Are you able to link the source document?

However, as an example of why nuclear is seen as risky, time-consuming and subject to massive cost blowout and time delays, see Flamanville 3 ( https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx Under “new nuclear capacity”)

It’s gone from being a project started in 2004 to build a 1650MWe plant costing 4.2 billion euros (in 2020 euros), to an estimated completion date of 2024, at 13.2 billion euros.

And this is France, a country that is very familiar and well-versed with building nuclear reactors.

Without the source document, this may well be the example you use from your 2nd bullet point. But I wouldn’t have called this a startup.

It’s simply less value for money these days. And government economic policy over the last 30 years has made it very clear they believe universities are more a personal empowerment vehicle, rather than a national benefit (through having a higher proportion of the population university educated).

On one hand, it’s become common knowledge having a degree doesn’t automatically get you a decent job, let alone a decent job, like many millennials and gen y were socialised to believe.

On the other hand, the quality of teaching has gone down, while the user-pays cost, even if it’s via HECS, has gone up substantially, at the same time that people know it’s going to be extremely hard to save up to buy a home these days, even with access to the bank of Mum and Dad.

Many younger people have given up on the feasibility of owning their own home till mum or dad dies, so there’s less push for those people to spend money and time on increasing their earning power. That dream of earning your own home on your own effort is very much dying.

Additionally, those that are still inclined to earn enough to afford their own home, are having to judge whether the larger HECS loans, and mandatory repayments, will affect their ability to take out and pay off the larger loans now needed to buy a home.

Our university system has Americanised to a much more user-pays system, where students are expected to take on larger loans (even if it’s HECS), as the government has continually withdrawn or starved funding for the sector over 30 odd years, and universities have responded by casualising its workforce, and getting rid of tenure for academics, so that the standard of teaching has fallen badly.

Not to mention the implementation of a private company-style economic model for universities, so at the same time as being starved of funding, they’re being encouraged to chase international students to make up that funding, which has affected academic integrity badly, and redirected funding from the quality of their teaching and academics, to more flashy but extremely expensive capital investments like new buildings and facilities. Which are nice if the money is available, but generally it’s come from badly-needed areas elsewhere within the University.

Imagine if a new funding model was proposed for our hospitals, where government reduced overall funding, but hospitals could make up the shortfall by advertising and encouraging international patients to have treatment with them. Obviously the quality and availability of treatment for domestic patients would suffer to some degree, as focus would go towards attracting international patients to help pay for those domestic patients. But it would be very easy for hospitals to lose focus on the big picture, and instead begin to see attracting international patients as the end goal, rather than a means to make treatment for available to more domestic patients.

Many classes are taught by PhD candidates or recent graduates, who are on insecure semester to semester contracts, often signed only weeks before a semester begins, and there are reports many are expected to only allocate, (or at least, will only be paid for) 10 minutes or less per student essay, and 5 minutes or less for other assessments. What sort of valid individualised feedback and recommendations for improvement can you give within that timeframe?

I’m going to assume it’s an autocorrect issue, but just for those not familiar with Australia’s university student funding system and want to websearch it, it’s HECS, not hex.

It’s not government related at all, it’s an industry-created body, formed by members of the alcohol and beverage industry, to self-regulate their advertising material.

And yes, extremely cushy. Like the article said, it’s created a voluntary code with no fines or penalties on its members, and was only spurred to action by a viral story of outrage and complaints spreading on social media. Probably mostly consists of board members who attend a few days a year and one or two employees who just press yes/approve on whatever they’re sent.

“Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code had given pre-approval for Hard Solo as an appropriate product.” Only to backflip quickly under actual political and media scrutiny once it’s release became public knowledge.

Even it’s response to one complaint’s suggestion that hard solo sounds like Han solo - and therefore potentially evoked associations with stars wars in the minds of some kids - was petty.

"the packaging doesn’t appeal to minors by having “a similar name to [a] Star Wars character”. How do they know that? I myself saw Han Solo at first glance, and thought of the fairly recent Han Solo movie -with black and yellow stencil font- before re-reading it as Hard Solo.

