shirro

They say the outrageous shit, walk it back a little, say even more outrageous shit. They know what they are doing. We know it. It isn't something new. I don't know why we pretend and give this piece of shit airtime.

Albo is a small target PM. He is never going to go down in history as a great reformer or a great leader, but he seems destined to be well up the leader board for time in office. If people want reform, look elsewhere. If something gains traction with the majority he will be on it like a fly on shit.

I am thoroughly sold on the idea of an apolitical, non-executive Australian head of state modeled on the powers and respobsibilities of the GG. But its a complicated discussion, there are a poweful minority that poison it with massive FUD and worst of all it is a distraction from more urgent issues. Cost of living needs urgent attention. The government inherited a turd but has no choice but to own it and demonstrate progress to the electorate.

I think we should have public discussion about the royals and their role in future Australia but it needs to be seperate from the political parties and mainstream politics and the media which poison it. There is nothing in it for them. We need to discuss it like the Cricket or Rugby. Are we happy with a Brit captaining our national team because his parents were captains. That doesn't sit well with me.

Every company does that. The difference is the AI companies will be broke soon and laying off all their staff so people are getting out before the collapse.

I think we have been taught from birth that we can and should have it all. The most expensive car, the biggest house, the most powerful phone. It is a lie and its becoming increasingly unattainable for more people. It is pure consumerism and doesn't make anyone happier. In truth people are lucky to have any sort of home which is a fucking travesty and an indictment on our society and politics. A 3 year old phone is still a phone. In a city you often don't need a car at all, certainly you don't need a lease for a massive truck that consumes all your income.

Windows has more and better software available than Linux (most free and open source software also runs on Windows). Most people don't need it. Downscale your life and be happy.

Nah, they didn't. The legislation is bad but it was driven by research into mobile phone/social media addiction and harms to teenagers. There is more than a bit of a satanic panic angle but there is enough substance that I think we have to take the concerns seriously. The target is algorithmic addiction machines run by huge predatory companies. Any impact on sites like aussie.zone is unintended and nobody cares about a self hosted forum or list for neurodivergent kids.

All such laws create unintended opportunities for companies that want to capture identity data like Palantir which must be resisted to protect our democratic freedoms and national sovereignty but that shit has been happening with the massive concentration of power in big companies like Facebook anyway. We have to decentralise and get back to doing stuff locally.

The problem is people are fucking stupid and they all jumped to evil shit like Facebook and everything else died. I have to go out of my way to find out anything in my local community with sports, school etc because people are moronic sheep. Apparently I am the weird one for not giving all my family and communities data to evil foreign companies that are complicit in all sorts of shit up to and including genocide. The government is targeting the right bunch of unethical cunts even if they are not doing it well.

Back in the old days we used to run forums and mailing lists for people of various interests. People used to make their own little idiosyncratic places full of creativity. I miss it so much.

Then the big US social media companies came in and took everyone away and the old Internet became a ghost town. Lots of online communities died to be replaced by highly predatory foreign companies.

I don't know why we should listen to people defending predatory social media but everyone ignored us old people telling them that these walled gardens were going to kill the Internet with massive corporate influence. Everyone is so fucking stupid now. Technical people can't even do technical shit anymore. I hate it.

All these craptastic US tech companies originally started on internationally developed free and open source software. They hoover up capital and talent then abuse their market power. Fuck them all.

They all run on Linux - Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. Greg KH who maintains stable is German. So many libraries and core system contributions by Germans like Drepper and Poettering. Youtube ran on mysql for years from Finnish Widenius. Google built a lot of stuff with Python - from Dutch Guido van Rossum and c++ from Danish Stroustrup. All of the video and audio sites rely heavily on ffmpeg, orginally from French Fabrice Bellard. Lots of them also using virtualisation stuff which includes qemu, also from Bellard. So much comp sci research from Europe and UK. Chrome and Safari originated with KDE (German) code. Europe did all the heavy lifting while the US took all the profits. I'm not even European but every country has the same experience. They have no idea how they are viewed.

suspension and retraining

Discharged from the police force.

Ideally, if things are as clear cut as shown in the video. If the protestor committed some unseen offense like spitting on the officer it would certainly justify an arrest, something that might require force if resisted. This guy had his hands in the air. Hard to make any case that this response was justified in any way. Even the cops are innocent until proven guilty though so this is all just opinion.

Going in throwing punches makes it look like the police were drafted out of a particularly incompetent pub brawl. Weird behavior for trained public servants. I don't get how that is justified as crowd control. Makes the cops look terrified and pissing themselves with fear in a country where ordinary people take down armed terrorists with their bare hands and milk crates.

In my opinion this sort of behavior brings the service into disrepute and if not dealt with sends a message that violently assaulting peaceful protesters is tolerable. Training and recruitment have a cost and there could be systematic issues with culture and training that need to be addressed and dealing with individuals and not the organization and leadership would be short sighted. This should be investigated right up to Minns and the instructions he gave about the handling of the protest. NSW police have earned a bit of a reputation for being political enforcers.

To be fair to the cops there are protesters whose aim is to provoke a violent response from police by whatever means necessary. The police have no choice but to defend themselves and establish order with that crowd and people get hurt on both sides. There is a time and place where the police have to use violence to maintain order. In my opinion this didn't look to be such an occasion.

People with no self control shouldn't hold responsible positions. If your having a bad day you shouldn't be in a uniform dealing with people. Goes for any job, not just cops. Imagine if nurses behaved like this, punching every patient who pissed them off. Yet they get paid less than police for some reason.

I am not anti-police at all. Strongly disagree with the ACAB bullshit in Australia. Some cops are bastards for sure. I think they have a tough job and an important one even if their recruitment and discipline sucks (less so in Australia than the US but we could do better). I feel particularly sorry for the ones who get shot dealing with cookers and some of the stuff they have to see and deal with.

If the police service can't self discipline and weed out the trigger happy snowflakes then the public lose faith in them. They need to put cops like this on suspension and retraining. They might not have the right personality for this sort of work. It makes them look week. If your an agitator and want to start a riot it is so easy to bait weak minded law enforcement.

I think a lot of gear will be server/AI specific and won't run in peoples home computers. GPUs with no graphics driver support, no video output etc. Some memory finding itself into HBM modules instead of DDR5. I wouldn't be surprised if they have an agreement with the semiconductor cartels to crush it all so it doesn't land in the consumer market.

Being a starving artist living on the safety net is more difficult with cost of living increases.

Lots of music came from countries like England, Sweden, Australia which were reasonably wealthy and had some minimum level of social welfare. We lost affordable tertiary education and it is one less place for people to meet and form bands or experiment.

Young people looking at creative careers are seeing management everywhere turn to AI slop and looking elsewhere. Everyone is hoping to find work that can't be outsourced, can't be automated, has fair labour practices, won't put them in massive student debt and will still be around in 20 years. The choices seem to be narrowing.

Football? But it's still cricket season.