This is the first result from Google. It’s I guess ancient history now being it was the labor rights push to (probably) unintentionally discredit kevin07, but internal politics aside Conroy (famous for his opposition to adult rating for videogames) was for aong time a candidate for ‘biggest piece of shit in Australian politics’. Stephen Conroy was the face of it, so search for him and firewall to your hearts content. The Alana and Madeline foundation were involved in some of the testing that damned the project, if I remember right (as if common sense hadn’t already damned it with seconds of the sales pitch).

Theres a scale of influence, with a big difference between foolproof and entirely unenforceable.

In this case, it’s effectively unenforceable, so what’s the point in wasting time and effort drafting something that won’t actually make any difference?

A few years ago the Australian government spent an enormous amount of money on a proposed firewall to protect the children. After years of development they were ready to pilot test their white elephant, and discovered that, on average, the Australian 12 year old could bypass it in ten minutes.

It’s unlikely that the government could even enforce an obstacle as robust as the “are you 18+” checkbox that porn sites opt in to. This new law will not have any influence on under 16s online presence.

*words hahaha

Only the first 7 letters words of this headline are needed.

XP sp1 and 2 were more or less the same as me with an updated UI and non existent 64 bit. However flawed vista was, it added an actual tangible benefit for 7 to further improve on.

I’d argue 7 was the last windows os that could be described as “better” in some way than what came before (which most, even the ones we remember as “bad” at the time, did offer some real step forward which isn’t true for 8/10/11).

I used to have a pebble back in the day, and then later a pebble steel. I’ve not found a modern smartwatch that is as good for my needs (partially because it doesn’t look like a smartwatch).

I use a Samsung Galaxy wear, which also looks like a normal watch. I’m sure competing products are used a lot and you just don’t notice them because their styling is modelled off of dumb watches.

If people wanted them, they’d sell them here.

Yeah depending on where “here” is different things are available. If people don’t buy them or if dealers make more money off SUVs, then they will be gone.

Also seems they have bigger engines and clearly a larger physical footprint than my wife’s CUV, so that argument is gone as well.

Size and fuel economy weren’t things I mentioned above, but yeah I agree with you. Usually station wagons, like SUVs, have different engine configurations which dictates fuel economy more than ride height. The fuel efficiency argument against SUVs is a little out of date, the smaller ones are shared chassis with passenger cars often with the same engine, so fuel economy is more or less unchanged (the aero is worse on an SUV, but the kind we are discussing it’s not really significant). By footprint I guess you mean length, which in the example I have is right, obviously height goes the other way. Smaller SUVs are more comparable to hatchbacks (eg Mazda 3 is the same as CX-30), I don’t think the mid sized car platform is as directly comparable to the mid sized CUV/SUV.

Ok so we could’ve saved time if you just said you’re the least cool person imaginable with negative sense of style. Claiming that this is somehow cooler than this is entirely indefensible, SUVs are the literal antithesis of cool, the “soccer mum” moniker is not a term of endearment and your insinuation that wagons are uncool or old fashioned is, at best, misinformed.

Aside from just being criminally uncool and unsexy, there are objective ways that SUVs/CUV are worse as well, most notably safety for other road users but also higher cost and of course the one people like me care about: that they also that they universally drive worse than a comparable passenger car.

I guess you didn’t Google the safety stats on SUVs vs passenger cars, your allegory to blaming the tools is flawed. It’s more like saying guns without safetys are more dangerous than those with them. All cars (much like all guns) are dangerous, but some are more likely to be involved in accidents than others.

Google pedestrian deaths by SUVs compared to conventional sedans. To say there is no rational argument against the SUV trend is laughably ignorant.

It also confuses me why yanks keep pretending small SUVs have more space than conventional station wagons. Unless you’re going full Yankee and think a 7 seater is “small”… despite the size they often have worse visibility and less passenger space, it’s a genuinely impressive how bad something like a Nissan kicks or toyota C-HR manage to be.

A station wagon is easier for moving animals, more space than a small SUV - it’s lower to the ground (huge plus if you have to lift them in, easier for them if you are leading them up a portable ramp).

The trade off is you can’t do soft sand, cross deeper streams etc, but IMO animals don’t need to be released far off track, to me it’s worth the trade off.

People always down vote when I point that out as well lol. Windows mobile was already moving towards icon based UIs pre iPhone, so while the UI was a definite improvement it wasn’t the revolution it’s made out to be. The iPhone 1 had no app store or 3g so was not good for emails and, back in 2007 when flash still mattered, couldn’t access most of the Internet where windows phone could. I’m pretty sure it was successful purely based on the iPods popularity, at least until the iPhone 3gs and app store came out and the iPhone became arguably a better smartphone than those that came before.

