[–] [S] 2 points 11 minutes ago

This masthead was told realigning the team into the engineering group would bring walking and cycling expertise into the planning and design process earlier, which would strengthen the delivery of active transport projects, including for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Sounds good if true, but there are very good reasons to doubt it's even true. And frankly even if it is, it's less than ideal. A dedicated team and embedding experts in earlier stages of projects would be the ideal outcome. There's a place for both.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 hours ago

    Imagine the fediverse.

    BlueSky gets a mention, but not ActivityPub, the fediverse, Mastodon, Lemmy, or anything related to them. Lame af. I get it, one feature of BlueSky is that users can effectively choose their own algorithms, but that's not that much better in practice than what we get in the fediverse.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago

    It's a bit hard to tell what's going on.

    It's possible that he pedalled to get a bit of a power boost, but the way I define it, if it could go faster than a walking pace without pedalling on flat ground, it's not an ebike, it's a motorbike. If it requires pedalling but has been deregulated to continue providing motor assistance above 25 km/h or can do more than 250 W, then it's an ebike, albeit an illegal one.

    I don't think he was pedalling in this quite as hard as it seems at first glance. The seat is very low, which creates a very weird exaggerated look when attempting to pedal, and makes the pedalling highly inefficient. The optimal setup has your knee close to (but not quite) straight at the bottom of the stroke, with your ankle angle slightly greater than 90 degrees. This guy seems to have knees not far from 90 degrees even at the bottom of the stroke. It's a setup that people who expect to be pedalling a bunch probably are not going to have, but one which makes a lot of sense for a motorbike where you're only pedalling if you really want to accelerate.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Is this actually an ebike rider? It looks to me more like an illegal, unregistered, electric motorbike.

    (The key difference: the ability to ride without pedalling.)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    I'm not taking any moderation action right now, but I would point out that the rules of the !worldnews@aussie.zone community are that it be about news from overseas with a specific focus on Australia. Generally speaking, if it's from an Australian news outlet, we let that qualify automatically, for now. If it's not from an Australian source, a significant focus of the article should be on Australia or Australians. This article is written by a former British Prime Minister, for the British edition of the Guardian, and makes only a very fleeting mention of Australia.

    I don't want you to do anything different right now, but if you're submitting to the Overseas News community, consider finding articles that come from Australian sources like the ABC or SBS, or finding an article that talks more directly about Australia in particular, or that approaches it through an angle that concerns Australian geopolitical concerns more specifically than the concerns an American or European-focused article would.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago

    Worth remembering that her ex, the person many believe was the primary target of her murders, didn't come to lunch that day, despite her specifically urging that he be there. His comments seem to imply that he may already have been suspicious of her motives.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    In short: Bela Lugosi, unsurprisingly. Makes it very similar to why pirates sound like they do in modern popular culture.

    But the more interesting part of this video is a bit of analysis of what the distinct features of his accent are.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Build-to-rent developers is corporates getting into the rental game isn’t it?

    Yes. I believe it's actually the norm in some other countries, such as America. I'm ambivalent about it, to be honest. More big corporates getting involved could have upsides, like a greater degree of professionalism and potentially being more responsive to serious issues than bad individual landlords. Many individual landlords will blatantly break the law not out of malice, but just sheer incompetence. And because they're a relatively small target, the chances they face legal repercussions are minimal. A larger landlord with hundreds of tenants has a much larger legal risk if they do it on purpose (at least in theory—before regulatory capture sets in), and will have procedures in place to avoid it

    But it could have very serious downsides, like never being as good as a good individual landlord who chooses to allow something they don't actually have to, and creating a more oligopolistic market that gives the landlords more power in the wider market than they currently do. It also means they have more political power to change the laws than they currently do, in theory (there's an argument for precisely the reverse: that policies that help landlords are an easy sell to the voting public when the landlords are mum-and-pop shops as policies that help people's "retirement nest eggs", whereas when it's a corporation it's harder to convince the public)

    Ultimately, to me who owns the property matters much less than what the law says they can do with it. If it's impossible to evict a tenant who isn't causing damage without a really good reason (a legitimate need of serious repairs—which occurred for reasons that couldn't have been avoided by doing regular routine maintenance), the landlord or an immediate family member moving back in (with serious fines for not actually moving back in long-term after this reason is used), if the tenant is able to make minor reversible modifications like hanging up paintings or painting the walls, if they are required to be able to pay through reasonable convenient fee-less means, if they are protected from obscene rent hikes, and if retaliation against a tenant who tries to enforce their rights is penalised harshly, it doesn't matter much to me whether my landlord is Joe Blow or Apartments Incorporated.

    to the uncompromising domination of a rental-corp

    True, but for the reasons partly stated above this may not always make things worse. Plus, many if not most individual landlords go through a realtor anyway, who does most of the actual work. Does the rental-corp owning the building vs managing it on behalf of an individual actually make that difference? Maybe. Maybe not.

    Reducing this support will likely deflate house prices a little, so the timing of changes like this would need to be considered carefully

    I honestly reject the notion that policies that "deflate house prices a little" need to be "considered carefully". Deflating houseprices should be seen as a good in and of itself. That said, I think it should be done by way of reducing incentive to invest in housing, not reduce incentive for someone to own their own home. The end goal is making it more affordable for people to live. That means house prices and rent need to go down. For that, demand needs to be reduced without reducing the buying power of people who don't already own a home.

    But regardless, voters aren't going to look at the nitty-gritty details. They'll see this headline and see "the Liberals want to make it harder to own a home". That can never be a vote winner. Nor can continued climate denial. Their base already votes for them on that account, but the vast majority of Australians accept the reality of climate change. The Liberals just need to keep climate change as far away from being a political issue as possible if they want to avoid losing potential votes.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    I just deployed a change. My testing seemed to work, but because of the environment I'm running it on there's a real chance it doesn't run at all or messes up in some other way. If I forget to check at the appropriate time tomorrow, I'd greatly appreciate anyone who happens to notice the bot failed to post letting me know here or (even better!) on my current main account: @Zagorath@quokk.au

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    I just deployed a change. My testing seemed to work, but because of the environment I'm running it on there's a real chance it doesn't run at all or messes up in some other way. If I forget to check at the appropriate time tomorrow, I'd greatly appreciate anyone who happens to notice the bot failed to post letting me know here or (even better!) on my current main account: @Zagorath@quokk.au

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Oh that's a handy tip. I actually just started using a pihole for my desktop and mobile devices very recently. Will have to figure out how to get my Synology's Docker containers to use it too.

    That said, I have to say I'd be a little surprised if it fixed this. I had a quick look at the browser's network inspector and it seemed as though the requests are coming from the same domain?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    Ah FFS. I really think I need some other approach here, because the current approach is so fragile. NYT constantly tweaks their HTML, changing IDs and classes, and in new components, etc. Every time they do the bot stops working properly with its current simplistic approach.

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