Sydney businessman given travel permit to pick up a luxury yacht: A Sydney businessman with connections to the Morrison government was granted an exemption from the travel ban to pick up a new luxury yacht in Europe. ... Official grounds for an exemption to the travel ban include urgent personal business, compassionate reasons, travel for critical business or industry, travel in the public interest, and the provision of humanitarian or medical aid.
Burning bush, melting Arctic, a deadly virus: nobody said the end times would be boring | Australia news | The Guardian: Sometimes your luck just runs out, and a hard truth of human nature is that we really only care about what's close. White Australia was a lucky country for so long, because the gift of distance was history's lack of interest in our affairs. But that absence of concern for a tiny outpost, removed from the centre of things, can just as easily turn to indifference and genuine disdain when fate turn against us. From afar it was possible to see with the cold objectivity of foreigners just how unflattering a picture we made for any who cared to look. An immensely privileged dominion occupied by a small number of deeply selfish people, suddenly confronted with the consequences of inaction. For a few months there you could finally see the world accelerating towards the existential discontinuity of irreversible, devastating climate change. No more projections. No theories. No modelling or arcane math. The future had arrived. It was not evenly distributed. It had exploded into the real on the eastern edge of the Australian continent. Meanwhile, sitting on a beach in Hawaii was our doughy, aggressively know-nothing prime minister, infamous for carrying a big lump of coal on to the floor of parliament and fondling the same with the puckish joy of a man-sized Billy Bunter in possession of a large, unexpected jam donut. To the beach he went, while his land and his people hurtled towards the burning pit.
Is Plastic Recycling A Lie? Oil Companies Touted Recycling To Sell More Plastic : NPR: Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic. Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.
Killer whales launch 'orchestrated' attacks on sailing boats | Marine life | The Guardian: The Spanish maritime authorities warned vessels to “keep a distance”. But reports from sailors around the strait throughout July and August suggest this may be difficult – at least one pod appears to be pursuing boats in behaviour that scientists agree is “highly unusual” and “concerning”. It is too early to understand what is going on, but it might indicate stress in a population that is endangered.
Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years - BBC News: When the container was hauled off the seabed around half a mile offshore after being placed there in May 2018, just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed.
[...]
The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule.
COVID-19 Melbourne: Big lie about lockdown under Daniel Andrews: There is far too much talk about how disgruntled the people of Melbourne have become after months of monotony. There is far too much focus on the few who try to bend the rules with a breach of curfew, a refusal to mask up, a cheeky drive to a mate's place. And there is far too much legitimacy afforded to the few hundred protesters who clash with police in scenes that are then shared around the country and make headlines around the world. What is left is a notion that Victorians are impatient, unwilling participants in a plan to keep themselves safe from a deadly virus. It is an unfair characterisation of what the majority of Victorians are doing, and have done, since they were thrust back into lockdown for a second time. The truth is that millions of Victorians are doing the right thing.
E-cigarettes to become available as prescription-only items in Australia from June 2021 | Smoking | The Guardian: The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) announced its interim decision to reclassify nicotine as a prescription-only medication, meaning nicotine for use in e-cigarettes, and e-juice containing nicotine, would become prescription-only from June 2021.
The changes would also effect heat-not-burn tobacco products, chewing tobacco, snuff and other novel nicotine products. ... E-cigarettes are not proven as a first-line treatment for smoking cessation. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is some evidence that young people may be attracted to the products, and may go on to use tobacco products.
COVIDSafe has been downloaded by millions, but yet to identify contacts (and authorities say that's a good thing) - ABC News: While more than 6 million Australians have downloaded it, this is still short of the 40 per cent of the population target first discussed as part of the Government's plans to ease lockdown restrictions. That goal has since fallen by the wayside. Acting Secretary for Health Caroline Edwards told a Senate committee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic response in May that there was no download target at all. Adding "lied about the download target" to the list of things the government lied about regarding the app.
Edit - since this one was published, the app was used to locate two contacts. Manual tracing found several hundred in the same incident, but hey at least it wasn't zero for the app.
