In Australia, there is a strong presumption towards keeping left as a pedestrian (and overtaking on the right - e.g. etiquette on escalators is to keep left, but if you are walking up the escalator, overtake to the right).

In some particularly busy places (especially on shared footpath / bike lane zones) there are even arrows on the pavement to ensure tourists know what side to keep to.

There are always a few people (probably tourists) who don’t follow the local etiquette.

to lose 100% of the court cases where they try this defense

I don’t think the litigants actually know this. The shady characters they are paying for the information probably know that, but represent that it will just work if they do it right.

Imagine you have some kind of legal problem, and you go to your lawyer, and your lawyer tells you they know what to do that will let you win. You’ll probably do it. Now for the litigants, it is the same thing, except instead of a lawyer, it is some person with an Internet and/or in real life following, who dazzles you with lots of fake formality that aligns to your preconceptions of the legal system based on TV. Of course, it is all just pseudolegal and a scam, but you don’t know that.

Now you might except that some critical thinking and/or research of authoritative sources like case law, or consulting a real lawyer might let the litigant see that it is a scam, but critical thinking skills are not as common as you might hope, and secondary education in many places doesn’t cover much about the law or how to do legal research.

Consider that 49.8% of voters in the 2024 US Presidential election voted for Trump, even after seeing the first term. Many people are easily hoodwinked into acting against their own best interests, especially if they are convinced there is a community of other people like them acting the same way (SovCit like groups do have some numbers), that people who endorse those theories get a lot of recognition / are influential (the leaders of the groups can create that impression), and that their theories have a long traditional backing (usually they make up a historical backstory).

IANAL, but it is an interesting question to consider whether it would be illegal in Australia (if anything, as a test to see if the right laws are on the books to block this kind of thing). The laws are likely different in the US, and it might vary from state to state.

The Fair Work Act 2009 (Commonwealth), s325 provides that:

An employer must not directly or indirectly require an employee to spend, or pay to the employer or another person, an amount of the employee’s money or the whole or any part of an amount payable to the employee in relation to the performance of work, if:

(a) the requirement is unreasonable in the circumstances; and

(b) for a payment—the payment is directly or indirectly for the benefit of the employer or a party related to the employer.

I think you could imagine the employer arguing a few lines:

• The employee is not required to spend, it is only a factor in promotions and not retaining the same role. OP said you can “get in trouble for not using this” - countering this defence perhaps depends on proving what kind of trouble to show it is a requirement. In addition, under s340, employers are not allowed to take an adverse action against an employee for exercising or proposing to exercise a workplace right, and adverse action includes discriminating between and employee and other employees of the employer.
• That the employee is not required to pay any particular person, they can choose what to buy as long as the select from a prescribed list. However, I think that could be countered by saying this is an indirect requirement to spend, and the “or another person” attaches to the “pay” part, so I don’t think that argument would fly.
• The the requirement is reasonable - however, that could be countered by arguing the privacy angle, and the fact that this is for personal shopping, far outside the reasonable scope of an employment relationship.
• That the payment isn’t for the benefit of the employer. I think that could be countered firstly by arguing this is a requirement to spend not pay, and event if it was to pay, it is indirectly for the employer’s benefit since it allows them to attract and retain clients. The way they are pushing it could further prove this.

So I think it would probably be contrary to s325 of the Fair Work Act in Australia.

Another angle could be the right to disconnect under s333M of the Fair Work Act:

An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from an employer outside of the employee’s working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable.

If someone has a work and a personal phone, and has the app on the work phone, but refuses to use take the work phone or install an app on their personal phone so they can respond to tracking requests from the employer, then maybe this also fits.

I also wonder if in Australia this could also be a form of cartel conduct - it is an arrangement of where purchases (other than those the company should legitimately control) are directed centrally under an arrangement by an organisation.

Under s45AD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010,

(1) For the purposes of this Act, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding is a cartel provision if: (a) either of the following conditions is satisfied in relation to the provision: (i) the purpose/effect condition set out in subsection (2); (ii) the purpose condition set out in subsection (3); and (b) the competition condition set out in subsection (4) is satisfied in relation to the provision.

So the purpose condition has several alternatives separated by ‘or’, one of which is:

(3) The purpose condition is satisfied if the provision has the purpose of directly or indirectly: … (b) allocating between any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (ii) the persons or classes of persons who have supplied, or who are likely to supply, goods or services to any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding; or

It sounds like there is a solid argument the purpose condition is met - they are allocating where people who are part of the arrangement (employees) shop.

