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A corollary is that text is better than video as well. Possibly not for entertainment, for for education, I find text infinitely preferable - much easier to scan forward and back as required.

> I prefer trees and grass over parking lots

I don't see a meaningful distinction between a consolidated parking lot and one that's distributed along the side of the road when it comes to tree and grass cover. For dense urban situations car parking buildings allow more than either surface lots or surface street parking.

Yeah, I live in the Melbourne CBD and it's great. I don't even need to cross a street to access all essentials.

When I lived in Perth in 2008 the coffee was awful compared to NZ (and to Melbourne, where I ended up afterwards). I lived in Leederville and Subiaco, both with popular cafe strips, but broadly awful coffee.

"want" is probably a misleading term here

$15 to transfer $20 to another country, the US really is a another world sometimes. Transfers are often free to cheap - substantially lower than the costs for transferring crypto in most cases.

It was my main motivation for running pihole, killing off more adverts across everything, not just in browser.

Similar, we use JS UDFs in BigQuery for JSON parsing (ELT instead of ETL) and occasionally for other tasks that are just easier in JS than pure SQL.

Inability to "split a cheque" is still a very annoying limitation; completely normal behaviour to do this in NZ, still moderately weird in Australia (although it's got better).

The ability to resolve this electronically rather than with cash makes it less bad, but still easier and faster to resolve it in store.

Australia's "PayID" system gets around this by allowing you to pay to a mobile phone number or email address (generally findable via your phone's contacts). The implementation is a little clunky, but an additional benefit is that it's a bit like DNS for your payments - you can associated those details with different bank account to redirect payments if you move.

I'm not arguing it's a solution for the poor, the absolute opposite - because I have sufficient income to pay my bills in full it just comes out cheaper than paying them with cash. It's a terrible solution _if you actually need credit_ because it typically comes with really bad interest rates.

You come out ahead because the card issuers expect to make money from you because you'll stay with them a long time so offer substantial sign up bonuses (I don't) and that you'll pay interest (I don't). There are generally annual fees, but if you ask they'll often waive them (if you spend enough, again not accessible if you're living pay to pay).

It's ~effortless (bills paid automatically in full from a mortgage offset account) and saves money even without rewards and other perks (0% loans via interest free "balance transfers").

People outside the US stopped using cheques ~decades ago. At 40+ from New Zealand I've literally never paid anyone with one and have been paid with them only a handful of times.

Credit cards are pretty common here in AU; I don't care so much about the fraud protection, but up to 55 day interest free periods are common (if the bill is paid in full each month) and so the cards literally save me money because I earn interest on savings and/or don't pay interest on mortgage vs having to pay everything immediately.

Rewards on top are an added bonus.

4.5% of the American population sounds like an _extremely_ significant number of people tbh

clickhouse.com is down for me, so for those looking for it the github repo[1] may be more useful

[1] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/tree/master#readme

Never go full Tony Abbot, not even for onions.

Contact lenses, for those that wear them, also largely mitigate the tears and stinging.

I thought I liked cream cheese until I bought bagels in NYC and there was more cream cheese than bagel. Even I can't eat that, got used to scraping off half the topping (and it was still half a brick left).

Have heard the "big enough to sue" which is also "big enough to afford the indemnity insurance in case they're sued" is a common problem in Australian government contracting.

In theory it shouldn't matter but you can SSR with React if that's important.

PayID is the service that let's you pay to a mobile / email / ABN, but it's not the only use - smaller value transfers to a standard BSB are also often instant thanks to Osko which is also using the New Payment Platform.

That's at the bank's discretion, rather than something enforced by the system.

Yeah, I did not like shingles.

Yeah, I have a balcony that's a plant kill zone (north facing high rise in Australia, so lots of sun, the odd 40 degree (100 farenheit) day, aircon outlet there pushes it up much hotter still.

Peace lilies have been surviving (not thriving, but surviving) there for 8 years now, but I've tried and killed rosemary three times now. I suspect overwatering is the cause.

All of these in pots, btw, because balcony - suspect that the rosemary would be easier in the ground.

Yeah, I thought Hobbs' books were well written, just not as much to my taste. I'm less interested in individual characters, or well formed prose (although both are good to have), than plot.

I don't really notice much difference in first and third person perspectives once into a book, although it's more noticeable when starting out. Second person is more jarring - I've read The Raven Tower and Harrow The Ninth recently, both being all or largely in second person.

Interesting point you make with regards to RPGs - open worlds are addictive to me (I played Skyrim for many, many years - and have played almost everything in the Elder Scrolls series).

I need to revisit The Dark Tower, I last read it when it was incomplete and have never read it through. Very different to his more famous works. Thanks for the reminder.

I read the Assassin's Apprentice series through, but it didn't really satisfy, and I haven't read anything else by the author. I like the Malazan ones, and ASoIF, a lot more - partly the grimdark, but more so the overall complexity of the plot. While Hobb's work was pleasant it just didn't really engage me.

Websockets are fine on flex, but yeah, Cloud Run is getting the love these days.

Or, annoyingly, websockets.

Melbourne, Australia, has Google Pay support for the transit system but not Apple Pay. I recently switched to iOS and the lack of phone transit support is the biggest pain so far (and I don't really even use public transport, living and working in the CBD/city/downtown, just walk through one of the stations quite often on the way to and from the office).