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This may well have been posted before.. But in case

Staff culled to be replaced by AI or offshore should be paid 12 months salary on termination. The banks are making record profits, as are many other employers going down this path. When I was retrenched from Westpac, it was computerisation in branches which resulted in the closure of the processing centre I managed. Jobs were near impossible to find as other banks were doing likewise at the same time. One branch manager from my district who was retrenched because his branch was closed (the CBAL/BNSW merger resulted in two branches in the one suburb), spent all his money at the RSL, drinking himself to death.

Just as a postscript, there is no perspective alongside other political leaders in Australia applying here. It was a standalone act done by him and him only and should be viewed as such in my opinion. So you can yeah but what about ... (insert whoever here) all you like, you'll be talking to a post in my case.

Well Marty, in my opinion it's nothing to do with parties or one side or the other. I look at it purely from the point of view of the position of prime minister and the certain amount of decorum and basic manners the holder of that office should have. What he did has nothing to do with what party he's from. My concern about what happened is that any prime minister of Australia would behave like that. I'd be pounding on him exactly the same if he was a Liberal prime minister or from any other party. Sure, a lot of them have done some crazy things over the years, like Gorton falling asleep pissed on a plane, waking up and spewing on the floor. And like that other time he was full as a boot at a function and made some very crude remarks about an African diplomat's wife when he was introduced to her. The point is, Albo, through his job position shamed the office of prime minister of Australia. When he (or anyone else in the position) does something like that, I couldn't give two hoots what party they're from. Just because other PM's have done bad stuff doesn't lessen what he's done. I can't see how whataboutism should apply here. No amount of yeah but's will lessen it

You seem to have missed the bit where I actually agreed with you about it being a stupid thing that he did. But if you're going to simply pound on him without putting the incident into perspective alongside other political leaders in Australia, you're simply having a free kick yourself.

I am in a whatsapp group that was recently formed as an alumni of a team I worked with way back on 1994. Some people seem to have been more or less displaced by foreign remote workers. This was a post: As I recall, Telstra started this approach way back when I was working with that team or shortly after. (Apols for any offence and mods please feel free to remove if desired - I would not normally post such language... )

Give her time, she has the lips. The full MAGA transformation might take a while.

I've heard the term pothole used as a nickname for someone who's always in the road.

That is interesting. One of the Aboriginal blokes I worked with in the oilfields was the captain of the Dubbo A grade Rugby League team, and the other Aboriginal people I worked with were all League supporters and some were players.

It's smarter than me. I couldn't even understand your simple instruction.

Another Bangladeshi IT worker put out of work!

Over here, driving into potholes is classed as one of the joys of motoring.

While it is fantastic that AI can conjure female versions of male celebrities, and no doubt male versions of female celebrities (I wonder if they will come with man-boobs), this is a storm in a teacup. Last weekend, I decided to put the lesser reputed "vibe coding" AI between the titans to the test - ChatGPT (Claude is reputedly far better). I asked it how do I go about establishing an online travel agent aka the likes of expedia et al. It went through everything - the current and future known regulatory issues, as a start up the options to take with least investment and recommendations, and with a simple prompt, built me a functioning web site. And when I say simple, the prompt was: "Build a private interactive website for my travel disruption-support business concept. Let me model a booking containing flights, hotels, car hire, and other suppliers; vary who contracts with the customer and how payment and commission flow; and compare when the arrangement is likely to remain separate bookings versus become a package in the UK and Australia. Include clear assumptions and regulatory caveats, and make the tool useful for exploring an OTA (Online Travel Agent) model that owns disruption support without promising supplier-controlled outcomes. Validate the key interactions, host it privately using Sites, and give me the working deployed URL. Do not publish it publicly without my approval." Well, that wasn't quite my prompt as it corrected my prompt to clearly articulate what I meant. The only think it left off was some cybersecurity requirements I specifically wanted so I added them in a later prompt. It built the whole website, release pipelines, testing using different agents. You could see the agents interacting with each other - the test agent failing something, the development agent fixing it or in a couple of cases correctly stating why it was designed that way. In less than two hours, I had a functional website with all the features I asked for ready to test. I will use AI to generate Selenium scripts to test the website. Selenium is an open source website testing tool used throughout the industry. I imagine it will take 1/2 hour to generate all the requisite tests. The vast majority of my time will be validating everything, but that will be 1/10th of the time if that of what would be a normal development cycle. BTW, Chat also included the integration to the wholesalers and affiliate agents - full account management - and a separate UI for "employees" if they are ever needed; not just the look and feel of the site. I need to tweak a couple of user interface elements as it has built it with too much artistic licence, but in theory could release the lot in a few weeks - with no developer or QA resource.