No timeline for when $25k HomeBuilder scheme will be up and running - ABC News: The Federal Government launched the HomeBuilder scheme on June 4, but just over three weeks later it is still not operational and there is no start date in sight. Each state and territory is responsible for administering the scheme and, according to Treasury, a national partnership agreement is still being negotiated. Yep, they announced a scheme that can't go ahead yet.
How Many Hot Dogs Can Someone Eat In 10 Minutes? - The New York Times: Despite using the same hot dogs and buns for 40 years, the Nathan's contest has seen performance among elite competitors rise by about 700 percent. “No other sport comes close to that when records are measured in a 100-plus year span,” Dr. Smoliga said.
Donald Trump suggests delay to 2020 US presidential election - BBC News: Mr Trump appears to be doing everything in his power to undermine the credibility of November's vote, in which a record number of Americans are predicted to rely on mail-in voting to avoid the risk of exposure to the coronavirus. He's repeatedly made false and misleading claims about the reliability of the mail balloting and suggested broad conspiracy theories. Critics warn that he could be laying the groundwork for contesting the results - although the purpose may be simply to give him a scapegoat if he loses. His tweet could also be an attempt to divert attention away from the truly dismal second-quarter economic numbers just released.
James Murdoch's resignation is the result of News Corp's increasing shift to the right – not just on climate: James left London for New York and his promised promotion in the company. But his reputation was in tatters, even with other members of the family. His public persona at this time consisted of neo-liberal politics and corporate ruthlessness, with his actions untroubled by ethical considerations.
Yet, now, this corporate and family loyalist has resigned from his last official position with the company. James has long seen the urgency of combating global warming. As early as 2006, largely at his urging, Rupert also embraced the issue. Rupert soon retreated from the cause, but James's commitment continued.
Rupert's conversion had surprisingly little impact on the company's journalism.
Why the Golden Gate Bridge Sounds Like a David Lynch Movie Now | KQED: the eerie sound you're hearing from the Golden Gate Bridge is in fact the result of new sidewalk railing slats, just installed, meant to curb the wind. Funny thing about wind: when it passes through certain open spaces, it creates a hum. This is how all reed instruments work, and it's something that the engineers of said sidewalk panels apparently forgot to take into consideration.
This Little Story About A Young Ivanka Trump's Lemonade Stand Sure Is Something | HuffPost Australia... it's an old story but holy shit: When Ivanka was a kid, she got frustrated because she couldn’t set up a lemonade stand in Trump Tower. “We had no such advantages,” she writes, meaning, in this case, an ordinary home on an ordinary street. She and her brothers finally tried to sell lemonade at their summer place in Connecticut, but their neighborhood was so ritzy that there was no foot traffic. “As good fortune would have it, we had a bodyguard that summer,” she writes. They persuaded their bodyguard to buy lemonade, and then their driver, and then the maids, who “dug deep for their spare change.” The lesson, she says, is that the kids “made the best of a bad situation.”
Black Lives Matter is six years old, but many founding members say these protests feel different - ABC News: The federal "abolish the police" plan most often cited by activists centres on divesting from the police budget and investing in local resources like education, healthcare and employment. The goal is not to end the police, but to increase the presence of social workers, teachers, doctors — the kind of people who make police interaction an absolute last resort. Mr Hansford expects there to be some backlash to flattening the complex policy discussion into a phrase like "abolish the police," especially from a white America that still views police as their protectors.
When the Office Is Like a Biohazard Lab - The New York Times: “There are some real practical limitations to the guidance they've provided,” said Jim Underhill, chief executive of Cresa, a commercial real estate firm. “In dense urban environments, you can't have everyone drive their car in alone. And in a 70-story high rise, you can't limit two people to the elevator.”
...
Willy Walker, chief executive of Walker & Dunlop, a commercial real estate financing firm, said managers of his 40 offices plan a wide variety of approaches to office life in the midst of a pandemic. In states like Texas or Florida, he said, everyone wants to go back to the office. In New York and California, employees are much more concerned about returning. “In the blue states, just two to three people want to go back in,” Mr. Walker said. “And in the red states, just two to three people don't want to go back in.”
