At the moment, the majority of us agree that immigration is necessary - particularly of skilled workers. We also agree that we need people in some trades desperately. But, it’s a leap to accept unskilled people into tafe courses and apprenticeship programs.

I see the problems, no idea how to fix them.

I do know that we can’t discuss it in a sensible debate. Particularly not in an election year.

The problem basically boils down to a design feature (or flaw) in the original Lemmy code. The different instances update each other transaction by transaction. Each lemmy.world upvote, post, comment etc is sent to the other instances one by one. Because lemmy.world is in Finland and Aussie.zone is in Sydney, that takes about a quarter of a second.

Lemmy devs never pictured a situation where one instance would get so big that they couldn’t update everyone in a timely manner. Basically, lemmy.world generates more than four upvotes, comments, posts etc per second. So it took until this afternoon for me to see your comment.

The latest version of Lemmy code allows instances to open more than one stream of updates. When/if lemmy.world upgrades to that version, they’ll be able to open several channels to update the other instances.

Aren’t we responding with ‘Enough about the bloody US election, already’? I was sick of the whole circus several weeks ago. Now, it’s supposedly over and we’re still getting articles about the whole stupid thing. I stay out of /All because it’s full of US politics.

This much noise about any other election, even our own, would be thought of as weird. But the Internet goes on and on and on about the US one. Yes, there are some ramifications for the rest of the world on how they vote. No, I’d have no problem with a few articles discussing it. But this wall-to-wall saturation for six months has left me feeling utterly sick of the whole thing.

As to AUKUS, I don’t even know what it gives us that our alliances of the past half-century already provide. It’s not like those relationships are in danger, no matter who sits in the White House/No. 10 Downing/Canberra.

Wait a minute - you’re a Lemmy.World user! And we didn’t need to wait a week to see you comment on a thread we moved on from ages ago! This is a big deal!!

I gave them a pass for artists they included, even if I’d have selected different songs from that artist. For Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, I’d have selected Into my Arms. But yeah, the Kylie collaboration was a bigger song than either of the Nick Cave/Kylie tracks they did select.

Puretone - Addicted to Bass

Ooh! Josh Abrahams!! There’s also The Joker from the Hackers soundtrack - which was one of the biggest albums of whatever year that movie happened in. That album is still great, to be honest. Side note: That’s something that’s a bit lost in today’s streaming world. The soundtrack albums to movies are often not on the streaming sites and are at risk of being forgotten.

Yes! We’re going to end up with a definitive 90s Aussie music play list, and I’m all on board with it!

I’m all about showcasing local talent. I love most of the bands in the list. 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.

I loved Ratcat, but I’d have selected That ain’t bad. Frente’s Accidentally Kelly Street and Custard with Funky again to really introduce a new generation to their music (because Dave’s voice is really recognisable to the kids in this track).

It’s possible to find a 4x2 house in Tasmania for under $300,000. I can see why people are moving there.

Some classics in this list. Such a list can’t exist without people pointing out who was missed, though. This reads like a top 50 of what JJJ had on high rotation. It’s missing several acts that were bigger than most of the names on this list. Off the top of my head (and only in the order I think of them), there’s:

• Madison Avenue - Don’t Call Me Baby
• Taxiride - Get Set / Everywhere you Go
• Savage Garden - Truly Madly Deeply / Affirmation / To the Moon & Back / I Knew I loved you
• John Farnham - Chain Reaction / That’s Freedom / Every Time You Cry - Plus his duets with Barnsy. Speaking of…
• Jimmy Barnes - When Something is Wrong with my Baby (with Farnsy) / Stone Cold
• Kate Cebrano - Pash (Can’t count the Jesus Christ Superstar album, unfortunately)
• Tina Arena - Chains
• Wendy Matthews - The Day You Went Away / Friday’s Child
• Black Sorrows - Harley and Rose / Ain’t Love the Strangest Thing / The Chosen Ones / Hold On To Me
• Icehouse - Miss Divine
• Hunters & Collectors - Holy Grail (Yes, the AFL flogged it to death, but it was still huge)
• Human Nature - Tellin’ Everbody / Got It Goin’ On / Wishes
• Merril Bainbridge - Mouth / Under the Water

How some of these names were left off the list is beyond me. Savage Garden are one of the only Australian Bands who have managed more than a single hit in the US charts. Farnsy and Barnsy are Australian staples. Even with some of the acts they did get right, I’d have picked different songs.

In the making of this list, I learned that Torn by Natalie Imbruglia and The Horses by Daryl Braithwaite are covers and don’t count. Also, an honorable mention to The Waifs and John Butler Trio who were pretty popular around the Perth pub scene of the 90s, but didn’t really crack the national consciousness until 2000 or later. This shocked me, I’m normally behind the trends, but I liked these bands before they were charting. Does that make me a hipster?

Immigration and asylum seekers have been politicized my whole life. When I was little, it was “wogs” - though which nationality that referred to was confusing. It was originally Italians and Greeks after World war 2, but later evolved to Lebanese. Then it was the Vietnamese/Asians. Then it was Middle Eastern / Arab nations. I think we’re still hearing about Sudanese gangs yeah?

