I am going to have to try that, it will be very amusing if it works.

Not sure if they still have it but Tidbinbilla’s visitor centre used to have a tank with corroboree frogs in it, they really are tiny little things (much smaller than the impression I’d previously had of them). Never seen one in the wild but I’ve been around a bit of the Brindabellas and Firey Range so it does make one wonder how many I’ve been past.

Some work there seems well overdue, the train takes a lot longer than the bus trip let alone compared to driving yourself. Plenty of talk about high speed rail lines in the far future but even just ok speed rail would attract more people. Be nice if they had a more convenient rail terminus than Kingston too but I can’t see that changing anytime soon given how expensive it would be to extend the line closer to the city.

Yep, not particularly far but I’m sure they’d like a few minutes less on the trip back and forth from the city. One can hope that the tram will eventually get further south but I can’t see it happening anytime soon - Belco would probably be the next most sensible route given the shorter distance and higher density. If it weren’t for political considerations regarding northside vs southside I suspect even Woden would have been lower priority.

Good news for those wanting to get to the city from the south, less ideal for tourists and those who work in the parliamentary triangle.

Hopefully they can move a bit faster now and get something happening to at least start some preliminary works on 2b when they finish stage 2a rather than waiting a few years between stages.

You’re allowed to keep it and you’re allowed to try and use it to buy stuff but you won’t have much luck doing so.

Turning up with foreign cash would be effectively the same as trying to buy stuff with precious metals, jewellery, or rare Pokemon cards - while there’s value in the item it’s not immediately verifiable, it doesn’t fit with the usual workflow of the shop, and they’re under no obligation to even consider this as a payment option.

You’d have more luck using foreign cash for person to person sales where bartering and swaps are more of an accepted payment option. Even then expect dubiousness and to lose a lot of the nominal value when it comes to purchasing power.

Hopefully it’s fixed up quickly, we don’t need any more things impeding our fuel supply at the moment.

44 trucks in a month is not a particularly big wave, though I’ll grant it’s a sizeable step from previous sales.

Electric trucks do make sense for a lot of the last mile delivery sort of stuff (lowish and predictable max km per day, lots of stop/start, return to same base each day) so I expect this use case at least will become popular in the near future. As the article says though charging is a bit of a killer and will likely be more of a problem than the actual purchase price of the trucks. It’ll be interesting to see if it leads to a shift towards the big companies buying rather than leasing more of their depots due to the capital input required for charging infrastructure (small companies are probably just out of luck).

I received two or three summons letters during a few months period when my name was on the shortlist (close on ten years ago). Each time I checked online close to the date to see if the trial was still going ahead and they all ended up having been called off for whatever reason so I never got to see further along the process.

The lesson seems to be that it helps a bit but is by no means a panacea - i.e. pretty much what one would expect.

Someone’s being optimistic putting that on a pine pallet (and not even across the stringers…).

The scale of heavy machinery can be a real step up from the usual cars etc - trying to work on an old tracked loader at Grandad’s place required a lot more mechanical aid than I’m used to with light machinery.

It’s not like the mine closing is happening overnight, what have they done to build alternative employment in the meantime? I believe the mine has been a point of contention for decades, those who wanted it gone should have been also working on a plan for what happens afterwards to keep the town alive.

If they become a problem you just tow it outside the environment, easy fix.

I hadn’t even noticed Enlighten was back on again - might pop over this weekend before it finishes now you’ve helpfully reminded me of its existence.

I find it amusing that he opened with the A28 because that’s about the only proper route number I can remember paying attention to - it’s useful for running the non-toll route north/south through Sydney. Even then though I would refer to that particular road as the Cumberland highway, the route number is just for keeping track when changing to a differently named road (which you do a few times going through that way).

Generally speaking the only roads I remember by number are a few Sydney motorways that don’t have prominent names - what comes to mind is the M5/7/8 and I guess the M4 (though that’s partly the F4 in my memory due to spending some early childhood in the Blue Mountains before moving elsewhere).

I get the claimed figures on both my car and van so it’s not like hitting them is impossible, but it is highly dependent on how and where you drive. Many people drive with the smoothness and ability to look ahead of a myopic orangutan (e.g. accelerate hard, immediately jump to brakes, back to acceleration, repeat) but even with a bit of care there’s only so much you can do if your driving involves a lot of short trips and stop start traffic.

It is a fair point that subsidies for the cars have often been benefiting those who could afford the expensive car anyway, but surely their idea of subsidising home and work chargers is also benefiting those with more money. The subsidies would after all be primarily going to those who own a house with enough space to put the charger (i.e. not much luck for renters or apartment owners) and those who have allocated parking at work.

What is really needed to drive uptake is both cheaper EVs (to the point where they reach price parity with regular cars) and a charging network widespread and obvious enough to give prospective buyers confidence that they can charge even on their less common routes. Significant progress has been made with this, we’ve come a long way from the early days where cashed up people would smugly advise buying a 90+k vehicle to save a few grand on petrol.

I think promoting electric motorcycles and scooters would be worthwhile too, they’re more affordable, take up noticeably less space and resources, and still provide much of the personal transport requirements of our current road network.

I think just go with either Australia, whichever capital city is appropriate for the state, or even both.

We don’t get that many posts that further separation is worthwhile IMO, that’s a pathway to ending up with a bunch of communities that appear dead from lack of activity (which can be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy - people only tend to post in places that seem alive). I think we’ve already fragmented discussion more than is ideal between splitting off news/politics/questions/environment/memes from the general Australia community, regional interests are more understandable but the existing city/state comms are already quiet enough with our current userbase.

I don’t think the star system actually does much, particularly with how it operates per category rather than overall. For example the packet of chips I’m eating right now is apparently 3.5/5 stars. That rating both fails to reflect the actual healthiness of said chips and didn’t play any part in me buying them (I’m under no illusion that chips are healthy, I just like eating them on occasion). In fact I can’t think of a single time I’ve cared about the star rating when buying something.

Doesn’t surprise me, the old website is a much better user experience for me.

The new one is noticeably slower, hides the info I want to see behind extra clicks/scrolling, made the radar view worse, and doesn’t improve the only thing I’d want to improve from the old site (making it easier to find less commonly used information such as river heights or past observations). In fact they made that part worse because now it bounces between the new design and remnants of the old one for anything bar the most commonly visited sections - even for basic stuff like a synoptic chart.