dragonsky67

A lot of "Normal" people are not stable. People are petty, vindictive and childish, to think anything else is just flying in the face of evidence.

I don't know if this was intentional, but I've never heard a better description of the current state of US foreign affairs.

Have a look at the history of western settlements in the "new world" and you will find that it was not a healthy enterprise. Disease, injury, starvation etc killed off massive numbers before they either acclimatised or learned how to deal with the hostile environment.

I can't see space exploration being any different. The only difference is that current society is fairly comfortable so the idea of leaving your comfortable home to risk everything on travelling to a new settlement on an other planet is distasteful.

Give it a few years and the situation on Earth may change, climate change, over population or simply the political situation may make travelling elsewhere more attractive.

Just a reminder that much of this information, especially on the commercial databases the information is collated by well meaning people, but levels of accuracy differ vastly. Many people seem to find a name that they are looking for and with little further research/verification link it in with their family.

As with any research, if you want to verify the information, you have to go back to the original source, rather than rely on other peoples research ..

I wonder how much of this is also people wanting to see value for money?

By this I mean regardless of how much work has to go into getting the information on screen, if it's just an information screen that does not allow much further interaction then the experience is finished after the first look. If you have to dig a little to find the information you are after, then the experience is extended which along with the feeling of discovery results in more satisfaction.

It's a problem I encounter when developing tools system support. I try for the simplest UI, but when presenting the tool inevitably get people asking how it took so long to develop something so simple?

And some of the poorest health outcomes in the western world. How can you spend so much money, and still have people who can't afford basic care?

I think this highlights one of the major differences between Australia and the US, in the US there appears to be some tolerance to arseholes as long as they are bringing in the $$. In Australia, the arseholes tend to get kicked regardless of how wealthy they are, in fact the more wealthy the bigger the target. In general it appears that bribery (in it's many forms) is less than in the US, wealth in and of itself does not impress people.

The concept of housing is changing.

Many retired and near retired are selling up their houses and taking to the road permanently in caravans and finding that as long as they are careful their costs are vastly reduced and as long as they don't travel too far and burn too much fuel. This option obviously has limitations and is dependent upon health and the ability to fund the equipment required, however for many it's a way of spending a healthy retirement whilst also feeling like they are achieving something. The added bonus is that these people are spending time and money in more remote areas, providing much needed income to local businesses. Remote area councils, understanding the need are providing places for these Grey nomads to free camp at little or no cost. Facilities may be provided, but most of the travellers carry everything they need with them, just needing somewhere to park.

There is currently a movement amongst younger people towards "Van Life". Unlike their older brethren they are not normally running around in caravans, but tend towards self contained vans or small busses. They are taking up a nomadic lifestyle moving between jobs as they become available, many servicing the needs of the Grey Nomads. In a very pragmatic way, this is a way of moving "homeless living out of a car" into a lifestyle choice.

I can well imagine how a young employed person or couple, faced with oppressive housing costs could decide to live in a small van in the city, moving around each day or two and with a bit of stealth living from their vehicle.

This is what is happening now, and at the moment, it's not causing too many problems and in fact with regard to the Grey Nomads is helping to move money into remote areas.

So what does the future hold...

We're going to see more and more people, young and old being forced to hit the road, we're going to see an increase in a nomadic workforce, we're going to see the facilities (free camps) provided in remote areas become more stressed as more and more people use them, resulting in calls to shut them down. Now we have a bunch of people on the road with limited funds and no legal place to spend the night.

So what is needed?

Younger people need a roof over their heads. they need somewhere to store their goods and cook their meals. They want safety and some degree of comfort. They want flexibility of being able to move accommodation easily as and when jobs or life requires. The need access public transport and services so that they can get and keep their jobs.

They don't need 5 star accommodation.

At the moment the options for a young person are: Live with their parents, Life with their friends in a shared house, Live in a rented room with somebody else, Rent a unit, Rent a house, live out the back of their car/van as described above.

Most of these are starting to be, or are already not affordable (or even accessible) to young people unless they are very lucky or earning a high wage.

Given that the traditional 4 bedroom brick veneer on a 1/4 acre block is not even a pipe dream for most younger people what are the other options.

Seems to me that there is a lot of inner city office space that is currently massively under occupied. In most cases these spaces are designed to be easily remodelled and could be turned into suitable accommodation. You do need to be concerned about not turning these places into ghettos, but with a little thought I think you could provide accommodation that can be occupied on a short or long term with minimal difficulty. Done right, with a AirB&B type setup you could do it in such a way as to reduce the administrative costs.