Apple was literally founded and initially successful off Steve jobs monetizing Woz’s genius. It is not at all a stretch to claim Steve Jobs never innovated a thing.

In modern apple, of course they are far more likely to buy innovative technologies and fund development or copy competitors. Why would they spend money funding R&D when they can more cheaply buy out worthwhile concepts?

Mid 30s Aussie living the the US. Yes I can drive a manual, yes I do drive a manual and yes I think it should be mandatory for 100% of learning drivers regardless of whether they plan to daily drive an automatic or manual when licensed.

The quality of driving here is considerably worse here than what I’ve experienced in Australia or Europe and I’m convinced requiring people to drive in a machine that forces them to consider the next ~100m leads to higher quality, more mindful drivers.

Which… gets back to cable. A decade or so ago? Pretty much everything WAS in one spot for about a hundred bucks a month. Get premium cable to get most channels and then spend extra for HBO or sports or whatever. And comcast and verizon both had a lot of VODs available too. Many of which didn’t even have ads. And the rest? you DVR it and then fast forward through the ads when they show up (… which is better than hulu). REALLY like movies? Get cinemax too.

You’re projecting an American perspective, but I suspect you’re talking to an Australian.

Cable in Australia has always been considerably more expensive than in the USA, and includes considerably less content. Except for movies, it was also never available adfree. It was changing in the last 5 years when I left the country, but it wasn’t even close to competing with the likes of Netflix on price or service and I don’t think there was any ad free option (despite the dramatically higher cost to consumer) - there was a whole media oligarch conspiracy to sink the national broadband upgrade because they knew they had the market cornered with their monopoly and streaming would disrupt that.

Money isn’t an investment, it’s a currency. Of course it’s a bad investment and investing in forex is barely a better investment than crypto (purely because there’s less risk of a sovereign currency devaluing to 0).

Investing in capital, like stocks, property, equipment etc does not require someone to lose money for the capital owner to profit. If I invest in a stock, each year I’m paid a dividend based on the profits of that organisation - no losers required. I could later sell that stock at the exact price I paid for it and come away with profit from those dividends. What determines whether it’s a good or bad investment, is the ratio of profit to the capital owner compared to cost of the asset. Crypto generates 0 profit, so it has 0 value as a capital investment.

Money has value insofar as governments use it to collect tax - so long as there’s a tax obligation, there’s a mandated demand for that currency and it has some value. Between different currencies, the value is determined based upon the demand for that currency, which is essentially tied to how much business is done in that currency (eg if a country sells goods in its own currency, demand for that currency goes up and so does it’s value).

This is not the same for crypto, there are no governments collecting tax with it so it does not have induced demand. The value of crypto is 100% speculative, which is fine for something that is used as currency, but imo a terrible vehicle for investment.

The two differences you listed improve traffic flow and safety massively!

Driver education is often more strict depending on country (I’m thinking Scandinavian countries and Germany), unsurprisingly this makes a big difference.

Traveling faster is a bit of a moot point. If people drive faster and rate of incidents and road toll are lower, surely that proves that travel speed isn’t the problem in the US.

But really, the drink driving culture in America is terrifying. The state of Texas has a similar population to Australia (where I’m from), 9,560 people died on the road in Q1 2022 in texas. Australia had just under 2000 FOR THE WHOLE YEAR! Both places have similar speed limits that are considerably slower than Europe, so I don’t think it would be honest to try and say the low speed limits cause deaths. My best guess would be that drink driving is enforced at 0.05 in Australia compared to 0.08 in Texas. On top of this, Texas only enforces if officers have a cause for lawful detainment, which is a high threshold to cross compared to random breath tests common where I’m from.

It’s incorrect to think of most road laws as being in place for safety, instead recognize that it’s largely a tax by another name. It is never safe to drive 20mph below prevailing traffic, regardless of what the sign on the side of the road instructs.

To avoid fines, pay attention and try to avoid routes where there are often cops collecting a toll, especially during quieter times when you’re one of a smaller number of commuters (and more likely to be the sucker who gets pinged). If you’re white, congratulations, you’re way less likely to be the unlucky party who gets pinged.

Exponentially both ways though I would argue, often, the slower driver is more of a hazard to other drivers!

If someone burns past in the left lane unless someone else does something wrong (like move lanes without looking first) or causes rapid traffic slowdown in the left lane either by merging poorly or being too aggressive on the brakes, they are more or less not a risk.

If someone is driving too slow they are dangerous without anyone else making a mistake - if you or anyone behind you doesn’t have visibility (eg behind a truck, around a bend, glare from the sun etc) then there’s a hard braking event, which is always dangerous. The more slowly compared to prevailing traffic they go, the more attentive other drivers need to be, the more dangerous it becomes.