It’s pretty well known that the American religious nutters want Israel to rebuild the temple of David so the apocalypse happens. This leads them to support Israel’s actions in general

OTOH Israel will never rebuild the temple, 'cause if they did they would lose the support of the American religious nutters when the apocalypse failed to occur (as apocalypses have so far)

I play freeciv which is civ 3.5. Unit stacking is a thing and a stack of whatever can defeat whatever

Incidentally I like to give competing civilizations railway technology so when I attack them I can easily overrun all their big cities in a single turn

Many thousands if they’re traction trebuchets

It’s pretty much a rule for funerals: wear black clothes and if you wear a tie, use a black one, if you wear a ribbon, make it a black one

I felt I needed more than 1L of DHMO after breakfast, I have been a habitual user for pretty much my whole life

It’s there hope for me‽

Australian magpies have a much nicer song than any corvid

My Australian town is almost as bad as American ones because it was built after cars became necessary

It has decent bike paths and painted bike lanes on many roads. Riding to local centres is easy, or to any of the five or so nearby schools (which gets a lot of kids onto bikes), but if you work a desk job it is probably in one of the three big centres and you’re likely to live up to an hour by bike away. So few adults get around by bike

That’s only because America makes terrible public transit

1. Are you saying the problem is cars are too expensive and too expensive to maintain because they are too complex?

Cheap cars are more dangerous. Simpler cars have higher emissions. I think the more complex ones are better. I would like to see legislation against the anti repair methods manufacturers use

2. Cars let you take longer trips. One of the Australian capitals had a train to the beach towns. That right of way was taken by a highway and the railway now only runs a tourist route between the three or four beach towns but not to the city

With cars less needed other transit methods get built for popular trips

Failing all that, hire a car the few times of year you want an out of town holiday would be cheaper even than a very cheap car

3. This one is completely correct. Last time I had a car problem I had a choice of tow companies and mechanics. Government services are monopolies but they’re pretty proof against failure. The worst that might happen is you might buy a car that turns out to be less valuable than you expected because it’s bad quality or the company owner turns out to be a nazi. But even that only costs you if you need to sell the vehicle.

I envy you for your walkable city. I don’t think I did better by getting a thousand square metre block and a detached house. I’d like to see our cities made walkable and the outer suburbs connected by rail so no one needs a car. I’d like to see cars banned from the city centre except working vehicles, taxis, disabled people, tourists with a hotel in town. For long trips off the transit network one would take a train to a car hire depot out of the city and drive from there. Hopefully cars will be sufficiently smart that the fact the drivers will have little practices will be mitigated

Public owned Telecom Australia charged like a wounded bull and provided poor service in connection or repair.

Telecom disabused me of the idea that government monopolies wouldn’t exploit their monopoly position

The secure solution is electronic access control on the door. A key box is very hard to secure

Kelvins are abbreviated to capital K

Cool to 25, heat to 20 (Canberra, Australia)

IRL 1984 was fine. America was still good; the Soviet Union didn’t nuke us all

Australia prefills all the information from employers, banks, share market registers so most people can log onto the government website, go to their tax account and accept the prefilled form

Musk is a shit, but lying doesn’t help

The last attempted helicopter prison escape in the Wikipedia list is from 2020

Hijinks are harder now than they were in the '80s but not extinct; though even in the '80s success rarely lasted more than a few months for helicopter escapees

How the fuck you do get a bullet to the head and then try the same shit again?

Perhaps he was not unharmed by the bullet in the head

I really loved my Trinitron, but it needed so much space

Flat CRTs were excellent though.