Once you have that sorted, start looking at the nomads living a Van Life. You just need some space, maybe install some toilets/showers pay a resident to keep the place clean and charge a small rental for somewhere for people to park their caravan, car or van.

I'm sure this is not anywhere as simple as I make out, you have to deal with zoning laws, tenancy laws, insurance and compliance, but all you need is to get some example sites approved by council and a desire to have them succeed.

What is really needed is an understanding that they don't need to extract every $$ possible from their tenants, working with them to ensure that they feel respected and that they will respect the space they are living in.

So in short, we are too comfortable to need the dog eat dog cutthroat start-up mentality because it's never been required?

I think this is a fair comment.

For me, being a wage earner, I have to date been able to have a pretty decent middle class lifestyle without having to scheme, hustle or con anybody and I take a pretty dim view of those that do. But that is changing. As others have pointed out, it's now almost impossible for the average wage earner to aspire to home ownership, it's hard enough to even find a place to rent. Cost of living is going through the roof, and many are discovering that that social safety nets that they thought they could rely on may not be big enough when a significant proportion of the population can't earn enough to both house and feed themselves.

We have a younger generation who are massively disaffected. They know their futures has been sold off and they are not happy. Political shifts are starting to rattle the establishment with an understanding that just doing the same thing is no longer good enough. Recent elections have telegraphed the changes that are coming.

I love the idea, but am wondering what the rational is over a smaller trailer and a tent?

I would imagine that a trailer of this size would have a lot of down sides when travelling.. the size restricts where you can take it and would tend to catch the wind quite a bit.

Australia is more than just Sydney... I've a feeling that Sydney has it's own culture and problems.

May be related to the high level of government support resource extraction attracts. I've a feeling that this is going to change somewhat.

Your level of concern about "The Boats" is directly related to which shock jock you listen to on morning radio.

I would suggest that most younger people have a well tuned bullshit detector and have a pretty good idea of what is important to their and the countries futures.

Politian's who try to pull the fear lever have a fairly small audience these days, as evidenced in the recent federal election.

Australia's population has always been concentrated around the capital cities with good services and reasonable facilities. Rural centres have been growing, but due to reduced services, remoteness and in some cases climatic issues have not been attractive as homes for businesses that are not based on the surrounding industry.

In the capitals the cost of housing in inner suburbs (say 1 hour commute) have increased by an order of magnitude or more over the last 20 years with the ability to develop new outer suburbs reaching the limits of geographical constraints and commute distance.

With the growth in remote work and working from home, I think we're starting to see a housing boom in the more remote centres as people sell up in the big cities and go bush... Unfortunately this is then leaving the remote locals being unable to afford accommodation. The entire housing market is ripe for disruption, especially if we don't want to see a lot of younger people living out of the back of cars or vans.

You are so correct, property ownership is now just a dream, however I stand by the cultural inertia of home ownership rather than "making it big" as being an underlying driver in peoples minds. Why else would people take up mortgages at very low interest rates that will be impossible for them to make payments when the interest rates start to rise as they have started to do.

My kids (low 20's) still seem to dream that owning a home (well at least having a mortgage) is something that they can aspire to on a normal wage. The one who has given up on this idea is now tending towards "not playing" as being a logical decision with regards to economic participation, and to be honest who could argue with them.

I think as an Australian, it's a bit of each.

There is not a great tradition amongst most Australians of trying to "Make it Big.". The Australian dream has been the house on the 1/4 acre block, not making millions in a Silicon Valley style buyout. Add to that the poor regard for those who are seen to be exploiting others for their personal gain and a strong dose of "Tall Poppy Syndrome" where the populous tries to tear down people who seem to be getting too big for their boots and you have a place where American style entrepreneurism is not encouraged.

That said, we tend to celebrate those who step ahead in business, but do it in a way that supports their workers and community.

Don't know what car you own, but I'm pretty sure I've spent more on my car in maintenance and service since I purchased it than the original purchase price.

Add to that the recalls for faulty airbags etc and I see a car as being a lot more high maintenance than a phone, which baring security updates does not require any further work beyond recharging and wiping off grubby fingerprints every now an then.

Tell that to the person with the Tesla who is trying to drive from one side of Australia to the other and is completely dependent upon the generator powered charging station in the middle of the Nullarbor Plane to complete the trip.

Yep, BEV are great for commuting, but very difficult to use if you need to travel long distances in remote areas or tow a caravan or trailer.

Incidentally Russia never did very well in Afghanistan either.

You don't win insurgencies, especially when people are defending their homes and money and material is coming from outside.

