Oh I see your playing the legacy monopoly where house prices sort of match the money paid out by the bank…you need to index property and utilities to inflation but you don’t adjust any of the money paid out by the bank to the players.

Aka Millennial monopoly.

The game is over much faster, unless you introduce a gig economy payment system. Then it really drags on.

And that’s what we do IRL too, a bunch of people aren’t playing by the rules, creating false hope through windfall lotteries, so it’s taking longer to get to the part where we flip the board in frustration and destroy the bank… Behead the mega rich and seize the means of production.

I forget my own fucking birthday but let me wax poetically about extinct Australian megafauna for a few hours.

Though it’s episodic memory, if you ask me to give you a fun fact, let alone name a species just off the cuff, my mind goes blank. I don’t know anything about anything.

But give me a minute to set myself the mental stage and start rambling about how as a kid I was obsessed with this old faux taxidermy at the Melbourne museum because it was like a derpy wombat horse. One time my mum took me to a kids activity workshop where we got to pretend we were digging up fossils and analysing them… did you know Australias geologic layering contains every single rock type that exists in on earth. Lots of Australian fossils are found in soft limestone. Hang on, dippy don! That’s what I named the derpy wombat at the museum. It was a Diprotodon, a herbivorous marsupial who died out about 40,000 years ago. The cave in NSW where they found a bunch of specimens was 400 million year old limestone but Dippy only entered the record ~2 million years ago, so it suggests they burrowed, which makes sense when you look at their closest living relative, the wombat, though Diprotodon and the family it belongs to is a dead end on the evolutionary tree.

But yeah, you can’t always rely on where you find the bones to date the specimens which is why carbon and uranium dating really changed our understanding of Australian history.

Speaking of locations of fossils, diprotodon is one of the only known Australian marsupials to seasonally migrate, so their range was huge! So were they! 2m tall, 3m long and easily 2500kg heavy, and have two giant protruding teeth (hence their name Diprotodon, Greek for “two protruding teeth”, Di=two, pro to/protrude, don/dontics like orthodontics …I also like etymology) and lived in the marshlands. European archaeologists thought they were originally skeletons of some kind of hippopotamus, but several mobs of indigenous Australians had/have oral histories around diprotodon. the last living dipro’s died out after the first Australian peoples inhabited the land. Which is why there is an association between dippy and bunyip (an Australian cryptid/aboriginal mythology) a giant melevolent monster who haunts billabongs.

They indigenous Australians are often blamed for the extinction of a lot of megafauna, there was a theory of overhunting for the many years, but to date no diprotodon fossils have been found with evidence of human butchery, but we do have evidence that people would move bones around for some reason.

Anyway…

It’s like a trance, and it’s really hard to stop once you start, but you can’t just pick up into it, something has to trigger the memory to surface, like seeing a certain train go past to remember specific train facts, or in my case thinking about where you I was and who I was with when I first learned some of the best facts about my thing.

Though I have AuDHD so not sure if the episodic memory is my autism or my ADHD, it feels like ADHD because the thoughts are so bouncy when they come, but it also feels like like autism because it’s anxiously obsessive in a fun way inside my brain once they journey starts.

Also maybe remembering cool megafauna facts is why I forget things I should remember like what house number I live at or what year I was born (genuinely forgot these things, had to go to the front of my house to check, and do maths because I could remember my mums birthday and how old she was when she had me, but not my own birthday or age … Autism and memory is fucking weird)

Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.

It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.

I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.

I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.

Public trees already have a maintenance schedule and budget, public fruit trees don’t need to be about filling hungry people, they’re just as much about finding small moments of joy in your community.

Also trees that bear fruit usually don’t produce as much pollen in spring so it would cut down on hayfever, they do drop more seed which can be messier if planted along sidewalks. That’s the main reason decorative public trees are often male, 40 years ago civic planners decided pollen was easier to deal with than seed drop.

All the more reason why they can’t be used as valid and binding contracts in a court of law!

They so often did though, how many massive fires broke out in London before the great fire finally convinced them to stop building overlapping thatched rooves.

Even during The Plague of Justinian scholars wrote about what was essentially ancient social distancing practices, 2000 years ago later we still can’t do it properly.

How many times did they have to put up with rat plagues and stinking open cess pits, followed by a big town clean up, and then nothing change in infrastructure or waste management practices, only to do the whole clean up again …until the Great Stink got to close enough to the windows of parliament that those in power decided maybe they should address the root problem instead of applying bandaids every few years.

(I don’t have a history degree so I’m pulling these details out of the memory depths of my dusty documentary viewings, and I’m probably wrong.)

Goose is the female and sex neutral term for members of those bird species.

