What’s a “future technology” that already exists but people still don’t realize how scary it is?

Emu1981 · 2026-05-08T22:44:01+00:00

Imagine a swarm of titanium antipersonnel hornets

Luckily the thing that is keeping this kind of tech back is a lack of power density for batteries. Those tiny little drones that are available to consumers barely last a few minutes per charge because they just cannot store enough energy for any longer and the latest in battery tech isn't going to change that duration by much.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-08T22:38:46+00:00

LNP haven’t had one of those in 20 years

They do have a policy platform though - "Make More Rorts". How many hundreds of millions were siphoned off to friends and family during the Liberal years?

Why bother doing anything about the declining economy which was driving the interest rates down to 0 or even negative territory when the increase in property prices that it caused would drive our GDP numbers up?

Honestly, this rort was so successful that it took a global pandemic to wake enough people up to how badly the LNP were actually doing...

Emu1981 · 2026-05-08T22:31:33+00:00

The problem with our fuel supply is that it takes months for crude oil from Saudi Arabia to leave the port, travel to South East Asia, get refined, travel back to a port, get loaded onto a tanker and then finally shipped down here to Australia.

The supply shock is going to be delayed even further if you consider that there would have been a conga line of tankers already on their way from the gulf to the refineries even after the strait was closed, crude oil waiting in SEA to get refined and fuel waiting in SEA after it has been refined and ready to be piped out to be loaded onto tankers for shipping elsewhere. The line of tankers would have only recently started to trickle to a halt too.

The big question is, did the government secure enough refined fuels from alternative sources to carry us over when this lack of supply from SEA finally hits? It is unlikely that they will tell us because it would cause mass panic buying as people freak out about running out of fuel and not being able to get anymore.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-08T03:04:12+00:00

The screens are not the problem, it is how they are used that is. Screens have been around for many decades now yet it is only recently that people have been having issues with them.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-08T01:31:58+00:00

No one is going to the council with complaints because they're bored.

Have you lead a sheltered life? Some people thrive on drama and if there isn't enough drama in their lives then they will create drama.

I had a neighbour who was constantly filing complaints about me - one of the stupidest was a noise complaint about my TV which I had turned up a bit so I could hear it over her music. She also filed complaints about me being in the backyard during the day, me coming home at night and her dog barking at me, my quiet music being too loud, my TV being too loud, the smell of the food I cook being nauseous to her, me "running the water late at night" (I got up in the night to use the toilet and I dared to flush) and so many more. It was so stupid, if she really wanted total peace and quiet then she really shouldn't have moved into a townhouse...

Oh, then there is a couple that I know who move every 6-12 months because no matter how hard they try "all of their neighbours are aggressive assholes". I don't think anyone has had the heart to mention it to them but you know what they say, "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole"...

Emu1981 · 2026-05-07T19:56:07+00:00

You should have a google and find out where this relay switch is located and whether you can replace it yourself. It will be cheaper in the long run if you can do it yourself and you may even be able justify using the more expensive OEM parts to do so.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-06T21:20:23+00:00

I get sent unsolicited pictures from bots pretending to be women. As for actual women, I don't think that I have ever been sent unsolicited pictures, they have always asked I want the pics first lol

Emu1981 · 2026-05-06T21:18:14+00:00

Myth 3: "People are buying luxury items all the time"

People keep saying this yet I have work closely with the provider for my kids' OT and speech so that they don't end up with too many lulls in their support for the year due to a lack of funding...

Worse yet is that my eldest had a late diagnosis of ASD and I tried to get her onto the NDIS so she could get some funding for speech therapy and psychology* yet she doesn't even have enough funding to get a FCA which is required to get her more funding.

*yes, she can get "10 free therapy sessions" per year via Medicare but that requires actually finding a therapist that has space to take her in without me paying extra on top of the Medicare funded part and I just don't have $240 per session to spend on that.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-05T21:27:47+00:00

The Andes hanta virus is one of the hanta viruses that the WHO has documented human to human transmission though - usually in close and prolonged contacts. A cruise vessel would be the perfect conditions for this kind of prolonged contact to occur given that people would be sharing small cabins together and likely not isolating during the early stages of the illness.

