MisterFrog

As much as this is deeply concerning, what exactly can the Australian Federal parliment do beyond making political asylum visas easier to access? Something, I'm told, is pretty difficult to do if you're a Chinese national, as many of these applications are rejected as illegitimate.

Unless we're willing to massively hurt our relationship with China, and lose the large pool of international students who come here to study, there's not really much that will be done about this.

You can bet the universities would lobby to not turn that tap off...

In conclusion, the only people who can fix this is the Chinese people themselves :/

Compared to how much we subsidise roads, this is a drop in the bucket

However, from a programming perspective, it either works or it doesn't. From a legal perspective, that is something completely else, so I guess the comparison is not quite equal.

To me this is the crux of the matter. It's why AI is absolutely worthless for engineering (the traditional kind) beyond asking "hey, what's the part of the standard that says something like XYZ?" and then just going directly to the source.

LLMs can't reason.

Oh I want them to introduce campaign funding limits, just without the loop holes and unfair advantages.

They won't though, because it wouldn't benefit them.

$5,000 in expenses on a standard four-bedroom home

This seems pretty damn reasonable to ensure that the house is built to a good standard...

Even their cherry picked numbers aren't convincing

but provided an exemption for funds transferred to registered political parties through their “nominated entities”.

The only parties with nominated entities registered with the Victorian Electoral Commission are Labor, and the Liberal and National parties. While laws allowed for the creation of new nominated entities, any set up after 1 July 2020 were subject to the donation cap.

Seems like the High Court made a sensible decision. This is some anti-democratic bullshit if I ever did see it.

Fuck the Labor Party. Watch them not reintroduce these laws at all now...

100%.

All I'm seeing is a subsidy for drivers here...

Like, I can sort of, SORT OF see the logic behind providing subsidy for fuel for the use of delivery or other legitimate business uses, and for people who live in the country, in order to suppress some inflation.

But for personal transportation in a city? Nah. Take public transport. Doesn't exist? Time to demand it. Bus routes can be spun up incredibly quickly, and yet governments aren't doing that at all...

Electric cars will fix everything.

Really hoping this is sarcasm.

The only solution to traffic is viable alternatives to driving.

I strongly dislike anyone who actively decides to go to these things.

I know they left the royal family, but for purely personal reasons.

Fuck the royals, and who gives two shits about these two ex-royals?

As much as I think tobacco and nicotine are really stupid drugs (very addictive with the most boring mind altering effects one ever did see).

I support you doing that because at least people could "shop local" with you and not support mega corps or other large cartels.

The prohibition though, in my opinion, is sound.

There's a reason why smoking is being banned in more and more locations: it stinks, and smoked as tobacco, definitely causes cancer - which the community also has to bear the cost of in medical expenses and familial/fraternal trauma.

Understandably, alcohol and other drugs also have bad side effects, and there's an argument to be made about whether is appropriate to control that also - but heck, at least the mind altering effects are actually fun, and it's not chemically addictive.

Basically. Smoking sucks, and I wish people didn't do it, sorry bud.

About bloody time. I'm glad that for once there's a semblance of justice

The only bad thing is the state government not rapid increasing train frequencies (and also removing the VLine booking system, like, that is really stupid)