Zagorath

Zagorath, 10 days ago

If you sign an NDA with a private company, they can sue you for violating that NDA.

If the reason you violated the NDA was to reveal that the company is doing something illegal, you are legally protected from that lawsuit.

The same ought to be true with the government. We have laws describing what the defence forces are and are not allowed to do in the execution of their military objectives. These are laws passed by the Australian Parliament in order to keep us in line with the internationally-accepted standard laid out in treaties. If the military is violating Australian law, it’s important that they be made to stop this. Ideally that would be done by a soldier reporting the crime to their superior, but what if the crime was ordered by superiors? Or if it’s a widespread institutional problem widespread across the military?

Well for that, we have whistleblower protection laws. We created these laws specifically so that whistleblowers would be allowed to reveal crimes. And McBride had 2 expert witnesses lined up to support his whistleblower defence. But the government stopped them from being allowed to testify, making a ridiculous claim of “national security”. I say ridiculous, because courts are allowed to be closed to the public & press for precisely this reason. We don’t know what the evidence he sought to bring in was, but we do at the very least know it’s not “identities of agents or codes”, thanks to comments from McBride’s lawyer.

The fact that he was prosecuted in the first place in a gross violation of Australia’s principles. The fact he was not allowed to present evidence in his defence is a gross perversion of the justice system. This is absolutely indefensible.

Zagorath, 10 days ago

it’s better in my opinion to keep a fucked up secret then have 10 men die

wtaf

Zagorath, 10 days ago

the journo doesn’t have clearance

The journo literally doesn’t need to have clearance. That’s why we have whistleblower protection laws.

Zagorath, 10 days ago

I dunno about other universities, but I’d say the UQ protests actually are focused on something they have more ability to change than McBride’s conviction. Boeing has a very cosy relationship with UQ, and their core demand is to end that partnership and stop their own university being complicit in genocide by association.

A UQ student has more ability to change what corporations UQ partners with than they do to change court decisions made in Canberra.

Zagorath, 10 days ago

I honestly don’t even know how to respond to someone saying they would rather have 10 people die because of keeping a fucked up secret than have an open and honest society. Like seriously that’s just beyond the pale.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Just had a delicious creamy chicken fettuccini. A little more work than I usually like to cook, but worth it.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Literally just copying London. The article says

The proposal mirrors a similar move in London where a new rail line was called the Elizabeth Line

But it’s even more similar than that. The workong name for the Elizabeth Line was “Cross Rail”. Which sounds awfully similar to “Cross River Rail”.

But also, since when did we name lines that way? All our lines are named for their terminus. There’s no reason that should change.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

I saw your post and don’t think it should have been removed, let alone banned, but I don’t think you did yourself any favours in the comments. You kept asserting it as fact that there is a huge problem with silencing SA survivors, and when asked to give evidence, the only thing you had was three comments in the same thread, where the one sexist guy was being downvoted and the multiple people correcting him were upvoted. Not good evidence of a systemic problem.

(Ironically, you now do have that evidence, in the form of your ban.)

Zagorath, 11 days ago

You are being very deceitful here, dude

Wow, rude. An honest mistake is not deceit.

Are you sure the one that got taken down wasn’t just because you were being an arse to people for no reason, like you are here?

Anyway, I’m glad the one I saw did not get you removed or banned. As I said, it wouldn’t have deserved that.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Peace, friend. ✌️

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Bro bought a Tesla just 2 years ago. Long after it was very widely known just how much of an arsehole Musk was, and after many other excellent EVs were on the market.

I’ll let you draw the conclusions from those facts.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

eBay and PayPal broke off 9 years ago btw.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Everything I’ve heard says that Teslas have had huge reliability problems.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

The point is that the teeny little barriers they’re installing which are supposedly adequate for cyclists’ safety are far less protection than the massive buffer they have as protection while installing them.

It’s not about blaming the people doing the installation, it’s about highlighting the government’s hypocrisy when it comes to cyclist safety.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

This feels like a reference I’m not German enough to understand.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Literally Game of Thrones logic.

Zagorath, 12 days ago

YouTube Premium costs as much for just two months as Nebula does for an entire year (if you sign up through a creator’s code—US prices. Australian prices it’s about 2.6 months) Highly recommend, probably the best bang for your buck option.

Dropout is quite a bit more expensive than Nebula, and narrower in range of content (basically comedy panel shows, sketch comedy, and D&D), but it’s still only 5.4 months’ worth of YouTube Premium in cost (for your second & subsequent year—4.3 months for the first year discount), and you’re directly supporting the creators. Still a very good deal.

If you’ve got both of those, that’s 8 months of YouTube Premium’s cost, leaving 4 months worth that can be spent directly on individual creators’ Patreons, Kofis, one-off donations, or on their merch.

Zagorath, 12 days ago

Nebula is US$50 per year if you go straight to the website, but $30 per year if you click through any one of the creators’ own referal URLs. No region-specific pricing as far as I know (but YouTube does have region-specific pricing, which is slightly cheaper in Australia than America using current currency exchange rates, which is why Nebula is more expensive here than in America, in YT-months).

