It's mandatory voting in Australia, but you just need to turn up and mark your name off the list and you won't get hassled to vote. But I guess, once you're there....might as well vote.
And the fine for not voting is $50 or so, and the electoral commission will take most reasonable excuses and waive the fine if you don't make it.
So it's more like a, "come on guys, do your civic duty" kind of thing as opposed to MANDATORY, and 90-something percent of the voting population in Australia just rolls with it.
Bonus: At most polling places you can usually get a "democracy sausage" for a small donation to a local cause, so most people will wander in just for that.
Edit: voting is on a Saturday, so most people don't have to take time from work to vote. There are legislative provisions that say that employers have to allow people time to vote if they work Saturdays, and polling stations are open from 8am to 6pm, which generally allows a window of opportunity for most people to vote without disrupting their day too much.
There are also postal votes of course, which can be ordered via phone/letter/internet and sent to your address. You can fill them in and send them back early, so there's no real reason to not vote.
The US system is broken. I have a tax file number in Australia, which is the broad equivalent of a US SSN, and you know what someone can do with it if they also have my name and DOB? Fuck-all, except file my taxes for me, because you can't use it as an identifier anywhere else than the Australian tax office.
If I want a loan or a credit card or to open a bank account or any number of things , I need enough verifiable documents including photo ID to satisfy the other party that I am really them. Basically it's a points system where any form of government photo ID gives you about 80 points and any other item of identifiable data gives you 10-20 points and usually you have to clear 100 points to be "identified".
So my passport plus my driver's licence is enough. My driver's licence plus my non photo ID government Medicare card or my official original copy of my birth certificate is enough. My driver's licence and two bank or credit cards is enough. About 5 or 6 things like my birth certificate, electricity bills in my name or local government rates notices and bank cards is sometimes enough, although photo ID from somewhere is usually required, or you need a statutory declaration from someone in good standing saying that you are who you say you are.
This kind of thing, while slightly more inconvenient, requires a number of physical items that can't be easily stolen en-masse. I carry enough of them in my wallet that I can do anything I need to do, as my driver's licence provides photo ID. People who don't drive or have a passport can scrape together enough bits and pieces to usually get by.
So it's time for a change. But it doesn't have to involve technology or a huge shift in the way of doing things. It just requires a points system similar to what I describe. Whether the US can effect that change now with the millions of systems that rely on a SSN for a trivial key in a database in some small retailer somewhere, I don't know.
A string of governments going back 30+ years cooking the housing market via investment opportunities/tax breaks.
Rental market being an absolute shitshow due to the above.
Some dickhead at the RBA, the group that sets cash interest rates, saying in 2021 that interest rate rises weren't going to happen for a fair while and then 6 months later ratcheting up the rates.
People taking 2.05 percent variable rate loans during that time for the maximum they can when a simple chart of mortgage interest rates over the last 40 years would suggest that budgeting for a 6-10 percent mortgage would be a good idea.
Banks, mortgage brokers, etc, all pushing for - and allowing - people to get the biggest mortgage they can handle right now.
The warped Australian dream of getting the biggest house you can and living the best life you can with the best cars and toys, pushed by advertising from corporations.
And then we get to quasi-monopolistic companies that get between the consumer and basic goods and services, cranking up the margins to provide maximum return to investors. That's Coles/Woolies/banks/telcos/power companies/Ampol/Caltex/etc.
The whole thing is a pressure cooker designed to get as much as possible out of the general public.
Do we need a dataismanipulated community? I think we need a dataismanipulated community. 🤔
Edit: we could have challenges like, presenting a mundane dataset and saying, "display this data in a way that gives a clear advantage to this particular group even though they have no particular advantage in any obvious metric". The most obscure way to elevate that group with provided and/or inferred data wins.
In the phone world, the jump in capacity that modern phones have from my 4370mAh battery in my A71 is negligible. They haven't increased power density much because that way leads to fires and lawsuits when users bend or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile phones
My point was, if modern phones had the physical space that my phone + case has, they could have a bigger battery, and that bigger battery would then power all the hungry, hungry electronics.
Discover that small UPS's fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
Get small generator.
Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.
Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.
It's a race to the bottom for providers, everyone's margin gets squeezed to compete, and services suffer as a result.
So you can buy a $69 hop from BNE to SYD, but there's no guarantee on timeliness, no practical refunds, and you will be provided the bare minimum of comfort and facilities on your trip.
I had a full run of vaccinations and got COVID about 6 months later. Nothing serious, in bed for a few days, cold and flu tablets kept everything under control, a perfect case of the effectiveness of the vaccines in taking the edge off.
But for about two weeks after "recovery" I was constantly forgetting keys, or my wallet. Drove halfway to the airport for a week away for work one morning and went, "oh shit, where's my wallet?" and I'd placed it on a bench behind my car when I put my suitcase in the back and didn't pick it up again. I'm 50 years old, I can count on one hand the number of times I'd forgotten my wallet before that.
That brain fog eased off after that but I wonder sometimes if there are still long term effects that I'm not aware of.
Yeah if you've got home charging it's not a real issue. We use 240v here in Aus so you can pull quite a bit out of domestic outlets before having to get serious and generally overnight charging to top up the day's commute would be fine.
So it wouldn't be a fast charger on every street, and you could always enforce limits by time of use pricing to put a dampener on peak loads.
I just wonder if utility planners might get caught with their pants down on this one. Like, could you say 5 years ago chargers might run to 800kW?
Yeah, just the random added load equivalent to 80-100 houses per car, any time between 5am and 9pm would be enough to send local suburban grids into a spin, especially in summer evenings when there's peak loading already underway. A lot of infrastructure would need to be beefed up to make it reliable.
Dave. @ dgriffith @aussie.zone Posts 0Comments 452Joined 2 yr. ago
I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.