NSW police pursue 80% of Indigenous people caught with cannabis through courts | Australia news | The Guardian: During the five year period, 82.55% of all Indigenous people found with a non-indictable quantity of cannabis were pursued through the courts, compared with only 52.29% for the non-Indigenous population, the data compiled by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows. The data shows police were four times more likely to issue cautions to non-Indigenous people. In the five years to 2017, only 11.41% of Indigenous Australians caught by police with small amounts of cannabis were issued cautions, compared with 40.03% of the non-Indigenous population. (stats collated from BOCSAR | NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research)
NSW is unable to use Covidsafe app's data for contact tracing | Australia news | The Guardian: Guardian Australia understands NSW Health has tested the data but has had issues integrating it into the existing contact-tracing methods, and the Digital Transformation Agency was contacted by the department to fix technical problems. The Digital Transformation Agency referred questions on the matter to the federal health department. The federal health department initially declined to answer specific questions on the issue, instead providing a general statement that states now have access to the app data.
Bushfire royal commission hears that Black Summer smoke killed nearly 450 people - ABC News: The commission heard modelling done by health researchers found 80 per cent of Australians were affected by bushfire smoke at some point over the 2019/2020 season. Associate Professor Fay Johnston, from the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania, said her team estimated around 445 people died as a result of the smoke, over 3,000 people were admitted to hospital for respiratory problems and 1,700 people presented for asthma.
Robodebt: government to refund 470,000 unlawful Centrelink debts worth $721m | Australia news | The Guardian: Stuart Robert, the government services minister, said the refunds would be received by 373,000 people, cost a total $721m and would include recovery fee charges. The debt refunds would begin from July, he said. ... Robert's statement did not say whether the government would agree to pay interest on the debts, a key demand from the class action led by Gordon Legal.
Robodebt was base politics, flawed policy and bad government: But those baying for the blood of the Government Services Minister, Stuart Robert, are looking at the wrong suspect. Robert was not even in the ministry when the Coalition devised the debacle. One of the chief proponents was Morrison himself. He announced the biggest part of the welfare crackdown as treasurer in the Turnbull government in the closing days of the 2016 election campaign.
Parasocial Relationships Are Changing the Way Women Use Social Media | Bitch Media: There's a more formal term for this: “Parasocial relationships,” a term coined by sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956, are one-sided connections that people form with public figures that give them a false sense of a friendship or even of romantic connection.
Death of the office | 1843: It's too early to say whether the office is done for. As with any sudden loss, many of us find our judgment blurred by conflicting emotions. Relief at freedom from the daily commute and pleasure at turning one's back on what Philip Larkin called “the toad work” are tinged with regret and nostalgia, as we prepare for another shapeless day of WFH in jogging bottoms.
Covid-19 will change the standards of professionalism — Quartz at Work: Any illusion we used to propagate about “balance,” telling both our work and our families that they are the top priority and acting like the two are entirely separate forces in our lives, has ended abruptly. The affair we were having from our life with our work and vice versa has just been exposed.
The glimmer of hope I am clinging to in trying times is that the pretending ends for good, that this global crisis liberates us from our post-industrial hangover of humans as resources, as pieces of the organizational machine, without families or feelings.
Can an AI be an inventor? Not yet. | MIT Technology Review: Instead of listing a human author on the applications, the inventor was listed as Dabus AI, an AI system that Thaler spent over a decade building. Dabus AI came up with the innovations after being fed general data about many subjects. Thaler may have built Dabus, but he has no expertise in creating lights or food containers, and wouldn’t have been able to generate the ideas on his own. And so, the AIP team argues, Dabus itself is the rightful inventor.
Coronavirus pandemic exposes fatal flaws of the 'just-in-time' economy - ABC News: Official estimates showing that nearly 800,000 Australians lost their jobs in the space of a week or so as the crisis hit were a stark illustration of how quickly the "flexible" workforce can become collateral damage, with their loss of earnings threatening to unravel the economy and financial system. The lack of a buffer for many businesses in the just-in-time economy has also been brought into stark relief, with so many enterprises utterly reliant on short-term cash flow, with few resources to fall back on.
Empty sets - BBC Archive: Give your video calls a makeover, with this selection of over 100 empty sets from the BBC Archive.
Sydney inventor David Soo can grow $600,000 worth of vanilla from his smartphone - ABC News: The solution Mr Soo is developing is a custom-designed, 350-cubic-metre greenhouse, with controlled growing conditions that can be adjusted by mobile device.