Just like “cow” is both the female (parous) and sex neutral term for domesticated bovine. (nuliparous/non breeding female cows are heifers, but they are also still cows in the sex neutral usage)

There are definitely some wars I’d much rather were just MMA death fights between the PM’s and presidents.

And others where I’m glad they aren’t, because the country whose victory would be best for the common good is led by someone who would not win a physical fight.

I teach IT to seniors and in the last ~3 years the types of digital trouble my students find themselves in has shifted.

We used to spend a lot of lessons talking about phishing scams, link safety, URL verification, etc. Our pop up sessions would involve lots of calling banks to get cards cancelled after mistakes were made.

But now my lessons are on “oh, that one is a real Toll text, you should have paid that, I know they used to send them in the mail and this text looks like a scam, but that’s how they do it now, and you really do owe that money to the police, that’s why you’re getting phone calls from the police, it’s not a spoofing scam, you missed a real toll notice, I’m so sorry, it was buried in your spam folder”

Older people got the memo about scams and they got block happy, now they ignore real notices.

I’ve done the same thing, I was getting texts for parking fines and permit renewals and I don’t have a lisence because I’m visually impaired so obviously a scam.

Only I forgot that when I was 16 grandma gave me her old car, I was like “the fuck do I do with this” so I gave the keys to my little brother and moved out.

15 years later, turns out the car has been in my name the whole time, which makes sense, I don’t remember signing anything about the car ever. My brother had no idea his permit was even expired because they were sending the text to the owner contactvia the car rego, not the drivers contact details my brother provided, and because I’d been ignoring the texts it took a while to iron out with the council, especially because my brother and “my” car are not just in another state, but another territory.

Not quite, the parents created an Uber Ride and Uber Eats accounts several years ago, agreeing to the ToS at that time.

Several months ago, uber updated the tos and pushed it out to users as a pop up agreement.

The daughter was monitoring the phone to watch the driver and pizza on the map when the pop up blocked the app, the daughter, being a minority who wanted her to pizza just hit “accept” to go back to the app to watch get pizza.

Several months later, the parents hooked an uber ride, where the driver crashes and injured the parent’s.

Uber is claiming that because the daughter agreed to the ToS, the new ToS is valid.

The parents only ever had the opportunity to read the original ToS, which also has a similar arbitration clause, which is why the lawyer is saying the daughters pizza situation was mooting. But the two ToS are different because one is an updated version of the other.

Heck half the time my screen reading software glitches out on ToS pages, so I just have to assume I’m selling my soul but hopefully not much else and click accept because it’s not like I’m going to find someone to sit and read it out to me, that would take hours!

And yet for every other contract I have ever signed in my entire life, I have a legal right to ask for it in an accessible form before I sign it. As a visually impaired person, uber is present in my life.

I hated it, it was the most inaccessible app for such a purpose, and the drivers really did not understand I can’t see what they see. I like just calling the depot, talking to a human, and booking a cab… But you can’t do that now either because when you call you wait on hold for 20 minutes while the automated message tells you about the taxi app.

So now unfortunately, uber is easier to book than a taxi, I don’t know if the ToS in the taxi app has any harmful stuff about arbitration because again, I’ve never been able to get a screen reader to read out the ToS properly on any app!

I feel like such a boomer, but I am really feeling more and more isolated as every service Abdi connection I’ve built my life around is moving online into a digital visual space faster than the affordable assustive technology can keep up with.

I’m expected to read something on a screen when I physically can not, uber and similar apps, including the app my local state government brought in during covid that now holds much only transit ID to show transit staff I’m blind (to get l transport assistance at train stations) all do this.

Once you open the wallet section of the app, for fraud prevention they disabled third party screen readers from reading anything on the app.

I have to open my app, then ask the other person to look through my wallet for me to find the card because I can’t, it’s such a privacy violation.

You should see some shops in Australia, they decide to put up a small display for “Christmas in July” then the next thing you know there’s no other holidays to protect that display from just becoming a growing Christmas display… in August!

And it’s so lazy because it’s still the Christmas in July display at the core, with the actual December Christmas merch expanding out from the it, so there’s ugly Christmas sweaters, roasts, and snow men decorations in the the middle, and board shorts, barbecues, thongs* and white boomers* after that.

(thongs are flip flops/sandals, white boomers are albino kangaroos, it’s what Santa uses to pull the rusted out ute across the sand because he leaves the reindeer and sleigh for the northern hemisphere…Australian Christmas is weird)

That’s a windfall payment and one less mouth to feed in the long run. Morbid, Yes, it’s not the best long term solution but anything you can do to survive true poverty never is.

What’s to say losing your job doesn’t have 3 of you dying from exposure in your car a week after you’re evicted?

