Sorry I just see a “In compliance with government regulation to provide you with a full set of search results you need to be logged in” prompt in the near future. If they can drive people to log in, or even better/worse make people who haven’t had an account create one, I see some big financial incentives for them to do so. Of course that is going to be offset by the potential cost of any breaches, but I can also see the silver lining on that of raising a bigger barrier to entry for any new competition that wants to get started in Australia, and a bit of supporting legislation that blocks “non-compliant” search engines from being accessed in Australia might actual serve to increase lock in. Maybe I am just being paranoid, but when I see an Industry aligned body co-authoring legislation I start to look for their angle.

Seems like a case of a Industry lobby group getting out ahead of the government to try to push an agenda to me.

Logged in users are worth more than logged out users as far as digital profiling and advertising so let’s conceal the juicy stuff behind a log in. Doing it this way makes the government the scapegoat. So I would guess 100% compliance isn’t anything too concerning, they just want to juice their numbers to make line go up.

If Google & Microsoft have to degrade our privacy and freedoms to raise their Oceania region profitability by 0.00000001% that’s a price they are happy for us to pay.

Well that is their special skill, and their happy place.

Its pretty notable that almost all the smokers I know have moved over to black market imports. $2+ per cigarette means that a pack of black markets charged at $1 per cigarette make it far to tempting, and there is a big enough profit margin on them that people will bring them in to the country despite enforcement actions.

They haven’t been able to stop weed, or cocaine, or heroin or ice what makes them think they will be able to stop tobacco products, especially when there is a legal version of cigarettes and e-cigarettes out there that at first glance can be hard to tell apart from the illegal ones.

I also heard that there is a tobacconist who couldn’t get a license in my old home town, so they pivoted to selling novelty products above board and illegal cigarettes under the counter. The council basically posed them the option of stay in business and break the law or shut down.

I apologise if my summary is too biased/inaccurate, tried my best to be as impartial and factual as I could while falling asleep on my phone at 4am.

Honestly not sure what to expect if a snap election is called, we can be a funny populace to call and a snap election leaves little time for political messaging to percolate, but also a commensurately short time to combat any poor messaging that gains a foothold.

I think Dean Winters (the Labor leader) may be unpopular enough to cause Labor some grief at the ballot box, but the Liberals fumbling is going to give the party a small lift. Labors stance that they won’t partner with the Greens will also cause them some grief.

I personally think independent stand the most to gain and will hold balance of power in whatever minority government gets through.

Gun to my head - Labor minority.

The stadium is a Lightning rod issue, but it is far from the only one.

Briefly we have had a Liberal government that is terrible at organisation and makes deals based upon cronyism, nepotism and or incompetence.

The state government has demonstrated that they are largely incapable of delivering any projects on budget and lack forward planning capability. For example two new high speed ferries were commissioned to connect Tasmania and Victoria to accomodate post COVID tourism increases. These ferries were constructed in Finland and were ready before the facilities required to berth them here in Tasmania, this has meant that we have had to pay a port in Scotland to hold on to them until we can get our side of things ready.

We have had a number of crises in our Public Health and hospital systems leading to extended delays for people seeking both emergency and planned treatment.

When it became obvious that the State government was unable to balance a budget they opted to institute a Public Service hiring freeze. Talked about instituting a government body to emulate the stated goals of DOGE.

The stadium is possibly the most politicised matter, our previous Premier got super focussed on getting a Tasmanian AFL team. After a lot of big talk AFL provided a pathway that a lot of people felt was demonstrative of them not wanting a Tasmanian team to go ahead, setting a requirement that a new stadium be constructed in a difficult/impossible location, with conditions that would potentially exclude its use for other sport and event types, with the state largely being the ones to bankroll a project that had a hopelessly optimistic budget.

Since there has been a yearning for an AFL team in Tasmania for a very long time the government and AFL are leveraging this to get people to back the stadium regardless of it’s feasibility.

All of this came to a head when the Liberals released a budget that would increase state debt to more than $10 billion by 2029. This would be a trigger for a bunch of state assets being put up for sale.

So the Labor Party leader pushed for a No Confidence vote, which has been successfull. By convention the Premier is expected to resign once a No Confidence motion has passed, but Jeremy Rlockliffe has opted to instead fight this by calling an election.

Now I really shouldn’t have started typing all this up at 4an. I’m going back to bed. Good night.

Yeah that’s a situation alright.

Oh yeah that’s what I mean, the trail of wreckage they leave as they get promoted out of the positions they ruin is astounding.

Yeah, just wait until the Australian electorate has a brain fart and let’s Sky News convince them to vote in spud head. He will get right on to climate change by “nuclear-ifying”* our power grid.

^ * “nuclear-ifying” is a term of art that should not be interpreted to mean any actual progress will be made towards nuclear power generation. Expect to see increased demand placed on coal and gas power plant, all hail Gina. Spoken and authorised by the Liberuhal Party… Oh and /s so it’s not elecgion interference ^

Oh it’s tragic. The kid is headed for a life of middle management, like I said he may or may not have been being honest. But he goes to the expensive private school that I couldn’t afford to send one of my kids to, let alone both. He will make the right connections and be part of the right social circles that details like not understanding his achievements won’t really matter.

I’ve worked for that sort of guy across industries and business, they do fine.

Or if he absolutely has to have a 1 hour response time sounds like a hiring someone to do admin might be the best way to stay competitive.

Had a chat with my kids friends while dropping them at home, they were talking about a kid who got busted using ChatGPT for some schoolwork. When I jokingly asked one of them how he avoids getting caught he admitted he uses it for “first drafts” then rewrites the whole thing in “his own words”. A bit of drilling down and he admitted it takes him longer to write a short paper with ChatGPT but it’s easier because he doesn’t have to think of what to say, just how to change the words.

If he was being honest the irony of the dumb kid rewriting the idiot boxes responses so he doesn’t get caught is just… Getting the article off Wikipedia and doing the same thing would have a similar result… Only with less faffing around and environmental impact.

They are already complaining about the hole in the budget illegal tobacco products are leaving, how on earth would our economy stand up to losing the addiction tax?

I get a really slimy vibe from this RFI group. Kinda reminds me of the NIMBY groups that go around blocking mobile phone sites.

I remember talking to a planner once about the mobile phone blocking efforts and he was pretty scathing about what he had seen, some of it genuinely people who had an axe to grind based upon Facebook radicalisation, but a lot of it seemed to have deeper financial motivations from some of the organisers.

He told a vague story about a guy who kicked up a big stink with a proposed tower for highway coverage in a rural area, that is until the site was relocated and he found out afterwards that the secondary site selected was owned by a relative of the guy kicking up the stink who made bag off the bush block that was suddenly worth more than 15 times its previous value.

I fully endorse research and feasibility studies with an eye towards minimising environmental impacts, but if the alternative to these projects is continued reliance on coal and gas I suspect that the long term impacts are far more likely to be worse by not going ahead with the OSW.

Of course I would prefer that the development were done by a domestic company rather than foreign investors, but it seems we don’t really do massive infrastructure domestically any more.

I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am “the computer guy” he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.

He observed, “oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That’s good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone.”

Which I found scarily insightful.

And the worst part is we, as a populace, will buy into the mining industry captured press and vote him in enthusiastically.

There’s a large part of me that wonders how bad the world will have to get before people stop voting against their best interests, and a more cynical part that acknowledges that we probably won’t.