zero_gravitas
@zero_gravitas@aussie.zone
- Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 11 comments
- Comment on Upgrade to lemmy 0.19.8 1 week ago:
I hope you’re getting penalty rates!
Thanks for all your hard work ❤️
- $200 taxi fares for a 5km trip: how illegal overcharging is surging – even as Victorian police are forced to crack downwww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 3 weeks ago to australia@aussie.zone | 1 comment
- Comment on US woman caught with golden gun in luggage at Sydney airport jailed for a year 3 weeks ago:
This commenter dug up even more baffling details: aussie.zone/post/15912083/13633454
The Guardian’s headline is.pretty tame all things considered. You could have had:
- US woman backflips in court, pleads guilty to smuggling 24-carat gold gun into Sydney
- Clown school student who tried to smuggle gold-plated pistol into Australia claims Google said it was ‘OK’
From the first one:
Goodson had declared that she was carrying cat, squirrel and rabbit parts on her incoming passenger card, but failed to mention the gun.
…
The court also heard that she previously owned two other guns while living in the States, but she had accidentally given them away.
"Those guns I ended up giving away, because I accidentally left them in a donation box."
From the last one:
Her lawyer said she packed the pistol because she was high and paranoid from synthetic marijuana
She also has a horn and a bone through her nose.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to australia@aussie.zone | 11 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to australia@aussie.zone | 7 comments
- Comment on Why Long COVID is looking more and more like it's driven by 'long infection' 5 weeks ago:
Maybe an Aus Science community would be good and could include health stuff?
I posted an article to !austech@aussie.zone a while back (aussie.zone/post/14355715) which may have fit better in a science comm (but again, could also have gone in plain ‘news’).
- Comment on Why Long COVID is looking more and more like it's driven by 'long infection' 5 weeks ago:
It’s not news
Isn’t it?
- Comment on Flash flood risk from tropics to Tasmania as storms bring potential 100mm deluge to eastern Australia 5 weeks ago:
Heat lwave to rain-bomb flash and river flooding in one week for NSW. Everything is fine 🐶🔥
- Comment on Parliament delivers a performance piece of legislative 'enshittification' that raises more questions than answers 5 weeks ago:
You make a reasonable point. I think, though, that there is difference, which is the degree to which ‘the customer is the product’ for these platforms, and that’s a key ingredient in Doctorow’s original post:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Sure, advertising is nothing new, but the degree to which these platforms can target content and ads to the individual is qualitatively different to ‘old media’. Emphasis on ‘the customer’, singular, being the product, not ‘the readers/viewers’ as a whole.
- Comment on Parliament delivers a performance piece of legislative 'enshittification' that raises more questions than answers 5 weeks ago:
‘Platform decay’ is more serious and more descriptive to boot.
- Comment on Queensland whooping cough vaccine numbers down in pregnant women amid huge surge in cases - ABC News 5 weeks ago:
Pertussis-containing vaccines are recommended for children at 2, 4, 6 and 18 months, and 4 years of age, and adolescents at 11–13 years of age.
Pertussis-containing vaccines are recommended for adults at ages 50 years and 65 years.
Vaccination of pregnant women is recommended during each pregnancy, preferably between 20 and 32 weeks gestation.
Vaccination is recommended every 10 years for healthcare workers, early childhood educators and carers, and people in close contact with infants.
- Comment on Queensland whooping cough vaccine numbers down in pregnant women amid huge surge in cases - ABC News 5 weeks ago:
Whooping cough (aka. pertussis) is still on the standard schedule of vaccines. It’s rates of boosters between and after the scheduled vaccinations that have dropped.
There’s a surge in cases about every 5 years, so it’s not unexpected, but then current one is particularly bad for reasons that aren’t clear but probably include lower vaccine coverage.
Some reading here: www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-08/…/104474394
- Woolworths and Coles are emphasising the threat of Aldi — is it really a competitive force to be reckoned with?www.abc.net.au ↗Submitted 1 month ago to australia@aussie.zone | 15 comments
- Comment on 24 hours remaining to make a submission to the senate inquiry considering social media age restrictions 1 month ago:
There are ways to implement age verification that address privacy concerns, for sure. It remains to be seen whether the government chooses to use them, or if they will use this as an excuse to de-anonymise Australian social media users.
In any case, blind signatures (or other cryptographic methods) won’t address the issue that Australians will be banned from any social media platform by default, until the developers get around to implementing the age verification system required (whatever that ends up being).
- Comment on Authorities must effectively regulate social media instead of banning children and young people 1 month ago:
If anyone didn’t this post yesterday, public submissions close *today* for the rushed senate committee review of this proposed legislation: aussie.zone/post/15477521
- Comment on Australia took its interest rate medicine – and it has poisoned our living standards | Greg Jericho 1 month ago:
In the US, the vast majority of mortgages have a fixed rate over decades.
90% of mortgages are fixed-rate for 30 years according to this page: mortgagecalculator.org/…/how-many-years-mortgage-…
I don’t know the details of how that works, but yeah, it’s possible for the vast majority of home borrowers to be on fixed rates.
- 24 hours remaining to make a submission to the senate inquiry considering social media age restrictionswww.aph.gov.au ↗Submitted 1 month ago to australia@aussie.zone | 5 comments
- Comment on Bunnings told to destroy 'faceprint' data after landmark ruling on facial recognition use 1 month ago:
I don’t think they were asking the cops to do anything, they just were refusing people service.
