What Brisbane considers cold, and what most of us consider cold are not the same thing. 😂

I usually get annoyed by people who get all soap-boxy about wind turbines and birds. These same people never seem to care about the birds (and all the other animals) who are killed by fossil fuel power generation.

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds

Do wind turbines kill birds?
Yes - but only a fraction as many as are killed by house cats, buildings, or even the fossil fuel operations that wind farms replace.

That said, it appears they have a path forward for this particular wind farm:

What makes that almost feasible is a recent leap in tracking. Researchers have been fitting orange-bellied parrots with tiny radio transmitters and seeding their flyway with receiver stations, slowly learning the exact timing and route of a journey that was a near mystery a few years ago.

The more precisely engineers know when the parrots are crossing, the more surgically they can pause the machines, the way some birds have begun to tolerate turbines on other sites.

Hopefully they'll get the best of both worlds from this farm.

If you are insinuating that being an Australian is a requirement to post here, you'd be in error.

The teen engaged in “clearly dangerous experimentation” with household chemicals, defence barrister Laura Reece told the jury on Monday during her closing statement.

The central issue at trial was the teen’s state of mind or intention at the time of these acts, Reece said.

“He was a troubled kid. He was experimenting not only with explosives but with ideas and beliefs,” she said.

“He was seeking out extremist material from wildly contradictory sources from the dark corners of the internet.”

The boy was about to turn 16 when he texted a school friend in July 2024 about bombing the Liberal party over its support for nuclear power and filmed himself testing incendiary devices in his back yard, the jury had heard.

The teenager was serious when he wrote of copying US domestic terrorists like Ted Kaczynski, the anti-technology “Unabomber”, and Timothy McVeigh, who killed 167 people with a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, crown prosecutor Sally Flynn told the jury.

“Technology has left a very clear indication of his acts and a very clear indication of his thoughts,” she said.

“There is a very powerful body of evidence in that case that comes directly from the defendant. It’s his messages that are relied upon, his web searches and the documents he downloaded.”

Yeah, we're waaaaaay past edgy joke territory, here. We're at least planning phase - possibly at conspiracy to involve likeminded individuals phase. An edgy joke is made once or twice. It doesn't involve Internet research into terrorists followed by experimentation and filming oneself making and testing IEDs.

It's so hard to wrap your head around what $1 Million would be to this guy.

Let's say the median net-worth of an individual Australian is $400k (scarily, this is pretty close to the truth).
A Happy meal is around $8.

So, a Happy Meal is around 0.00002% of an average Aussie net-worth.
Extrapolating that 0.00002% to someone with a Trillion-dollar net-worth makes the Happy-Meal cost $20 Million.

Uh, we have to vote. It's one of the best things about our democracy - it's moderately representative.

I can't believe I'm defending her, but she's no Trump wannabe.
She's been saying this crazy shit since 1996. All that's changed is the level of attention she's been getting for some reason. If it turns out that there's been an orchestrated campaign to mass-spam social media with ONP propaganda a couple of years down the line, I'd believe it. She's been around for decades, and catering to her 5% fringe whack-jobs all this time. Suddenly in 2026, she's mainstream-relevant.

To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:

• Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called "Starfield".
• They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
• Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
• Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
• Nexus decided they don't want to host this mod. It's hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.

That's about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don't even play the game. They're just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they'd just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.

I'll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can't just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there's no such thing. There's x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted "4% milk") in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you've gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I'm not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it's like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they'd last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it's sugar or preservatives in it, I don't know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it's 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I'd much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a "I'm better than this person" way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there's a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone's worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I'll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it's weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They're mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it's train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what's going on. Most of you couldn't name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don't know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I'll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I'm white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I've ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don't seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as 'good' by default. There's a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I've been to.

I hate this law. Not because I think people should be saluting like Nazis, but because it was actually needed. We should be better than that. Have we learned nothing from 80-90 years ago?

Given how many millions of people must have used Amazon to order stuff to work from home over the past 3+ years, this is a really weird position to hold. You'd think this guy would be all about everyone kitting out their home office spaces.

As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.

Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:

1. Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they'd never get in.
2. Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn't get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren't forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).

I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. "You can't make me vote, that's against the constitution or something".

This is actually something being debated in Australia. Until a few years ago, Dingoes were considered the same species as the regular dog Canis familiaris. Recent DNA studies have shown them to be distinct, however. So now there's Canis dingo. Only, Dingoes can interbreed with the regular dog, which normally is the test for them being the same species. Maybe that makes them a subspecies?

So, yeah - even we don't know what they are. If they were raised by humans, they are happy friendly doggos. If in the wild, then they're dingoes.

Dance. In a troupe full of girls. Honestly, it was me and 15-20 girls.

Other boys literally called me gay for dancing, while they went and played whatever sports they did and then all went into a locker room and showered together etc.

I honestly never understood how they thought dance was gay. I don't understand it now.

This is itself a sad picture of what has happened to that site. A medium sized sub goes down and everyone's immediate expectation is that the cause is a management decision rather than a technical problemm

The administration of Reddit has shown enough times that it's interests are not aligned with its users'.

I think if I only made 300 Million dollars in three years, I'd probably wonder what on earth I was even doing with myself as well. What is even the point? 😔

Holy engagement bait, Batman! What a terrible headline.

Yes, it is a fact that women lie about domestic and sexual violence. I've seen first-hand a family seriously impacted by a false accusation. The son was detained in prison for a year, the parents took out a mortgage on their home to defend the case and finally the girl admitted in court that she fabricated the whole thing. The son was acquitted. These cases happen. Here's a fairly broad paper on the matter discussing several deeper studies spanning several countries including Australia, Canada and the UK.

Among the seven studies that attempted some degree of scrutiny of police classifications and/or applied a definition of false reporting at least similar to that of the IACP, the rate of false reporting, given the many sources of potential variation in findings, is relatively consistent:

• 2.1% (Heenan & Murray, 2006)
• 2.5% (Kelly et al., 2005)
• 3.0% (McCahill et al., 1979)
• 5.9% (the present study)
• 6.8% (Lonsway & Archambault, 2008)
• 8.3% (Grace et al., 1992)
• 10.3% (Clark & Lewis, 1977)
• 10.9% (Harris & Grace, 1999)

With that out of the way, let's move on to the elephant in the room:

IN OVER 90% OF CASES, THE RAPES WERE CREDIBLE! FALSE ACCUSATIONS ARE THE EXCEPTION!!

$10 a month to have basically every song ever and never have to worry about YouTube ads. Yes, I use it.

This demonstrates there is demand for rail services if it's superior to driving. In this case with cost.

Hopefully the long term response to this will be more services and maybe even restoration of old lines that have fallen out of use in the past 100 years. There used to be rail services going to most towns in the state. It'd be so great to see some of those come back.

Why were you fired?

• I stole a coworker's wallet
• I defrauded Walmart buying gift cards
• I am very stupid

That's an impressive trifecta.