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- 440 Comments
1·10 hours agoIn the US, the vast majority of mortgages have a fixed rate over decades.
90% of mortgages are fixed-rate for 30 years according to this page: https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/how-many-years-mortgage-loan.php
I don’t know the details of how that works, but yeah, it’s possible for the vast majority of home borrowers to be on fixed rates.
2·19 hours agoAnother source - though it is itself citing Carbon Brief - with an additional chart to illustrate the per capita figures:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/19/climate/china-emissions-fossil-fuels-climate.html
2·21 hours agoThe Internet Archive is compliant with the law. My understanding is that archive.today isn’t, and I believe they do things like using paid subscriptions (donated, if I recall correctly) to de-paywall articles.
As a result, you should use the Internet Archive where you have the option, because archive.today may eventually be shut down.
EDIT: Here’s the article I was recalling all this from: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ It’s worth a read!
For your reading enjoyment:
Many news sites can be de-paywalled by archive.is / archive.md / archive.today (they are all the same system, the operators just keep multiple domain names on the go in case one gets shut down).
EDIT: Never mind, it’s not de-paywalling this article/publication. I’ll leave this comment as a monument to my hubris, though, haha, and in general it’s helpful advice.
I don’t think they were asking the cops to do anything, they just were refusing people service.
But I agree with your conclusion. If they weren’t using the data for commercial reasons, they were using it as a deniable trial to see what they could get away with.
Fucking Coles is using Palantir and has their checkout face cameras, so I suspect in the wake of this we’ll hear more about this sort of thing with other companies.
Article says they’ve got 30 days to publish it, and also that they’re planning to appeal, so that might delay it further.
I have no specific knowledge, I just follow the news on it.
My read is that the issues are relatively minor but tricky to fix - especially without alerting the media and triggering a slew of ‘PUBLIC TRANSPORT BUNGLE’ headlines.
E.g. some of the track is a little too steep to meet the maximum braking distance requirements, and now they need to have a back-and-forth with the manufacturer to see whether they can retrofit better braking systems or something. DISCLAIMER: This is just a thought-bubble, I’m not a train expert! I’m just thinking the issue(s) seem to not be visible/obvious, so some kind of technical metric not being met, and a long delay to organise a technical solution with a third party would fit the bill.
2·3 days agoI’m an Australian, and I also don’t know why I know Oodnadatta! Probably it’s just one of those words that sticks in the brain, and it comes up every so often because it is a key point between Adelaide and Darwin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oodnadatta (population 102)
Wittenoom, WA - population 0
I didn’t instantly recognise the name, but I’ve heard the story.
Coober Pedy, SA - population 1437
This is a very solid one.
@[email protected] beat me to the punch with Port Arthur, and I think they’ve hit the nail on the head there. Although, as they note, maybe the name recognition isn’t there for younger generations.
Here’s some suggestions that haven’t been made yet:
- Gundegai - population 2,057 (2021 census) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundagai
- Featured in songs and poetry, most famously Along the Road to Gundegai
- ‘The Dog on the Tucker Box’ sits on the road outside the town (and is itself a reference to a poem mentioning Gundegai)
- Betoota - population 3 (2023) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betoota,_Queensland
- Known because its name was adopted by the satirical news website The Betoota Advocate
- Gundegai - population 2,057 (2021 census) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundagai
Are the major vaccines the RNA ones where it’s just the protein?
- Moderna and Pfizer are mRNA.
- Novavax is protein subunit.
- AstraZeneca is viral vector (not an attenuated SARS-CoV-2, a completely different virus).
13·7 days agoGiven rideshare driver (is this relevant?) this smacks of driving while black type discrimination.
I think you’re on to something here. Any behaviour becomes 10x more threatening to the public/cops when the person doing it has brown skin.
Obviously the toy looks a bit real, but it seems to me all this needed was “hey we had a complaint, that looked real, why not hand it over and go home for a bit?”
Thing is, he’d already left the scene when he was arrested. They had to track this guy down to arrest him and confiscate his property, and it’s not even clear that he was breaking any law. Seems like they would have had time to check that?
I also don’t know why they keep saying it was “discharged” like that’s a relevant detail. It’s not like it made it more threatening, because if you see someone pull a trigger and it doesn’t make a loud pop, then you know it’s not a real gun (or at very least it’s not a loaded gun). Unless this is a weird kind of water pistol that does make some kind of a pop? Also, if people are close enough to see the trigger being pulled then they’re probably also close enough to see the spray of water. It’d be far more effective to just brandish it if you wanted to scare people.
In short:
NSW Police have arrested a man possessing a water pistol following reports that a replica gun was discharged near NSW’s parliament.
About 1pm, officers were called to Sydney’s CBD following reports that a white replica gun was discharged.
What’s next?
It’s not clear whether the man will be charged given the legality of possessing a water pistol.
2·7 days agoWhy do you reckon it wasn’t made up? Was it submitted through a public platform or something?
I hope so!
what aid group said that?
From the article:
Eight international aid groups, including Oxfam and Save the Children, said in a report that Israel had failed to meet the demands by the Tuesday deadline.
If you want the full list, though:
Signatories
Anera
CARE International
MedGlobal
Mercy Corps
Norwegian Refugee Council
Oxfam
Refugees International
Save the ChildrenSource: https://www.nrc.no/news/2024/november/joint-statement-israel-receives-failing-grade-on-u.s.-demands-in-gaza (this page has the full text of the joint statement and a link to the full report)
Hamas infested unrwa
UNRWA - the organisation that Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Japan, Sweden and the European Union determined they should restore their funding to after investigations into allegations were concluded - were not one of the aid organisations referred to by the headline, no.
9·10 days agoWhy is it “virtually impossible to deliver on”? Higher education has been free in the past, right?
But don’t call it the “best Australian songs of the 90s” if you’re going to leave out so many of the best songs of the 90s.
Yeah, the title is intentional click-bait/engagement-bait
Is there some way we could turn the trains into casinos?
But seriously, it seems nuts to me that the trains stop at midnight. I shouldn’t be surprised, though, since successive governments made it clear they wanted Sydneysiders to be in bed by 10.