It’s almost like destroying side loading was a pre-emptive damage mitigation strategy to maintain an iron grip while surrendering a small portion of the appearance of control they maintain.

So instead of forcing them to sell off android, or silo it with a legal structural separation and say billion dollar fines for each breach, they are getting out of this with an arbitrary amount of money changing hands and hand shake deals with the least amount of regulatory interference they can manage.

Having worked with confidential data for a cohort that included people with Protection orders we had it drilled into us that any mistakes could (and had) cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to remediate and that was with super specific tailored contracts to cover every contingency that the company had encountered in the past. That was 20 years ago. I can’t imagine those costs have diminished since then… The companies willingness to do everything to stay out of court and out of the headlines may have though.

As if any of this is about protecting children. At best that will be a side effect of the ban. It’s mainly about linking an ID to as much online activity as possible.

Discussions with the office of my representative showed that they are treating all the issues that will arise from this as secondary. When I asked if tax payer money would be used to redress the absolutely inevitable data breaches when they happen I was told the eSafety Commissioner has the power to bring legal action against companies that don’t implement best practise with regards to data security.

I asked where best practise was codified in legal terms and was then told that the government has published guidelines that state data gathered should be limited in scope and secured in a safe manner. In other words we are putting the horse so far in front of the cart it’s as though the horse is still in the stable.

When I asked about penalties I was told that companies could be fined up to 850k per offense. However when I asked what was to stop a company that had just accidentally leaked say a million drivers licenses from simply closing shop and abandoning Australia to deal with the fallout rather than accept an multi trillion dollar fine I just got some limp hand-wavey statements about how companies would be compelled by the rules and regulations.

I think the biggest problem facing the welfare system is decades of the Australian public having the recipients demonized as dole bludgers by populist shitbags. Every time I point out to my father that we give far more money in corporate welfare than we invest into people who are down on their luck I get the same tired bootstraps rhetoric. Taking support for aged pensions and family tax supplements out of the equation the actual amount we offer as support to people who can’t get a job through disability or lack of opportunity is an insult. If we taxed corporate entities and people squatting on virtual dragon hordes of property correctly the landscape would change.

Amateurs… here in Tassie we would just build between 3 and 6 stadiums with that sort of money. The hardest part would be finding enough hideously inconvenient spots that have insufficient infrastructure and potentially contaminated soil to site them. We know how to piss money we don’t have away on White Elephants down here.

It’s a ritual that we have a whiskey when I go to pay my rent. Couldn’t be nicer. It’s just hard to reconcile with some of the more irrational beliefs. Honestly my dad is worse in some ways, my dad would have been much happier if he was born 40 years earlier. Australian Society in the 50s would have been a lot more his pace.

I don’t know anyone else’s inner world obviously, but reading between the lines of what he said it sounds like that era of German history disrupted his family enough that there is no romanticisation going on.

Plus he told me about an occasion where he confronted some stupid teenager who decided to go to a nearby shopping centre in a reproduction Waffen SS uniform and rather forcefully told him to leave when the police said it was distasteful but they couldn’t do anything about it (before the bans on publicly showing Nazi iconography).

I think he is a standard Lib Nats voter that has the usual amount of mindrot from watching a bit too much SkyNews (more than 15 seconds qualifies as far as I am concerned).

Oh I got him to agree that the NSN should be openly repudiated by any of the “reasonable” people who were just there for every day run of the mill racism. He is one of those people who is “just using common sense”. He unfortunately is a fan of the Gish gallop and one of the biggest frustrations for both of us is that I kept tackling his arguments in order starting from the first.

Look I get it, he has worked hard (and I know he has that’s not just hyperbole) and feels indignant that this means he has to pay a larger share of tax than people who are not as financially sound as he is, and so some wannabe populist talking head telling him “Oh it’s all the immigrants soaking up the prosperity of the nation!” is compelling. When I pointed out that if we just taxed big business and big finance correctly he started to come around, before haring off down some other tangent.

Ultimately I think I will just have to avoid politics, bit awkward to be arguing with the person who decides if your lease gets renewed when it expires. But if it does come up I might just start throwing out figures for Fuel Tax Credits paid to mining companies, or tax avoidance by tech giants, or multi-millionaires and billionaires funding political action against the best interests of voters.

I had a big difference of opinion with my landlord about this… He is convinced that the racists are just rocking up in good faith to express that they want immigration policy reviewed, I pointed out that the Nazi wannabes are the ones doing the planning and logistics but keeping the invites mild to draw numbers. He thinks that the Nazi wannabes are just a fringe group who turned up to try to recruit but they weren’t really involved.

We went round and round in circles for ages.

Funnily enough he broadly agrees with Labor policies and social stances, and agrees Dutton would have been disastrous for the country, but the taxes on his property and business have gone up under Albanese so he hates Labor now.

The kicker is that he is the child of German immigrants with a grandfather that was press ganged into the Nazi support apparatus as the Nazis were after competent photographers, you would think with that sort of family history he would be a bit wiser to the kinds of tactics fascists employ to foster a sense of acceptance and complacency in the general population for their batshit crazy movement.

