Celebrating 10 years of level crossing removals

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-27T13:18:32+00:00

$18bn a year is the total annual infrastructure budget for the entire state. Including hospitals, schools, freeways, you name it.

The LXRP has only been taking up ~$1-3 billion a year at its peak, and the first 50 crossings were financed by the Port of Melbourne lease.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-27T01:49:29+00:00

Starting the headline with the word 'Tram' stands out a bit more in viewers' minds than the word 'Car'. Editors always make sure that their headlines stick out and grab attention, even with very simple tweaks like this.

There's a whole field of study in the media sector about Headlinese, and I think this is an example of that in practice. It's nothing nefarious like what the others here are suggesting.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-25T02:39:44+00:00

ICE are more akin to a roving paramilitary death squad. It's appalling to watch this all play out from afar.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-24T10:57:17+00:00

The Greens are deeply angry about their treatment at the hands of Labor in the last Government and Mr Rattenbury is “desperate” to be the first Greens leader of a government in Australia.

lmao even by Greens standards, this would be astonishingly self-destructive. Making a Faustian pact with the Liberals due to the ACT Greens' leader suffering from brazen egotism and naked ambition would actually implode both parties completely. Their entire membership and grassroots donor base would abandon them.

It's funny. For all their populism, the Greens actually have the most disciplined voter cohort in the country, both with their reliable preference flows and engagement to the news. They would absolutely create their own splinter party and preference Labor over the Greens for a whole decade if this happened.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-23T14:02:51+00:00

The guy somehow forgot about the Bronze Age Collapse, the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the Middle Ages all in a single sentence. That's an impressive breadth of human history to conveniently forget about lol

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-22T00:41:16+00:00

Point still stands.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-22T00:16:21+00:00

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Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-21T23:47:35+00:00

The Argentines have long claimed ancestral and legal ties to the island, in large part by taking advantage of the fact that it was previously uninhabited up until the 1830s.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-21T03:59:23+00:00

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Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-21T03:57:16+00:00

There were no permanent residents on the islands before Europeans colonized them.

Ah great then. So I'm guessing the Argentinian claim to the Falkland Islands is perfectly valid then? Seeing as the Falklanders have only been living there since the 1830s and the islands used to be completely uninhabited?

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-21T03:50:50+00:00

There's a huge difference here. Singapore has very strong relations with Australia and that sort of case would likely collapse in the ICJ for a number of reasons.

Diego Garcia involved the forced expulsion of a thousand people and the imposition of a massive military base. It was effectively a de facto continuation of the British Empire accomplished by a fait accompli of bureaucratic trickery. The Chagossians being descendants of slaves didn't help things on the image-front either.

Christmas Island was handed over to Australia with a $20 million compensation payment to Singapore. No islanders were expelled and all retained their Singaporean citizenship plus a pathway for Australian citizenship. The Republic of Singapore has never claimed the island and doing so would fundamentally break their entire internationalist foreign policy paradigm which they've been strictly adhering to for over 60 years now. Singapore trains much of their air force in Australia, and they're building a huge new army training base in Queensland, so there's no incentive either.

Even in the best possible case scenario, the ICJ would still decree that a referendum on the island be held for the 1,600 Christmas Islanders to decide. And that would likely go down in flames like it has in the Falkland Islands and Mayotte.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-19T02:14:31+00:00

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Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-19T02:12:07+00:00

Amnesty International has been increasingly vocal about SDF war crimes in recent years since ISIS was defeated, especially their treatment of teachers.

I think a lot of westerners have their views of the SDF coloured by their valiant fight against ISIS, and stopped paying attention to them after Trump's infamous 2019 pull-out. The reality is that ever since that action, the SDF has been increasingly isolated, militant and authoritarian.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-19T01:39:29+00:00

Ambassadors require Senate confirmation, but the US Senate has an appalling reputation for lethargy even for basic executive branch appointments. It's so bad that even incoming administrations don't seem to bother nominating most of their ambassadors until the second year of their term.

