I have tried a tiny sample of what was meant to be a hamburger pattie/mince thing. It was not big enough to really judge - but it gave an idea.

It tasted different, the texture was definitely different to what you know. But it wasn’t bad. I think we’d get used to it. They said they were nowhere near making a steak be similar.

After a threshold. You don’t want to tax some poor pensioner who has lived in the same 2-bedroom cottage in Carlton for 60 years, simply because that location is now worth $2Million.

And now it’s complicated. How do you find that threshold?
If it’s per-person, you’ll find rich people divvying up their portfolios to family members to distribute this tax benefit.
If you grandfather it in so it only affects future property purchases, you disincentivise retirees from downsizing to a smaller place, freeing up some 4-bedroom house.

Taxation policies are hard.

Remember that whole thing 15-20 years ago about “Occupy” and taxing the 1% etc?

This whole thing affects the top 0.3% of the population. 99.7% of us won’t be affected by it. There should be very wide popular support for this.

Hell, I wish I were affected by this policy. This is an awesome problem to have!

Unless you are a teenager, you’ll be retiring far sooner than 50 years. Less than 20, for me (hopefully).

Three million?! Who the hell has that much?

At that point, 5% interest will give you an annual salary of $150k. You can comfortably live off that and never touch the Three Million!

Full disclosure: I honestly thought everyone could. 😆

That sort of vote manipulation wouldn’t be posted to this community. 😄

I’m a little surprised at how many people have seen this post. More people subscribe to Meta/browse Local than I would have guessed. Whichever it is, I love how engaged our users are in the health of the instance. You guys are great!

You are absolutely allowed to downvote anything you’d like to see less of. Yours was one of the two legitimate downvotes I was speaking of.

Nah, Eureka is legit. He just doesn’t think news should be in Australia. And that’s perfectly fine. There may come a time where we are getting enough content that we’ll want to introduce that as a rule.

I was going to re-size this image to better reflect the real scale. But the required image was 468,000 pixels wide.

This image is pretty misleading. It’s super easy to overlook that “900km” at the bottom. They would somehow transport the raw product 900km to existing infrastructure. This is on top of the problem of capturing the gas they want, while leaving behind the gas they don’t want (CO2) - which makes up 40% of what’s in there.

These are pretty significant bridges to cross. I don’t want to say that they’re dreaming, because the technology to do this does exist. But it’s going to be super vital to hold them to the whole ‘put the Carbon Dioxide back into the hole’ part of the picture, and not just let them ‘whoopsie, we accidentally let it loose into the atmosphere’.

She’s trying to tarnish the character of her critics by (falsely) suggesting that their own consumption makes it hypocritical to criticise Woodside.

That wasn’t the take I got at all.

“So that human impact and the consumer’s role in driving energy demand and emissions absolutely is a missing space in the conversation.”

She’s basically saying the entire reason they exist and are doing what they do is because of consumer demand. That’s you and me. We just aren’t to accept it if we flick a switch and power doesn’t come on. In the medium term, we still need fossil fuels to support our society.

The correct response to her is to keep developing and employing sources of energy that reduce this demand. And not only for us, but for people globally.

You’ve completely missed the point. Yes, those companies are driving emissions. Where are they driving those emissions to though? People like you and me who are generating that demand. Nobody is burning fossil fuels for shits and giggles. They’re doing it to make a profit. It is also worth looking at who those companies are - very strong representation in developing nations who are lifting their populations into the modern world. If you are the beneficiary of two centuries of industrial advancement, it’s a bit hypocritical to sit there and claim that people who are trying to join you are the problem.

We’re talking specifically about Australian environmental issues here and an Australian company. In Australia, renewable energy is subsidised and more incentives are on the way. I don’t think you’ll find too many people in Australia who will agree that their home electricity bills are low. They are in fact so high that the federal government has stepped in to help households pay their power bills.