The vast majority of Nebula content is available on YouTube, albeit with sponsors/ad reads removed, and sometimes a week or so early.

There’s a fair amount of Nebula “Plus” content. Extra or supplementary material to videos that are otherwise available on YouTube, or an extra video in a series where most of the series is on YouTube but this episode is not.

There are also Nebula Originals, where Nebula themselves helped fund the project and the video is exclusive to Nebula. There are quite a few of these, but they’re less common than the other categories.

The entire library is available to browse for free without an account if you go to their website and hit Explore so you can see for yourself. Look for the Nebula logo star for Originals, the + sign for Plus content, and the lightning bolt for Nebula First. You can also use the filters near the top to see only those, if you want. To give a rough sense of the relative abundance, my tablet displays up to 9 thumbnails per screen, and when sorting by most recent, the oldest I see without scrolling is 20 March for Originals, 30 April for Plus, just 9 May for First, and when unfiltered it only goes as far back as 19 hours ago, including 2 Nebula First videos.

some companies just convert dollar values to local currencies

This is what Dropout does I think. It displayed some weird numbers like $91.74, but didn’t actually say anywhere that this was AUD until I read the fine print, so I almost started out comparing it to the US YT price. I assume the US price is a more round number.

Nebula just displays US prices and charges US prices regardless, I think. It’s been a while since I actually looked at how they do it.

Zagorath, 12 days ago

I Googled, and found an article that said this:

in 2005 McMillan had a specific idea of who was to blame for the rent being, well, too damn high:

There are over (25) Twenty Five Thousand Newly Rented Apartments, Available, Now Renting in the Williamsberg Section of Brooklyn, NY. as is all throughout the (5) Five Boro’s. But… they are only being Rented to the Jewish People.

Which certainly seems antisemitic. I tracked down that claim to a Gawker article from October 2005 which said the above quote came from his website. It was hard to track down because all the news orgs link to his website’s homepage which substantially changed multiple times since then and eventually stopped existing entirely, and it wasn’t very easily navigable at the time. But here’s the page being cited. It’s…pretty fucking wild.

Here’s his rather weak apology from 2010.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

Oh that’s quite weird. What client is that?

Zagorath, 13 days ago

I do quite like how clear TeX is. The curly braces make it completely unambiguous how everything is supposed to be parsed, which means even though it’s a little more awkward to write, it’s still a lot easier to write if your comments are getting more complicated. Plus it’s so much easier for the parsing libraries to get right.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

I agree that light rail is vastly preferable to buses where appropriate, but I think you’re going too far in the other direction.

It’s quickly scalable up and down

It really isn’t.

Yes it is. That’s why, for example, we’re able to have special event buses take you from Chermside to Lang Park or the Gabba when there’s a game or concert on.

Of course, @Tregetour underestimates the degree to which rail can be scaled, too. It’s quite easy to add a car or two to a particular light rail engine when peak use demands it.

The ability to reroute buses is not a positive attribute. It sucks.

It can suck if done badly, like in the situation you describe. It doesn’t have to suck. It’s important to clearly communicate and make allowances when rerouting though. For example, you might have to completely abandon several stops, which needs to be clearly announced ahead of time, and if it’s a decision made en-route, you should give the opportunity for people to get off outside of a scheduled stop, if appropriate.

You need bus stops. Bus lanes.

Bus stops cost effectively zero. They can be just a sign post at a minimum, and even a shelter costs almost nothing compared to the significant infrastructure costs of rail.

Bus lanes are optional. They should be used. And frankly I don’t think we should ever have 3 lanes in the same direction without at least one of them being either a bus lane or a separated bike lane/bike path. But most buses run most of their routes on entirely normal roads.

I don’t really see how busses are that different from trains.

Honestly the parent comment is just straight-up wrong here. Maintenance costs for buses (btw, buses, not busses) and trains are night and day. Train maintenance costs are so much less than buses it’s not funny.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

Did you reply to the wrong person, or?

Zagorath, 10 days ago

It does? It seems completely obvious to me. Buses are like cars, but bigger. Cars have huge numbers of complex parts that need to be maintained, but the most obvious one is tyres. Rubber tyres wear out, and on heavier vehicles they wear out faster. Fossil fuel–powered buses additionally have very complex engines and transmissions which require significant amounts of maintenance for which there is simply no equivalent on trains. Electric buses perform better in this capacity, at the cost of being heavier and thus putting more wear on their tyres. Because of their maintenance needs, you’ll need to over-purchase buses in order to have the required number running while others are off the road for maintenance.

There’s also the secondary effect that buses do a lot of damage to roads, being both heavier and more frequently accelerating & decelerating at the same locations than single-occupancy cars, and thus you end up needing to spend more money on road resurfacing. And again, EVs end up worse in this regard than petrol, diesel, or natural gas vehicles.

Trains are steel on steel. They wear out shockingly little. Their electric motors require less maintenance than ICE engines. And the vehicles themselves last a lot longer due to this simplicity, so you can buy trains now and keep using them for far longer than you can keep using a bus you buy now. I’m not clear on the lifespan of electric buses, except that at a minimum the battery will need to be replaced much more regularly than a train would need replacing.