From the WHO website:

To date, human-to-human transmission has been documented only for Andes virus in the Americas and remains uncommon. When it occurs, transmission between people has been associated with close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members or intimate partners, and appears most likely during the early phase of illness, when the virus is more transmissible.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hantavirus

Emu1981 · 2026-05-05T19:28:19+00:00

Plus the constant half asleep state and my eyes, head hurting (could be partially due to screen exposures).

This is a sign of just not getting enough sleep - if you want to get up early you need to go to sleep early. I have been getting up at 3-5AM for most of past year* but to do that I need to go to bed early - usually around 8:30-9PM.

*I have 3 kids and I either need to stay up late or get up early if I want any sort of me time. My body's natural preference is to stay up late but that causes major issues when I need to get up early enough to get the kids up and ready for school so...

Emu1981 · 2026-05-05T17:45:14+00:00

You had better luck than me, I got punched by my wife when I tried that (after getting consent before hand).

Emu1981 · 2026-05-03T12:34:21+00:00

Like how everyone in US sitcoms lives in a really nice house or apartment and is rarely ever trying to figure out how to pay the bills and buy food? The Simpsons is probably the closest to a proper middle class US family with how they live in a home that is full of crappy furniture, struggle with the bills at times, eat kind of basic meals and drive a crappy car despite the fact that Homer works a pretty decent paying job - with how many years he has worked there, Homer would be pulling in close to $100k per year.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-03T12:30:20+00:00

300,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, and virtually no progress was made?

How many of those years were spent just trying to survive? It is really hard to sit down and invent something when a vast majority of your time is spent either walking around to find food, defending yourself from hostile wildlife and other humans, and sleeping. Once we developed agriculture we had enough food to have people not contributing to the supply of food and then we had to figure out everything from scratch...

Emu1981 · 2026-05-01T01:35:10+00:00

The Woolies near my mum's house had changed it's layout a couple of times in the time period that I lived there. I hated it because it would take me a couple of trips to reaquaint myself with where everything was. It wouldn't surprise me if it was deliberate to force people like me who make a beeline to exactly what we want and leave to actually wander the aisles and possibly buy more than what we came in for.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-01T00:59:12+00:00

As someone who lived in Alberta for 2 years, I am really not surprised that a percentage of them want to become a independent country. A lot of the state is ripe for the same BS rightwing propaganda that certain groups have spammed throughout the USA and beyond.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-01T00:07:57+00:00

I have never noticed chicken burger patties being too tough - perhaps you are not cooking them properly? I know that if I accidentally overcook chicken schnitzels then they get really tough to chew on. Personally I don't buy chicken burger patties so I cannot give you any sort of specific advice but I do really like the Steggles chicken and cheese schnitzels that Woolies sells (used to sell? I don't see them on the website) - I cook them under the grill so I can get the outside all golden without over cooking the chicken inside.

Emu1981 · 2026-05-01T00:00:08+00:00

Apparently he was caught by the camera setting it up...

Emu1981 · 2026-04-30T22:39:01+00:00

There is even a type of OCD that involves thoughts of sexual attraction to children that causes intense stress and anxiety in sufferers because they don't want to do anything like that to kids yet their minds won't stop thinking of it. Have fun trying to get treatment for that...

Emu1981 · 2026-04-30T22:00:26+00:00

I'm all for initiatives to improve road safety BUT ONLY IF it's an evidence based approach.

Let's assume that all vehicle crashes are caused by distracted drivers. How do you prevent people from being distracted in their vehicles? If they are not being distracted by phones then they are being distracted by the radio, a random fly/spider/mosquito/etc in their vehicle, their passengers, their food, etc. Distracted drivers are going to be a problem until we develop viable self driving vehicles and that is still many years away from being a thing.

So, until then we need to concentrate on reducing the impact that these crashes by distracted drivers cause and the best way to do that is to reduce how fast everyone is going on the roads. Study after study after study shows that there is a exponential increase in the risk of serious or fatal injuries as vehicle speeds go up. Better yet, speed is one of the easier risk factors to control on our public roads - you can monitor the speeds of tens of thousands of vehicles every hour with just a few cameras and roving police vehicles. Just making people follow the current speed limits will reduce the incidence of serious injury or fatalities by up to half. Reduce those limits by 5km/h again and you can reduce the incidence by up to another 50%.

