ajsadauskas
@ajsadauskas@aus.social
Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.
Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!
- Submitted 2 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 16 comments
- Submitted 3 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 3 comments
- Comment on Let's chat about these SEVEN nuclear power plants the LNP want to build ... 5 months ago:
@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here's an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:
Where's RedFlow based? Brisbane.
An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.
And where is one of the world's largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.
The Coalition's policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.
Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.
Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.
And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.
- Comment on Keeping pet cats indoors would save millions of native animals and billions of dollars. So what's stopping us? 5 months ago:
@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .
The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.
Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.
But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.
The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.
- Comment on Health and fitness 6 months ago:
- Comment on Australia's first solar garden sprouts in Grong Grong, taking the renewables boom to the community 6 months ago:
- Comment on Elon Musk vs Australia: global content take-down orders can harm the internet if adopted widely 6 months ago:
@Ilandar Most major platforms are based in the US.
A DMCA request basically means the flagged content is taken down globally, not just for the US.
If the person who uploaded that content is not a US citizen, it still gets pulled.
- Comment on Elon Musk vs Australia: global content take-down orders can harm the internet if adopted widely 6 months ago:
- Comment on Australian prime minister labels Elon Musk ‘an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law’ 6 months ago:
@shirro @tardigrada
Not just *would*, but *has*.Here's the "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk, in his own words, in 2023:
"The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws."
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-government-takedown/index.html
- Comment on Australian prime minister labels Elon Musk ‘an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law’ 6 months ago:
@skribe @danbeeston @Salvo The other option would be to set up an official gov.au Mastodon instance, and give each government department, agency, and Parliamentarian an official account.
People can then have their choice of instance, whether that's community run or private (e.g. Threads).
In the longer term, there might be scope for some other government institutions — particularly universities — to set up their own instances as well.
- Comment on Australian prime minister labels Elon Musk ‘an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law’ 6 months ago:
@Ilandar @quoll You mean like the US government's Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act
- Comment on Australian prime minister labels Elon Musk ‘an arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law’ 6 months ago:
@quicken @tardigrada Really great point.
If Albo really wanted to send a message to Musk, here's how he could do it:
1) Ask all federal Labor MPs to stop posting on X, and start posting on Mastodon.
2) Order all federal government departments and agencies to stop posting on X, and start posting on Mastodon.
3) Bribe the states to do the same.
"Hi Queensland, guess what? We just found a billion dollars under the couch for a shiny new Olympic stadium. Hi Tasmania, likewise for your new AFL stadium. And look Victoria, here's a few billion for the airport rail link — we'll cover the cost difference to put the airport station underground.
"But only if you direct all your MPs, departments, and agencies to switch to Mastodon."
- Comment on Inside the quota-driven culture that boosted police searches from 88 to 550 a day 8 months ago:
@fosstulate @zero_gravitas "The ABC has analysed the figures to reveal when and where you’re most likely to be searched, who is most likely to be targeted and how proactive policing pushed search levels to unprecedented heights.
"What we found is that search patterns vary significantly by location. Lower socioeconomic, migrant and Indigenous areas are often searched at higher rates, despite searches being no more likely to find anything.
...
"Police conducted 9 searches per 100 indigenous people in NSW in 2022-23, compared to 2 searches per 100 people in the general population.
...
"The state’s specialist Proactive Crime Teams are part of the broader push towards proactive policing.
"They conduct more than half of searches in some police commands, including Liverpool (59 per cent), the Inner West (54 per cent) and Campbelltown (53 per cent).
...
"Statewide, in 2022-23, First Nations people made up just under 18 per cent of all person searches, according to figures from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
"Among proactive crime times, that figure surges to 40 per cent, according to an ABC analysis of NSW Police data.
"Only 3.5 per cent of the state’s population is indigenous.
"Among proactive crime teams, the share of searches of Indigenous people leaps to more than 80 per cent in some regional areas, including the police divisions of Central North (94 per cent), Oxley (85 per cent), Orana Mid-Western (86 per cent) and New England (83 per cent), all in the state’s west.
"Within Greater Sydney, Indigenous people made up more than half of proactive crime team searches in the police commands of Mt Druitt (61 per cent), Nepean (53 per cent) and Campbelltown (51 per cent)."
- Comment on “We cannot support it:” Polestar follows Tesla out of car lobby over Toyota led campaign 8 months ago:
- Comment on “We cannot support it:” Polestar follows Tesla out of car lobby over Toyota led campaign 8 months ago:
@moitoi @unionagainstdhmo It's a bit more complicated than that.
So Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft for around US$7.5 billion in 2013.
Microsoft licensed the rights to use the Nokia brand for 10 years (but eventually rebranded the phones to Microsoft Lumia).
The old Nokia continues to make commercial communications equipment: https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2014/04/25/nokia-completes-sale-of-substantially-all-of-its-devices-services-business-to-microsoft/
By 2015, Microsoft realised it screwed up and wrote down the entire value of the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone business: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2945371/microsoft-writes-off-76b-admits-failure-of-nokia-acquisition.html
Meanwhile, a group of former Nokia employees, with financial backing from Nokia, set up a new company called HMD Global.
Then HMD Global bought most of the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone business off Microsoft for $350 million (including the licence to use the Nokia brand).
Foxconn bought the manufacturing, distribution and sales divisions. Foxconn then signed an agreement with HMD to build phones for HMD using those assets: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-returns-phone-market-microsoft-sells-brand-hmd-foxconn
So when you buy a HMD phone, you're buying from a company that's partly owned by Nokia, managed by ex-Nokia people, designed by the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone division, and built by the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone division (through Foxconn).
It's pretty much a Nokia phone.
- Comment on “We cannot support it:” Polestar follows Tesla out of car lobby over Toyota led campaign 8 months ago:
@Ilovethebomb @lordriffington There's a guy on the Fediverse named @tomiahonen who's a former Nokia executive.
The short version goes something like this: the first iPhone launched in the US as of 2007, the first Android by 2008.
Nokia responded by making its Symbian operating system touch enabled, and working longer-term on a next generation operating system called MeeGo.
By mid-2011, Nokia launched its first MeeGo phone, called the N9.
Nokia was actually outselling Apple in smartphones, and it had a faster growth rate.
It had great relations with most telcos around the world.
All it had to do was persuade existing Nokia featurephone owners to upgrade to a MeeGo phone and it was set.
Then Nokia hired an ex-Microsoft executive named Stephen Elop. He immediately signed Nokia up to go Windows Phone exclusive and called MeeGo a burning platform.
He openly said that even if N9 was a massive success, there'd be no more MeeGo phones ever.
The first Nokia Windows Phones came at the end of 2011, running Windows Phone 7. It was basically just Windows CE with a touch interface.
Microsoft's true response to iOS and Android was Windows Phone 8, and that didn't come until right at the end of 2012, nearly 2013.
(At this point, the iPhone had been on the market for five years, and Android for four years.)
Why Windows Phone screwed up is a whole 'nother story, but Nokia went all in on what turned out to be a sinking ship, and the rest is history.
- Comment on “We cannot support it:” Polestar follows Tesla out of car lobby over Toyota led campaign 8 months ago:
@zurohki @notgold In some ways, it's also a tech standards war, a bit like VHS vs Betamax. Or HD-DVD vs BluRay. Or Windows Phone vs Android.
Right now, it looks like most of the auto industry is going in the direction of BEVs, just like most of the home electronics industry went with VHS in the '80s.
Meanwhile, Toyota is sticking with hydrogen.
The best technology doesn't always win a standards war. There are some benefits to green hydrogen cars over BEVs, just like Beta had some benefits over VHS.
The problem with one company supporting one standard when the rest of the industry goes the other way is that it can get expensive.
You have most of the economies of scale with the industry-leading technology. That tends to make it cheaper for consumers.
You have a bigger ecosystem of companies and more infrastructure supporting the industry standard.
That means a company that uses the non-standard technology typically has to do more work (and has more costs) to support it.
At this point, Tesla doesn't have to spend a lot of money to roll out its own EV charging stations, because there's a growing ecosystem.of companies doing it.
However, if hydrogen doesn't become the industry standard fuel for cars and Toyota wants to stick with it, then it might need to cover some of the costs of rolling out hydrogen refueling itself.
A company like Apple, which has a large and loyal customer base, can get away with charging customers more to use its own standards.
I'm not sure Toyota does.
None of that in itself means Toyota will go out of business. But it will be a lot more challenging.
- Comment on We're experiencing the biggest dive in living standards in half a century — and a recession is looming 8 months ago:
@exocrinous @Longmactoppedup In a number of key industries — supermarkets, telcos, banks, airlines, electricity — Australia doesn't have genuine competition.
Instead, we have two to four big companies that own the industry and basically act as a cartel.
They saw the supply shortages and skills shortages, and jacked up their prices.