Now three years into a pilot project on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Mr Soo is growing about 200 vanilla vines in a patented geodesic dome greenhouse.
He claims the vines are growing three times faster than in a plantation environment. The mobile is really incidental, bit of a crappy headline choice.
After coronavirus passes, nothing will be the same — and that might not be a bad thing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): And there is the question of just how realistic it is that the threat of this virus will dissipate and the Government will be able to simply quickly turn off forms of assistance like the JobKeeper allowance and the increased JobSeeker allowance, or return to the previous system of funding childcare, or not intervene in areas like mortgage holidays and eviction moratoriums. Legislation to protect tenants from exorbitant increases in rents in the years after World War II was still in place in some states 40 years later. The term you're going to hear a lot is 'snap back', the fervent dream of the right wing that they can put everything straight back to how it was before. This is essentially the mindset of conservatism - that change is dangerous and must be avoided and reverted. But this change is too big. We can never go straight back and trying to do so will cause more harm.
The petrol station designed in 1953 by the French architect and designer Jean Prouvé and his brother Henry is one of the first serially manufactured petrol stations. Vitra acquired one of the last remaining models, which originally stood at a rest area in Haute-Loire (France). pic.twitter.com/CsXoy1Z2IN
More than 1.3 million Australians on jobseeker as Senate inquiry calls for permanent increase to rate | Australia news | The Guardian: More than 1.3 million people are now receiving unemployed benefits across the country, an increase of about 450,000 in less than one month. But a further 300,000 dole claims are still yet to be processed and department officials acknowledged on Thursday they expected about 1.7 million people to be receiving the jobseeker payment in September. On the same day the report from a nine-month Senate inquiry into unemployment benefits recommended an permanent increase to the rate...
AAP closure: competition watchdog says it is monitoring newswire's demise | Australian media | The Guardian: It is understood the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has the ability to look into the transaction because as well as closing the newswire business AAP plans to sell other parts of itself, including its profitable media release distribution unit. This could potentially raise competition issues that would not be posed by a simple shutdown.
Bill Gates leaves Microsoft's board | TechCrunch: Bill Gates has stepped down from the board of Microsoft to spend more time on his philanthropic endeavors, the company announced Friday afternoon. Though he will remain technology advisor to CEO Satya Nadella, this move reduces his involvement with the company to the lowest level it has ever been.
Australia's ALS probe finds half of coal quality reports amended - Reuters: Testing laboratory ALS Ltd said on Thursday an investigation found that about half the certificates it provided for export coal samples over the past decade had been manually altered to improve the quality of the commodity. ...
The ALS unit has about 40% of the market for testing coal samples to ensure shipments meet quality standards agreed with buyers, according to industry estimates.
...
Shares in ALS fell 4.1% and are down 41% since it announced the investigation, outpacing a 28% decline in the broader market.
Gosh it's a good thing the government wants to double down on this industry, right?
EU votes in favor of choosing a common charging cable standard | Engadget: European Union lawmakers have voted overwhelmingly to legislate manufacturers to adopt a shared charging cable standard. ... The European Parliament also instructed the Commission to think about wireless chargers and how they could be used to reduce electronic waste. It also wants the body to find ways for the EU to collect and recycle more cables and chargers.
Streaming spells the end of the 'ownership' era of music, but are we ready to let go? | Music | The Guardian: Previously, people maintained access by owning records, cassette tapes, CDs or, more recently, digital files. Now all you need is a playback device and an internet connection. But the shift to streaming comes with trade-offs. [...] Streaming platforms offer convenience and variety, but they don’t always give us the latest album from the hottest artist of the decade – or the 1992 Vampire Mix of A Tribe Called Quest’s I Left My Wallet in El Segundo.
I had sort of assumed everyone noticed the Seinfeld opening music matched the timing of the standup routine, but given responses to this old video doing the rounds... apparently not!
How will MIDI 2.0 change music? — Quartz: In early January 2020, the MIDI Manufacturers Association, the nonprofit organization that manages MIDI, announced the release of MIDI 2.0. The new protocol involved years of work from the organization's volunteers, and getting companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and all of the major music manufacturers on board.
