Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 22 hours ago:
Is PDA substantially different from Oppositional Defiance Disorder? Just based on the names they sound like exactly the same thing.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 22 hours ago:
The first male teacher I had was when I moved overseas, in year 5, in the middle aughts. That’s a 3% chance of happening if teachers had an equal gender representation, and were spread equally.
Maybe it’s gotten worse since the 60s. Maybe not. Some of this is obviously going to be random or depend on the specific school. 1% across all of primary school and preschool is low odds, but enough that it could definitely happen to enough students that you might expect to run into one of them in your lifetime. But if it were an even spread, you’d also expect to run into someone who had had all male teachers.
- Comment on The Original Rules of Australian Football (1859) 3 days ago:
No passing
Passing yes, but only by punching the ball. No forward pass rule.
professionals must play the same as little kids and all swarm following the ball around the field
😆
- Comment on Netanyahu doubles down on Albanese attack despite Australian Jewish group urging calm 3 days ago:
It reminds me of Rome, circa 50 BC…
- Comment on Netanyahu doubles down on Albanese attack despite Australian Jewish group urging calm 3 days ago:
You’ve gotta remember, he’s not just a war criminal, he’s also a boring domestic criminal. Keeping the genocide going is what’s keeping him in power, and being in power is what’s protecting him from prosecution for his crimes domestically.
- Submitted 4 days ago to australia@aussie.zone | 2 comments
- Comment on Stop the free ride: all motorists should pay their way, whatever vehicle they drive 4 days ago:
Ride single file?
Oh, you’re one of those arseholes.
Here’s a suggestion, before making suggestions about road rules, read up on what the rules are currently, and teach yourself about what safe road use looks like.
- Comment on Stop the free ride: all motorists should pay their way, whatever vehicle they drive 4 days ago:
Statistically, cyclists break the rules at roughly the same rate as drivers, in even the most unfavourable studies.
But there’s a key difference. When cyclists break the law, it is generally done in the interest of their own safety, because the law is often set up in such a way that following it, for cyclists, actually puts you at more risk. Drivers tend to break the law merely for convenience. And when a cyclist does hit someone, the impacts are much, much less bad than when a car does.
You’re proposing a solution to a problem that does not exist. And which would have far more intense negative side effects, because it would decrease the number of cyclists. That is precisely the opposite of what good policy does.
Not to mention, having plates doesn’t actually work to stop cars breaking the law and deliberately endangering people’s lives all the time. You can send clear video footage to the police and you’ve got maybe a 1 in 10 shot at best that the police actually fine the driver.
- Comment on Age verification fun 4 days ago:
Yo ho, me hearties, yo ho!
- Comment on Age verification fun 4 days ago:
Has age verification started rolling out? I haven’t had to do it anywhere yet.
Then again, my Reddit account is one of my younger social media accounts, and it’s 13. And if you assume a 2-year-old is not creating a Reddit account, it’s pretty easy to prove that I’m over 16.
- Comment on More AZ issues 19/8/25 6 days ago:
We’re behind Cloudflare, right? Do we have their new AI blocking features enabled?
- Comment on Stop the free ride: all motorists should pay their way, whatever vehicle they drive 6 days ago:
For clarity: your idea of $10/year as a “nominal” amount is itself patently absurd. That’s an enormous cost, many hundreds of times more than the amount that would be proportional to how much damage they do to the infrastructure, compared to other vehicles.
If you wanted a truly “fair” price, it would be measured in cents, if that. And at that point, the cost to administer the system would far outweigh the revenue brought in.
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 6 days ago:
Yeah as I said, I have already used my local library’s audiobook service. I probably just happened to grab the one book that they had a dud copy of or something.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 6 days ago:
Oh, Adelaide Street is nothing like that:
It’s a single lane in each direction, with that lane being wide enough that when buses are pulled over for passengers, another vehicle behind them usually has room to overtake. Or, a cyclist riding near the left kerb can very easily be overtaken with enough room. What doesn’t work, here or anywhere else, is buses starting to overtake cyclists, getting halfway past them, and then pulling in to a stop to drop off passengers.
- Comment on Stop the free ride: all motorists should pay their way, whatever vehicle they drive 6 days ago:
So tax cyclists a nominal amount. $10/year.
Absolutely fucking terrible idea.
Where would a cyclist’s compensation come from
From the driver. When bikes and cars collide, the driver is basically always responsible, so they’re the ones who pay.
if they’re using the road, they should share the cost
Cyclists don’t create a cost. More cyclists is literally a net positive economically, the exact opposite of car drivers. Cyclists cause negligible wear and tear on the roads, even once you account for the risk of crashes (which is actually a car’s fault anyway), they’re a lower burden on public healthcare, and they’re more likely to be spending money at local businesses.
Literally everything about encouraging more people to ride rather than drive is positive. And by extension, putting up any barriers is a terrible idea. Even a “nominal amount” would deter huge numbers of people from cycling. And that’s not the effect we want.
- Comment on Stop the free ride: all motorists should pay their way, whatever vehicle they drive 1 week ago:
Thanks for sharing!
I thought this line from the conclusion was particularly interesting:
Vehicle registration fees make only a modest contribution to road costs. That’s why all motorists should pay a road-user charge.
