Or if he absolutely has to have a 1 hour response time sounds like a hiring someone to do admin might be the best way to stay competitive.

Had a chat with my kids friends while dropping them at home, they were talking about a kid who got busted using ChatGPT for some schoolwork. When I jokingly asked one of them how he avoids getting caught he admitted he uses it for “first drafts” then rewrites the whole thing in “his own words”. A bit of drilling down and he admitted it takes him longer to write a short paper with ChatGPT but it’s easier because he doesn’t have to think of what to say, just how to change the words.

If he was being honest the irony of the dumb kid rewriting the idiot boxes responses so he doesn’t get caught is just… Getting the article off Wikipedia and doing the same thing would have a similar result… Only with less faffing around and environmental impact.

I like it, however are you concerned about having something made out of hard plastic, glass and metal at roughly head height in the event of a crash?

Having seen a few improvised claymore mines in cars (rhinestones or diamontes on steering wheels or dashes) it’s always something I consider.

They are already complaining about the hole in the budget illegal tobacco products are leaving, how on earth would our economy stand up to losing the addiction tax?

I get a really slimy vibe from this RFI group. Kinda reminds me of the NIMBY groups that go around blocking mobile phone sites.

I remember talking to a planner once about the mobile phone blocking efforts and he was pretty scathing about what he had seen, some of it genuinely people who had an axe to grind based upon Facebook radicalisation, but a lot of it seemed to have deeper financial motivations from some of the organisers.

He told a vague story about a guy who kicked up a big stink with a proposed tower for highway coverage in a rural area, that is until the site was relocated and he found out afterwards that the secondary site selected was owned by a relative of the guy kicking up the stink who made bag off the bush block that was suddenly worth more than 15 times its previous value.

I fully endorse research and feasibility studies with an eye towards minimising environmental impacts, but if the alternative to these projects is continued reliance on coal and gas I suspect that the long term impacts are far more likely to be worse by not going ahead with the OSW.

Of course I would prefer that the development were done by a domestic company rather than foreign investors, but it seems we don’t really do massive infrastructure domestically any more.

I guess what I was trying to say with my rambling 1am slightly drunken screed, is that all of us swim in a sea of ignorance. I sure as hell do, I know little to nothing about mining, a lot of farming practices are completely unknown to me and the logistics used to coordinate the delivery of healthcare at a national level are frankly mind boggling (I live in a country with a somewhat functional healthcare system, ignore this example if you live in the US).

The biggest thing, IMHO, that seperates me from a lot of the younger (and older) people I meet and interact with, is that I am happy to say “I don’t know.” And if it’s important I can and will go and find out how it works, at least well enough to approach the cliffs of competency and decide if it’s worth the effort to scale them.

I cannot tell you how many topics I have learnt enough about to decide to eat the steak and declare that “Ignorance is bliss.” Thankfully I haven’t had to do so while betraying my colleagues to the agents yet.

OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.

With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn’t already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.

I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.

I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.

However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.

So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It… Just… Isn’t… Important…

They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise “magic box does things when I perform this ritual” is enough for them to function in their world, the same as “Car starts when I turn this key” is enough for me to function in mine.

Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?

And the worst part is we, as a populace, will buy into the mining industry captured press and vote him in enthusiastically.

There’s a large part of me that wonders how bad the world will have to get before people stop voting against their best interests, and a more cynical part that acknowledges that we probably won’t.

I don’t know all the ins and outs of her financial situation. But I do know it’s been a point of contention. And she is not the first property owner I have talked to who has been pinged for not charging enough rent as far as a bank was concerned.

Thousands of words of waffle to try to be apologists for those poor unfairly maligned property investors who were just doing their best when they took advantage of circumstances and taxation benefits to snap up the available supply of a limited resource.

Do they realise that enabling this class of people to do these things without the threat of social consequence is at least in part how this gets normalised.

Not only that but it skews society. My sister owns two properties thanks to an interstate move for work requiring her to spend more than a decade away from the first home unit she purchased. That first unit was on the rental market for a little under a year while my Mum saw out the lease at her rental she then moved into my sisters and is maintaining the unit as though it was her own. She pays the mortgage, pays for maintenance, rates etc. My sister calls the aggregate of these payments rent (I imagine she derives some tax benefits from this but I don’t imagine it’s super significant and she does pay for things like strata fees herself). Every time she talks to her bank she gets harassed about not deriving enough income from this property asset and that she won’t be eligible for more money until she raises the “rent” my mother pays… By a lot. She is currently looking to sell the 2nd house she bought to put the money towards the next interstate purchase for the new requirements of her job and is being told the bank won’t extend her a loan until the rent on the unit is increased to a “reasonable” amount.

Our system is broken, badly, and the only corrections I can see that would reintroduce equity will destroy the people who have invested into the property ponzi scheme. Find me a government who would bankrupt a large portion of the population, including themselves, for a better future. I’ll arrange an airborne porcine squadron to replace the Roulettes for the next ANZAC day to celebrate.

Hmm, not meaning to get my conspiracy hat on here but do we think this could relate to the fact that Microsoft now has a quantum computing chip that they can hype to their investors to show they have the next big thing in the bag?

AI has served its purpose and is no longer strategically necessary?

Since they are only spending investors money it doesn’t matter if they burn billions on leading the industry down the wrong path and now they can let it rot on the vine and rake in the next round of funding while the competition scrambles to catch up.