And of course in that case the information is of immediate importance to you, however if I'm 16000 km away, I'm not sure that I need blow by blow reporting on events that may only impact me through increased costs of goods.

I have absolutely no way of impacting events in the Ukraine, even if I decide to contribute to a charity or try to influence my local member of parliament there is still absolutely no benefit to be gained by anybody (except perhaps the media) of me consuming this coverage.

I can however benefit significantly by avoiding news reporting that is going to continually trigger primitive fight or flight instincts and leave me in a high state of stress.

I wonder if the accurate deliver of fire retardant could be achieved using automated mortars or similar, maybe terminal guidance munition delivered from a high level loitering airship. Your cost may be higher, but I'm thinking that there will be a significant loss rate with drones, and you lose the cost of prepositioning.

base the drones on an airship that can loiter for days/weeks.

airship could also assist in surveillance.

One of the biggest problems with managing bushfire in Australia is having the fire "jump the line". Where embers fly ahead of the main fire, starting spot fires that unless dealt with just extend the reach of the fire. Currently a lot of spot fire management is attempted using helicopters with water buckets, but this is both expensive and bloody dangerous. Being able to use semi disposable drones could assist dramatically.

There are however a number of problems I can see that this approach will have to overcome.

- You need to preposition the drone in such a way that it can remain charged and also is protected from any potential bush fire before it's utilised. This could be achieved with a fire protected, solar powered shelter, but this significantly increases the cost. Maybe they could be deployed from a long duration aircraft?

- The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment. I'm not seeing the average off the shelf drone deal with smoke, particles and embers and still function effectively. Also the sensor package will have to deal with restricted view as well as reduced GPS/Radio caused by smoke/firestorm interference.

That said, this system could be very effective in dealing with smaller locations, close to built up areas where you can target deployment for those high risk fire ban periods.

Just wondering what the range is on those drones. If you are supposed to be covering 100's of km of bushland you will need a significant number of drones, or they will need to have high speed and long range.

Wondering if they would be better having the fire retardant dropped from some type of lighter than air craft or maybe base the drones on a lighter than air craft that can loiter in the area for a significant period, reducing the difficulty in pre placing the drones.

Is this the thing that I see in many Americans giving presentations? They are always uncomfortably excited and happy, regardless of what they are presenting. I get it, you're excited, but please accept that I'm here for the information, not your personal endorphin levels.

/rant off.... Sorry just came out of a workshop where the presenter spent half the time trying to get a bunch of technical people excited rather than just presenting the information we came for. Very exhausting.

I think it needs to be emphasised that advertising in one of the catalogue magazines and even the classified section of many specialist mags is very different to most of the advertising on the internet today.

Those ad's were informative for those who were looking to see what services or products were available. Little or no possibility of creating demand where it did not exist. Internet ads are almost universally designed not only to create demand for a product, but also to feed the fear of exclusion if the viewer does not have the product.

I'm thinking of the classified ads that used to be in the back of gaming magazines. There would be pages of small print only black and white listings of everything from miniatures to game supplements that you could purchase by mailing the given address. You had to go looking for them.

In the front of the Mag between the articles you would have full page colour ads, some with skimpily dressed women selling boxed games, computer games etc.

In some of the mags, some of the articles were reviews of products, some of these reviews were obviously promotions, very much trying to sell the product. Very few were critical of the product under review.

There is a continuum in advertising from simple "this product exists" to "Will change your life". Far to many of the adverts we see today tend to the targeted "change your life" category.

Add to that that many of the ads on the internet have there own tracking built in that allows your existence to become a product that is sold without your knowledge or consent and you have a situation that has a bunch of moral questions to answer.

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Makes me wonder how much liability the owner or participants in the network used for tracking carry if bad things are facilitated by the network.

This has been evidenced by the big push to get kids back into face to face school during the pandemic. It is very rare for any discussion promoting this to even mention education let alone propose that face to face education is better than what has been happening over the last couple of years.

We drive significant distances each year and I need to be comfortable when I drive. If the wheel alignment is out, it's an irritation having to continually push the wheel to centre and I get it fixed. If something in the load is continually rattling or squeaking (hate polystyrene) then I pack it so that it doesn't. Distractions like this are tiring and potentially create distractions.

I love the idea of fully autonomous driving where I can sit back and read a book or watch a movie, but I cannot imagine what it would be like driving a car where you are not actually driving, but have to be constantly on your guard in case it decides to do something unexpected.

Driving with constant attention is fairly easy, I would imagine not driving, but having to continually monitor ready to make split second would be exhausting.