Zagorath

Actual digital communication over power lines

Is a real thing, though not at all in the way the parent comment seems to be discussing it.

Ah, that explains it.

Oh yeah, it’s 100% fair. Just not what I expected from what seems to be an American author.

Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting Queensland to get called out in this post.

You definitely don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) go as far as Japan, but even in places with abundant space like America or Australia, there are huge advantages to keeping homes relatively smaller in terms of land-area per-person. (Floor space can stay higher by: building multi-storey row houses, building apartments, reducing private lawn areas, etc.)

Keeping things less spread out is much, much more affordable. Fewer roads to maintain, fewer ks of electricity, sewerage, and Internet infrastructure, etc. It makes public transport run much more efficiently, which reduces the cost of operating it, which means you get more of it. This makes it a better service, which means people use it, which takes cars off the road, which makes congestion less of a problem, which makes getting around faster. Ditto the cost and usability of bike paths and nice pedestrian footpaths, which become more usable as a result of things being literally closer together, resulting in a store you might once have had to drive to get to being possible to walk to now. This in turn makes things more affordable for individuals, because they might not need to pay the huge prices associated with cars (buying the thing, maintenance, insurance, petrol) if they can get around by bike and public transport. Or at the very least, a family can drop down from 2 or 3 cars to just 1 being enough.

It makes housing more affordable, since instead of paying for 300 sq m of land per 100 sq m of floor space, you might now be paying 50 sq m or less of land per 100 sq m floor space. And because things a denser, your commute can drop from potentially over an hour to something reasonable like less than 30 minutes.

Catbox should honestly really be avoided. It’s blocked for such a huge range of users unless they use either a non-default DNS or a VPN (depending on which specific block they’re behind).

This includes all users in Australia, the UK, and Ireland. American customers of Comcast, Verizon, and Spectrum and Canadian customers of Rogers. And any user who has their DNS set to the popular alternate DNS of Quad 9.

If uploading photographs in particular, it also does not remove EXIF or other metadata, which may expose GPS location or other potentially sensitive information to everyone.

Have you been trying to gather more supporters to join you in this crusade? One person speaking for 3 minutes every week is, I suspect, less likely to be successful than 10 people doing the same, even if it’s not all of them every week. (Though 10 people turning up consistently, and growing in numbers, is even better, obviously.)

everybody

I think you mean “precisely nobody who was actually paying attention and had any idea what they were talking about”. Unfortunately, too many politicians were not in that group.

In Brisbane, Australia, we’re buying funny-looking buses with wheel covers and calling it a “metro”.

Neither of the above. The question mark indicates a rising tone (common in informal speech), as a way to reduce intensity and specifically not be a dick about it. It’s a polite and friendly way of letting you know you made a fairly easy-to-understand mistake (it’s basically a mondegreen), and what the correct phrase is.

chock it up

Chalk it up?

Does anyone other than the author and publisher get paid on a per-unit-sold basis?

What’s MAM, and in what ways is it better than Anna’s Archive?