Nath
@Nath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Australia’s gun lobby says it’s ‘winning’ the fight against firearm control as numbers surge 1 day 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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? 1 week 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? 1 week 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? 1 week 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? 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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? 1 week 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 1 week ago:
An ‘ideal’ Australian dad isn’t white. He’s blue and lives in Brisbane.
- Comment on Legendary film critic David Stratton dies peacefully aged 85 1 week ago:
When they disagreed, and I loved when they disagreed, I usually fell into Margaret’s camp. But he always had great insights, and it was rare for me not to be able to see where he was coming from. He was a kind and patient man, and I miss them on TV.
The biggest thing he taught me wasn’t even about movies. It was how to have a full on heated discussion with love and respect and remain friends after. Farewell David, you never knew the many thousands of people you touched. But we’ll remember you.
- Comment on Jennifer Mui Len Chin, who stabbed teen daughter's boyfriend, was 'trying to protect family' 2 weeks ago:
I think she stands a decent chance of getting acquitted. Unknown person in the house semi naked with her daughter. Nobody explains what is going on. Neither the boy nor the daughter admitted he was a boyfriend and it was consensual.
Honestly, I can see this going either way.
- Comment on Australia Completely Loses The Plot, Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube 2 weeks ago:
Who: Yes, Aussie zone appears to fit the definition of a social media site.
What: “A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with the age-restricted social media platform.” Details are a bit scarce on “reasonable steps”. There’s a bit about how we are not to collect Government ID details though.
When: Presently December 10, 2025 but the bill is worded such that they are prepared to shift it.
Why: Protect the kiddies from the evils of the site. By the way, if you spot any actual bad content please report it.
How: and now we get to the big question. I truly don’t see how you’d enforce this on Lemmy. Even if a perfect system were introduced to verify everyone’s ages somehow, nothing stops people from shifting to a non-australian instance and just keep using the site. Or just spinning up their own private instance at home. Lemmy federation works a bit like email - imagine trying to stop kids from being able to access email. Again, I just don’t see how you’d accomplish that.
So, we’re doing what the government is doing. Keeping an eye on things and waiting to see how the big players respond. I’d love to see Facebook or YouTube to just go ‘nup’ and withdraw from the market. The public backlash would be insane and this bill would quickly vanish. People are asleep on this thing because they don’t really see it affecting them. Yet.
The UK has just introduced an age verification thingy, and it’s off to a poor start. The words are nice, but putting them into action is not trivial.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 3 weeks ago:
In Australia at least, those cards are everywhere in populated areas. Supermarkets and department stores pretty-much all stock them. I’d say that over 90% of Australians live within 3km of a store that sells Steam cards and takes cash. Most of us even closer than that.
- Comment on "We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal 4 weeks ago:
Your point is sound because I usually use a credit card for this, but most of my Steam purchases come from buying gift cards. However, I could easily buy those gift cards with cash.
Your comment implies this is not possible/common.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to australia@aussie.zone | 0 comments
- Comment on Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steam's new censorship rules in victory against 'porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists', and things only get weirder from there 5 weeks ago:
I was indifferent, it’s true. People who sell porn have had issues with the likes of PayPal and credit card payments for decades. I wasn’t surprised by the move, nor did I blame Valve.
Am I bothered that it was instigated by this mob? Not particularly. If it weren’t them, it would have been some other mob. They were only pointing at something the payment companies are already pre-disposed to disassociate from.
Taking credit for it is a bit of overreach. They pointed at Valve and said “Look! they have porn on their platform!” They didn’t actually do anything.
- Comment on Carolina Wilga search triggers uncomfortable questions for families of missing Indigenous men 5 weeks ago:
Well, a young American dude went missing in the desert in WA in the 90’s and that had wall-to-wall coverage in the news for weeks until he was found also.
I think @DiaDeLosMuertos is right - the driving factor in the interest was that he was a tourist, not that he was any particular nationality/gender. So yes: I think a young Turkish bloke going missing would get just as much coverage.
- Comment on Xi Jinping says Australia and China should ‘unswervingly’ work together despite global instability 5 weeks ago:
China wants Australia’s dirt. Australia wants China’s money.
Everything else is just theatre.
- Comment on Card payment surcharges should be banned for debit and credit payments, RBA says 1 month ago:
I don’t think the problem is banks charging fees. In fact, I don’t really have an issue with the banks taking 1% of the sale. The issue is that merchants don’t realise that counting cash and taking it to the bank etc actually costs more than 1% anyway. Electronic payments are actually cheaper than all that, they already give you a total and handle the bank end.
I can think of a couple of places in Perth who have gone totally cashless. They only accept Eftpos/credit cards.
- Comment on Pensioner robbed of $1,338 is taking NAB to court for millions 1 month ago:
I can’t comment on this case at all, but I will say that my father in law was totally scammed out of $19k and NAB blocked the transfer. NAB literally saved my in-laws from losing nearly $20k. The scammers were very convincing, they basically got remote access to his PC and from there accessed his online banking.
So, offset this story with a good one for NAB.
- Comment on The original Ettamogah Pub in Albury, NSW 1 month ago:
Perth also had one, but it closed down 20 years ago. Two businesses have since occupied the building, but both have died.
You can see how the building would have looked with the angular awnings etc. but they were made boring after the Ettamogah closed down.
Image - Comment on Canvas (fedi's r/place) starts in 12 days, here's the Australia flag plans this year! 1 month ago:
Huh. Well this went from “something to look into next week” to “Oops, it’s finished already”.
Looks like there wasn’t much interest this year. - Comment on Hop to it. 1 month ago:
Put the left shoes on eBay. Investigate whoever bids on them. 👍
- Comment on Erin Patterson found guilty of three counts of murder 1 month ago:
Oooh - and this is how I learned the news. I’ve been super busy today and just checked the site briefly.