Give it a month it will be retabled.

I was making a comment about the new Xbox handhelds and how no one should trust Microsoft to keep ads and telemetry collection out of their handhelds even if it launches without any signs of it. Microsoft has historic precedent of Darth Vadering those deals. An idiot confidently replied to tell me no one wants to use “user unfriendly Linux”.

Luckily I was able to demonstrate to him that Linux is entirely neutral to users… Linux users are the ones who are unfriendly.

Well actually I just offered to sell him a lightly used bridge. Don’t really have it in me to be too insulting to people just because they are ignorant and vocal about it.

Nah it’ll be fine, our premier is going to push past commonsense and planning advice to get Hobart an eye sore white elephant stadium. That’ll be a valuable asset to house all the displaced people moving down here.

Honestly if we can’t build houses to match the current trickle of people moving here how do they think we will go when it becomes a flood, plus the government takes decades to do any infrastructure work so even if we throw up some housing you better not want a road capable of handling the traffic flowing to it.

I gotta admit my first thought while watching this was older CPUs, always had an affinity for the Motorola 68k family (see if you can guess my first computer).

But I also wonder how much we would be using those CPUs to provide control planes and interfaces for Industrial gear running 8051 variants. I imagine that a lot of those microcontrollers, which are already in use across a frightening amount of Industrial equipment will likely have enormously longer operational lifespans than the computers used to program them. Plus a cursory search shows I can buy hundreds of thousands of them without resorting to scavenging and repurposing.

Plus when suddenly everything in a DIL DIP package is seen as desirable again my soldering skills will only be seen as deficient not a heinous abomination.

Yep

Down here in Tassie we seem pretty well stocked for water as well. My family will likely be reining in our showers once it stops raining and the tanks are no longer covering our needs though. Right now the more we use the less strain it puts on our storm water drains. We might lean on the landlord to upgrade to a solar hot water system at some stage so our showers are closer to genuinely free.

Hopefully this doesnt make me sound too ignorant, but I find Indian food hits different to hot sauce. With Hot Sauce you are trying to condense down all the different elements into a single substance its why it works so well on fairly bland chicken or with chips etc. Indian cuisine is like a palate of different flavours, so instead of having to build sour notes in they can have pickles, for sweetness take some chutney or a Raita or Lassi. Means I can handle a subjectively hotter curry than hot sauce.

That’s probably a dumb take but I find that to be the case, and the larger the group the greater variety of extras can be justified and shared which makes the whole thing even better. At a 4/10 WBS (white boy scale) I get a bit of colour, at a 6/10 WBS I would be fairly rosy and have some sweat going, at 9/10 WBS I am beet red and the sweat is flowing (and I will probably pay for it the next day).

I had the pleasure of attending a Nepali wedding a few years back and I found all the food on offer there very manageable. Also went to a neighbourhood BBQ where a group of lovely Chinese ladies from Heilongjiang had prepared some dishes from their home. When I mentioned the flavour was great but it felt like it was.lacking in heat I got an immediate invitation to her house (which I sadly never took up due to life being busy) so she could make my wife and I the version that’s not been “Australianised” by removing most of the heat.

Anyway all of that is a very roundabout way of saying that for someone as picky as I am about a lot of traditionally English foods, I am glad I can give other cuisines a crack.

The 9 out of 10 they serve people like me, it might have an equivalency for their authentic scale, I don’t know. This is one of those places where when we go in for a meal there is a constant stream of people with much darker skin than us coming in to pick up takeaway and it was like that before Uber eats was in the area. Apparently it was really popular in the Malaysian student community, before our government decided to fuck over the education system to make a bunch of racists happy by limiting student visas.

Australian chiming in.

My favourite Indian restaurant was this little hole in the wall place (for the first three years of operation, they upgraded when the word got out). The first time I went I ordered a Vindaloo, the lovely waitress/chef that took my order asked how spicy. I was a fool and said, I like spicy food, how about a 6 out of 10. I actually made it 3/4 of the way through but the owner/other chef came out to check on me, I think because he was worried I was about to combust. It was astounding, easily the best Vindaloo I have ever eaten.

The next time I went in I ordered a white guy 4, it honestly was still fantastic, but not as good. The owner came out to say hi, asked what I had ordered this time, and he said “Ah yes we make that without any chilli.”, never been sure how I should take that. For a while I was hoping to gradually increase my tolerance but I think I am topping out at white guy 9.

Doesn’t matter how often these programs are shown to save lives there’s always some conservative stroking his rock hard erection while he talks about taking these programs away and fantasises about the number of young people he is indirectly murdering.

I don’t take drugs (well except ones purchased from a pharmacy) never touched anything harder than a bit of weed, but I have at least one friend who has a child that survived their teens thanks to pill testing.

What fucking ghouls.

So glad I moved from a FTTP connected house to a Fixed Wireless serviced area. Not jealous at all.

Although I am setting higher than advertised download speeds, which I think may be due to having a 4th gen connection in an area where almost everyone I talk to is using 2nd gen and doesnt seem to understand why you would want to update.