Given they didn’t detect anything wrong with mimicking a soft drink before, I don’t think they have any legitimacy to arbitrarily dismiss other potential associations, especially when the colours pretty much match exactly the title schema of the Han Solo and Star Wars movies.

Anyway (I got distracted sorry), the article itself has people stating this is why industry self-regulation doesn’t work, and why an actual government body with a mandatory code and penalties should be in place.

But, its much cheaper for government not to, since then government would need to fund the new body and it’s employees, and spend time drawing up and debating relevant legislation and regulatory powers, whereas ABAC is funded by its member companies.

Haha yeah, in 200 words summarising an 800 word article, it’s managed to skirt around all the meat of the article, so we don’t actually know what the issue was, just peripheral mentions that Centrepay is somehow involved, a fair amount of money and customers are possibly involved, and the company doesn’t want to comment, essentially. None of which tells us what was going wrong. We get more of an idea from the original title!

Very bad bot!

That’s the one.

“See, they are McDonald’s, I’m McDowells… They got the golden arches, mine is the golden arcs.They got the Big Mac. I got the Big Mick… But they use a sesame seed bun. My buns have no seeds.”

Examples of bad grammar.

I also noticed the article seemed a little vague regarding ideal goals of an FTA between Australia and EU.

Seems like the EU mostly wanted Australia to agree to their geographical indicator rules (e.g. not allowed to use feta, Prosecco etc names) and for Australia to agree to much more ambitious climate action and sustainability targets.

So that kind of explains why they aren’t too fussed about reaching an agreement with Australia (plus Australia upset France by withdrawing from its submarine deal the way it did), whereas Australia had a lot more to gain.

• Reducing or eliminating the current excise levels (7-12%) across industrial goods,
• increasing or eliminating altogether the allowed currently very restrictive quotas of agricultural goods that can be exported to EU, and
• building towards mutual recognition of professional licensing and registration, so workers can more easily move between EU and Australia.

But the EU being almost half a billion people vs our 26 million, we were never going to have very effective leverage I think.

(This link had better details https://www.claytonutz.com/knowledge/2022/july/free-trade-agreement-between-australia-and-the-european-union-back-on-the-table-with-some-caveats)

Not excusing it, but I’d say it’s very easy to feel disconnected from others when you’re in a privileged position of power.

Everyone else becomes “them”, and you lose track of what “normal” or “average” experiences are like, because you tend to live within a very different space to others, and tend only associate with people with similar privilege levels.

I remember visiting my country’s Parliament building, and within about 15 minutes having this weird sense of disconnection due to the incredibly different beautiful and privileged environment. Everywhere were massive pieces of art, beautiful marble inlays, everything was clean and well ordered, great big wide open spaces, beautifully carved wooden chairs in dining areas etc.

I remember thinking no wonder politicians tend to be labelled disconnected and removed from the concerns of the average citizen. If I was working in that building 8-12 hours a day, 4-6 days a week, 40+ weeks a year, I’d find it hard to remain grounded and to also remind myself that what I was experiencing was something less than 5% of the population might experience, rather than being the “norm” or standard for the majority of the population.

Not really that weird.

It’s a common occurrence.

It’s a passion project that someone or a team spend a lot of time and energy on, likely thinking that the advantages of implementation will be so obvious that it’ll just be out into production based on its self-evident merits or improvement on existing practices.

Then it hits the concrete wall of reality, where there’s actually lots of friction and barriers in the process of trying to get the project into production and implemented. Management just doesn’t want to go ahead with it for whatever reason, and people don’t seem to be as enthusiastic about it and clamoring for it as the dev/team thought they would be, despite it solving a number of common issues they have with a product/service.

So the dev/team can either go home and forget about it, starting a new project, or write a manifesto remembering and defending the project they’ve spent many hours on.

