Yeah, one more drink won't hurt, we can stop any time, it's not a problem.

Actually I'm going to go a few steps forward and let coal and forward get used, but remove every tax breakand subsidy from them. The second a Billionaire starts threatening to take their money elsewhere start nationalising for the sake of the workers.

We need to start treating the existence of billionaires as a sign of serious imbalance and imminent failure.

We should absolutely be making our own solar and batteries, a smart government would have included some money in the budget towards kick starting and incentivising that, they could call it Future Made in Australia.

The problem with Nuclear is that it requires multiple decade commitments to be practical, we have an entire wing of politics which actively wants to take retrograde steps to keep us on gas and coal as long as possible, the next time they are in power they will find ways to go slow on nuclear.

You are right that the best time to start is decades ago, but starting it now will result in us making Hinkley Point look like a model of efficiency.

What we need is to develop our grid in distinct achievable packets of work to minimise the Liberal parties opportunities to piss all over modernisation to help their billionaire buddies.

I have had multiple people show me that 7 Spotlight propaganda piece and try to tell me this is why renewables are a scam, then get defensive and rude when I ask which liar they want me to listen to, the Journalist turned fossil fuel PR flack turned "Veteran Journalist" (who works for a company owned by a billionaire), the politician (and member of a climate denial club called Saltbush that counts a certain mining magnate billionaire as a member) that wants us to build out coal and concedes we should probably do nuclear at some stage, the "conservationist" who won't admit who is funding him and appears to be a compulsive liar.

We need to get rid of coal and gas as quickly as possible, we need to reduce our usage of fossil fuels in the transport sector, and we need to kick start local manufacturing and R&D. Once we have a reasonable level of security we can start building out capacity for the next century, until then I worry we will be debating and procrastinating until the rest of the world overtakes us... Or worse, laps us.

Cool, what's your prescription professor, we going to buy solely Australian made equipment for all future infrastructure?

Oh wait, we were so beholden to preserving profitability of our extractive indutries that we effectively offshored the lions share of our manufacturing sector. Worst part is we have all the raw materials we need on shore to support modern battery and renewable generation technology, but we let our billionaires piss it all away.

Now we are going to get xenophobic about where we source our infrastructure from?

Let me guess we are going to somehow make nuclear cheaper than renewables, somehow kickstart our own nuclear construction capacity from effectively nil, and then we are going to have a properly "'Straylyan" energy grid.

Yet again I ask, what part of the fossil fuel industry are you employed in and do you feel guilty that you are willing to let your ideology get in the way of pursuing the cheapest most effective way of pushing forward?

I bet you the Venn diagram of doing this crap and being incapable of comprehending why women picked the bear is a perfect circle.

I was made redundant 6 months before the pandemic by a large telco. During the process I was offered career counselling so the company could tick off the requirement to provide assistance with redeployment. The sum total of their counselling effort was to provide an eLearning module on how to create and optimise a LinkedIn profile.

I bluntly told them that LinkedIn was a contributing factor in my redundancy as it allowed productivity black holes to move from company to company "right-sizing" the workforce and actively engaging with it held the same appeal as sawing my left arm off without the assistance of anaesthesia.

7 months later I was contacted by an entirely different bunch of HR drones begging me to come back to work at the company as the pandemic hitting had revealed how desperately understaffed and brittle it was with little to no ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Explaining to them that I would happily come back for a salary equal to that of the executive in charge of HR with a 5 year contract got me an incredulous response. When I pointed out they wanted me to quit the job I had found (entirely on my own) that paid better, with better hours, less responsibility and more time with my family to return to a job with a company that hired contracted HR goons to fire as many people as possible to goose the share price they acted genuinely befuddled.

TLDR: In my experience LinkedIn is a quasi cult that exists solely to benefit the management class. If it was shutdown today and the top 20% of users by engagement were thrown into a dungeon and never allowed out nothing of value would be lost and the world would actually function better.

Imagine any other media content where you had these sorts of restrictions placed on you.

You may only watch this movie in a theatre with armed guards walking the aisles to ensure you don't record it on your phone. You must also endure a studio driven survey before you may enter. Approved snacks are posted on the list below, you must eat at least 4 items from this list. If you are unhappy with any of the terms you may only address them through arbitration, no class actions allowed!

This is why piracy is a service delivery issue.

Just repaying the excess fees is "taking shareholder money". No fines or penalties, just making the original customers whole.

Just make the entire executive team pay the money to the shareholders, problem solved. If they aren't good for it I am sure they can get a line of credit extended to them, pretty sure they know some people in the banking industry.

Oh I think I have seen this one, don't the vampires get to go public now? And we find out werewolves and fairies are real too?

Its funny because the overlap of people who are in to Star Wars and Evangelical Christianity really took me by surprise. How are those two things so closely aligned? And let's face it, remove the people who fundamentally believe it is their obligation to proscribe how and what people think and you get a whole bunch of people who realise that peoples gender identity is none of their damned business.

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.

And yet Copilot is busy burrowing into the flesh of the government like a growing hookworm, a large swathe of big business is simply trusting to Microsoft's: "Oh no we keep your data entirely seperate and safe. We don't use it to train the LLM, pinky promise." Whilst ChatGPT keeps showing up in the hands of the most clueless people, "Oh I gave it all my personal info so it could rewrite my resume. How great is AI!"

I feel like this could be solved immediately and easily, make every privacy breach by any company subject to a fine totalling a single digit percentage of global turnover of the company. So for each privacy breach where Copilot is involved that will be... say... 3 billion dollars. They would yank their "AI Solution" from the local market so quickly you would hear a cracking sound.