They’d also need to meet the competition condition for it to be cartel conduct. For this to be met, the arrangement might need to include the clients of the company:

(4) The competition condition is satisfied if at least 2 of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (a) are or are likely to be; or (b) but for any contract, arrangement or understanding, would be or would be likely to be; in competition with each other in relation to: … © if paragraph (2)© or (3)(b) applies in relation to a supply, or likely supply, of goods or services—the supply of those goods or services in trade or commerce; or

So it could be argued that this is a cartel arrangement between the company, its clients, and its employees, and so attract penalties for cartel conduct.

It is possible for all of the following to be simultaneously true:

• The Israeli War Cabinet are war criminals and terrible people for slaughtering civilians in Palestine and Lebanon.
• The Houthis are war criminals and terrible people for targeting civilians in Israel.
• The US Trump Administration are war criminals and terrible people for killing civilians in Houthi-controlled areas.
• Hamas are war criminals and terrible people for targeting civilians.

While all of the above crimes are of roughly the same type (albeit for different reasons), they do differ in extent - the Israeli War Cabinet is responsible for the most suffering by a wide margin.

I think it is a morally consistent position to condemn all of the war crimes above, although perhaps to prioritise efforts condemning the bigger ones.

The awkwardness here actually works in favour of abolishing tips and replacing them with the pay being factored into higher prices.

No one wants to be the sucker - human nature is that people are generous if they think everyone else is generous, but if they feel that others are not ‘pulling their weight’ on generosity and are instead taking advantage, that’s the fastest way to dry up other people’s generosity. Right-wing media use this fact to undermine support for social welfare - e.g. if 0.001% of welfare payments are fraudulently taken, they set editorial policy that makes it seem like beneficiaries are rorting the system instead of being truly needy.

But when it comes to tipping, the dynamic actually works the other way - people feel generous by tipping, even though it is harmful long term. If a few people ahead of someone in the line don’t tip, should they be the sucker who does tip? And for the employee, you want them to be the advocate on the inside for forcing people to pay their share instead of taking advantage - by having the displayed price be the total upfront price that includes the compensation for employees, instead of an optional tip.

There is a minimum amount of total money the employee could make before they’d go and work somewhere else instead. So if, hypothetically, everyone in a country where tipping is common even for non-exceptional service just stopped paying tips, hospitality employers would be forced to pay more to stay competitive with other non-customer-facing industries.

Of course, a drastic shock to the economy like that would probably cause a lot of upheaval, as some employers struggle to accept the new norm.

However, the same thing would work even if the change was slower - e.g. if 5% of people didn’t tip, and did it very obviously and vocally, and then the practice spread as it reached 10% and so on.

Obviously it sucks for the employees who get hit by the first few non-tippers, but over the long term it would be for the better for worker rights. So I could absolutely see it working.

That said, I say this from a country where tipping is not the norm (except maybe the occasional ‘keep the change’ for exceptional service), and the law and expectation is that the most prominent displayed price is the total price you pay - and people react very negatively towards businesses seen as trying to bring in American style tipping culture.

I believe nothing in the podman rm family worked because the container was already gone - it was just the IP allocation that was left.

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story from the 2nd century - although even that is a parody of existing stories. So the origin dates back a long time!

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This slowly degrades the power of the union and ultimately reduces wages and benefits of the workers

I’m not sure I buy into that - but that said I live in a country where unions are popular, but unions are not allowed to force people to join (but unions do have a right of access to workplaces to ask people to join / hold meetings).

Firstly, it doesn’t take that big a percentage of an employer’s workforce to strike before a strike is effective… companies don’t have a lot of surplus staff capacity just sitting around doing nothing. And they can’t fire striking union workers for striking.

Secondly, if all employees have to belong to one particular union, that also means the employees have no choice of which union, and hence no leverage over the union. Bad unions who just agree to whatever the employer asks and don’t look after their members then become entrenched and the employees can’t do much. If there are several unions representing employees, they can still unite and work together if they agree on an issue - but there is much more incentive for unions to act in the interests of their members, instead of just their leadership.

A lack of guaranteed employee protections, on the other hand, is inexcusable - it’s just wealthy politicians looking out for the interests of their donors in big business.

Why not donate to a local charity that might not receive as much, rather than a US based one?

Oh you are right - but it actually seems like history was repeating! https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/delays-ease-after-peak-hour-equipment-fault-hits-melbourne-trains/ar-AA1vaHLD seems to talk about the actual fault that was yesterday.

