AOC

If you were taught on a typewriter, you double space for life. It’s impossible to stop once ingrained.

idiot corporate managers who insist on the word ‘huddle’ instead of ‘meeting’. Ugh.

“Mokhiber, who was stepping down having reached retirement age…”

I am perhaps naively hopeful that the education curriculum has evolved since you were at school, although quite likely not. The genocide part is not a palatable discussion to most people and probably a little heavy for high school.

The British knew full-well what they were doing. The legal maneuvering necessary to dispossess the indigenous population is not unique to Australia’s colonial history - and the British had plenty of practice subjugating more aggressive native populations before they founded Sydney.

You’re quite right - the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the French were already aware of the Australian continent and must have made some contact with Aboriginal people. There were also informal outposts of whalers and seal-hunters that were probably established to some extent several years before British occupation.

There were many aboriginal people living on the continent when Cook and Banks dropped anchor in Sydney. The earliest accounts usually mention seeing smoke from campfires all along the coast. Most of the initial deaths were from disease. The British took smallpox cultures to Sydney with the first fleet in 1788 - within a year of their arrival in Sydney, disease killed between 50 and 90 percent of the indigenous population. Whether the British deliberately introduced smallpox to the aboriginal population is still debated, although I don’t know why else they would carry smallpox cultures on the first fleet - maybe they already knew how to vaccinate with it - but I would think you could get the cultures from an infected person were that the case. What other reason for carrying smallpox to Australia on the first fleet could there be, unless it was a biological weapon?

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/smallpox-epidemic

In Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) the resistance to the settlers moving in on aboriginal hunting grounds became so troublesome that the government set up a program to capture or exterminate all native people in 1830 - by which time the Aboriginal population had already been reduced by 90 percent since settlement - the remaining few thousand aboriginal people were extremely hostile to the encroaching settlements and they were raiding and burning houses, killing settlers.

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/the-black-line

As in all conflicts, there are nuances and factors that we can’t fully appreciate or empathize with from our current perspective, but what happened to the Aboriginal population during Australia’s settlement should be a cause for national introspection - this makes the referendum result last week seem so disappointing to those who would like to see a more open acknowledgement of the darker history of Australia’s founding - and greater efforts made to redress it.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, I didn’t say anything like that - go easy on those quote marks ;) - I’m just talking about Australian history, not the current events. I am cautious discussing history in this contentious thread because I’m really just interested in the discussion about indigenous Australians, who did resist occupation, to the extent they could. The colonial response to that became “The Frontier Wars”. Which was quasi-official genocide.

There are parallels in colonization throughout history, of course, which is presumably how this particular discussion came about, but today’s situation is obviously a vastly different time and place to early Australia and I’m not informed enough to opine on what’s happening now. I’m just here reading stuff on Lemmy.

Having said all this, indigenous Australians were living for thousands of years without any formalized state, political or military structure. No metal, wheels, writing or permanent dwellings. Had there been less difference in technology and logistical capabilities between aboriginal Australians and the British in the early 1800s, then Australia would probably look very different than it does today.

For the first years of Australia’s colonization, there was militant Aboriginal resistance - of course, given their technological disadvantages, it was not successful and the indigenous population were slaughtered at every turn.

The most well-known and feared of the early insurrectionists - a Bidjigal man named Pemulwuy - is today celebrated by white Australian culture - one of Sydney’s suburbs is named for him. The British were somewhat less charitable in 1802, when he was finally captured, shot and beheaded after many years of fighting against their presence in early Sydney.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_frontier_wars

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/pemulwuy

The mining lobby in Australia is behind everything.

https://www.mining-technology.com/features/in-numbers-how-mining-came-to-be-australias-most-profitable-sector/

Yeah but it would be a lot better with socialized healthcare and free education.

you’re right. I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing with you, sorry to come off that way. I just think that any money from the public treasury given to an entity associated with Elon Musk is going in the wrong direction.

I understand that having lousy internet service sucks. I’d just prefer if no part of public spending whatsoever was going to an individual as malodorous as Elon Musk, who already has abundantly more than his fair share.

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SpaceX becomes NASA’s second-largest vendor, surpassing Boeing

NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/spacex-becomes-nasas-second-largest-vendor-surpassing-boeing/

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are about to ruin stargazing for everyone

With the naked eye, stargazing from a dark-sky location allows you to see about 4,500 stars. From a typical suburban location, you can see about 400. Simulations show that from 52 degrees north (the latitude of both Saskatoon and London, U.K.) hundreds of Starlinks will be visible for a couple of hours after sunset and before sunrise (comparable to the number of visible stars) and dozens of these will be visible all night during the summer months.

https://theconversation.com/spacexs-starlink-satellites-are-about-to-ruin-stargazing-for-everyone-149516

Boondoggle

Friends don’t let friends support fascists.

you could hold up a mirror and they still wouldn’t recognize themselves in it.

You mean the ancient old farts who invented the internet? Yep. Couldn’t even use a mouse. No wonder the world wide web is so enshittified. Idiots.

Same shit, different century.

Ugh. The number of vacuous conversations endured/overheard in offices about sports. And the insufferable adages, analogies and idiotic motivational speeches comparing sports and wage slavery. Where’s my fucking stapler?

Oh by no means am I suggesting it was reasonable to do this. Musk would be a fucking nightmare as an employer. As a customer probably not much better but you know what they say about a fool and his money. This fool would be a great customer as long as you had a good lawyer to write the contracts.

I do suspect that some of the details of this story are somewhat embellished though, if only for the sheer joy of it, which I’m all for. It’s a great story. I don’t believe, for instance, that they could possibly have moved 5000 racks - or even 5000 servers - as I think the story was intimating. It sounds like they filled a few semis, which would be a small fraction of the systems. Maybe this was just the last of it that was too hard to move earlier. As for the rack configs at the other end, they would need power and services and an empty space if they are just rolling the stuff in. That’s only a few weeks of lead time in a properly run facility.

If they had their reservations set up correctly they wouldn’t need to change hostnames or even addresses, just wheel in the racks, brace and connect them. Ideally stuff would be shut down gracefully, but it shouldn’t really matter if they just pulled the plug. The software should be resilient enough to restart ok. Again, no idea if they had anything thought out, probably not, given the way it was done. But I have seen a big tech co move several rows this way when they basically couldn’t be bothered figuring out how to logically migrate them. Of course they weren’t doing it with a coked up CEO at 2am on Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t as difficult as you might imagine. But yeah not 5000 racks at once. Not even close to possible.

The Fediverse, fuck yeah!