• 4 Posts
  • 97 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 15th, 2023

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  • Literally my first thought: s it going to be based on honesty policy or is one of them going to act as the official genital inspector? I mean I am a heterosexual cisgender man, but even I can see that they are going to struggle to attract new young members when the newbies have to demonstrate their fully functional reproductive system to a senior member before being invited to events.

    I have heard some pretty rough stories of women transvestigating people and making it worse by pushing past the limits of verbal and psychological harassment into physical assault. Do they really feel that this will make their community safer?



  • The amount of vitriol coming from the usual sources towards this proposal was pretty high. The comment section on Pulse (local online publication with some backroom links to the state Liberal party) was full of people upset with even the idea of council workers getting pay rises a little over CPI, not to mention all the racist, bigoted, misogynistic stuff that’s usually on there.

    Honestly Tasmania is this melting pot of conservatives (with all the negative connotations that word can carry) right through to the most impractical of hippies, but the fringe elements of both sides are the most visible.

    The big difference is that the hippies have a political party that occasionally sees some success at a state level and some activist level zines. Whereas the conservatives have a political party that keeps getting voted into power and effectively the entire media landscape jamming a party line directly into their heads.

    My tin foil hat theory is that the HIA is worried that showing too much humanity to council workers will get some in the construction industry peering over the fence and wondering why the grass is so much greener. They of course couch it around delays to getting projects completed, but I have known plenty of builders who work around supplier and sub-contractor availability without it destroying their businesses, the industry, or society its self. I’m fairly certain they would do the same with council work being a 4 day a week thing.


  • I only apply that judgement where it fits. If you are an anti-vaxxer I don’t need you as a friend. If you tell everyone who will listen that Daniel Andrews is a paedophile based on rumours that apparently started on cairnsnews.org, I don’t need you as a friend. If you think Port Arthur was a false flag to take away your guns I don’t need you as a friend. If you think the lazy botched mess that is this legislation has more to do with protecting kids than getting us used to handing over our ID or biometrics to whichever large company asks for it I don’t need you as a friend.

    I called my member and asked who will pay for the damage that this could cause in the event of massive data breaches and was told that the eSafety Commissioner was empowered to hand out fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars per person affected by breaches… Why is Discord not trying to figure out how to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in fines? Because the government doesn’t care and Comissioner Grant is too busy flying around the world doing a victory lap to bother with trivial details like protecting the people she is selling out for her pet project.


  • Audiobookshelf is fantastic, however if you aren’t ready to self host I would have a long think about if you want to start pulling that thread.

    We are not IOS users so can’t comment on client software but the experience on Android is pretty good.

    Got my wife set up and a few titles from Librivox for her to stream while driving across my home state for work and she essentially jumped from Google Play Books to Audiobookshelf without missing a beat, saved us a lot of money on a voice she largely ignores to help her focus.


  • Agreed, completely. I used Facebook for all of 9 months before I did the self reflection and realised that it was like voluntarily poisoning myself and got out in, I think, 2012 or so. I was unemployed at the time and it became clear to me that it was doing bad things to me mentally and I was developing an addiction to the scroll.

    Imagine if you would that instead of this garbage social media ban on kids we had some serious investigation into the corrosive nature of these social media orgs and they were held accountable for every bit of “experimentation” they conducted without informed consent. While we were at it we could have maybe whipped up some regulstion to curb the gambling industry.

    The only people I have personally talked with who say the teen social media ban is unambiguously good just so happen to be the same people whose brains have been completely cooked by a combination of Facebook and Sky News. I kid you not when I say that the last person to loudly assert social media ban good also told me about the time he threatened bodily harm to a man who was wearing a mask immediately after Covid lockdowns were lifted and got upset when he unmasked got within 20cm of his face.

    Oh and the absolute bullshit conspiracy theories he spouted about Daniel Andrews while telling me he wishes we had an Australian Trump to “get rid of all the corrupt pedos in Australian Politics”.