Then when those shortages cleared, instead of lowering prices, they kept raising them and raked in record profits.
All this led to skyrocketing inflation.
Here's where the Reserve Bank comes into play.
Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a number of years where there was a wages spiral.
Basically, this was where prices were rising, so unions demanded and received higher wages, which led to companies putting up prices, which led to higher wage demands...
The thing that eventually ended that cycle was the Reserve Bank lifting interest rates to 17% and causing a recession.
At its simplest, this caused people to lose jobs and stop demanding wage increases and businesses to stop raising prices.
The Reserve Bank acted like a wage spiral was happening again, and put up interest rates.
But this time, it didn't work particularly well, because in most industries, wages weren't rising.
And because housing prices were one of the root causes of the inflation, and higher interest rates made it more expensive to borrow to build houses, it actually made the problem worse.
Instead, people just cut their spending right back.
Which brings us to the almighty catastrofuck of an economic mess Australia's in right now.
And that's the simple version — there's even more to it, but I'm already on the second post.
It's basically the end product of 30 or 40 years of short-sighted economic policy.
We simultaneously need more skilled migration to fix this mess, but it will also make the problem worse.
The Reserve Bank is lifting interest rates to slow inflation but it's also making the problem worse.
Consumer spending has fallen off a cliff and simultaneously inflation is running rampant.
Households are in a recession while the overall economy is overheating.
It's a mess. (2/2)
- Comment on We're experiencing the biggest dive in living standards in half a century — and a recession is looming 8 months ago:
@exocrinous @Longmactoppedup I think there's a few big pieces of this puzzle that you guys are missing.
Housing is too expensive.
Why? Australia doesn't have enough housing.
To build more housing, we need skilled tradies, structural engineers, etc.
But there's a problem.
Australia has skills shortages in those areas.
Okay, so we'll bring in more skilled migrants to fill those skills shortages to build more housing.
Those skilled migrants need somewhere to live.
But there's a problem.
Australia doesn't have enough housing.
So we need more houses for the skilled migrants we need to build more houses to fix the problem of not enough houses.
It gets worse.
For around two years during the pandemic, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade needed more staff for things like hotel quarantine and border pass applications.
So DFAT basically took all staff off examining skilled migrant visa applications.
The problem is that when the borders reopened, there was a roughly two-year backlog of skilled migrant applications.
Also, Vlad decided to invade Ukraine, which meant most Western countries blocked Russian exports.
The problem is that a lot of — for example — the timber for the formwork used in concrete came from Russia. So the countries that had domestic supplies were hoarding them, while the rest of the world was scrambling to find alternative supplies.
So developers were waiting weeks or months to hire tradies, the tradies would show up on site, the parts they needed still hadn't shown up because of the supply shortage, so they'd go home. A few weeks later, the parts would show up, but the developer would then need to book the tradies again...
Russia is also a big oil and gas supplier, so as it was shut off from the world market, energy prices surged.
So building projects were being delayed, costs were increasing, new housing supply was delayed.
But wait — what about our higher education system? Why are there skills shortages to begin with? Why aren't our TAFEs and unis producing enough skilled workers?
Well, starting with the Keating government and accelerating under John Howard, the federal government discovered that full fee paying international students are a great way to fund higher education without raising taxes.
So higher education went from primarily training students to fill local skills gaps to exporting education.
Student migration dried up during the pandemic, but it kicked off again just as border restrictions were lifted.
Those students need housing.
At the same time, delays in processing skilled migration visas meant there were massive skills shortages in construction. And supply shortages.
It still gets worse.
In a number of key industries — supermarkets, telcos, banks, airlines, electricity — Australia doesn't have genuine competition.
It gets even worse... (1/2)
- Submitted 8 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 1 comment
- Submitted 9 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 27 comments
- Comment on Does the way you say 'France' rhyme with 'pants' or 'aunts'? How the Australian accent is changing 9 months ago:
- Comment on Internode and Westnet shutdown: TPG moves customers to iiNet 11 months ago:
@DeltaTangoLima @WaterWaiver Internode was quality when @NewtonMark was running the network...
- Comment on Parking isn't as important for restaurants as the owners think it is 11 months ago:
@No1 @Zagorath Especially in inner-city areas, many of those deliveries are done by bike.
And because most suburbs lack proper Dutch-style protected bike lanes, those riders either have to try to avoid getting hit by cars if they cycle on the road, or dodge pedestrians on the footpath.
Fewer parking spots and more protected bike lanes would help, rather than hinder, many food deliveries.