It’s an unending cycle that has showed no signs of going away. Ned Kelly resorted to crime because of being discriminated against for being Irish. Yes, Mr. Howard absolutely tapped into that cycle with the Tampa incident, but he didn’t start the fire. It was always burning like the world’s been turning.

This thread is a product of our collective ages. Billy McMahon is pretty universally thought of as the worst PM ever, but we’re too young to remember him first-hand. A rich guy, I think he still holds the record for longest time in parliament. He was probably gay, but persecuted LGBT+ people.

Laurie Oakes: [he was] “devious, nasty, dishonest - he lied all the time and stole things”. He tells a story where McMahon tried to steal (clearly labelled) radio station gear after an interview, claiming to own it.

Robert Menzies: “the most characterless man who was ever prime minister of Australia – a dreadful little man”

John McEwan almost succeeded in keeping McMahon out of the PM spot, by absolutely refusing to work with him. McMahon couldn’t get party leadership until after McEwan retired. Gough Witlam reportedly called him a “notorious homosexual” and a “cunt” in a story told by McMahon - who complained that he “couldn’t be both”.

Challenge for anyone here: Google him and see if you can find anyone with something nice to say about him. The quotes you’ll find about him are honestly hysterical. 😃

I had several disagreements with Mr Howard, but I believe that despite those differences, he really was trying to do the right thing for the country.

I liked Mr Turnbull. In an alternate universe where he was permitted to actually lead the nation and wasn’t held down by his party, I think he could have been one of the great PMs.

I didn’t have a lot of time for either Mr Abbott nor Mr Morrison. Both were bad for the country. I honestly can’t recall a redeeming thing to say about either of them.

Mr Fraser privatised Medibank (the original Medicare). Universal healthcare was the dream-child of the preceding government. The Liberal Party hated it and tried to block it. One of the first things they did was kill it. I fully recognise that my views of Mr Fraser were the product of my childhood - where my political views mostly boiled down to “Liberals are evil and Labor are the good guys” thanks to my parental influences.

It turns out that universal healthcare is pretty popular, though. It was the main issue that kept the Libs in the wilderness for over a decade. They had to promise not to kill Medicare to ever get another shot at government.

The thing about legislation is: The new government can make/change/remove it. Unless you enshrine it in the Constitution - and we have a pretty poor track record of changing that.

The problem with a “Future Fund” is that our politics isn’t geared up to handle it. Imagine a kitty of $50 Billion sitting just there and a new party gets in. They’ll spend it, of course. So even if you get a fiscally responsible PM who establishes such a fund, the other party would get in three years later, spend that money immediately on [PROJECT] and then claim all the credit for it.

WA still owns its power grid. My power bills in WA are far cheaper than they were in Victoria. These two facts are probably related.

Also, the WA government reserves a stash of gas for local reservation before companies are allowed to sell the rest “at market rate”. That gas belongs to everyone, not just the company that extracts it. This policy also helps to keep energy prices in WA reasonable.

How do the telcos get more money? A few phone sales are not going to do anything to their profits. They own the 3G infrastructure, it’s theirs. They could have legally turned it off years ago and there’s nothing anyone (including the government) could have done about it. Forcing them to sell a service is no different to forcing Woolies to sell your favourite brand of peanut butter. You can argue that the Government of the day should never have sold 100+ years of infrastructure investment and only privatised the retail side of Telstra - and would 100% agree with you. But that horse bolted 30 years ago. The simple truth is that all our phones rely on three companies and with few exceptions, there are no guarantees the service will work. As that Optus outage a year ago demonstrated.

I’m all about bashing on the telcos when they deserve it. But they’ve handled this about as nicely as was possible. They’ve been warning everyone for over a year. They’ve been individually messaging affected phones for months. Nobody can really say they didn’t get warning.

I don’t really agree with blocking IMEIs of phones they didn’t sell because they’re not sure they’ll work without 3G. But I see the reasoning for it. They can’t make a regular call today, but they can make an emergency call. They are forcing that pain now, while the phone can still call in an emergency instead of it dropping totally off the network at a future date when it can’t make any sort of call. I’d have gone the other direction to give those customers more time. I recognise though that some people simply would not have done anything until they were forced to - no matter how much time they were given.

It’s pretty similar to the analogue tv signal shutdown in 2010. The difference though was you could buy a digital tuner and plug it into your tv and keep using it.

3G is taking up a lot of spectrum space and they need to free it up for future data technology. It is also used by a very small (and shrinking) percentage of people, while costing too much to maintain.

It has to die. Telcos gave more than a year’s warning. Then an extended grace period. I don’t really know how they could have done this without annoying some people.

While I move in a bubble of nerds who tend to have decent gear, I don’t actually know anyone affected by this shutdown first-hand.

While I agree with you, she’s in far better shape now than she has been for years. During a 50-day stay in hospital, she gained 7kg and grew 3.4cm. One presumes that recovery is continuing.

She certainly is not dead.