I don’t like the whole Darwin-Awards/Eugenics dichotomy but I can’t comprehend anyone stupid enough to think that having a fancy haircut is more important than their brains being on the inside of their heads.
I remember it being sold in the 90s as a “designer drug” called “Grievous Bodily Harm”.
Every few years, it is re-marketted as a new designer drug to be fashionable. These Drug dealers are nearly as dishonest as Real Estate Developer and Tech Bros.!
There was a mob who have been selling prefab Barns, Sheds and Tiny Homes near us under different business names for the last 20 years.
Every time the get called out and prosecuted, the close up shop, let the grass grow and the vandalised signs fade, before they open up under a new name, doing the same dodgy crap.
Yeah, we have some of the no-name UHF radios in the kids toybox.
We don’t put batteries in them, in case the kids hear something on the airwaves that isn’t suitable for young children.
We have one high-end Chinese UHF in the garage in a box. It was purchased because it could be reprogrammed to pickup all 80 UHF channels instead of just the 40 that were available for public use.
It has never been used.
My car is a proper 4WD (albeit small) so I have an Australian-made GME XRS-330C installed with an antenna permanently mounted on the roof.
I have an inexpensive GME TX677 in my glove-box for emergencies and an even more inexpensive TX667 in my centre console as a loaner for anyone I am driving with (for their passenger to use, of course).
I plan on upgrading to an XRS-660 as my portable, but it is at the bottom of my Wishlist.
During the chip shortage, I purchased an XRS-330CP as temporary solution. I loan that to family members on touring holidays so we can use the XRS/GPS feature to keep track of each other.
Speaking of which, the GME XRS app has great maps too!
Even OSM has errors and can sometimes have bad actors and commercial intretests deliberately vandalise content.
If you want to carry a definitive, (relatively) accurate map in Victoria, the VicEmergency App is free and usually has current map data and also has reasonable up-to-date incident conditions. I assume other states have similar services.
I think you are right.
In the end, Turn-By-Turn Navigation is just another driver assistance system that can be turned into a crutch, just like Automatic Transmissions and Automated Cruise Control.
The driver still needs to take responsibility for their driving.
That said, using Turn-By-Turn Navigation is much safer than having the driver flip through the Melways or VicRoads Directory and whilst driving, or flipping and folding a RoofTops map whilst driving.
Phone coverage is pitiful in most rural areas, and the death of 3G is only going to make it worse.
UHF CB radios are cheap, lightweight and (as long as you don’t use them while driving legal for anyone to (responsibly) use in Australia.
My number one recommendation for safety feature for any vehicle going into regional areas is a UHF.
(Second recommendation is rated recovery points, but these are not really applicable unless you plan on off-roading).
Recovery tracks, ropes, winches can be bought in by whoever is coming to rescue you, but without a UHF, you won’t be able to tell them you need rescuing.
We are not talking about a criminal mastermind here.
It is was a high-risk, low return heist. She could have called the police, liberated her baby, had the stores brick the laptops on purpose and he would have gotten nothing.
The way it was, he (as so far) managed to get away with hot, easily traceable goods and she has suffered a financial loss and serious trauma. No one will win in the long term.
There are enough people who own rentals who will be running their hands together and grinning maniacally.
They have been cranking up their tenants rent to cover their interest rates increases, and now that their tenants are government funded, they can increase rents even more!
Rent assistance claims to be welfare for people who can’t afford to buy their own home, it is actually just welfare for landlords.
It is almost as if the economists who advise the government don’t understand economics.
If you pay more for a thing, it makes it more expensive, it is Economics 101.
And don’t get me started on the Reserve Bank and interest rates.
“People have too much debt; let’s make their current manageable debt into crippling debt so they can’t survive at all! That will stop them from borrowing more money.”
Also corporate welfare.
All rent assistance and energy rebates are going to do is drive up the prices.
Exactly the same thing happened with Home Owners Grants; we went from being able to purchase an entry-level house and land for 2 years worth of wages to having to save for 5 years just to have a deposit.
The Jimny Wave is a thing, if we see another person driving a Jimny, we wave to each other.
It used to be people in Jeeps would wave, but people who drive Jeeps (an G-Wagons) are all yuppie snobs.
Occasionally you will see someone in a 2-door Wranger who isn’t a snob…
Fun fact, if you see someone driving a Jeep Wranger with a spare wheel rim, but no tyre, you will immediately know three things about them.
They have replaced their factory tyre with illegally oversized tyres.
They are idiots who do not understand how reality works.
They are of a certain racial group with a caste-based social structure. Manual labour like changing a wheel when they have a flat tyre is beneath their status.
It’s not about the current state of their OS, it is about the corporate attitude to users.
Microsoft are treating users not as valued customers purchasing a product, but as a resource to be manipulated and sold off to the cheapest bidder.
They may have backflipped on actual ads in the Start Menu, purely due to user backlash, but they still have game/app/bullshit recommendations and reinstalled garbage, unless you are a windows sysadmin and know jo to use a Profile Editor.
I don’t like the whole Darwin-Awards/Eugenics dichotomy but I can’t comprehend anyone stupid enough to think that having a fancy haircut is more important than their brains being on the inside of their heads.