Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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A little off topic, but if you're interested in recs for other games from that era, I highly recommend the early PS2 title Dark Cloud. It's not exactly a mascot game like the ones you named, but it's kinda close; the biggest comparison it had at the time of release was the Zelda series.

I clicked on the "3" on the page I was on when it suggested "1 Park per Day", which I thought was meant to be 3 days. Not 100% sure though. 'twas late last night.

Let's do a quick hypothetical. A solo traveller from De Moines, Iowa going to Disney Orlando. We'll be leaving on 28th July and returning 30th, giving us one full day at the park. I picked those dates for being approximately the cheapest option on an Expedia search for flights.

• Flights: $357 return
• Hotel (at Disney): $288
• Park entry (using the "1 Park per Day" option I got when trying to book the hotel): $823

That's $1468, before you add in even basic meals, let alone snacks and souvenirs a person is likely to want on a theme park holiday, or travel to and from the airport. And I chose there to look for dates that were cheaper. A real person might not have that option.

and strangers will frequently “fill in the blanks” with their own assumptions

Yes, but a large number of strangers with different life experiences can help cancel out any one person's personal baggage.

Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I'm vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn't have a clue how.

Oh, I see. That seems...very non-obvious, given it only refers to "ICE vehicles", and a certain subset of ICE vehicles are a popular target for vandalism because of their association with the kind of person likely to be a fan of the ICE government department (and because of their even greater overall societal harm than regular vehicles).

Why only ICE vehicles? EVs might be marginally better, but cars are still cars, and they kill hundreds of people every year, cost billions of dollars in direct infrastructure costs (in the huge subsidies that roads get), and untold amounts more in indirect infrastructure costs (because of how inefficient low-density car-centric sprawl is wrt things like sewerage and other municipal infrastructure). Over about 20 km/h the noise pollution is roughly equally bad, and the plastic pollution from tyres is just as bad if not worse on EVs.

What's needed isn't to push people from ICE vehicles onto EVs, it's to encourage people to use (and more importantly, governments to support) active transport like walking and cycling first and foremost, with public transport for longer journeys.

I'm also not a big fan of that sort of indiscriminate vandalism anyway. I'm not gonna bat an eye if you're doing it to all yank tanks, but people's sedans and hatchbacks? That's a bit much, IMO.

Not exactly. Everything counted on election night gets recounted later. All the counts done on the night are basically unofficial counts for the media and the convenience of the politicians. They're a little more official than that makes it sounds, but only a little.

That's enrolling to vote. This is about requesting a mail-in ballot for people who are already enrolled.

More similar to yours than one could possibly imagine.

• A centre-left incumbent that seemed on track to lose, as of February.
• Thanks in part to Trump, the incumbent saw huge swings towards them in the polls during the campaign.
• So much so that their conservative opposition lost his own seat.
• The unfortunate harm done to a real left-wing party as a by-product (in your case it was because of FPTP and strategic voting. In ours it seems likely to be an unintuitive byproduct of how IRV works).
• Your left-wing party lost his seat. We're still counting but it looks very possible that detail could be replicated here.

This would just be another parallel between us and Canada. Yes, Pierre Poilievre losing his seat, and Dutton following in his footsteps, has gotten most of the attention. But New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh also lost his seat in Canada.

I suppose "loose" in this context could also be a much nicer euphemism for "knife". As in "free him of the obligation of being party leader". But that context would be if he retains his seat, but they've decided they no longer like his leadership.

It's about time the AEC adopts a 3CP count on election night for 3-way seats.

For those unaware, on election night, AEC workers count the 1st preferences of votes, and then conduct a 2CP count to the 2 candidates the Commissioner (or the Division Returning Officer, not sure which...but it's someone high up in the permanent AEC staff) has decided are most likely to win. This is great in most cases, but if the AEC gets it wrong it can lead to wild results where the person who was believed to have won on the night has actually lost, and either the 2CP loser on the night actually wins, or even the winner can be someone who made no appearance in the 2CP on the night.