Gilgandra doesn't have a Rugby team, but for some reason Gulargambone, up the road does have a lub and theGil boys play there. I agree that it is the Boarders who are the main players, but the local boys still do well. What is interesting is that the Aboriginal boys are not made welcome. That's why they play League.

I have seen her come up in my YT feed. I have to admit, her physical appearance lured me to click the vid. About 1 minute in, I couldn't see it getting any better from a very low base. Without being demeaning, as I largely consider myself one as well, her humour seems to be designed to be aimed at the lower end of the bogan spectrum. And for some reason, even supposedly well educated people like that simple stuff theydon't have to think about. Great comedy with wit and play on language requires someone to think a little bit. That is my theory.. Otherwise, how would Eddie McGuire have become so popular (even though he is not a comedian, he really didn't have that much talent more than calling footy - and even then, he was no Rex Hunt, Denis Commetti, Peter Landy, etc). Also, my theory is one learns to like stuff amongst what is on offer as that is all that one has to compare against. It's a bit like drinking beer or smoking.. Very few people actually liked it when they started.

ome, I guess it's a similar story in NSW where you live. In Queensland, and I guess NSW, Union is the private school code. It's also the predominant football code played in rural areas. The reason behind that is that a lot of kids in rural areas go to boarding school due to the lack of nearby public schools. Some kids in the bush would have to travel for hours each day to get to a public school, so boarding school is often the only viable option. They play Union at boarding school and bring it home with them when they leave school. Country Rugby Union is a fairly casual affair. Most of them do it just for the social life. It's often the only social life for young people in some places. In some country towns if you're not a player or supporter or somehow involved with the football scene, you're right out of the loop.

When I was in Melb in July, I was initially thinking "what potholes?" My first week was between Cantebury and Healesville both almost straight up Cantebury road, or when my brother drove, through some toll road built after I left that seemed a bit of a labyrinth way to go and didn't seem to save much time. I did a bit of driving around the old traps - mainly SE suburbs, down to Moorabbin airport and back via Clayton et al.. No real potholes to mention.. I don't even think I saw one. But when I drove up the Hume highway - OMG.. the potholes on the main route between Melbourne and Sydney and the Gateway to the central north of the state was littered with them.. and not small ones by any means. Thankfully the traffic was light and you could see them to avoid them, but all that was doing was putting pressure on the surface around them. The Goulburn Valley Highway (I think they are called something else these days) was not too bad comparatively, but when nearing Shepparton, it really got bad. I must have looked away at some sight for a second and thwack.. left front wheel into one and it was deep and long. I pulled over at the nearest safe place to inspect the damage. Thankfully nothing to note. I shudder to think what would have happened if I was on a bike - and it was only time before one was killed, which was near Ballarat, if I recall. Over here, we had a pothole crisis as well. However, there is a problem for the government in this case. If a pothole is reported and is beyond certain dimensions, they have a reasonable time to fix it or they are liable for damage to person or property. So, even though the model is similar (i.e. private road maintenance/construction companies), it got done. There was a cry out here, but that was because it al developed very quickly over prolong rain and storms. I did hit a new pothole with the bike coming home last week, but thankfully it was small enough for the suspension to stop a back compression injury. There are apps that will use the accelerometer to detect a bump, use the GPS to determine where and automatically file a pothole report. The other think I noticed about Vic roads from the potholes is the substrate looked quite sandy. Here the potholes seemed to have a more resilient substrate of hardcore. I image the sand is to provide flex and drainage. I am no engineer, but with hard core, you would get drainage but not so much flex. I have no idea, but the layers of the road just didn't quite look as robust as they could be.

You're on the right track Jerry. Union is played in 135 countries, League about 70.

ome, I'd put her in the pathetic class when it comes to would be comedians. What worked for Sir Les Patterson has definitely fallen flat on her. She seems to think playing a foul mouthed drunken idiot will get her over the line, but the act doesn't mask her basic lack of talent in the field. Only my opinion though, some people might find her act funny, but I don't know why.

As I mentioned earlier Marty, whataboutism and the argument that the other side is equally bad or worse doesn't cut it as an excuse. What any other politician has said or done has absolutely no relevance to Albo's blunder. I know you love a free kick on the opposition but it's got nothing to do with Albo's idiocy.

In most of Australia people drive on the left. In Victoria they drive on what's left.

How they fix potholes in our neck of the woods. Bitumen in the hole, but not level with the road. A bit of rain and they will fill with water and crumble again.

What evidence have you got for that claim:?

The left have turned to violence. Supporting Labor goes a long way to condoning that violence.

Here is a summary of a number of polls taken over the last month or so, pollsters named. Click to enlarge.