I knew a Penthouse Pet when I was a regular/part of the furniture in a strip club got to know her pretty well and drove her to and from home and the airport a couple of times.

A few months after meeting her on a quiet night while having a bit of a banter with her she disputed the correct spelling of my name. I bet her a coffee date she was wrong, added a stipulation she had to wear jeans and a t-shirt not any of her usual wardrobe.

I won, we had coffee a couple of days later, she turned up in denim shorts so cut off she was risking being done for indecent exposure and a t-shirt that looked like it was purchased from the kids section.

I spent our “date” getting the expected looks from every other guy in the cafe wondering how the ugliest guy in the place was with the girl who looked (and dressed) like a pornstar. Was fun. Glad I don’t move in those circles anymore.

Still kinda entertaining to me that I was at the strip club 2-3 nights a week for a good 7 months when I was unemployed and had no money, use to pick up odd jobs for the bar and get dancers rates on my drinks cause I was friends with the management. Once I was working and had money I pretty much stopped going entirely.

Oh I am painfully aware.

I wonder how much it costs to buy Scummy these days, does his handler even need to put an expense claim in or does it fall under the petty cash threshold?

Just ban gambling companies from operating in Australia already. If we can ban social media for under 16s based on some barely coherent conservative masturbatory book that ascribes all the angst and doom that young people feel to that one easy scapegoat. Imagine how much more conviction our pollies should have against outlawing a borderline criminal enterprise that is literally propped up on the misery of addicts.

Well jokes on them, if RAM prices maintain their current trajectories nobody will start their computers anymore as we will all be considering the degradation of the individual RAM chips and how that will impact our retirement RAM nest egg.

Across all my machines and the parts box I have about 2.5tb of RAM right now. Looking forward to selling that and retiring in a couple of years.

Not a big comment, but my wife says “Well done you!”

This seems legit. Wonder if I will get the only comment before the post is removed.

I was made redundant 6 months before the pandemic by a large telco. During the process I was offered career counselling so the company could tick off the requirement to provide assistance with redeployment. The sum total of their counselling effort was to provide an eLearning module on how to create and optimise a LinkedIn profile.

I bluntly told them that LinkedIn was a contributing factor in my redundancy as it allowed productivity black holes to move from company to company “right-sizing” the workforce and actively engaging with it held the same appeal as sawing my left arm off without the assistance of anaesthesia.

7 months later I was contacted by an entirely different bunch of HR drones begging me to come back to work at the company as the pandemic hitting had revealed how desperately understaffed and brittle it was with little to no ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Explaining to them that I would happily come back for a salary equal to that of the executive in charge of HR with a 5 year contract got me an incredulous response. When I pointed out they wanted me to quit the job I had found (entirely on my own) that paid better, with better hours, less responsibility and more time with my family to return to a job with a company that hired contracted HR goons to fire as many people as possible to goose the share price they acted genuinely befuddled.

TLDR: In my experience LinkedIn is a quasi cult that exists solely to benefit the management class. If it was shutdown today and the top 20% of users by engagement were thrown into a dungeon and never allowed out nothing of value would be lost and the world would actually function better.

Only for certain parts of the state, not on Liverpool Street in Hobart. But yeah it’s been moderately cold and rainy all day Christmas Eve.

Imagine any other media content where you had these sorts of restrictions placed on you.

You may only watch this movie in a theatre with armed guards walking the aisles to ensure you don’t record it on your phone. You must also endure a studio driven survey before you may enter. Approved snacks are posted on the list below, you must eat at least 4 items from this list. If you are unhappy with any of the terms you may only address them through arbitration, no class actions allowed!

This is why piracy is a service delivery issue.

Hey Sarah, just curious, looking through your account I would have guessed you were a lesbian until I read your fiction. Am I way off base to guess you are Pan with more interest in women?

Fellow Aussie so not particularly precious so obviously I will also accept “Piss off weirdo!” as an alternate answer to this question.

Removed by mod

My maths teacher back in the late 90s had his little side job doing Cricket stats. He always described it that way. Imagine my surprise when he came clean one day and mentioned he made more money from 8 hours a week doing Cricket stats than he did from 40+ hours a week teaching. He “jokingly” asked if I had made my first million a year after I graduated, mentioned it to my mum and she told me he had turned a $100k inheritance into his first million 2 years later thanks to buying some property in the path of a resort 6 months before planning application was submitted at age 18.

