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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Australia is nice this time of year. Why not send a conference or two down under?

Smart, well educated individuals, all motivated by the perpetual drive for international relevance and the existential dread of possibly being taken by the wildlife at any moment.

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Australia has similarly draconian monitoring of it's citizens. The whole blow-up about metadata in the US surprised me, because I was already conditioned to believe the government was reading all our actual messages. A couple of years ago there was a violent confrontation between white Australians and Lebanese, and part of the news cycle around that was the media nonchalantly reporting on the contents of text message conversations the white supremacists in Australia were having. Australia probably has an even broader reaching surveillance state, but Australian media never reports on it because the Australian people and its government have a far less antagonistic relationship than that of US citizens and the government.

>Australia is nice this time of year. Why not send a conference or two down under?

Because it's even worse in this regard.

>Smart, well educated individuals

Well, let's not generalize.

> Because it's even worse in this regard.

Do you have some stories of conference speakers or attendees being treated this way in Australia?

Honest answer? It's very far for pretty much everybody not in AUS/NZ

12h if you're in the West Coast, a shorter trip if you're in Japan and that's "the closest" most people will be

Well, Elon did announce his BFR Earth to Earth solution in Adelaide, South Australia, which resides near the bottom of the continent. Perhaps he had a market segment in mind.

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