Spyke

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The lack of ads!

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DNS adblocking doesn't help with ads served on the same host as the content, so you typically need ublock origin or similar as well. But yeah, OP is being a bit hyperbolic but you can certainly set things up such that is exceedingly rare.

Live sport is the only place I'm still assaulted by advertisements, and I'm not willing to pay Murdoch to avoid (some) of it.

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Landlords could be forced to explain above-inflation rent increases under sweeping proposed NSW reform

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I'm not an expert on this but I'll try:

Rental prices have been pretty bad across the board since the pandemic, but I understand it's dropped back a little in regional areas since people have been moving back to the cities. Inflation has given landlords the excuse to pump up prices repeatedly. Some of it due to their own mortgage repayments going up, but the rest due to greed. Things are bad enough in the cities that some people are living out of their cars because they can't afford the rent, or because there simply isn't an available place to rent. And regional areas are constrained in supply due to holiday homes and airbnb etc which of course raises prices as well.

House prices are expensive everywhere, but cheaper in regional areas as you'd expect (but not what I'd call affordable). Wages are fairly high on average in Australia but the price to income ratio is very high, so it's tough for many people to afford a home. And the ability to get a loan has become more challenging since interest rates have risen, and lending requirements have become somewhat more stringent. Some in the cities will do the whole long commute thing and save some money while having more opportunities for high wage employment, but it's still expensive.

So the short answer is that it's not really affordable anywhere to rent or buy, but it will depend on one's individual circumstances. Definitely not a good situation all in all, but seems to mirror most Western democracies in recent years.

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Secure way to allow external access to Home Assistant

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Worked well but always annoying toggling that on/off since all my traffic went over WG and some apps (bank, Pokemon Go, Netflix) didn’t like that my source IP was a VPS.

For the record, with wireguard you can configure AllowedIPs on the client such that internet traffic isn't routed through the tunnel. Basically, don't use the wildcard 0.0.0.0/0 and instead set the wireguard network and the LAN subnet that Home Assistant is on if you need to access other devices.

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Federal government launches review of transmission line planning to ease community opposition

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I'll add that in theory it takes longer to install underground transmission lines (although community opposition of overhead lines could change that calculus). This is relevant because a significant number of investors won't invest their money unless they have certainty that the transmission lines will be ready when they are finished building. I'd prefer the government just build the bulk renewables (wind and solar), but for better or worse most governments would prefer to outsource some or most of the work to private investment.

Here's a PDF from TransGrid related to HumeLink, which outlines some of the pros/cons for that project specifically.

EDIT: And the full study.

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Australia’s fossil fuel methane emissions are nearly twice as bad as industry reports

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Australia also has significant emissions from animal agriculture and even without accounting for the underreporting, we emit far more methane than our population warrants. Mostly because of our export industries, but it does show we could have an outsized impact from moving away from these industries quickly.

But on the underreporting, this article suggests global methane emissions are 70% higher than reported, so it's probably broadly similar with Australia specifically (not that it makes it okay).