Nath

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.

Feeling a bit conscious of the fact that I'm at work right now, and too busy to give this the diplomatic response it deserves. The short answer to this question is that we don't generally defederate anyone for anything they say/do inside their own instance. We do however happily support you in blocking them for yourself. Click on your username in the top-right, go to Settings and then Blocks. Under the Instance section, search for lemmy.ml and make sure you click on their name in the drop-down like this:

Do this and you will no longer see lemmy.ml content.

Disclosure: I subscribe to that community - and while I'm aware that the locals of lemmy.ml have quirky political leanings, that particular community is frequented by a lot of non-local members. Also, that post was always going to attract hardliners from all sides, wherever that question was asked.

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.

I was saying they're not likely to axe those seats. Sorry. 😀

The back seats serve a purpose: You can buy a ute through your business as it is clearly a work vehicle. If you want your business to effectively pay for your family car, you make a ute that can drive your family around.

That's why tradies buy these. They don't need the dual cab for work, they need the tray to justify buying the family vehicle through their business and expensing/depreciating it.

Those first two videos are a bit extreme - I obviously wouldn't have attempted either of those in the Outlander. I doubt I'd have attempted it in the Teslas, either. Those were big risks with minimal rewards in both examples. Thought the second was obviously a planned "Is this possible?" crossing.

I'm equal parts impressed and horrified. I know enough about electrics to be horrified at what water can do if it gets in your motor. Would the vehicle be covered under warranty if you inundated your motor doing this?

They didn't. The kid is fine.

This case is interesting, as the kid was off the radar. She was homeschooled, and part of the reason it's newsworthy is that the dance instructors didn't really have a channel to report their concerns to Child Protection like a teacher would.

The case is still unfolding, as the parents are still in court and more details are released.

It's not a dig at the Shark, specifically. It's my lack of familiarity with electric vehicles in general. I've never seen an electric vehicle drive through water.

The depth of the water was about the height of the wheels. Which I'm guessing is past 400mm. I probably wouldn't have taken the car along that road to that crossing if I'd known about it ahead of getting there. I was already calculating the odds of getting across and what I'd do if I got bogged down in the water etc.

This is all true, but there's more:

• Our election campaigns are six weeks by definition. No political ads filling the airwaves the rest of the time.
• We have preferential voting. You don't have to choose only between the shit and shit-lite parties. You can vote for someone else, and still put shit-lite as your preferred option if the independent you voted first for didn't get in.
• The electoral commission will help pay for your campaigning if you secured 5% of the vote. Evens the field a bit for not-rich people to run.
• Political signs on houses are pretty rare. Maybe a couple of diehard fans.
• Nobody gets real angry at you if you vote for someone different.

On the other side, I gladly take my Outlander off the beaten track. I took it through a river crossing last month that I probably shouldn't have. It handled it like a champion, though.

I don't know whether I'd take one of these through that same crossing.

The biggest problem we faced in 2020 was that the federal government of the day dropped the ball. One of the federal government's primary duties is border control. The borders should have closed and national quarantine facilities engaged to control and protect repatriated citizens.

This ended up being left to the State Governments. And in fairness, the premiers stepped in and filled that void as best they could. It was heartening - party politics took a back seat to addressing issues that faced everyone. Internally, the states had a real mixed bag of responses - and their varying levels of success should be case studies on how to approach this in the future. Melbourne locked down, and while that was no fun for anyone, the death rates of Melbourne are a tiny fraction of any comparable city in the USA.

WA just shut the whole border. This had its challenges, but from within we cruised through 2020 and 2021 as though there was no pandemic. A couple of short, sharp semi-lockdowns in there when the odd minor outbreak threatened is all.

NSW dabbled a bit with locking down, but opened up again too quickly. We saw the effects that had on case numbers.

It isn't that the public doesn't trust the measures employed - it's that they were a patchwork of different measures and they had varying degrees of success. Hopefully, the next time this happens, the federal government will learn from 2020 and step in with a nation-wide response that we can all get behind.