I’m torn. I do like the idea, in principle. Add a road-use charge to both EVs and ICE vehicles. That helps keep EVs at an economic leg-up over ICE, while also helping address the broader societal costs of cars.
The thing that makes me nervous is that even today, when there’s no such thing as a road use charge and roads are paid for out of general revenue, we frequently see drivers say things like “I have a right to be on the road because I’m paying to use it, and you need to get out of my way” to cyclists. This is both factually and morally wrong, and my concern is that if the factual side of it were made correct, it might be a little harder to immediately shut them down for the bad morals. Not that I think some people arguing in bad faith should be a reason to avoid doing a good thing. It just needs to be accompanied by strong PR around the idea that it’s to help offset the damage cars do to roads, and perhaps also the effects of pollution caused by tyres. And not merely framed purely as a toll for the right to use the roads.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 1 week ago:
For real. We don’t build nearly enough higher-density housing in general, and that problem gets exacerbated exponentially if you want to live with a family larger than a childless couple, because we just don’t build much of that.
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 1 week ago:
Oh right I see, sorry.
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 1 week ago:
Where do you get audiobooks? I’ve only once tried to listen to an audiobook since giving up on Audible (because Amazon is fucking evil, and somehow Audible manages to add on its own layer of evil on top of that of its parent company), and I ended up with a copy that seemed to just randomly skip large parts of the text. Not an abridged copy, it would just skip paragraphs at a time, with no way to keep up on the story. That was a copy through my library.
- Comment on Have men really stopped reading? We take a deeper dive into the data 1 week ago:
It does mean they are confident that the rates are different for men and women in Gen X
Umm, surely not? If the confidence intervals overlap it means that they are not confident that the rates are different, doesn’t it? Of course, it also does not mean that they can say they are confident that the reading rates are the same.
So the statistically sound way of saying it is that the null hypothesis is that reading rates are the same, and their study has failed to reject the null hypothesis.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 1 week ago:
I’m not really sure how to answer your question because I don’t know what you mean. To me the reason for it doesn’t really matter too much. People are opposed to improvements to our city planning and transportation networks. Call it “small mindedness”, call it “having been lied to their whole lives”, call it “wanting things to stay similar to what they already know”, call it what you like, the fact is that they will lobby against improvements like increased density, better bike paths, and reductions in the convenience of cars.
The fact is that neither Amsterdam nor Tokyo got how they are by sheer accident. Amsterdam’s case is perhaps more well-known, because they were going down exactly the same route as us in the '60s, until there was a concerted effort to reverse that (a campaign known as “Stop de Kindermoord” or “Stop the Child Murder”), and now it’s one of the best cities in the world to get around in.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 1 week ago:
It happened in a way that, if it were an extremely rare occurrence, I could easily put down to sheer ignorance, rather than aggressiveness. But it was just so common, and these are supposed to be professional drivers, so ignorance is a hard excuse to swallow. I’d be riding along and a bus would start overtaking me, and then mid-overtake would just suddenly pull into the kerb, forcing me to jump off my bike and onto the footpath to avoid getting crushed. I was only commuting along that particular road for about 2 years, but it probably happened 5 or 6 times on a single 400 m stretch of road.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 1 week ago:
Geez, I think I’ve had at least one bus driver alone, per year since I started working professionally who tried to run me off the road. And that’s despite mostly working from home since COVID, and ignoring all the car and ute drivers.
The one metre rule has made a difference for sure, but only against the marginal idiots. No difference with the complete morons or the actively hostile.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 1 week ago:
It’s both. People will do whatever is most convenient. If our cities are built to be convenient for cars, people will use cars. And this has the effect of people seeing cars are more convenient than other options and being unable to imagine another way, so they are hostile towards ideas which would improve the city planning.
People in the Amsterdam or Tokyo are not more virtuous than Australians for choosing to ride or take public transport. They do it because their cities are just designed around these things being the easy option.
- Comment on Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero? 1 week ago:
The unfortunate fact is that there are a shit tonne of Australians who absolutely do idolise that aspect of Americana. They probably don’t usually identify it with Americana though, and would go on about how they need a car because they drive out in the country or they need a wankpanzer because sometimes they carry a heavy load. There’s a big overlap with the kind of people who would identify themselves as “true Australians” (though the car problem is far more ubiquitous). It doesn’t change the fact that this whole thing, especially when applied within cities, is thanks to American imports from the '60s and later.
- Australia, why are you still obsessed with freeways – when they’re driving us away from net zero?theconversation.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 27 comments
- Comment on Legendary film critic David Stratton dies peacefully aged 85 1 week ago:
Because SBS introduced advertising! They didn’t move on a whim.
Interesting. Have you got a source for that? If it was such a principled stance you’d think it’d be something they’d have shared publicly, but all my search results are finding news from today.
- Uni staff told to 'wash delicates' for stress management as 146 courses suspended [QUT]www.abc.net.au ↗Submitted 1 week ago to australia@aussie.zone | 0 comments
- Comment on Australia to recognise Palestinians' right 'to a state of their own', PM says 1 week ago:
This is a dumb take
- Comment on Australia to recognise Palestinians' right 'to a state of their own', PM says 1 week ago:
The coup against Whitlam was made possible by LNP control of the Senate. Right now, Labor can pass whatever it wants if it has Greens support.