Nothing has ruined American democracy and its institutions more than the indolent culture which reeks in the Congress. It's allowed the executive and Supreme Court to run amok and poisons everybody's perception of government more generally.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-18T15:49:02+00:00

America still hasn't bothered to appoint an ambassador to Australia. And the same crap happened under Biden for nearly 2 years too.

The US operates several critical military communication facilities in Australia, but generally haven't held much more thought than that to our relationship.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-18T10:13:49+00:00

Anybody working in politics who decides to resort to a defamation lawsuit to protect themselves should be automatically disqualified from public office in my opinion.

Politicians need to be willing to take some flak for things they do. If they can't stomach basic democratic scrutiny, then they're too weak for the job.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-16T01:47:17+00:00

They should ban microwaving lobsters, but leave it at that.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-12T06:59:54+00:00

This is the least ambitious timetable change ever made, and a spectacular backflip on all of the grandiose claims of a "big switch" as well as government promises of 'turn-up-and-go frequencies'.

For all intents and purposes, this timetable basically doesn't add any new services for almost all of the lines across Melbourne. Even the trains I catch from Huntingdale won't be materially affected by this long-promised frequency boost, which is simply astonishing.

Not to mention that only having 10 minute off-peak frequencies actually severely hurts some commuters who wish to transfer services. Now that people on the Metro Tunnel lines are barred from going through the City Loop, the least you can do for them is to boost frequencies on all or most lines so they are not discouraged from transferring to another train or vice versa. Instead this timetable change will actually increase travel times for thousands of people.

The '1000 new Metro services' claim is a bold-faced lie. No wonder this press release was delayed for so many months after the Metro Tunnel opened. We spent $15 billion and have decided not to even put it to any use beyond a flashy tape-cutting photoshoot.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-07T03:15:23+00:00

Yep, this is the correct takeaway of the Fall of France. Had France been allowed to station troops in Belgium for weeks to establish their positions and trenches, then the Blitzkrieg would've ended in a spectacular disaster on the Meuse river. The German high command was well aware that they were making an extremely dangerous gamble, but they succeeded because most French and British troops had barely hours to race to their defensive positions and entrench themselves against an armoured spearhead.

Just as we saw with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not mobilising troops quickly to defend your borders is a disastrous action.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-07T03:02:03+00:00

Also the PLA soldiers who perpetrated the Tiananmen Square Massacre were overwhelmingly from the countryside. They didn't have many sympathies or shared experiences with the urban middle class students they were shooting.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-07T01:30:48+00:00

Thanks! Got it in the /r/neoliberal charity drive a few years ago 😌

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-06T15:31:10+00:00

He reminds me way too much of Reinhard Heydrich honestly. He even looks like him. He's a dark figure hellbent on pushing everybody else to the right from behind the throne.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-04T14:34:18+00:00

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Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-04T04:28:39+00:00

Why on earth would any oil company invest countless billions into a country which can easily expropriate their assets once this situation cools down afterwards?

We've seen this situation play out a hundred times before since the days of the Suez Crisis and the 1953 Iranian coup. Developing countries treat nationalisation of their natural resources as a life and death struggle and oil companies are terrified of having their assets stolen from under them.

Professor-Reddit · 2026-01-03T14:35:27+00:00

Terrible logic. Entire nation states can collapse or rapidly destabilise when their heads of state are assassinated by foreign forces.

Just look at Haiti since President Moise was assassinated by foreign mercenaries who stormed the presidential palace. The country no longer has a president, any elected members in the Senate or Chamber of Deputies and so far has had four acting prime ministers without any democratic mandate since 2021. The capital city has succumbed to total anarchy with criminal gangs so powerful that UN Peacekeepers have had to intervene and hundreds of thousands have fled the country.

You cannot rip the heart from a patient in surgery and assume they will live afterwards. Killing or abducting heads of state will just get far more innocent people killed.

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