By population, and not land area, certain more remote geographic places are well known but have quite a low population. ‘Everyone’ is a high bar, but most adults in Australia would know the following places (ordered from smaller population but slightly less known to higher population):

• Wittenoom, WA - population 0 - well known in Australia for being heavily contaminated with dangerous blue asbestos (which used to be mined there until the 60s), and having been de-gazetted and removed from maps to discourage tourism to it.
• Coober Pedy, SA - population 1437 - well known in Australia for its underground homes and opal production.
• Alice Springs, NT - population 25,912 - well known for being near the centre of Australia in the rangelands (outback) - most larger population centres in Australia are coastal.

Stargate SG-1, Season 4, Episode 6 has a variant of the loop trope, but everyone (including most of the protagonists, and everyone else on earth) don’t remember what happens, while two protagonists remember every loop until they are able to stop the looping.

They debrief the others who don’t remember at the end (except for the things they did when they took a loop off anyway!) - but they didn’t miss too much since everyone else on earth missed it.

Another fictional work - a book, not a movie / TV show / anime - is Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. The time travel aspect is questionable - he sends things back in time to stop Hitler being born, but no people travel through time. However, he remembers the past before his change, and has to deal with the consequences of having the wrong memories relative to everyone else.

Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.

I believe it is what Americans call what might be called an Owners Corporation / Body Corporate / Apartment Owners Association / Management Company in other parts of the English-speaking world.

Here’s an idea: if the US wants a say in the ICC, maybe they should sign the Rome Statute.

No

On economic policy I am quite far left - I support a low Gini coefficient, achieved through a mixed economy, but with state provided options (with no ‘think of the businesses’ pricing strategy) for the essentials and state owned options for natural monopolies / utilities / media.

But on social policy, I support social liberties and democracy. I believe the government should intervene, with force if needed, to protect the rights of others from interference by others (including rights to bodily safety and autonomy, not to be discriminated against, the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right not to be exploited or misled by profiteers) and to redistribute wealth from those with a surplus to those in need / to fund the legitimate functions of the state. Outside of that, people should have social and political liberties.

I consider being a ‘tankie’ to require both the leftist aspect (✅) and the authoritarian aspect (❌), so I don’t meet the definition.

The fears people who like to talk about the singularity like to propose is that there will be one ‘rogue’ misaligned ASI that progressively takes over everything - i.e. all the AI in the world works against all the people.

My point is that more likely is there will be lots of ASI or AGI systems, not aligned to each other, most on the side of the humans.

I think any prediction based on a ‘singularity’ neglects to consider the physical limitations, and just how long the journey towards significant amounts of AGI would be.

The human brain has an estimated 100 trillion neuronal connections - so probably a good order of magnitude estimation for the parameter count of an AGI model.

If we consider a current GPU, e.g. the 12 GB GFX 3060, it can hold about 24 billion parameters at 4 bit quantisation (in reality a fair few less), and uses 180 W of power. So that means an AGI might use 750 kW of power to operate. A super-intelligent machine might use more. That is a farm of 2500 300W solar panels, while the sun is shining, just for the equivalent of one person.

Now to pose a real threat against the billions of humans, you’d need more than one person’s worth of intelligence. Maybe an army equivalent to 1,000 people, powered by 8,333,333 GPUs and 2,500,000 solar panels.

That is not going to materialise out of the air too quickly.

In practice, as we get closer to an AGI or ASI, there will be multiple separate deployments of similar sizes (within an order of magnitude), and they won’t be aligned to each other - some systems will be adversaries of any system executing a plan to destroy humanity, and will be aligned to protect against harm (AI technologies are already widely used for threat analysis). So you’d have a bunch of malicious systems, and a bunch of defender systems, going head to head.

The real AI risks, which I think many of the people ranting about singularities want to obscure, are:

• An oligopoly of companies get dominance over the AI space, and perpetuates a ‘rich get richer’ cycle, accumulating wealth and power to the detriment of society. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and AWS are probably all battling for that. Open models is the way to battle that.
• People can no longer trust their eyes when it comes to media; existing problems of fake news, deepfakes, and so on become so severe that they undermine any sense of truth. That might fundamentally shift society, but I think we’ll adjust.
• Doing bad stuff becomes easier. That might be scamming, but at the more extreme end it might be designing weapons of mass destruction. On the positive side, AI can help defenders too.
• Poor quality AI might be relied on to make decisions that affect people’s lives. Best handled through the same regulatory approaches that prevent companies and governments doing the same with simple flow charts / scripts.