    Oh how I wish we had some IT savvy legislators who would make good law, since this won’t happen I would settle for them doing nothing. This sort of ineffectual crap serves the sole purpose of creating opportunities for these corporations to further entrench their hold over the internet. I am watching on with dread to find out how much data is going directly to Palantir from this mess.


  • With all due respect that’s the justification, not the “why”. The why is politicians wanting to be seen as proactive and advertising company’s wanting to protect the goose that lays the golden eggs by heading of regulation on advertising of the gambling industry. If addictive and algorithmic harms was the actual concerns we would be in the process of legislating the gambling industry out of existence. Add to the above a light sprinkling of oh so grudging compliance from social media companies who will be seeing a boost in the value of their data now they can tie it with even greater certainty to a real world ID.

    I am ideologically opposed to the Liberal party, it’s shit like this that makes me reconsider my support of the Labor party. I already vote independent most of the time, looks like Labor doesn’t want to win me back.


  • So you are criticising this story for being to broad and generalised by using a broad and generalised example. You are right the thirty minutes my kids were blocked on social media was absolutely worth the upheaval and angst of this government imposed erosion of EVERYONES privacy. Oh and before you start waffling about how I should be policing their social media usage, I was doing that before this farce was implemented through the astounding application of a skill called parenting. Only thing is now the major control I had over my kids most prevalent online usage… Youtube… Is now gone as I no longer have the ability to view what they are using.

    This law doesn’t actually make anything better, it doesn’t help and it just causes division and more angst. When the vast majority of the kids that go to school with mine have had uninterrupted usage of social media and its only 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 that get targeted it is just another means of ostracization, only this is government mandated.

    But hey if you think this is a good and effective law I have a bridge you might be interested in, solidly made only one previous owner.







  • I’ll touch base with him next time he is back in town from sailing on his yacht and ask if he is better off.

    He is my go to example, not the only former business owner I know who has outright stated working for a living is dumb. It’s almost always people working in trades who evangelise the benefits of being a landlord to me, and who can blame them?

    Work 20-30 years and be physically broken for whatever time you have left, or work for long enough to get the first 2 or 3 properties bought and then use that as a platform to become a full time landlord.

    One of those options is definitely the less physically impactful. This is also the route to personal wealth for a whole lot of politicians, so they are far less likely to close the loopholes they themselves are using for personal enrichment.


  • My previous landlord shutdown his Electrical business because it makes less sense to funnel money into keeping a business operational than to just use it to buy more property. When we have small businesses shutting down so people can join the landlord class is it at least worth considering that something is askew in our economy?

    If the political will existed then we could tackle monopolistic property ownership through regulation anyway. In the event we get politicians to legislate against their own cashcow then having them legislate against lobbyists shouldn’t be that hard.





  • I was trying to solidify a joke about beating up people who are pro-AI, but just can’t get the timing right.

    But I do have a question for someone who can apparently see things from both sides. Do you think that people’s perceptions and engagement would be different if “AI” was marketed as natural language processing coding / programming expert system.

    I feel like some of the visceral pushback against “AI” would be reduced if we didn’t all have to pretend there was actual intelligence in operation. Plus it would seem more like the successor to context aware code completion, rather than the successor to the individual sat at the keyboard.


  • I started writing out a detailed reply going into all the nuance, but I feel that it’s a waste of time. I’m not sure if you are trolling as such, but you are being deliberately obtuse. I actually feel like you understand the points that people are making to you quite clearly. This is terrible legislation, it’s a knee jerk reaction to a complex problem, with very few exceptions this is almost always a bad way of enacting policy.

    The jab at my parenting because I already do the things you claim parents are too feeble to do without the government holding their hand is admittedly irritating, but I am going to choose to move past it.

    This is the brainfart of a conservative grifter, it’s satanic panic, it’s the war on drugs, it’s another populist policy being pitched at the unintelligent to draw their attention while the business and political interests behind it are picking their pocket. You choose not to see it that way then fine, but we both know it’s true.

    I am going to stop engaging with you now, feel free to have as many last says and derisive put downs as you want. I will not be reading them.