As someone who voted yes in a very no place, I was actually a bit frustrated by how poorly the yes campaign communicated with people - right up until those pamphlets came out, most of the people I was talking to had never heard of the referendum, and only after that most people started looking up what it was about.

I would argue the no campaign had a huge head start on the yes campaign, there was negative speculation going on a year before the referendum, and it gradually snowballed into misinformation before the yes campaign even started. So the stuff people found was all negative. For the people I was talking to, I was the only person they knew who thought a voice was a good idea.

One of the people I was talking to mentioned how they hadn’t even encountered a single ad promoting a voice to parliament until a week before, and it didn’t bother talking about how it would work or why it’s a good idea. They did eventually vote yes, but only after I talked to them about what I understood about it. In fact, my experience is that most people leaning no were willing to vote yes after hearing enough about it.

I think a huge issue is that the yes campaign either failed to reach here somehow, or just relied on the media and self-research for informing people. And the media was very insistent on platforming no campaigners while almost never platforming yes.

One of the most confusing things to hear was how people in the capital cities had heard so much about it when people here had barely heard of it. Some people missed the referendum date entirely.

To clarify, Lidia claimed that both the racist no campaign and the yes campaign drowned out the progressive no campaign.

Lidia Thorpe has also believed before the vote that a No vote would prove Australia is racist, just as a yes vote would prove Australia is racist. Given that, I think Lidia would agree with the author here.

Admittedly this is where the meme kind of breaks down.

I forgot about that, oops.

Historically, yes, Ubuntu has put in the most effort into being the most user-friendly, most easy-to-use distro.

However, I would argue that is not really the case anymore because as other distros (especially Mint and Pop!) have arisen for a user-friendly experience, Canonical has gradually abandoned this over the past few years in favour of being more server focused. Most of the innovation for user-friendly design just isn’t coming from Canonical anymore.

The biggest argument for Ubuntu for beginners is that there are more resources such as tutorials for it - mostly momentum.

BusyBox

Ah, I must have misunderstood, sorry. Rereading your first reply to TinyBreak I see that now.

While I agree that increased bandwidth is crucial, I’m not so sure about leaving so many people and remote areas cut off over this. Especially as each generation of technology has shorter range (and therefore more expensive to service). Each generation of technology will have more people cut off, and I think there are implicit fears that one day, it will be them.

Maybe those fears are wrong, but it seems you’re just as dismissive of these fears as people that dismiss future benefits from greater bandwidth.

Also, I don’t know about looking to the US for inspiration, they also have a very large digital divide, largely based on the wealth of the local area.

I’d argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.

Although I agree that other forms of transport should be considered, I genuinely can’t figure out how either a conveyor belt or autonomous carts could be better than a freight train. Both for battling decreasing manpower and for intercity freight transport.

I think both proposed ideas are better for short-distance transport, with conveyor belts better for a single direction of movement in indoor (or as the article mentions, tunnel) conditions (must be kept clear of debris in order to run, more so than track which only needs to be cleared before the next train) and autonomous carts better for transporting small packages between many origins and destinations (eg. a warehouse or maybe delivery service).

Conveyor belts might also require much more maintenance, as moving parts would be all along the length of the belt.

They’ve been working on GIMP 3.0 for over a decade, which has non-destructive editing, as well as an upgrade to the UI toolkit (although actual UI changes are still to-do). They don’t want it to be this way, development has just been insanely slow. Mostly due to lack of developers and donations, although that has been changing recently.

They planned to have GIMP 3.0 out by May, but with so many delays it might be a few months yet.

I think that’s more what the people excited about AI think it it is, many of the people who fear it don’t really fear its intelligence as much as how it’s abused. Personally, I don’t even like the machine learning algorithms in social media, despite them being a thing for a long time now.

I think it should be clarified that GIMP’s structure isn’t able to make use of donations to GIMP as a single entity. Edit: or at least wasn’t, I hear they can now.

I agree that Krita is more promising though, I switched to Krita years ago and have never looked back.

From what I understand, GIMP fell behind because it refused corporate donations while Krita accepted them. This lead to GIMP reducing in scope as the 1-3 part-time* developers (at least when I last really looked into it) realised they’d never catch up, leading to people donating less as they weren’t satisfied with GIMP’s simultaneous underpromising and underdelivering. Meanwhile Krita managed to receive enough money to hire a team of full time developers for several years, leading to better software, to more donations. It’s like the poverty trap, but with software.

• Edit: part-time isn’t the right word, more like casual

I guess we just have different perspectives on how things currently are then, I view it as already the case that structural discrimination is at play, and that it’s very embedded into Australian government and society.

A referendum isn’t needed to consult with people.

While that does seem to be mostly correct, I think it’s also complicated. As I’m sure many people have said, previous consultative bodies have been abolished several times, and could only consult with the executive branch. This constitutional change will also enable representations be made to the legislative branch.

Could they have just tried to do so without a constitutional change? Probably. Yet they aren’t without reason for putting it in the constitution either.

And people shouldn’t be included/excluded from consultation just because of their race/culture/heritage.

People are right now, but perhaps not in ways explicitly stated by law. If we were a new country with a clean slate I might think this voice wouldn’t be necessary. Not only do we have a history of excluding people based on race, but I can see in the community that we still do so, and that will continue unless put a stop to.

I understand the unease of putting a specifically indigenous voice in there, but from what I understand even if parliament gives it the most power possible, it will still be less powerful than a traditional lobby group, only able to table discussions and research. Discussions I think should have happened decades ago.

It’s not a perfect solution, I don’t think I’ve met anybody who truly thinks that. But my opinion is that it would provide overall more help than harm, especially considering that I think the government’s inability to listen is structural, and not just individual fault.

I believe that any time the government is going to introduce or change laws, they should consult with the people those laws will affect. Regardless of the race or culture of those people.

This is the entire reason why this is being debated. The government has a horrendous track record of ignoring indigenous people on matters that affect them. Even to this day, and it appears to be a structural issue. Let us not forget what the Australian government has done in the name of “helping” them, resulting in the Stolen Generations, among other things.

One thing that I didn’t expect myself to miss is Zathura. Everything else always seems cluttered by comparison.

Imagines is probably a better word, not all fiction is fantasy.