I'm ambivalent. I'd like to protect the kids, but I don't think this will do anything to stop kids from doing whatever the hell they want online. No legislation would have stopped me at that age.

I get what they're trying to do. I worry about what kids do online. I worry about my own kids online. I think the solution is my problem (as the parent) though, not the government's.

I wonder what percentage of Australians will have stepped into a Bunnings over the past three years? It has to be above 90% of us, right? That's pretty close to a record of us all.

Covid boosters are like a flu shot these days. For the last two years, I've gotten them both in a single visit. WA government has a programme where they're free at the start of the season.

Has anyone actually written out a cheque in their personal banking chequebook this century? I only did it occasionally in ye olden days, and mostly to post payments to utilities and pay rent etc. I don't think I ever stood in a store and wrote out a cheque. Hardly any would accept them without a prior arrangement.

I've used bank cheques this century, but not lately. Who's out there writing cheques?

There are a few retailers these days who don't deal with cash. It's just as weird to me as the retailers who only deal with cash.

At the moment, the majority of us agree that immigration is necessary - particularly of skilled workers. We also agree that we need people in some trades desperately. But, it's a leap to accept unskilled people into tafe courses and apprenticeship programs.

I see the problems, no idea how to fix them.

I do know that we can't discuss it in a sensible debate. Particularly not in an election year.

The problem basically boils down to a design feature (or flaw) in the original Lemmy code. The different instances update each other transaction by transaction. Each lemmy.world upvote, post, comment etc is sent to the other instances one by one. Because lemmy.world is in Finland and Aussie.zone is in Sydney, that takes about a quarter of a second.

Lemmy devs never pictured a situation where one instance would get so big that they couldn't update everyone in a timely manner. Basically, lemmy.world generates more than four upvotes, comments, posts etc per second. So it took until this afternoon for me to see your comment.

The latest version of Lemmy code allows instances to open more than one stream of updates. When/if lemmy.world upgrades to that version, they'll be able to open several channels to update the other instances.

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.

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.

I'd be surprised if Reddit hasn't recovered and grown past its size at the point of the exodus. Only about 60,000 came here. 60k isn't even a big sub.

I read somewhere that they were 2% smaller in July. We are no threat to Reddit.

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.

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.