Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • To be honest, I’m not surprised. Driving in peak hour is already bad enough that a significant portion would choose it rather than drive even with the extreme prices. The cost of parking in the CBD along with the inconvenience of how awful peak hour traffic is helps offset that.

    But leisure trips are outside of peak hour and usually to places where parking is easy. They’re also more likely to involve larger numbers of people as you go with the whole family. People are more likely to change their mode of transport if it’s cheaper.

    With the ferry specifically, it’s often just a trip down the river and then back up. The cost of that trip before would be $3 per adult if you can start at the river, but higher if you’ve gotta travel in from zone 2 or 3 first. For a family of 4 that’d be at least $9, which isn’t actually a lot, but it psychologically feels like a hell of a lot more than $2. So it’s a fun little treat that’s basically free now. People are more likely to do that.

    TL;DR leisure trips are much more price elastic than commutes are.












  • would you be ok with people counter protesting at the houses of these protesters?

    No? That’s an insane false equivalency. They are not public figures by virtue of being the CEO of multibillion dollar public companies.

    It’s fascinating to see how high the concern is but this is like the house being on fire and you’re running around freaking out trying to throw water on a piece of paper that happens to be nearby.

    What’s your proposed solution then? We just…don’t do anything? We don’t worry about it? Not our problem?

    Other countries use the lack of action by rich western nations as an excuse to not act themselves. Not to mention the amount of emissions that result from all the fossil fuels that we export to them. That’s all reflected on other countries on that graph, not against us. But it’s something we could do something about. And before you excuse it by saying “they’d buy it somewhere else”, maybe. But basic supply and demand dictates that the price would go way up if one of the two largest exporters of coal were to cease those exports, providing more incentive for other countries to switch to cleaner methods.

    But anyway, that graph is highly misleading. We’re a country of 26 million people. But those 26 million use way more than their fair share of carbon dioxide. Here’s a better graph, using the same basic data source and showing the same countries.

    imo the best course of action is to continue to reduce our own reliance on fossil fuels, far more subsidises for heat pumps/solar batteries (especially heat pumps in Victoria to get rid of gas reliance) and far more investment in renewables

    All great ideas. Not sure what it is that you’re actually opposed to, in that case.


  • No, blaming immigration is just a racist scapegoat. The amount of housing being built far outstrips the number of new households due to immigration. The problem is that the number of houses being bought by investors (instead of first home buyers) is almost equal to the number of new houses being built. Which is a problem caused by our incredibly harmful policies that treat housing as a financial instrument more than a right that people need to have. There’s also a huge number of completely empty homes—again, a problem caused by pro-investor policies.

    There are also issues with our council policies around what kinds of housing can be built where. Restrictive zoning laws that prevent more efficient medium-density housing, instead of most of our cities being made up of low density zoning that uses obscene amounts of land, and a preference to use the highest zoning possible in the smallest number of places possible, when low density is not sufficient (which is more expensive per capita due to the higher costs of materials, labour, and technical requirements associated with high rises compared to 2–4 storey row houses and apartments). And a severe lack of investment in public housing from our state governments.

    Tax incentives. Public housing. Zoning laws. This is a problem created by all three levels of government. But immigration? Not a significant factor.


  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonesponsor rule
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    1 day ago

    they also have the potential to cause great harm to their users

    What harm is that?

    The only harm I can see is either:

    (a) by associating their users with those who use VPNs to do illegal things. Which is a nonsense association and shouldn’t be given any weight, or

    (b) if they do keep logs and turn those over to authorities. Which is why companies that have been audited and shown not to collect logs, or, even better, companies that have been tested in court and unable to comply with requests for information, are the VPN providers that should be preferred.


  • Connections
    Puzzle #611
    🟩🟩🟩🟩
    🟨🟨🟨🟨
    🟪🟪🟪🟪
    🟦🟦🟦🟦

    Skill 95/99
    Uniqueness 1 in 147

    Really struggled today. Figured out yellow pretty easily. Eventually struggled to figure out green. Stared for ages after that before eventually deciding I was going to give up and just guess to see if those two were right. Thankfully they were, and it didn’t take me too long after that to figure out purple. Never had a hope with blue though. I’ve never heard of any of the blues being associated with their category, except the one obvious one.





  • I played in the band in my highschool orchestra when we did a production of this musical back in…I think it was 2012. This version here is just the highest quality full recorded version I could find on YouTube. I think it’s a community production, rather than professional. This musical, as well as the Skyrim Dawnguard expansion that came out around the same time, is a big part of what kicked off my love of vampire media. It apparently did not do very well in English, though a reworking of it was much more successful in Austria and east Asia.

    Which is a shame, because I really love it. I would love to see it performed live. It’s one of the most faithful adaptations of Dracula I’ve seen: certainly more than any movie. It amps up the romance between Mina and Dracula a fair bit for the sake of the musical drama, but IMO that works really well in the format.