- Comment on As a trans man, Max Simensen says he has unique insights everyone could learn from 11 months ago:
@Zagorath @tess This is a very interesting discussion, so thanks for all the ramblings in the mentions 😊
Here's a couple of my ramblings. (And I'll preface them by acknowledging my own privilege.)
First, too often discussions about discrimination are framed in terms of individual moral virtue. Discrimination is framed as simply a personal vice of the racist or the misogynist. If only the bad people stopped choosing to behave badly, it would all be solved.
Enough Twitter pile-ons against enough bad people, and we solve it for good.
But we are not just individuals. We are citizens. We are part of a society. And discrimination is a problem with our society.
It's not just individual actions. It's the inequitable distribution of power and resources. The discrimination is embedded in the structures of social, political, economic, cultural, and institutional power.
For every individual bigot, there's whole social structures standing behind them.
Second, when it comes to privilege and discrimination, most of us are sitting somewhere in the middle.
Sure, there are some intergenerationally wealthy neurotypical cishet white men who are born with basically a guaranteed life in the top 1%, who have never experienced any discrimination of any form. Someone like Lachlan Murdoch is a great example.
At the other end, there are elderly working-class neurodiverse queer Black women with multiple chronic health conditions and disabilities, who society screws over at every turn.
The rest of us are, to varying degrees, somewhere in-between. Privileged in some ways, discriminated against in others.
(And yes, even if you're a neurotypical cishet white guy, if you're not in the 1%, you are still in that middle ground.)
So there's a simple choice for us to make: what kind of society we want to live in.
We can choose to align ourselves with the powerful, uphold the system as it stands, at the cost of continuing to experience the forms of discrimination we currently face.
We can choose to uphold the system, while only working to change the forms of discrimination we experience personally.
Or we can be empathetic, and seek to make our society equitable — including ending the forms of discrimination we don't personally experience.
Ultimately, it's our choice what kind of society we want to live in.
- Comment on Brad Pitt in a chicken suit and rating friends: jobseekers believed ‘condescending’ courses required to get payments 11 months ago:
@Ilandar @vividspecter The short answer is yes.
Basically, up until the late 1970s and early 1980s, Australia's official government policy was to have full employment. There was a minor scandal when unemployment skyrocketed to around 3% under Fraser.
Especially after the oil shocks that followed the Suez canal crisis, inflation was running quite high through the late '70s and early '80s.
Partly to try to curb this high inflation, US, UK, and Australia all adopted a range of neoliberal economic policies advocated by people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
The thinking was that if there was no or low unemployment, when inflation rose, workers would demand higher wages, and those wages would put further pressure on inflation, creating a cycle.
So one of the main ways the Hawke Labor government sought to stop this inflation cycle was by stopping wage growth.
As part of this policy shift, The Australian government walked away from the idea of guaranteeing full employment.
As part of a set of policies called the Accord, the unions basically agreed to wage increases below the rate of inflation, in exchange for the introduction of Medicare.
The Australian dollar was floated, instead of having the Reserve Bank set it each morning like it used to. The Reserve Bank got an independent board that would raise Interest rates if inflation got above 2-3%.
Importantly, if unemployment rates ever fell too low, the Reserve Bank would see it as an inflationary risk, and raises interest rates to increase unemployment to stop inflation.
So instead of seeking full employment, the idea that there's a "natural rate of unemployment" (as economists call it) became part of our economic system.
But, instead of properly explaining this to the public, governments from Hawke and Keating onwards essentially blamed the victims and called them "dole bludgers".
In the early '90s, the Keating government followed this up by bringing in a limited form of work for the dole as part of his Working Nation policy.
Around this time, in the US, Bill Clinton, and in the UK, Tony Blair, brought in tough new welfare policies.
In the late '90s and early 2000s, the Howard government followed in the footsteps of these crackdowns.
He also privatised a lot of the old Commonwealth Employment Service, outsourcing its training services to private "Jobs Network" providers. What was left over became Centrelink.
If you're interested, there's a lot more details about how mutual obligation came about under Howard here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jan/01/where-mutual-obligation-began-john-howards-paradigm-shift-on-welfare
And there's also in this government research paper from 1999: https://aifs.gov.au/research/family-matters/no-54/welfare-reform-britain-australia-and-united-states
- Comment on Sleeper trains are making a comeback. Why are ours being axed? 11 months ago:
@kowcop @naevaTheRat Heads up @timrichards, there's quite a discussion about your article over on Lemmy.