It almost reads like a PhD thesis defence. At least that PhD then gets recorded, filled and archived, and despite it potentially having no immediate real-world impact, possibly someone down the line might access the extensive work and research already done here, and use it to further their own project, and fingers crossed that project has more success in making a real-world change than this one.

TL;DR: I imagine his management don’t want to go ahead with implementation for whatever reason, but because the research and any coding was done during his time at Google, he can’t just go and create his own app or implementation, or approach another more willing company for implementation. But by providing the research and element summaries, and points for how a better system might work, he not only memorialized his hours of work on a “dead end” project, but allows others in a less captive situation the advantage of taking his summary and using it to actually try to get change happening elsewhere.

I think it’s bringing up a couple of good points actually, that are worth considering when crafting public policy, and observing where our current society is heading.

1. Treating and thinking of our current public education system as “the great equaliser”, such that children coming out of it operate at a roughly similar level once they leave, isn’t actually a reality.

2. The outcomes of children, despite going through this “great equaliser” system, is actually still significantly affected by parents, meaning parents, and the way they interact with their children, still have a massive role in children’s outcomes.

I think a lot of people, and teachers, have observed that parents appear to be increasingly farming out non-academic responsibilities onto the school system and teachers (e.g. discipline, life lessons, social expectations), let alone give time to help their child academically.

And I imagine a lot of this is due to themselves being overwhelmed, under financial stress, or simply having to work more hours less securely to cover rapidly rising living expenses.

All of this adds up to a picture that creating the conditions in our society where parents are under less pressure financially and mentally (presumably similar to conditions experienced by university educated and CEO parents) is likely to improve children’s educational outcomes, and their future outlook and experience in life.

TLDR; it suggests easing life conditions for low socio-economic parents, such that it enables them to spend more time with their kids, would have more of an impact in improving their children’s life outcomes, rather than focusing money and resources entirely on the education system to do the same. Admittedly some assumptions in there. But worth investigating.

And another reading could be that putting resources into making university more universally accessible, and something that is encouraged to be taken even by those pursuing careers not requiring university, and structured in a way to more easily and unobtrusively allow that, so that more parents had university experience, could be a better way of improving children’s educational outcomes than putting the same resources purely into public schooling and children.

‘May’ is used, (in addition to other reasons) because otherwise it creates a legal obligation on the Voice, to make representations.

Then that would have to be regulated by parliamentary legislation, stating exactly when and how often the Voice legally has to make representations (once a year? Twice a year?) and when exactly.

Even your example of ‘the legislature and executive “shall receive” representations from the Voice’ sets up the necessity of creating parliamentary legistion to regulate, as they would be needed to define how often and in what form (Email? Formal oration to shared session of HoR and Senate? Document submitted to Cabinet? Oration to Cabinet in a specific ceremonial format? Or to Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet?) those representations are to be made, in order for parliament to “receive them”

And “shall receive” still puts the legal/constitutional obligation on the Voice to come up with and present those representations, (even if they’ve nothing important to say at that time, or need more time to discuss an issue) and then obey all those parliamentary regulations in order to fulfil the constitutional obligations you’ve just created.

The current wording allows that a formal constitutional body, calling itself the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, may make representations to Parliament and the Executive, and therefore that those representations will be formally recognised as coming from a constitutionally enshrined and recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entity. The current wording doesn’t force them to make representations, and more importantly, doesn’t mean the creation and the Voice having to follow strict rules about when, how, and how often those representations are made.

With the current wording, if the Voice decided they wanted to present their representation as a handwritten piece of paper hand-delivered to the Prime Minister, they could. Because any legislation that blocks the Voice from making a representation to the Executive would be found unconstitutional. And any legislation moderating and regulating how the Voice can make those representations could be potentially challenged in the High Court if they negatively impinge the Voice’s ability to make those representations.

Basically, the current constitutional wording allows for the creation of an ATSI Voice that can’t be told to shut up.

And also importantly, can’t be closed down and discontinued through a legislative act of parliament.

As pointed out in the link by spiffmeister, that’s concocted misinformation.

