To be fair they were against the entire world. At the time there was a generalised policy idea pushed by American economists that by enriching a nation it will naturally tend towards a stable democracy. The people most shouting against this were among the poorest and they were dismissed on similar grounds.

Buying Russian gas, investing in Russia, and China, and the middle east, all of this was seen as a way to enrich the people. With riches comes education, with education comes resistance against autocracy. That was the theory anyway.

And it was only a theory.

It's easy to point the finger at Merkel, if you ignore literally everyone else in the world. But the reality was this was effectively western world policy. Merkel's gas policy just happened to seal the largest monetary deal.

That it yadeyaddering a WHOLE lot of history. Europe wasn't so much a kept woman as much as she was married off unwillingly due to a war. Much of the continent was devastated not just by the way, but by the terms agreed to by the losing team. E.g. limiting the amount of armoury, the dismantling of industry, the resulting economic disaster that followed. A "beaten woman" may be a more apt description.

There's a reason LULUCF is included in climate change estimates around the world: deforestation and the use of land is a huge emission source. It's easy to be quick to dismiss Australia's efforts, but the reality is LULUCF's inclusion should be applauded because Australia had a fucking horrendous historical track record on deforestation, and despite still being very bad it's encouraging to see the rate reduce since 2008. Excluding it as a source of emissions doesn't help anyone even if the accounting can be a bit more questionable than direct emissions.

Because monopolies and oligopolies exist only to make the maximum amount of money, and the maximum amount of money is achieved by stuffing the global catalogue with global appeal. For that you still look to the USA movie industry, despite the fact they produce less movies per year than Australia on a per capita basis.

Australia seems to understand that a healthy market is maintained through regulation. Many Slashdotters on the other hand haven't seen what an economics textbook actually looks like. If they ever peaked into one, they'd realise what a horror show a truly free market is.

You're so clever showing the world your ignorance. Australia used to have one of the largest film industries in the world. Even now on a per capita basis they release more local movies than the USA does with an average of one movie every 3-4 days. The local series industry is also quite massive though America has them beat on a per capita basis there.

I can't completely fault your ignorance, you're probably a Netflix subscriber and only know what Netflix chooses to show you, and guess what, they will preference making movie deals for general world wide audiences rather than your local content.

Yeah, and whose fault is that? Right the USA which objected to one word in the entire accord: "Shall" instead of "Should". But sure, blame the French.
Anyway blame game aside the fault is your own. The court case fine had little to nothing to do with the Paris agreement as it was brought locally by a local court against the government related to an international agreement. The fine was always going to be symbolic because there was no legal mechanism to do something otherwise. Governments can't pass laws to fine themselves. Laws don't work like that.

Incidentally the French are part of the EU and the Paris Agreement was signed in such a way that the block reports emissions. The EU is ranked "Insufficient" against the Paris target. Canada is ranked "Highly Insufficient" along with China and India, and the USA "Critically Insufficient" sharing that category with what Trump would call "3rd world shitholes".

So I wouldn't go throwing shade at France in a story about Canada.

The problem is one of short term thinking and lack of strategy. Those who will invest money to deal with the problem are the ones that will make the most money in the future when the rest of the world plays catchup and comes asking the experts for assistance.

The future cost money but that investment pays dividends.

Yes... that is ... the problem... Literally the last few major AWS outages have been the result of a Route 53 fuckup.

In other news when there's a breakdown on the highway and you reroute traffic over local roads it will be slower.

You just called every company dumb. Either that or you just pointed out you have no idea how financial departments work. Massive excel spreadsheets are the mainstay of all large companies and even wall street. In many cases replacing a spreadsheet will require a myriad of interlinked tools, databases, calculation engines, scripts, all suddenly opaque to the end user who ultimately needs a data in a row that is able to be analysed. Most of the best data analytics tools are also designed around the ability to quickly ingest large spreadsheets and export them again.

You're just clueless as to how the world around you works.

No one is not accepting anything. The AI label is no different than "This product may contain Peanuts". What Sweeny wants to do is push AI rubbish while hiding it from people who actually care about it.

When you ask people to vote for change vs no change they will vote for the latter regardless of how good the former. The problem there is that you will perpetually maintain two systems.

People hate change. All change. Even if the new website was perfect people will vote for what they know.

Found the guy who doesn't own a mobile phone. No there's nothing fine about the BOM website. It flat out doesn't work on the device most people use to get weather information. Forget mobile site, it doesn't even format existing text to make it readable on a small screen.

The BOM website is truly a national embarrassment, especially in a country that is so often hit by floods, fires, and tropical storms.

One of the problems here is legacy. There's an insane volume of information on the BOM websites dumped in a very simple way. Many years of lack of an API has created all sorts of interesting ways people use and access the data.

Making a front end is easy. Making a front end that doesn't break someone's workflow is virtually impossible, even for sites much smaller.

Honestly their best bet would be a parallel system. Make and app, register the domain bom2.gov.au and set up shop there. Then monitor how the old site gets used to see what functionality is actually required.

That's precisely the thinking that can put you in the situation of massively overspending. You made an assumption without ever even looking at the requirements. Your project is doomed from the onset simply because of your approach or view of the situation.

Well the OP did correctly title his post...

You're another person who has fallen into the trap of thinking that taxes are somehow labelled and designated to a certain activity. They are not. Road taxes go to the treasury. Fuel taxes go to the treasury. Whether they get used for building new roads, maintaining existing roads, or making bombs to blow up roads, or to refurnish 10 Downing Street is completely irrelevant.

Before talking about cutting taxes maybe look at the budget deficit.