Are you from Canberra or the NT? Because if not, you have 13 members who represent you geographically in the federal Parliament alone.

I actually don’t have contempt for Keating as a whole. I shared this video because aside from the two points I mentioned here, I pretty much agree with everything he had to say. The dismissal may not have been unconstitutional, but it certainly was an abhorrent moral failing on the part of Kerr and especially Fraser. And our subsequent PMs have cosied up to the US too much (even if I don’t agree with Keating’s opinion—not mentioned in this interview, but elsewhere—that we should be much friendlier to China and side with their foreign policy interests).

Avatar is the only PbtA system I’ve ever read (and never played or GMed any), but do systems have a significant amount of mechanics unique to each system, or is it all mostly flavour on top of the same system?

My initial reaction was confusion or intrigue, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

I can definitely see that Avatar might be a system that makes sense for Star Wars. Combat is largely martial arts based, with magical ability to affect things at a distance. Plus non magic using characters (with weapons or technology) are important.

Narratively, the idea of balance is incredibly important in both worlds, and the balance mechanic is pretty core to the Avatar RPG. Three of the four core stats (focus, harmony, and passion) are super important in the existing Star Wars lore, and creativity is hardly a huge stretch to add.

Keating’s ridiculous insistence that the Senate is “unrepresentative swill”, even to this day, is a notable shortcoming of his views here that might get lost in the midst of his even more ridiculous assertion that he would have had the police arrest the governor general, if he were the deposed Prime Minister. Yes, the Senate gives Tasmanians a disproportionate voice compared to New South Welshmen, but by its electoral method, it nevertheless produces a result which is a much more representative of the wishes of the Australian people than the House of Representatives is.

The most important thing is to keep building. Once you stop the knowledge is gone

Hear, hear.

Oh shit that was Whitlam? I always associated that with Keating for some reason.

Maintain the rage!

Establish national standards for high-speed rail, in a way that is classic-compatible, so that trains can run slowly on legacy lines

Queensland doesn’t run standard gauge, so that’s extra hard up here.

It’s so frustrating to me that even relatively new projects like Cross-River Rail didn’t build dual-gauge so they could be compatible with a future high speed project.

Yeah I’m not sure how I feel about the expensive tunnel + bridges route. Maybe getting that out of the way early could make it easier to keep going, giving a sort of “the hard part has already been done” argument in favour of continuing. On the other hand, the high pricetag could give opponents something to point at to say “stop this here”.

I do wonder about that “relatively short distance” bit. You’re definitely right about the large number of commuters, but considering 60% of it is going to be tunnels, and a further 20% via bridges and viaducts, that seems likely to be much more expensive per kilometre than some other routes might be. Someone else suggested Sydney to Canberra, which would have added prestige factor and be connecting different states/territories, demonstrating more clearly the need for federal involvement. I imagine it would have a much lower per-kilometre cost, too. Starting with Sydney to Wollongong (on the way to Canberra) might achieve a fairly similar level of demand and time savings to Newy.

I would suggest quite the opposite. Privatised transportation systems have proven themselves to be absolute abject failures. The UK is currently moving back towards nationalised railway after decades of failure under privatisation. My city of Brisbane, Australia has one private railway, and it’s extortionately expensive at 45 times the price of our regular public transport…and they have literally not allowed any other public transport along that route to be run.

Private businesses necessarily need to make a profit. But public transport is a public good (in the informal sense), and it’s practically an economic public good. It shouldn’t be run for profit, but for the benefit of society. That means sometimes being unprofitable.

That tardigrade is clearly playing a tiny cello, and not a tiny violin.

STAR voting

Video has been deleted.

Alternative vote

Ranked Choice voting

Why are these presented as different systems? The Alternative Vote is just another name for Instant Runoff Voting. And ranked choice voting is a name for a whole class of systems which includes IRV, as well as Single Transferable Vote and some others not linked here, but in practice someone who says “ranked choice voting” usually means IRV, and it’s IRV that the video describes.

Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now?

I remember my bittorrent client having an option to do that even back in like 2010, though I never used it to actually stream, because my Internet wasn’t good enough.

As others have said, Nebula is pretty great. Much more limited in content, since creators are invite-only, and they curate for high quality creators. But it’s growing quite quickly and has a wide variety of content from leftist cultural video essays, to music analysis, to urbanism, film criticism, science, original films, game shows, and more.

There are a couple of centrist creators on there that I personally avoid, but most creators are centre-left to leftist, and I don’t think there’s anyone I would explicitly describe as right-wing.

It’s subscription only, but extremely affordable at $36/year or $6/month if you sign up through a creator’s invite code, and I think they promised grandfathered pricing if they raise the price in the future. You can see their library without an account at https://nebula.tv/explore/videos. Or ask any more questions you might have at !nebula@lemmy.world.

Yeah Nebula is for sure the best with the volume and variety of content they have. But there are also many creators/groups creating their own independent platforms. The NZ-based videogame sketch creators Viva la Dirt League have Viva+, the ancient tech podcast/vodcast company This Week in Tech has Club TWiT, and probably most successfully the former CollegeHumor is now focusing on improv comedy as Dropout, among others.

I assume many of these are probably white labelled Patreon (or similar) services, or possibly a front-end site with white-labelled Vimeo for serving videos, rather than building their own infrastructure from scratch. But as far as the viewer is concerned those technical details don’t matter.

Kinda like pirating a movie these days

Not really. More like pirating a movie in 2012. These days, there are excellent-quality pirate streaming services, there’s the ability to stream videos over bittorrent (if there are enough seeds), and probably other options I’m not thinking of that make pirated video more accessible than ever.

It’s also possible, not having seen the videos in question, that they simply did violate YouTube’s rules regarding graphic content. YouTube has had a terrible record of banning important content despite its societal value because of rigid adherence to ill-thought-out content policies. AI takes that problem and turns it up to 11.

A friendly reminder that cars are still highly destructive, whether powered by petrol, battery, or hydrogen, and whether driven by a human or automation. The only real environmentally, economically, and socially responsible solution is to drastically reduce the amount of trips made by car, by introducing road diets and modal filters, by having mixed-use medium or higher density zoning, by building high quality safe separated bike paths, and good quality, frequent, affordable public transport.

Also, keep your pets on your property. If there’s no way to keep them from leaving your yard, keep them inside. It’s better for them (they live longer on average, even if you control for the increased likelihood of getting run over) and for the environment.

Honestly I think most people won’t care. They’ll more than happily upload their photo ID or share their face with AI data miners and continue using commercial social media. It’d be great if this does drum up a stink about how poorly thought-out the bill was, but I’m not expecting much.

Ouch! I hope it recovered ok!