If you haven’t lived the trauma of life and death poverty, I’m glad, but I don’t think it’s something that can be fully explained.

Trauma changes the way your brain processes risk, people living in chronic poverty don’t have the same risk assessment framework as you.

This is a good point about cultural export, majority of modern content use American, and the majority of childhood content at least for me was Canadian.

I’m often surprised how little I know of the UK compared to the USA when I think of how much is imported to Australia from the UK …including my family.

Thank you so much for giving me your guesses at state names, we did make it easy for you with just a bunch of cardinal directions.

You are bang on with 6 states, and almost bang on with their names.

The place you’ve dubbed “Northern Australia” is the “Northern Territory” and is not a state, the state you are missing is South Australia.

We have two major territories, Northern Territory as mentioned, but then similar to the USA, our national capital is not located within a state.

Our capital city is in “The Australian Capital Territory”, or just “the ACT”

We are super creative with the names. Hence why we named 2 after the Queen (then stupidly named the capital city of Victoria “Melbourne” instead of “Batmania”, which was totally an option on the table!) but also America can’t talk, how many important places have you named after Washington and Columbus?

Tasmania is indeed ours, ours lonely Island state. Not so fun fact, Tasmanian Devils are endangered because they keeps biting each other’s faces off and giving each other contagious facial cancer.

There’s another internal territory no one really talks about, Jarvis Bay, it was formed mostly so the ACT could have access to a port without needing to use a state’s port.

We have 7 external territories, the main ones being the island territories of Norfolk, Cocos, and Christmas Islands.

I don’t read words in any voice other than the naturally subvocalisation that occurs when I’m reading, which is always in my voice.

Even when I read a quote myself Morgan Freeman, I’m hearing my voice, doing a Morgan freeman impression.

But in terms of who I picture? Nothing, people online are not even corporal beings to me until details are revealed. They are still human and have whole lives offline so that’s not an excuse to be needlessly rude, but I know nothing of them so why would I randomly invent details unless I’m doing so as a “put myself in their shoes” thought experiment.

But then I have a degree of aphantasia so I’m not “picturing” anything, all I have is words anyway, so it’s easy not to add in extra words that change my assumptions about a person.

I just wish Americans would have a little self awareness when engaging in foreign content.

I was in a comment thread for a video on a report by the ABC about ADEs. Now I will give Americans the benefit of the doubt, we both have ABC networks, but ours clearly says “Australia”, the news presenter has a Australian accent, and was talking about the Australian minimum wage, there were references to Centrelink and the Australian government repeatedly. If you watched the video and couldn’t tell me what country the video was about, you need to go back to primary school, your media comprehension level is dysfunctional .

I mentioned a clarifying point in the the comments about ADE being different from DES and giving numbers for each (you don’t need to know anything about these acronyms), and someone starts arguing with me that when they were in the disability program they got xyz and they didn’t have to do any of this. I replied saying that these processes have been unchanged for 20 years, I don’t know how they’re getting what they’re getting, they have a unique case. They come back telling me everyone gets that, that’s how it is, I need to do my research before I make stuff up. I explain that I work in the sector, I’m looking at the cases software, if they are indeed getting those services through that program, they are the only one of 40,000 people in the program getting that, because that’s not how the service works. They tell me 15 million people people use the program. I finally realise what’s happening. “there are only 25 million people people in Australia…you’re a lost American aren’t you?” and sure enough ,they politely reply with “oh yeah, I’m not Australian so I don’t know, maybe it’s different over there”.

And I just can’t with that level of American stupidity.

You can came into an Australian forum and assumed I wasn’t Australian, assumed I wasn’t talking about Australia, then came to the conclusion that “maybe it’s different over there” when I had explicitly just informed you that ,yes, the law is different here.

Now many times could I have used the acronym DES before the American thought to themselves “maybe this person isn’t talking about SSDI”.

And this is just the example from the last hour. I end up in a lot of international PD sessions for my work, and something like this is a daily occurrence, only with the Americans.

Canada, you are sadly not excused from this, nor sure why but it’s always "okay, where are we all from? “Australia” “Belgium” “Brazil” “Indonesia” “Fort Freedom” “Edmonton”

Those are cities and provinces, clearly the rest of us are doing countries, some of us are big enough that we could name states if we wanted to, but we’re being polite, you’ve got 50 (10+3 🇨🇦 ) of them and we didn’t memorise a silly song in school to learn your states.

The fact that I know how many states the US has and how many provinces and tertories Canada has, but an American would be stabbing in the dark to guess how many states and territories Australia has, even though our biggest state is 3x bigger than Texas and Australia as a whole is a comparable landmass to the contiguous 48.