We are also talking about a gas company in WA. WA has a scheme where gas is sold to its domestic market at a lower rate under a very smart quota system, but this is not a subsidy - it is a recognition that the gas is owned by everyone and does not just belong to the company that happens to extract it.

This isn’t wrong, but it would also be a mistake to ignore her altogether. The wider point she is making is that many of the people protesting Woodside’s actions are also consumers. Home energy in particular is something people take for granted. People also don’t think about the energy it takes to order stuff online, or to buy asparagus and avocados from Mexico etc.

Woodside exists to make money. They make money by meeting a demand that we the consumers are providing. I’m no exception here, so this isn’t a soapbox spiel. We need to work toward a renewable future, but simply are not yet in a position where we can avoid burning any fossil fuels as well. If we accept that we need fossil fuels in our world for the moment, it is our responsibility to keep the Woodsides of the world to practices that are as sustainable for the planet as possible, not only sustainable for their profit margins.

Hold these people to a high standard, yes. But don’t ignore the difference millions of people can also make. Don’t simply go “eh, my teeny carbon footprint is insignificant next to Woodside’s” - because collectively all our footprints together are in fact a bit significant.

Middle-income tech nerd criticises Gina Rinehart for:

1. Being completely out of touch with Australians.
2. Constantly releasing media statements on issues like we should care what she thinks (and the media for publishing them).
3. Being on the wrong side of history on just about every topic.
4. Her awful poetry. Seriously, mine is better and I don’t write poetry.
5. Complaining that paying people in Australia more money than she pays workers in African nations is an issue, while choosing to live in Australia and being a parasite on us.
6. For defending a dude who did do some amazing heroic stuff as well as well as committing war crimes, domestic abuse, bullying and generally being a jerk.

Ha! We are not even the biggest instance in Australia. Nor are we the oldest or most used.

The biggest/oldest Australian instance I know of is Blahaj. While you can argue they’re more global than Australian, I count them because 1. I am super proud of them and what they’ve built and 2. Ada is in Brisbane and active in our communities. 😀

My client is spending waaaaaaay more money on Microsoft Online than it ever used to on software licenses. Every single user in the business is costing 🇦🇺$30 per month alone just for their Office suite. That’s before you get to the Azure stuff. Some hosted apps cost over 🇦🇺$1k/month to host in Azure.

Before you go too strongly after Microsoft for charging so much, this is cheaper than what we used to pay for running our own SharePoint, Exchange etc farms as well as the infrastructure required to host websites/database etc. All that has been outsourced to Microsoft Online and saves significant money.

Microsoft is doing very well out of its own cloud fees and can cope with AWS, Google and all the smaller private cloud operations getting some of that action.

The hubris of claiming ownership of most of the galaxy because it’s above our little piece of rock aside, I liked the thought exercise.

I am now imagining that Earth falls under the night sky of some distant planet and we fall under their dominion as a result. They just haven’t gotten around to implementing their rule over us because of some stupid thing like spiders on our planet make it too difficult to impose. Or the Star Trek Whale thing. 😆

I mostly let the upvotes lead me on these sorts of questions. We aren’t algorithms - I’m happy for something worth talking about being posted on Australia (I do it often enough).

As a counter question: if you’d prefer to see less news and politics, what sort of content would you prefer to be posted instead? There might not be enough.

Antony Green said on Saturday night that he believed Mr Bandt would end up retaining Melbourne.
Antony Green said 2 hours ago that he believed Mr Bandt would end up retaining Melbourne.

Greens leader Adam Bandt looks like he’s in a good position to be re-elected in the seat he’s held since 2010.
Postal votes had been breaking strongly to Labor, with Bandt getting just 23 per cent of preferences from them. For victory, he needs that number to be above a third.
The good news for him is that all four of the polling places counted today have beaten that target.
Based on current preference flows, Bandt trails his Labor opponent, but if today’s counting trend continues, Bandt should be re-elected.
At this stage, no early voting centres have been recounted.