Ilandar @ Ilandar @lemmy.today

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From the report:

Despite the financial attractiveness of household energy upgrades, many households including renters or those on low incomes have no ability to undertake upgrades. Furthermore, even consumers who can invest in household energy upgrades are subject to “bounded rationality” – a barrier that is often overlooked by energy efficiency policies.

Increasing minimum energy performance standards to encourage a shift from gas or inefficient electric appliances to efficient electric alternatives is a compelling solution. New legislation to phase out gas hot water systems in Victoria presents one example of an approach to achieve this, and there is an opportunity to reinvigorate the federal Equipment Energy Efficiency programme.

In the near term, financial incentives play a critical role to reduce the upfront cost hurdle for consumers and scale up the industry capacity to deliver upgrades. However, the current approach to incentives is piecemeal.

Victoria and New South Wales have implemented broad-based incentives for household energy upgrades, but there is a case for more comprehensive national versions of these schemes to be rolled out, which could be complemented with specific state government schemes where they would bring further benefits.

Pricing reform is not the sole solution, but it is nonetheless critical to ensure consumers have access to fair electricity plans that reward their contributions to the grid, without imposing unrealistic expectations on consumers to become energy traders.

What hardware (other than 5G antenna) changed since the first/second one?

Everything would have changed. Smartphones are not desktop computers, they are not designed to be iterated on piece-by-piece over a long period of time. Fairphone has been trying to convince Qualcomm to develop a modular chipset that can be swapped out like a desktop CPU, but it is just one small European company in an industry filled with global giants. It doesn't have a lot of bargaining power, unfortunately. The same can be said for its negotiations with suppliers, which is why Fairphones tend to have very middle-of-the-road specs and don't lead the industry in any area. It is designing and sourcing with long-term availability in mind, because it knows it doesn't have the market power to go out and demand things.

Since Fairphone is unable to create a truly modular phone, it is forced to release newer models to keep afloat as a business. It releases one phone every two years, less than most manufacturers, and has a very low profit margin. Less than 0.1% in 2022, for example. It's also a bit of a misconception that Fairphone is solely focused on modularity or e-waste, because it is also doing a lot of work behind the scenes on industry working conditions and pay rates throughout its supply chain and is taking on an advocacy role within the industry to push for change. For example, in 2020 it launched the Fair Cobalt Alliance which now has over 20 members, including major tech companies like Google and Tesla.

If your car is 2x the size of a normal car then that should mean you suffer 2x the pain. Not everybody else.

Everyone else does suffer the pain, though, because these people park on the street and effectively remove the left lane for several hundred metres at all times.

I live in an area with a lot of new developments and this is definitely a planning problem that needs to be looked at. Many roads constantly have rows of cars parked along the side because none of the owners use their garage (either because their oversized car doesn't fit or because the development is too tight to get in and out of comfortably).

Aren't they big in Africa as well?

Which bit do you disagree with? People have been saying this about the price for 6 years now. "Oh the price will come down when the technology stabilises". Yet book style foldables in the West have had very little in the way of innovation now for several generations and they're still the most expensive phones by far.

As you point out, all phones are large now. So is there really a sizeable corner of the market out there for an even bigger (but not as big as a tablet and in a weird aspect ratio) phone? Compact devices are niche, true, but niches sell because they are catering to a small corner of the market. Book-style foldables don't even appear to have a niche audience after 6 years.

Nobook, which was shared here last month. Very clean and lightweight app with a much nicer interface than the app I was previously using (Friendly). Thanks to @Blaze@piefed.social for recommending it! It's not on an app store so I wouldn't have found it without you sharing it here.

Cycling is somewhat understandable, but I completely agree with running and walking. It always baffles me when I see these people around my area going for walks or runs along a main road, breathing in all the traffic fumes, when they could do it on quiet suburban streets, around a lake or along the beach.

I'm not sure why some journalists are still conflating the two styles of folding phones after so many years, particularly when it comes to their issues. Flip phones are much cheaper and more durable (relative to the larger book-style foldables) and it's no surprise that they are selling better. They also offer a solution to the market problem of phones increasing significantly in size whilst also decreasing significantly in size variety. The larger book-style foldables are really the ones we should be questioning, considering their price, durability issues and lack of a clear reason to exist.

I'm not sure if I'd blanket recommend it to everyone. Whether you get something out of it probably depends on if you have an angle of interest going in. Like for me, I didn't know much about the way a jury in Australia (NSW) works so it was interesting to see a semi-real version of something I've only ever seen depicted in fictional films and TV series.

However, the producers obviously picked a few people based on their backgrounds/belief systems and that made it quite annoying as well. Like there were true crime fans in there who were obsessed with this idea that they had to "solve" the crime, even though they were repeatedly told that was not their role at all. Then there were people with very black and white ideas about crime or strong religious beliefs that meant they just completely ignored all evidence and insisted on pushing a narrative/verdict that they had basically arrived at from day one. It was so frustrating at times to witness the mental gymnastics these absolute morons would go through to defend an indefensible position, and even more frustrating knowing that there could actually be people as stupid as this out there impacting the lives of real people and that such a process could be called "justice".

So yeah, if that second paragraph doesn't put you off then maybe it's worth checking out. But you've been warned!

I thought she probably did it, but I don’t think I could have returned a verdict of guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Have you watched the SBS reality TV series 'The Jury: Death on the Staircase'? It was a frustrating insight into how difficult it is for some people to understand the difference between these two things.

Diet might not be the only factor. We are also more sedentary at home and in the work place, and sitting for long periods of time is very bad for our health.

Pretty disappointed with the way this entire saga was hyped up by the Australian media. I guess you expect it from the commercial networks, but even the ABC was gleefully announcing a daily podcast two years in advance of the trial. I'm not sure if Media Watch has run an episode on this, but it should.

Probably books lol

Has anyone recommended Laya's Horizon before? It's a Netflix-exclusive game where you wingsuit fly around a big island with different biomes. There are a lots of different activities to do and as you complete achievements you unlock new magical capes (the game's equivalent of wingsuits) that change how you fly. The gameplay really fits mobile devices because there's no real story or main objective and you can complete a single run down the mountain in just a minute or two, which makes it perfect as a "time waster" type game. The controls are very fun and intuitive and it runs quite well on modern mid-tier devices (Snapdragon 7 Gen 1) and above.

Not sure when that would have been. I've also had an account for close to a decade and the registration process was the same as it is now.

It's a normal forum, registration is just an automated verification thing like anywhere else. You can download the Mobilism app without registering, although I can't remember if you need to sign in to download through it.

I'm not sure what's more amusing out of the American hypocrisy or all these football boot manufacturers pretending they are ethical for returning to cow leather.

And yet, if you look them up you'll find many of them have tens of millions of downloads. It's crazy the types of random shit people thoughtlessly download from the Play Store. The North Korean spy agency also had spyware apps on there until recently, targeting South Korean users.

SAPOL introduced something similar last year, specifically to target people who use their phones while driving. They issued 64,454 letters in the first three months lol