I do think there is something to be said about being wary of modern cars in regards to security. I wouldn’t trust manufacturers as far as I could throw them when it comes to actually making secure systems - particularly when you’re dealing with remote connection capabilities. The focus on China is convenient for the US but I wouldn’t trust their systems either. Ford in particular has been concerning recently by patenting a way of ad serving based on user data a normal person would consider private (such as conversations within their cars). It doesn’t even take the OEM being malicious to be a problem, they only need to miss a security hole…

According to a news article I just read this morning gets the record for coldest spring morning ever recorded in Canberra, so you could say it was pretty chilly.

While you will get the fine notice you shouldn’t have to pay it - there is an option to reply with a reason why you shouldn’t be fined and being overseas at the time would count as a legit excuse.

Yep, like in other elections we do have pre poll and postal voting (with a valid reason and you need to apply for postal) but the standard method is turning up on the day. I’m not sure if that has any effect on turnout compared to other states.

Probably less likely than a federal election but I’d still give it decent odds of finding one (particularly if the school is trying to raise funds for something). I can’t remember exactly whether this was during council or state elections but I have turned up to vote before and not found a sausage sizzle.

Public transport in this area is indeed less attractive if you have any other form of transport, particularly if you live on one side of the ACT/NSW border and commute to the other. Google reckons for example that it’d take me a bit over an hour to get to either of my usual work sites on a bus compared to the 15-20 minutes it takes me normally.

Not mentioned (like usual) is motorbikes as an alternative to cars. The space advantages when it comes to both on road and parking are obvious compared to the usual one person per car (and they use less resources to make, particularly when it comes to EVs) so you’d think anyone actually worried about congestion would do more to encourage their use.

I was wondering if this would happen after seeing Brisbane cancelled their contract, they’ve followed suit pretty quickly.

Yep, they ended up deciding it was sparked by various batteries that had ended up in one of the compactors. Whatever they had for fire protection mustn’t have been enough to stop it once the fire was noticed - I assume the source was within a big pile of recycling so would have required a serious amount of water to put out. It ended up being a rather large fire (one of the local accident chasers has some decent photos) and took out the recycling capability for the whole area. The rubbish piles within ended up smouldering away for a few days after the main fire was put out.

For over a year and a half now I believe most if not all the ACTs recycling has had to be sent to Sydney due to this fire, so I can understand the new centre getting priority when it comes to the waste management budget.

Tree pollen season has already kicked off, I was sitting at the traffic lights on City Hill just the other day watching the wind blow visible clouds of pollen off the pine trees.

Highlights IMO are an amusingly ironic bit of tram signage at 7:20 and a very well timed song at 29:40.

Disappointingly I only saw two clips from Canberra but luckily both involved roundabouts (or faux-abouts) so at least the reputation of the city is intact.

I can see why they didn’t think to have measures specifically against something like this given it’s a pretty low probability occurrence. You’d have to be unlucky enough to have both applied hand sanitiser just before touching the globe and then get a spark off the globe to ignite it, and I don’t recall ever getting a spark off plasma globes when I’ve touched them before.

It’ll be interesting to see if this getting into the news means companies/departments will scramble to get rid of alcohol based hand sanitiser in their buildings, ignition is after all technically possible with static shocks etc so there will be people worried about liability.

Includes a video with a selection of the latest examples of people not seeing the giant red thing that can be found in predictable locations…

it seems that the smaller the town, the higher the military worship. They may not even have a public toilet, but they will have a military worship statue that seemed to have cost more than all the town to build.

That’s because the vast majority of our towns pre date WW2, and basically every area lost enough people in WW1/WW2 to affect multiple families and the broader local community. For example I grew up in a country village of a couple of hundred people (with several hundred more in the locality and upriver) and it has a war memorial listing what would have been ~50 people killed in WW2 and at least that again in WW1. I think it is understandable that towns (particularly smaller or more closely knit communities) would be in general support of the families and friends wanting a memorial to their dead given that level of losses.

I haven’t seen anywhere near the number of memorials for other conflicts, they definitely exist but are significantly less common. If you want to avoid war related stuff your best bet would be towns/suburbs built well after WW2, but these tend to be suburbs of existing centres (which are likely to have a war memorial) instead of completely new towns.

Edit: Also consider that many of our country towns/villages have either not grown significantly or have even shrunk in population in the last half century or so, so historical memorials are more likely to retain the prominence they were originally intended to have instead of being surrounded or crowded out by new development.

It would’ve been completely unsafe to drive at 80

That’s why it’s called a speed limit, emphasis on limit. I believe limits should be set at a point such as you describe - a speed which reasonable people would consider clearly unsafe for a road. Drivers should then use their judgement of the corners/visibility, the current conditions, and their vehicle to choose a speed safe for their particular circumstances - this will obviously vary widely for different parts of the road, different conditions, and different vehicles. Setting speed limits to a point where you can safely drive the slowest sections of the road in poor conditions makes them effectively recommended speeds rather than limits, and I believe this trend has (and will continue to have) a negative effect on driver skill levels.

Thanks :)

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It was pretty busy up there, plenty of 4wds out and about heading to Mt Coree and up Mt Franklin road to either Bulls Head or where the road was closed at the Snow Gum gate. Luckily not at a traffic jam sort of level though - the dirt roads tend to dissuade a lot of people.

I can imagine Corin road would indeed have been a mess today, it can be bad enough on a regular weekend let alone a snow day where you have considerably more traffic and even more chance of people driving super slowly or trying to pull over for photos.

That is a good point, I do think a lot of ‘speeding’ issues come down to limits that are set too low for what people consider a natural speed for a section of road. I definitely agree that if you want people to drive slowly the road should encourage that speed - narrower lanes, curves, tree plantings etc help. Instead you get situations like how the ACT gov dropped a good section of wide three lane arterial road from 60km/h to 40km/h, changed nothing but the signs, and then acted shocked that the vast majority of people were now speeding…

That does seem a general trend, and applies to my personal opinion too - I would definitely be more sympathetic to a person with a low range speeding ticket than to someone with a mobile phone usage ticket.

I think much of that is due to the increasing disconnect between speeding in the form of exceeding speed limits and speeding in the form of exceeding the limits of safe driving (given good conditions). Personally I do find it annoying how much focus is put on reducing and enforcing speed limits instead of actually teaching people driving skills, so I guess I would fit into the pro speeding category as long as it’s not dangerously so.

Same with ACT and NSW for mobile speed cameras. The mobile phone cameras are unmanned however, must think they’re less of a target (and admittedly I haven’t heard of many being damaged).