More so though, even if one wasn’t able to accept that those points were false or misinformation, those points aren’t being added to the constitution by this vote.

The wording is very clear. Nothing will be added to the constitution that relate to any of the points you raised.

Your response would be like Australians in 1900 refusing to ratify the proposed constitution because they objected to the line in section 24 that the House of Representatives be “directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth”, since one day, one of those “directly chosen” people might make outlandish, farfetched, or incendiary suggestions during their time in the House of Representatives.

Or a local council refusing to allow a bakery to open in its township, because of the possibility that one day, a baker from that store might bake bad bread. Even if that bread was never sold, and never affected anyone, the mere possibility that bread might come out the oven bad within the next 20 years, is enough to convince the council they should never allow a bakery to open.

Yeah, after I unknowingly opened

in the colony and all the myconids did was cast haste on each other and run around uselessly but cutely, I didn’t have the heart to ever want to attack them.

Was very much this meme when Glut said what he said.

(Keeping things vague as I don’t know if this spoiler tag will actually work)

Or on purpose, in this case.

Rebranding at this level sounds very much like purposeful destruction of an existing resource and company, rather than an attempt to make the company any better, successful, or more profitable.

I’m starting to wonder if the Saudis have told him they’ll reimburse any of his personal losses from his stock buy, in return for sinking and destroying the company.

It just seems like the Musk buy, once it happened, has been too effective a means of destroying a platform that was previously used extensively by protestors and activists to organise mass group activity against governments and authorities.

It would certainly be my answer now to those regular Reddit questions like “what’s the one conspiracy theory you actually believe is true?”

Yep. I wasn’t aware that I had a habit of just ending a conversation with co-workers and walking away (and honestly believing and remembering it had finished) when it was getting into difficult or emotional territory.

Several years later I found out I had undiagnosed autism, but at the time, was confronting but extremely helpful when the supervisor scheduled a meeting with me and a co-worker to make me aware of that behaviour, and especially that this particular co-worker considered it extremely rude and disrespectful towards her. It had never occurred to me that walking away might be taken that way, but also more importantly, that those conversations weren’t actually finished.

The co-worker felt much better after learning that it wasn’t disrespect towards her, but me apparently not being able to deal with difficult or emotional conversations, and my brain appearing to completely excise those memories of the end of those conversations at the same time as removing me from the situation.

If I’d found out about it by social media, or overhearing others calling me a misogynist (probably because it was the female coworkers that tended towards emotional or confronting conversation) or weird, I can imagine getting instantly defensive and me not believing them, or thinking that they were over exaggerating, misinterpreting etc. Basically, that the problem was them, not me.

It would have been an impossible leap, while feeling attacked “socially” and indirectly, for me to realise on my own, and then admit, that my brain was doing something weird and unusual, and that I couldn’t trust it’s recall in those situations.

After chatting to a few gen z, if I was to assume a characteristic of this generation, it’s that most seem to have completely given up, or not even started, the fight against the deterioration of online privacy, exposure to ads, and companies “rights” and/or ability to harvest personal data from them no matter what they want. It’s just part of life to them.

It’s just accepted, and whenever I’ve raised the issue with them, they’ll generally just reply with defeatist/pessimist/‘pragmatic’: “well, the alternative X, y and z apps/websites you’ve suggested likely all have hardware backdoors forcibly installed anyway”

So I think the willingness to fight, and picture a different way of having things, really is focused on those within millennial and gen-x age bands.

Edit: the point being, gen z therefore appear less likely to move away from existing structures, like Snapchat and Reddit, over increased ad promulgation, personal data harvesting, or bad company behaviour.

The alternatives, for those interested.

For those who don’t want to maintain a natural lawn, Professor Howden suggests planting ground covers and shrubs, or growing a cottage garden.

And if native grass and shrubs won’t work for your backyard, you could always lay down some bark or wood chip.

“You can just have bark chips like mulch over your earth, and that doesn’t heat up as much as artificial turf and does keep the ground healthy,” Assistant Professor Ting said.