There are a few major changes in the new version. The biggest development is the expansion from 7-bit values to 32-bit values.
Adani Coal Mine: The World's Most Insane Energy Project Moves Ahead - Rolling Stone: The biggest myth associated with the Adani mine may be that continuing to mine and export coal is somehow vital to the Australian economy. It is not. As James Bradley points out, although coal accounts for almost 15 per cent of Australia's exports, it contributes less than 1 percent of the Commonwealth government's total revenue. And it's not like the industry creates a lot of jobs, either. In 2018, it employed slightly fewer than 50,000 people. That's less than 0.4 per cent of Australia's total workforce, and, more importantly, it's less that the 65,000 jobs created by tourism at the Great Barrier Reef. Even if you don't believe in climate change, the economics of Adani in particular simply don't add up.
The 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change are all flawed — Quartz: Broadly, there were three main errors in the papers denying climate change. Many had cherry-picked the results that conveniently supported their conclusion, while ignoring other context or records. Then there were some that applied inappropriate “curve-fitting”—in which they would step farther and farther away from data until the points matched the curve of their choosing.
The medications that change who we are - BBC Future: The results revealed that paracetamol significantly reduces our ability to feel positive empathy – a result with implications for how the drug is shaping the social relationships of millions of people every day. [...] Technically, paracetamol isn’t changing our personalities, because the effects only last a few hours and few of us take it continuously. But Mischkowski stresses that we do need to be informed about the ways it affects us, so that we can use our common sense.
Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware - VICE: Farmers worry what will happen if John Deere is bought by another company, or what will happen if the company decides to stop servicing its tractors. And so they have taken matters into their own hands by taking control of the software themselves.
"What happens in 20 years when there's a new tractor out and John Deere doesn't want to fix these anymore?" the farmer using Ukrainian software told me. "Are we supposed to throw the tractor in the garbage, or what?"
Climate change and extreme events – quantifying the changing odds - ECOS: An important part of event attribution is posing the appropriate question. Natural variability and climate change come together to give us what we experience, thus “did climate change cause this event?” is the wrong question – climate change didn't start a fire or create a drought. What climate change may do is change the likelihood of the event or make the event more severe or last longer than would have been the case without climate change.
I’ve had a number of messages saying that the media is ignoring arson as a major cause of the Australia bushfire crisis. Well, we looked at it today. Arson is not a major part of why these fires are so widespread and so severe. Here’s why. Produced @courtbembridge. pic.twitter.com/P16nCD1Bli
An 'absolutely seminal moment': climate change opinion shifting in face of fires: Veteran pollster John Utting believes the fires have been an “absolutely seminal moment. The conversation in the past has been kind of abstract, with [the case for stronger action] very much in in the hands of the virtue signallers; people felt they were being lectured. But now, everyone is breathing the proof. There is an incredible amount of evidence that the issue is beginning to bite … people are worried about a huge loss of lifestyle, and the impact on how they want to live and what they like about this country.”
Huntley agrees, though she's not yet as certain as Utting that this season's fires are a complete game-changer. “People can respond to traumatic events in very different ways, and some can push back and say, %u2018I don't want you to play politics with this disaster',” she says.
Scott Morrison can't afford to waste the bushfire crisis when Australia urgently needs its own green new deal | Malcolm Turnbull | Australia news | The Guardian: If ever there was a crisis not to waste, it is this one. Morrison has the chance now to reinstate the Neg with higher targets. Both he and Josh Frydenberg were among its strongest supporters when I was PM. They abandoned it in the lead-up to an election, to pacify the right wing of the Coalition that sabotaged it in the first place.
The election is won, and the fires have surely demonstrated that an integrated climate and energy policy is vital if we are to be serious about cutting emissions.
Farmers Are Buying 40-Year-Old Tractors Because They're Actually Repairable - VICE: The tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s look and run like modern tractors, but lack the computer components that drive up costs and make repair a nightmare. That's made them popular at auctions around the American midwest. A Nebraska area auctioneer sold off 27 older model John Deere tractors in 2019. The old work horse tractors are so popular that one with low mileage can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. A 1980 model with 2,147 hours of use sold for $43,500. A 1979 model sold for $61,000.