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 4 weeks ago:
Ever read a Playboy magazine? Without any exaggeration or sarcasm, those articles were often really good!
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 4 weeks ago:
- Ralph Lister’s Skyhold series - Really great fun
- Devoured all of Honor Harrington by David Weber in about 3 months. It was all I could do not to just start them again I wanted more!
- Kevin J Anderson’s Hidden Empire series. A really interesting concept of an antagonist alien species. I liked them.
- Julie Kagawa’s Talon books - a fun bit of Urban Fantasy about dragons that shape shift into human form and try to live among us. I’m probably not its target demographic (but I like middle school and teen books more than I’m probably meant to), but I’d read these again.
- Currently reading Naomi Novik’s Telemere series and I’m 100% hooked. It’s more dragons, but this time set in the Napolionic wars.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 4 weeks ago:
I don’t think anyone looks at the USA and wants any of that noise. Possibly maybe the image the USA thinks it is a little (like what is portrayed in Friends). But those guys are not driving on any freeways.
We certainly don’t want anything like their car culture.
- Comment on Researchers asked AI to show a typical Australian dad: he was white and had an iguana 4 weeks ago:
An ‘ideal’ Australian dad isn’t white. He’s blue and lives in Brisbane.