It is a fair point that subsidies for the cars have often been benefiting those who could afford the expensive car anyway, but surely their idea of subsidising home and work chargers is also benefiting those with more money. The subsidies would after all be primarily going to those who own a house with enough space to put the charger (i.e. not much luck for renters or apartment owners) and those who have allocated parking at work.

What is really needed to drive uptake is both cheaper EVs (to the point where they reach price parity with regular cars) and a charging network widespread and obvious enough to give prospective buyers confidence that they can charge even on their less common routes. Significant progress has been made with this, we’ve come a long way from the early days where cashed up people would smugly advise buying a 90+k vehicle to save a few grand on petrol.

I think promoting electric motorcycles and scooters would be worthwhile too, they’re more affordable, take up noticeably less space and resources, and still provide much of the personal transport requirements of our current road network.

I think just go with either Australia, whichever capital city is appropriate for the state, or even both.

We don’t get that many posts that further separation is worthwhile IMO, that’s a pathway to ending up with a bunch of communities that appear dead from lack of activity (which can be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy - people only tend to post in places that seem alive). I think we’ve already fragmented discussion more than is ideal between splitting off news/politics/questions/environment/memes from the general Australia community, regional interests are more understandable but the existing city/state comms are already quiet enough with our current userbase.

I don’t think the star system actually does much, particularly with how it operates per category rather than overall. For example the packet of chips I’m eating right now is apparently 3.5/5 stars. That rating both fails to reflect the actual healthiness of said chips and didn’t play any part in me buying them (I’m under no illusion that chips are healthy, I just like eating them on occasion). In fact I can’t think of a single time I’ve cared about the star rating when buying something.

Doesn’t surprise me, the old website is a much better user experience for me.

The new one is noticeably slower, hides the info I want to see behind extra clicks/scrolling, made the radar view worse, and doesn’t improve the only thing I’d want to improve from the old site (making it easier to find less commonly used information such as river heights or past observations). In fact they made that part worse because now it bounces between the new design and remnants of the old one for anything bar the most commonly visited sections - even for basic stuff like a synoptic chart.

I just exchanged contracts on an apartment so I’m not surprised they chose now to start cranking the rates back up again - I was waiting for something annoying to come along once I committed. Luckily I’m not a complete goose so I didn’t borrow right to my max, should be able to handle a few rises without being overly stretched.

I think you’re doing a fair bit of jumping to conclusions there yourself, pointing out a good bit of nominative determinism can be just amusing rather than necessarily being ill intentioned.

If she had a different name and was described as Dr Orca from the Marine Conservation Society that would also be amusing and a comment regarding that could just be that rather than a jab at her.

It’s what you’d expect - we’re not perfect but overall we do pretty well.

I just read the transcript though because I’m not going to spend 10 minutes watching a video when I can read the salient info much faster (i.e. like many things this should have been an article rather than a video).

Probably not, I think Labor would be back with an actual majority after any attempt at this. I think the Greens would lose more though than the Liberals, both in votes from annoyed members and the power they have under the status quo re. forming a majority.

Yes, I only ever see you here to stir up drama and your flood of posts agitating against a day you would never celebrate anyway regardless of the date are no exception. You’re doing it again with this comment, post stuff that’s not attempting to stir up shit if you want upvotes.

It’s a feeling based idea to assuage the public rather than a logic based one. If someone has four guns already there is little difference between what damage they are likely to be able to cause with those four vs what they could do with five, six, or seven (and the difference is less significant again if they already have ten). The limits seem rather arbitrary instead of evidence based and would not stop a repetition of the Bondi massacre, they appear instead to just be a quick decision made to show the government is doing something in reaction to a tragedy (something must be done, this is something therefore we must do it…).

“These are low-IQ individuals who don’t actually understand the historic significance of the monuments that they are attacking,” he said.

True, though I expect they’d still be the type to tell everyone else they should learn our history.

This sort of thing is why I’m less and less inclined to support changing Australia Day - why bother changing the date when it’s clear the loudest voices against it will never support celebrating Australia. That this is happening in the state that went to the effort of a truth telling commission and a treaty is the icing on the cake.

Probably, I did find a copy of that as a kid but it’s been long enough that I can’t recall specifics.

That is something that could fall under the new rule though, as could watching youtube videos of people modding guns, or gun owners downloading a maintenance manual for the guns they own, or if particularly misapplied even things like getting an ebook that happens to mention an aside about weapons/explosive manufacture (pretty sure Jules Verne describes a way to make explosives in The Mysterious Island for example).

It’s a way of saying a method of transmitting information. Replace ‘a carriage service’ with ‘the internet’ and you’d cover much (albeit not all) of the intention there.

It will be an offence to use a carriage service to access material on the manufacture or modification of guns and accessories, as well as other explosives or lethal devices.

This has such broad potential for misapplication, but apparently everyone throws critical thinking out the window because guns are scary…

I think the gun number limit is also a kneejerk reaction playing more on people’s fears rather than actually being logical, but at least it’s affecting less people than the above.

Bit rich for her to be going on about censorship and silencing authors if she demanded someone else be excluded previously from the same festival over provocative comments.

Like the possums in NZ there isn’t really a good reason to keep them around - it’s just interesting to see a switcheroo from the usual stories of other countries animals causing problems in Australia.

The little Honda is a pretty attractive idea, looks nice and it’s good to see something that’s supposedly designed to be fun to drive rather than yet another sluggish poor handling SUV.

The BYD Atto 1 I think though is a more significant model simply because it’s something that’s at least approaching affordable to an average person. That 24k price is really narrowing the gap between the cheapest cars and cheapest EVs and I expect will result in a noticeable increase in uptake.

I like that another van option is appearing too, it’s sure to be well above a price I can justify but having more secondhand options in the future will be good for me when my Transporter gets beyond logical upkeep.

And there goes the chances for a minor incident. I guess I’ll just hope it stays below the level of us getting dragged into another war that we shouldn’t need to be involved in…

It does appear that they have, as of a few minutes ago the article is now saying Venezuela’s government has accused the US and that a anonymous US official told Reuters the US was performing strikes in the country.

Hopefully this ends up just being another relatively minor step in the progression of this conflict, but (probable) air raids on another nations capital does sound like something that could escalate quickly.