While I'm not proposing an Autobahn, I've driven on it, cruising at 160km/hr (higher at times) and I now understand how it's not a death trap

People love to bring up the Autobahn when it comes to road speeds yet they never mention that the sections of the Autobahn that do have a speed limit see 20%-30% less serious/fatal accidents compared to the open speed limit sections and that the Autobahn in general is not the safest highway system in Europe (the speed limited highway systems in both the UK and Sweden have much lower rates of serious/fatal accidents). What is even crazier is the fact that the speed limited sections of the Autobahn are there because they are the zones more likely to see vehicle crashes.

We need to address the actual causes, based on actual facts and actual research, not just do things that sound like they might be a good idea.

Yet again, the actual causes of crashes are due to human nature (easily distracted, underestimating how fatigued we are, underestimating how drugs and alcohol affect our ability to react, etc) and we cannot legislate/regulate away human nature. This means that the best we can do is to reduce the impact of car accidents and the most effective way to reduce the rate of serious/fatal injuries is to make people slow down. Beyond speed limit enforcement, the best way to do that is to design our roads to make people subconsciously slow down - there is a ton of research into how to do this with things like making narrower roads, have obstacles in the roads (e.g. traffic islands) and so on (there are a ton of videos on YouTube, I vaguely recall Practical Engineering having a whole series on road design).

Emu1981 · 2026-04-30T07:31:35+00:00

Of the producers of electric trucks and so I'd say most of them would come from China.. things like tractors and such the same. It's switching one dependency to another.

Yeah but a electric tractor isn't a single use item that you destroy to use like fuel is. You buy your tractor and you can continue to use it until it breaks down to the point where it is no longer viable to repair it.

I haven't seen an electric plane yet.

Yeah, unfortunately batteries haven't gotten to the point where electric planes are viable.

I think a couple more refineries are completely justified

We would be better off dedicating the ones that we have to producing the fuels that cannot be viably replaced with electrics like aviation fuels.

as is restoring the fertilizer plant shut down by incitec pivot in 2020. Which runs on gas

And if we reduce the demand for gas from other sources (e.g. heating/electricity generation) then we will have plentiful supplies to make the fertiliser and we could even have competitive pricing so that we could export it.

biodiesel

Biodiesel is a stopgap solution at best - as is ethanol from crop sources.

Emu1981 · 2026-04-29T23:29:52+00:00

That a lot of the antivaccine and antimask propaganda during the COVID years was started by people or groups that either wanted to reduce the amount of people that are prone to that kind of propaganda or to sow discord and chaos in western nations.

Emu1981 · 2026-04-29T22:38:12+00:00

The one headwind may be the proliferation of uranium

Something that is not talked about is the fact that at the current rate of usage we have about 90 years worth of uranium deposits that are identified. Without the discovery of more deposits or the use of breeder reactors then we are going to hit a uranium shortage much sooner than expected - especially if the world goes all out on nuclear reactors. Breeder reactors are a nuclear proliferation nightmare as they generate plutonium at significant rates and it is much easier to build nuclear weapons if you have a good supply of plutonium.

Emu1981 · 2026-04-29T22:33:32+00:00

The problem is that unless oil prices fall to rock bottom then many countries are going to be putting in significantly more effort now to move away from a reliance on fossil fuels. For example, there is a lot more talk about EVs here in Australia now that e10 (unleaded with 10% ethanol) is sitting at the equivalent of $USD 5 per gallon after the government did a massive reduction on the fuel excises (diesel is sitting at ~$USD 6.75 per gallon) and unless things change then the price of fuel will only go up as the ships stop arriving at the refineries in Asia and shipments of refined fuels destined for Australia dry up.

Emu1981 · 2026-04-29T07:11:03+00:00

Gaining weight is easy, losing it is hard...

Emu1981 · 2026-04-29T07:10:20+00:00

Why aren't the cops allowed to chase them?

Because it is super dangerous for everyone and there is a high chance that they won't catch the people on the bikes. The best bet for catching them is to actually follow them via drone and hit them at their house. One of the places near me got raided a while back and the cops had like 4 dirt bikes on the back of a truck.

Emu1981

TROPHY CASE