But I agree with your conclusion. If they weren’t using the data for commercial reasons, they were using it as a deniable trial to see what they could get away with.
Fucking Coles is using Palantir and has their checkout face cameras, so I suspect in the wake of this we’ll hear more about this sort of thing with other companies.
- Comment on Bunnings told to destroy 'faceprint' data after landmark ruling on facial recognition use 1 month ago:
Article says they’ve got 30 days, and also that they’re planning to appeal, so that might delay it further.
- Comment on 'Cooker, anti-vaxxer, sheep': The people Australia's COVID-19 response forgot 1 month ago:
Are the major vaccines the RNA ones where it’s just the protein?
Moderna and Pfizer are mRNA. Novavax is protein subunit. AstraZeneca is viral vector (not an attenuated SARS-CoV-2, a completely different virus).
- The five 'shonkiest' products and companies put in the spotlight in annual CHOICE consumer awardswww.abc.net.au ↗Submitted 1 month ago to australia@aussie.zone | 0 comments
- Comment on The 50 best Australian songs of the 90s 1 month ago:
Yeah, the title is intentional click-bait/engagement-bait
- Comment on The 50 best Australian songs of the 90s 1 month ago:
Madison Avenue - Don’t Call Me Baby
I had no idea this was Australian! Now you’ve mentioned it, though, there’s a noticeable lack of hard ‘r’ in some lines (for reference: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-mRcnF5tSc).
Some classics in this list. Such a list can’t exist without people pointing out who was missed, though. This reads like a top 50 of what JJJ had on high rotation. It’s missing several acts that were bigger than most of the names on this list.
Agreed - and thanks for making your list of things it omitted - but the list was compiled by a poll of Double J staff, so it was always going to be biased towards deep-cuts, and it’s a good thing to bring lesser-known and forgotten music to attention (so long as people don’t take the list to be authoritative).
- 'Cute and an attractive' pollinator, crucial for food crops is the 2024 ABC Australian Insect of the Yearwww.abc.net.au ↗Submitted 1 month ago to australia@aussie.zone | 1 comment
- Comment on Australians who think inequality is high have less faith in democratic institutions, study finds 1 month ago:
“People who believe system is failing have less faith in system”
I know it’s the headline writer, who I think isn’t usually the author of the article (I don’t know how The Conversation does it, though), and much less still is it reflective of worth of the study, but these kinds of headlines still annoy me. Maybe they’re written to annoy people, I don’t know.
The headline isn’t even accurate. The question asked in the survey isn’t about whether respondents think inequality is high, but whether they think income distribution is fair (the exact wording is: “How fair do you think income distribution is in Australia?”).
Department of Home Affairs Strengthening Democracy Taskforce
This is a slightly terrifying phrase. I still associate Home Affairs so strongly with Dutton - as the mega-portfolio that was created to placate him - that it’s hard not to read ‘Strengthening Democracy Taskforce’ in the same way as American war-mongering rhetoric of ‘SPREADING FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY’.
This impression is not helped by this bit of double-speak later in the article 😂:
The Department of Home Affairs’ 2024 Strengthening Democracy report describes Australia’s democratic resilience as “strong, but vulnerable”.
This suggests Australia’s satisfaction with democracy is at risk. It may erode further if voters think the major parties aren’t sufficiently responsive to the economic pressures they are under.
Not to defend the state of our ‘democracy’, but I feel compelled to point out that thanks to preferential voting we can vote for parties other than the major parties. Unfortunately many of the minor parties are also in favour of policies that would increase inequality, but the Greens consistently campaign on reducing inequality. I suppose a lot of people who might be roughly characterised as ‘right-wing populists’ and against status-quo neoliberalism would find the Greens unpalatable, though. Do we need a party that’s like the Greens but with One Nation’s aesthetics or something?
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 1 month ago:
- Burning out: how Australia’s bid to cut smoking rates exploded into suburban tobacco warswww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 2 months ago to australia@aussie.zone | 2 comments
- Comment on No-fault evictions banned and break-lease fees capped under sweeping reforms in Victoria 2 months ago:
That’d rely on tenants reporting their evictions to the tentants’ union, and most people aren’t engaged with the tenants union, and even among those who are, relying on tenants reporting would probably be a bit spotty.
If the government is serious about enforcement, I think the logical thing would be for the bond authority to track it. They could be required to log the reason when the bond is claimed, and then their system would flag it if another bond was lodged for the address within the specified period.
- Comment on No-fault evictions banned and break-lease fees capped under sweeping reforms in Victoria 2 months ago:
In Victoria, renters can challenge a rent increase “if they believe the increase is higher than the market range”
See: …gov.au/…/challenging-rent-increases-or-high-rent
I assume, like with many renter protections, it’s a pain in the arse to actually do in practice, but it’s there, so they can’t just double your rent in one go to force you out.
Also, rent can only be increased once every 12 months in Vic, so landleeches may need to wait months before they can increase the rent by any amount at all.
Not that I doubt there will be some dodgy workarounds. I suspect landlords might try to abuse the “if the owner is moving back in” exemption, because even if there’s strong provisions - e.g. the property can’t be advertised again for at least 12 months - it still requires someone to be paying enough attention to notice and report any violations.
