The idea of like having to put on a comedicly overwrought accent to make a machine understand you is 👌

I’ve tried this to good effect before when I got my current motorbike helmet headset - the voice commands on default settings worked much better when hamming it up with an American accent like one was trying to audition for a part in a Western. Luckily though I ended up finding out that Cardo also trained a British accent option in the settings, and that works a lot better if you want to talk like a normal person.

Thanks :)

I’ve clicked around a bit this morning and so far so good, so all might be well again after your changes.

The same argument that won the gay marriage plebiscite - people should be equal under the law and, by extension, our constitution.

Last year, Australia showed how unengaged and racist this country remains by refusing to insert an Indigenous advisory voice

Convenient that the author forgot to mention that the very person they’re writing about was a vocal No voter. You can say many things about Lydia Thorpe but politically unengaged is not one of them, and while she might be a little bit racist it’s definitely not against Indigenous people.

I’ll also note that the Tent Embassy had a giant banner hung up urging people to vote No, guess they’re all politically unengaged and racist…

They tried other designs first but it was found you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd…

While you will get the fine notice you shouldn’t have to pay it - there is an option to reply with a reason why you shouldn’t be fined and being overseas at the time would count as a legit excuse.

Yep, like in other elections we do have pre poll and postal voting (with a valid reason and you need to apply for postal) but the standard method is turning up on the day. I’m not sure if that has any effect on turnout compared to other states.

Probably less likely than a federal election but I’d still give it decent odds of finding one (particularly if the school is trying to raise funds for something). I can’t remember exactly whether this was during council or state elections but I have turned up to vote before and not found a sausage sizzle.

I think the QLD and NSW options are actually decent, which is surprising for a modern flag redesign. Not sure about the Victorian one, could do with either making the symbol more regular (i.e. less finger paint style) or deleting the crown (too hard to keep details on) and making the stars loosely drawn too. WA seems a decent idea but could do with a cleaner swan rather than the ruffled feathers on the back. The SA idea looks pretty good but does have hints of invading Poland due to the imperial eagle magpie. Tasmania however is another one I could get behind.

Not a real fan of the current ACT/NT flags and I don’t think changing to a wavy line helps them, and the idea for the Jervis Bay territory seems a bit too committee style bland for my liking (like most new flag designs I see mentioned).

Not keen at all on how it increases picture sizes and makes certain articles more prominent at the expense of actual information.

Also, what pelican told them that video shorts should take up such a massive section of the page (and not at the bottom either)? One of my bugbears these days is how information that can be conveyed much faster as text keeps getting pushed as video so people can spend both more time and vastly more data to find it out.

Highlights IMO are an amusingly ironic bit of tram signage at 7:20 and a very well timed song at 29:40.

Disappointingly I only saw two clips from Canberra but luckily both involved roundabouts (or faux-abouts) so at least the reputation of the city is intact.

it seems that the smaller the town, the higher the military worship. They may not even have a public toilet, but they will have a military worship statue that seemed to have cost more than all the town to build.

That’s because the vast majority of our towns pre date WW2, and basically every area lost enough people in WW1/WW2 to affect multiple families and the broader local community. For example I grew up in a country village of a couple of hundred people (with several hundred more in the locality and upriver) and it has a war memorial listing what would have been ~50 people killed in WW2 and at least that again in WW1. I think it is understandable that towns (particularly smaller or more closely knit communities) would be in general support of the families and friends wanting a memorial to their dead given that level of losses.

I haven’t seen anywhere near the number of memorials for other conflicts, they definitely exist but are significantly less common. If you want to avoid war related stuff your best bet would be towns/suburbs built well after WW2, but these tend to be suburbs of existing centres (which are likely to have a war memorial) instead of completely new towns.

Edit: Also consider that many of our country towns/villages have either not grown significantly or have even shrunk in population in the last half century or so, so historical memorials are more likely to retain the prominence they were originally intended to have instead of being surrounded or crowded out by new development.

It would’ve been completely unsafe to drive at 80

That’s why it’s called a speed limit, emphasis on limit. I believe limits should be set at a point such as you describe - a speed which reasonable people would consider clearly unsafe for a road. Drivers should then use their judgement of the corners/visibility, the current conditions, and their vehicle to choose a speed safe for their particular circumstances - this will obviously vary widely for different parts of the road, different conditions, and different vehicles. Setting speed limits to a point where you can safely drive the slowest sections of the road in poor conditions makes them effectively recommended speeds rather than limits, and I believe this trend has (and will continue to have) a negative effect on driver skill levels.

Thanks :)

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It was pretty busy up there, plenty of 4wds out and about heading to Mt Coree and up Mt Franklin road to either Bulls Head or where the road was closed at the Snow Gum gate. Luckily not at a traffic jam sort of level though - the dirt roads tend to dissuade a lot of people.

I can imagine Corin road would indeed have been a mess today, it can be bad enough on a regular weekend let alone a snow day where you have considerably more traffic and even more chance of people driving super slowly or trying to pull over for photos.

That is a good point, I do think a lot of ‘speeding’ issues come down to limits that are set too low for what people consider a natural speed for a section of road. I definitely agree that if you want people to drive slowly the road should encourage that speed - narrower lanes, curves, tree plantings etc help. Instead you get situations like how the ACT gov dropped a good section of wide three lane arterial road from 60km/h to 40km/h, changed nothing but the signs, and then acted shocked that the vast majority of people were now speeding…

That does seem a general trend, and applies to my personal opinion too - I would definitely be more sympathetic to a person with a low range speeding ticket than to someone with a mobile phone usage ticket.

I think much of that is due to the increasing disconnect between speeding in the form of exceeding speed limits and speeding in the form of exceeding the limits of safe driving (given good conditions). Personally I do find it annoying how much focus is put on reducing and enforcing speed limits instead of actually teaching people driving skills, so I guess I would fit into the pro speeding category as long as it’s not dangerously so.

Same with ACT and NSW for mobile speed cameras. The mobile phone cameras are unmanned however, must think they’re less of a target (and admittedly I haven’t heard of many being damaged).

If you don’t want your cameras set on fire don’t put them where they can be set on fire, right? Works just as well as not speeding works at avoiding fines…

Really though if they want mobile cameras they should make them manned cameras - a lot less likely to be vandalised and at least that way someone gets a job out of it.