Nath

Mum smoked a pack (of 25s) per day in the 80's. That habit would cost over $100/wk these days. I presume some of the drop is simply that smoking is too expensive these days.

The West Australian font page article today was all "they had a strike but it was a complete failure, BHP claims victory". They claimed that fewer than 50 staff walked off the site. I don't know how true that is, though.

Funny world we live in where we can't trust a supposedly prestigious newspaper to be 100% truthful.

There are good reasons to opt out of MyHealthRecord, but this case isn't proving your point. What we have here is a private health provider having their database compromised. A private database that will have a percentage of patients opting out of MyHealthRecord. Their data was still breached.

What are the odds of MyHealthRecord itself being breached? That's super difficult to say as someone totally unconnected with that database. I will say though that health providers are notorious for being bad at IT; because their first focus is health stuff and IT has been a bolted-on afterthought. IT systems and database(s) tending to get added to ad-hoc as a needed administration requirement and not designed upfront with potential hacking in mind. It's practically a meme in IT professional circles - look up what "WannaCry" did to British hospitals. They're also getting a lot better on this front.

A centralised government database would (should) have been built from the ground up with data security and integrity as it's primary and singular objective. With no first-hand knowledge on the specific health database, but plenty of experience working with other government IT agencies, I believe they'll have approached this content with decent protections. The bigger fear with the centralised database is that clinics and hospitals around the country can access that data. So instead of someone hacking the central database, they compromise South Cairns medical centre (example) and use their permissions to access your data. While I'm sure any single set of credentials would get locked out of the API if it were to try to slurp everything up, the risk remains that your records could be sniffed out from that vector before that cut-off.

There was also an independent audit of the MyHealthRecord implementation that was pretty good - sadly it pre-dates the Essential Eight maturity levels, which is a shame because I'd love to know how compliant they are, and the fact that they haven't published their Maturity Level is actually a bit of a yellow flag (if not red). Not that I am aware of any government agency anywhere attaining Maturity Level 3, but I'd love to hear that MyHealthRecord was at least Maturity Level 2.

So, leaving your health record on a private database can be dangerous, and leaving it on MyHealthRecord can be dangerous. What's the solution, then? Something the architects of MyHealthRecord did that is a good idea is giving patients the ability to set a Record Access Code. Basically, your health records are encrypted without you providing a PIN. Hop onto the MyGov app and set a RAC. Then if your record is downloaded, the data is encrypted/useless to whoever has it without you giving them your RAC.

So, what are good reasons for/against having your data in MHR?
For opting in: You actually have a significant medical history. You want the myriad of health data in your history to all be available to the doctors in Emergency in the event that you are hospitalised.
Against opting in: You haven't got much of a health history. There's no advantage to you in having your (lack of) health data being simple to access for a doctor. You can just tell them that you don't have a significant medical history.

I agree that is the best approach. And so did Kevin Rudd. You're describing NBNCo, and I think that's been a success - despite a decade of lies and resistance from the coalition about its successes. The two big issues with this approach are:

1. What we saw with the NBN: The political party who doesn't build it will smear it and taint it with the populace.
2. Eventually, the government could look at this lovely piece of infrastructure as a huge asset that it can sell for a quick buck to fund some shiny thing.

This one's a little more nuanced. The government owned (and sold off) the old copper phone lines. And yes, that sale hurt the people for two decades.
The government did not have 5G data towers. Hell, they didn't have 3G data towers. There were some 2G towers, but most of the mobile network at the time of the Telecom sale was analogue.

They have had government assistance/incentives while deploying mobile towers in rural areas, but they have pretty-much always privately owned their mobile telephony infrastructure.

I understand what's in this for us, for Optus and Vodafone.

But what's in this for Telstra?
"Great job deploying all those towers in places where the other carriers don't cover. Now give access to those towers to your competitors' customers"

I mean, I want this - I'm on the Telstra network explicitly for the better coverage. If I could get that same coverage on any carrier, I would no longer feel the need to be on the Telstra network. But at the same time, the very fact that this change could lead to Telstra losing thousands of customers makes me understand why they'd fight this kicking and screaming for all they are worth.

Have we learned nothing? This is literally what happened a few years ago with the big Optus outage. They were doing a change overnight, and broke everything. But all the on-call technicians were asleep because nobody could call their Optus phones to wake them up. Couldn't even try to raise them with email pings because their home Internet was also Optus. Management were clueless, because nobody could call them either.

Everyone found out in the morning from the news or when they rocked up to work per usual and the place was an ants' nest.

Issue some people phones on a different carrier, for pity's sake.

I see your Schwartz is as big as mine. Now let's see how well you handle it.

I'm ambivalent. The friendship between Australia and USA surpasses the present government. The friendship has been stretched, and I think support for the current US presidency in Australia would struggle to get into double-digits. But it isn't gone, yet.

I am not against this support of the nation of USA. I still hold hope that their people will begin the process of repairing the damage their government has wrought - starting with their mid-term elections later this year. I hope further that they will seriously set about mending fences with the inauguration of a new president. Because I hold that hope, I am not against this show of support to the nation.

That hope will be extinguished however if they double-down and keep the crazies in power.

There's a lot of domestic solar in WA, same as most of Australia, I guess. There isn't a lot of sun at night, though. There are a few places like Albany on the south coast that are almost 100% renewable (wind farms).

We still have some coal in the mix, but I'm not an expert/couldn't tell you how much.

We don't have peak/off-peak prices. That's the rate. I remember being pleasantly surprised because our bill halved coming to Perth from Melbourne.

Around 20 years ago, the WA state government introduced a gas reserve. It has been reinforced multiple times since then by premiers on both sides of government. Short version: 15% of offshore gas and 20% onshore is reserved for WA before whoever is extracting it is permitted to sell it outside the state.

I think WA is doing alright, here's an extract from our energy bill (family of four) to compare:

Your average daily usage 15.7778 units Your average daily cost $6.27 per day

So after doing it last year, I'm being asked to stay overnight at the kids' band camp again this year. Only I was wrong a year ago: it was Sunday Night > Monday morning. As I predicted, I got insufficient sleep that night and went from the band camp straight to work the next day. It sucked.

I don't especially want to do it, but I'm being guilted by the whole "Sadly, we won't be able to proceed with the overnight stay if this spot remains empty" bit of the email. I'll hold back a little and hope another dad steps up this year. And if I do end up caving, I'll be taking that Monday off.