I was trying to solidify a joke about beating up people who are pro-AI, but just can’t get the timing right.

But I do have a question for someone who can apparently see things from both sides. Do you think that people’s perceptions and engagement would be different if “AI” was marketed as natural language processing coding / programming expert system.

I feel like some of the visceral pushback against “AI” would be reduced if we didn’t all have to pretend there was actual intelligence in operation. Plus it would seem more like the successor to context aware code completion, rather than the successor to the individual sat at the keyboard.

I started writing out a detailed reply going into all the nuance, but I feel that it’s a waste of time. I’m not sure if you are trolling as such, but you are being deliberately obtuse. I actually feel like you understand the points that people are making to you quite clearly. This is terrible legislation, it’s a knee jerk reaction to a complex problem, with very few exceptions this is almost always a bad way of enacting policy.

The jab at my parenting because I already do the things you claim parents are too feeble to do without the government holding their hand is admittedly irritating, but I am going to choose to move past it.

This is the brainfart of a conservative grifter, it’s satanic panic, it’s the war on drugs, it’s another populist policy being pitched at the unintelligent to draw their attention while the business and political interests behind it are picking their pocket. You choose not to see it that way then fine, but we both know it’s true.

I am going to stop engaging with you now, feel free to have as many last says and derisive put downs as you want. I will not be reading them.

The parental controls I had? That worked just fine? That no longer work as the kids are force logged out of YouTube until they have turned 16. Or do you mean I should engage with Microsoft’s virtual spyware? Sorry but we are an opt out family and I do all I can to block telemetry and surveillance as I think my kids deserve better than to be reduced to a profile on a server. What do you use to monitor your kids activity online?

Do you not see the betrayal of our elected officials bowing to minority interests and pursuing policies that are, at very best, counterproductive, and at worst a distraction, that experts are telling them will not have the intended outcomes, to give them an excuse to avoid legislating the harder things? A deciding factor for my preferences at the last election was to minimise the creeping advance of the surveillance state that Dutton so obviously desperately wanted to push through… We are getting it anyway.

We keep moving further and further away from privacy and security in the face of the spooky spectres of “terrorism” and “protecting the children” but once we have handed those things over they are almost impossibly hard to regain. When we look back in 10 years and realise we voluntarily handed the government and big business all the info they need to monitor our every movement online at all times and got nothing in return how do we stuff that Genie back in the bottle?

No, what it does is removes agency from parents and tells us that we aren’t capable of raising our kids, the government will have to do it. My kids have been asking, for several years, to get Facebook accounts so they can use marketplace. I used that desire to have a frank discussion with them about how predatory Facebook is and how sinister it is that they have subsumed so many things that used to be independent and didn’t require an account with them specifically so they can lock users in and Hoover up more data. I have told the kids that if they want Facebook accounts after they turn 18 they are welcome to open them then, but until that day I am not allowing them to give up their privacy. Do I seem disengaged as a parent?

Not to mention it is counter productive in a number of ways. I have lost the ability to monitor my kids YouTube usage, the kids are just going to move to alternate platforms, and I am amongst the cohort of sensible Australians who will refuse to use social media before I provide some dodgy AI company my ID, it’s going to be a lot harder to convince my kids to do the same once all their friends and peers start ratcheting up the conformity pressure after they turn 16. This whole thing isn’t misguided, it’s a betrayal of the majority of Australians who are too dumb to realise what they are giving away to access these services.

What a trash take. Won’t somebody think of the children nonsense. So to protect teens we are going to surrender our privacy, to minimise harm we are going to allow government to reduce the overall safety of those self same teens.

Getting seriously sick of these bootlicking arguments, “Well as long as the government says these laws mitigate harm then that’s what they do.” Bunch of sycophantic idiots with their knee jerk reactions agreeing the whole internet should be less safe to gain some intangible aspirational measure of safety for a small subsection of the population.

My father bought his house in the 80s for 1.5x his annual pretax wage. Last time he had his house valued it is worth somewhere north of 15x his annual pretax wage, same job. He is constantly asking when I will be buying my own house. I keep explaining to him, I am in my early 40s and got stuck in the rent trap fairly early, I am not in a position to take on a 30 year mortgage at this point, I will likely never own my own home. Median house price in my area is just under 9.5x my annual pre-tax income, and I don’t see how I could support my kids and actually live my life while paying down a mortgage compared to the deal I got on my rental house through sheer dumb luck.