I don't believe this is happening on a wide scale. I would love to see it. Living in a city with cycling infrastructure like we've been seeing in some European cities would truly be a joy.

We're a super keen cycling household, with more bikes than people. The kids and I ride to school/work routinely and have done pretty much all our lives. Even we can't get rid of the car. Sometimes, it is just necessary.

I disagree. I ride 10-12km to work and 10-12 km home practically daily. Because I understand people lie on the Internet all the time, here are my Strava cycling stats to show I'm telling the truth:

I cycled daily when I lived in Queensland. I cycled less often (because I'm a wuss about riding in the rain) but still regularly when I lived in Melbourne. And I cycle almost every day in Perth. The last four weeks actually really low for me - between the wet weather and having a holiday in September, my numbers are down. It would usually be 10 rides per week.

To answer @AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space's question: You can often buy bikes next to the sporting equipment in some stores (cycling is a sport, after all). These are terrible though, and people who really use their bikes get them at dedicated bike stores - which are very common in Australia.

I just sort of assume my instance gives away my location - I'm in Australia, not the UK. Not that we can talk, we also churned through about 5 prime ministers in five years a while back.

But I could still talk about any number of issues going on around the world, because our news covers topics around the world. Yours doesn't. It's too busy talking about your election and recently a hurricane. Which I know about as it was in our news.

That's not a criticism, I actually sought out world news while I was there, and there just weren't any local sources of it.

Eggs look like this:

They don't need to be washed with hot water and soap, they're perfectly good as they are.

Sorry about the hospital thing. By "for-profit", I meant you had to pay to go there. That's completely alien to everyone in the first world. We have private hospitals as well, and yep: lots of them are (or claim to be) non-profit also.

20 years ago, I used to have custom playlists that I'd load onto a 64mb SD card for my commute. A 64kbit wma file is surprisingly listenable. You can fit more than a standard album onto 64mb. I'm trying to remember now how much, probably 20-25 songs?

At that compression rate, I expect you can get a few hundred songs into half a GB. Of course, picking them would be its own challenge! It'd be the most curated playlist in history.

In Australia and New Zealand: we have skim milk, and call 2% milk "Hi-Lo" - sometimes I see it branded "lite milk". Then there's regular milk. It has 4% fat, but you need to read the fine print on the side of the bottle to learn that. I've heard it called "full cream milk", but usually in a cafe setting when ordering coffee.

My brother in the USA had something called half-and-half in his fridge. I think that one was 8%? You guys would know better than I. We don't have whatever it is.

You're right, of course - I heard the same stuff referred to as "whole milk". But the only thing you're correcting about the wider point is the appropriate adjective. Which I find very funny. 😀

It's interesting that you picked this one out. I thought the money one in particular was going to be a controversial take.

I'll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can't just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there's no such thing. There's x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted "4% milk") in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you've gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I'm not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it's like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they'd last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it's sugar or preservatives in it, I don't know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it's 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I'd much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a "I'm better than this person" way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there's a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone's worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I'll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it's weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They're mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it's train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what's going on. Most of you couldn't name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don't know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I'll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I'm white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I've ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don't seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as 'good' by default. There's a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I've been to.

If you know it was the most recent rsync command: just type !rsync.

Plastic on its own is not evil. The problem is single-use plastic. Tupperware lasts decades - I've got a few containers that mum bought 40+ years ago. Hard to imagine that she was younger than I am when she bought these containers, and they outlasted her.

No argument that we have a plastic problem as a society; but I don't really see Tupperware itself as a part of that problem.

It looks like there might be something wrong with Pictrs. I've refreshed the icon, but it isn't making a new thumbnail. I'm afraid I won't be able to look closer at this until tonight when I get home.

Good morning (It's still Morning in Perth so Nyer)!

Baku is right - the tram is in fact still there. What's happening here is your phone thinks it has the image cached, and so isn't loading it from the web server - instead displaying a local version of it. Only there's a problem with that local copy of the image. If you visit https://aussie.zone/c/melbourne in your browser you'll see that the tram is there.

What app do you have there? I thought I had all the main Android apps (Boost, Connect, Jerboa, Voyager and Sync), but none of them seem to match this screenshot. Whichever it is, you'll want to find a setting to clear the local cache. You can clear the cache from Android settings, but that will probably clear your account and make you log in again.

Bit drastic, but I suppose I could upload a new icon. Your phone would recognise that it doesn't have the new one in its cache and would load it. That would affect everyone though. Then again, maybe its time to upgrade from a W class to a Z class tram? 😀

This right here is one of the major reasons we left Melbourne. We were on our own there, without any family support.

To answer the question: One of us usually takes personal (carers) leave. Sometimes that isn't possible, so we ask grandparents or my sister to help us out (if safe/not contagious). What often happens is that one of us is sick also, having caught whatever pestilence the child(ren) introduced to the house anyway.

Don't send the kids to daycare if they're sick. You'll just be lumping this hassle on other families. I was always resentful of parents who did that.

I am typing this comment on a Pixel 7. I have had it for nearly two years and I have never experienced these symptoms.

The only app I can think of that doesn't load in under a second is Asphalt Legends - and that's because the app takes a week to load on anything.

I am very satisfied with this device, and doubt I'll be upgrading to Pixel 9. I have no reason to upgrade.

This makes more sense (expensive to run) than butterflies being stressed. Melbourne Zoo has a butterfly house as well, and it shows no sign of going away.

The butterflies themselves land on people and get photographed all the time. They don't seem to be shy at all.

I thought the tradition was that people were slapped across the face with a trout? Times have changed.

I never encountered them outside about a 500m radius of the zoo, but yes - they were very common in the zoo itself. In fact, I was surprised to find they were gone when I first visited the zoo after moving back to Perth about 7 years ago. I'm fairly certain they were still around in 2007.

The squirrels and the butterfly house being missing were the main things I remember from my first visit with the kids in 2017.

People always used to say that Perth never changes, but it really changed a great deal in those 10 years.

My grandfather was the Anzac. He served in both world wars. He passed away before I was born, though.

He was an absolute larrikin, there are loads of stories about him. He was famous in his hometown, is mentioned in its history etc.

I'd share highlights, but it'd probably doxx me. 😂

Hearing one of the kids on the hockey team introduce his great-grandma to my son. Totally wild. My great grandmother lived 1867-1952.

I didn't even really get the grandparent experience as a kid, let alone great-grandparents.

Rat Poker