I don't know who the 2CP was between on election night in Melbourne (I was too busy doing that counting in Ryan—ours was between Greens and LNP), but the need to "re-throw" between Labor and Greens implies it was probably Greens/LNP? If so that seems strangely out of alignment with previous results so I don't understand why they did that. If they did in fact 2CP between Labor and Greens I wonder why the recount would be so far off of what was declared on the night.

Doing a 3CP count on the night, only in seats where this kind of thing is considered likely, would give a much better indication. Yes, it would be more anticlimactic because you'd lose the ability to confidently declare who did win, but it would at least mean the numbers you're seeing on the ABC (or your media source of choice) are definitely accurate and unlikely to change by large amounts over the coming week. And you can just make an estimate of how preferences will flow from the 3rd in 3CP to the other two. (Before anyone asks, it would definitely not be viable to do a 3CP and then a 2CP on the night. I didn't leave the booth until 11:30 pm last night as it was; extending it too much more than that would be unreasonable. Besides, you couldn't start a 2CP until every booth had done its 3CP, including the postal votes and prepolls. And that's just not how it works. Each booth does their own thing based on guidance set out ahead of time.)

3CP would actually speed up the result, allowing workers to get home earlier and the media to get reliable answers sooner. Each ballot would take a bit longer to count, but the number of ballots to be counted is absolutely decimated (in the modern, not Roman, sense). Instead of counting nearly 700 2CPs, we'd be counting less than 250 3CPs at my booth. The disadvantage is the potentially higher error rate. (A less important disadvantage is the lack of ability to use the 3CP to find errors in the 1st preference results...but you only lose this ability in the 1 candidate that would have undergone 2CP redistribution but is now part of the 3CP...in my booth our redistribution of the Labor candidate results meant we noticed we had undercounted her 1st preference results initially by 1.)

So in summary:

• 3CP would reduce post-election-night surprises
• 3CP would give the media accurate, if incomplete, results that can be used to make informed speculation about the final result
• 3CP would speed up the count on election night, saving the AEC money, their workers sleep, and giving the media information faster

I don't know if this would require legislative change, a directive from some Minister, or just an internal AEC policy change. But whatever it is, it needs to happen.

Ok I found the ABC liveblog from last night which said this:

the electoral commission was counting preferences between the Liberals and the Greens because they were the final two parties in 2022

I don't understand this, because the AEC Tallyroom website says the final two were Labor and Greens. But at least I now know who they were counting...unless the ABC was wrong on both points.

edit:

Ok I found the ABC liveblog from last night which said this:

the electoral commission was counting preferences between the Liberals and the Greens because they were the final two parties in 2022

I don't understand this, because the AEC Tallyroom website says the final two were Labor and Greens. But at least I now know who they were counting...unless the ABC was wrong on both points.

What did it originally say?

Btw it now says "loose", when presumably you meant to say "lose".

It does? The Hopi Reservation and US/Mexico border were brought up in that Reddit thread? Discussion of the humorous origin of place names, and of how train schedules are the reason behind the time Eucla time zone happened on /r/perth earlier in the week?

Good post.

Wrong community.

A hilarious take (with some really interesting asides) on Australia's weirdest time zone.

In Australia, one way you can apply for a postal vote is by sending an application form by mail to the Australian Electoral Commission—the nonpartisan government agency responsible for overseeing federal elections.

Political parties like our centre-right–to–far-right LNP and centre-left–to–centre-right Labor will often send you a letter, in the lead-up to an election. Inside that letter will be an application form, and a reply-paid envelope addressed to the party headquarters. But the address doesn't say "LNP party headquarters", it says something like "postal vote centre".

If you fill out the form, I believe the parties are obligated to send it on to the AEC. But there is no law preventing them from harvesting your data to use for marketing purposes before they do so. Because political parties have exempted themselves from a lot of the usual privacy laws.

There have also been accusations that they might delay sending your details on by a few days if you're from an area less likely to vote for them. Increasing the chances your postal vote doesn't arrive in time for you to actually use it. Not sure how founded that is, and I doubt it would be legal, but it also may be difficult to prove.

Political parties sending you a reply-paid envelope that says it'll enrol you to vote postal ballot, with a return address that sends your information to that party, so long as they eventually do forward your info on to the Electoral Commission to register you for a postal vote.

❤️ you guys too! 🍁