It sounds like the guy was costing more than he was paying. At that point excuses are made to either make him pay more or get rid of him.

I'd say take from someone that's done some wiring and has read the relevant Australian standards instead of kids guessing based on rumour. We've got a bit of a culture creeping in of people that don't dare take responsibility for anything (oddly we blame the US for it's origin but that's really something that's spread by rumour - who knows why it's really emerging), and they are the sort of people that wouldn't dare to learn how to do simple wiring and some go as far as thinking it's illegal for them to wire up the back shed. A common practice is to leave the last connection to mains to a licenced electrician.
So in other words, nothing to see here and looks like the same as in your bit of the world.

Getting back to the article, it's perfectly legal to make guns here but certain types (eg. automatics) can't get registered so are illegal to keep. The NSW police want to put this stupid plastic grenade that looks like a gun into that category. To get an idea of how insane this device is consider how many types of wood are stronger than the plastic used - so a carved wooden gun would be more effective than the "liberator" (stupid name chosen deliberately to get attention and force the issue of gun control and fuck things up for the hobby gun community and the 3D printer scene).

Look at it for a bit and you'll see it matches the visions those far better than what the libertarians want to deliver - an aristocracy run by whoever has the most money or guns - King Koch instead of King George.

Instead there's people that make real guns for a hobby. A guy I worked with made a long barreled smoothbore breechloader that took one inch calibre cartridges - it looked awesome but kicked like anything and had trouble hitting anything near a target. You know what you can do with your pathetic zip guns.

So instead you want to arm to overthrow what Washington, Franklin and Jefferson won for you?
That's why we see your "smash the state" libertarians as idiots.

Mad Max was fiction and the crime rate is still on the way down.

I imagine none of that would be legal in the prison colony down under

You imagine incorrectly, it's the same deal where "a licensed contractor has to bless the installation". In practice there's a lot of situations where nobody with an electrician's ticket has set foot in the door to even do that much. It's funny how you Americans have got completely the wrong idea about this place just because we make fun of your Libertarians.

It's not all that hard to get a licence.

The 1930s happened and easy interstate transport meant cross border criminal gangs taking advantage of uneven law enforcement and juristictions. Now it's today, and for some reason people have forgotten that lesson and think it's unlikely that criminals will drive for an hour to get a gun.

For just that reason I bought a slingshot.

Makes sense - when my father was growing up during WWII he was only allowed one bullet per rabbit because it was hard to get ammo. Those rabbits were traded for other stuff and everyone managed to get by.
To find out how to survive true horror instead of just shortages you could talk to some old Koreans - from what I heard from one Korean immigrant a couple of years of stockpiled food wouldn't have helped as much as working with neighbours to get every last drop out of everything available.

Hunger makes almost any food taste good.

That reminds me of some words from a polar expedition: "this stuff is wonderful, why were we feeding it to the dogs?"

There's been a lot of progress with organic materials and it's almost at the point of printing organs. Livers are at the top of the list.

Different causes vary, but I managed to get over my sleep apnea after about five years on the machine by a combination of propping my head up at an angle with a wedge shaped pillow and losing a bit of weight. Sleeping on a folded futon with my legs hanging over the end and my head hard up against a wall at an angle (cusioned with a normal pillow) also did the trick since I couldn't roll in my sleep.

and the government probably knows since they can look at my credit card purchases without a warrant

If it gets to full on depression they'll be far too busy worrying about other stuff to care about your purchases - so fairly safe there.

One thing that's amazed me here is nobody has written anything about having around six months worth of rice and other dry food in the house as a normal situation. It's vastly cheaper in bulk, is easy to get in bulk and lasts years. A Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian etc food market would be a survivalist's dream - that's where I started getting all my camping food for long trips and now a lot of food in general (it's not all imports). Some of the Indian heat and serve curries in a plastic pouch taste better than the watered down for sensitive taste stuff in Indian restraunts - but you have to take note that they are made for consumption by Indians so when the say "hot" in terms of chilli they mean "very hot". Forget your MRE meals at twice the price when you can have Punjabi Chole after boiling the packet for three minutes.

Bankers typically know fuckall about the industries they are financing so can't tell something with no hope from a sure success. All they can do is look at similar ventures from the past and hope, which means people doing something new can usually forget about bankers. Venture capitalists on the other hand sometimes know a bit about a specific industry, but they've been rare since before 2008.

The funny thing is I was doing a bit of R&D work on remaining life extension of high temperature and pressure pipework during those power station jobs. Hard schedule limits with daily penalties that exceed your entire budget (thousands of MW/h are not cheap and neither is an entire day's worth of production from an oil refinery) just mean you have to limit the design changes to fit.