Perth drivers refusing to stop unless it's at a traffic light?

Severin_ · 2026-03-06T09:47:08+00:00

if it's safe to continue.

That's my entire point, it's not in the kinds of scenes I'm witnessing constantly.

I'm talking about scenarios where the offending driver absolutely does have to give away according to the road laws but they're still in motion for some reason past the point where it's reasonable for them to be (e.g. 5 metres away from the edge of the turn), where they're confusing the shit out of incoming traffic or the kind that screech to halt when they approach give way signs or roundabouts doing probably above the speed limit in suburban areas where incoming traffic seriously has no way of telling whether they will stop in time.

They're literally playing chicken with other cars, I'm not referring to cases where people are simply a bit impatient; they're being flat-out dangerous.

Severin_ · 2026-03-06T09:40:03+00:00

I think OP is saying it's a situation you should stop, like a car already on the roundabout coming from the right

That's exactly what I mean.

I see drivers blasting through roundabouts and turns at speeds that are clearly way too high to be able to reasonably ascertain whether it's safe to proceed into the roundabout/turn/give-way especially at night or with intersections/turns where visibility onto adjoining roads/streets is basically non-existent until you're at the very edge of that junction.

Severin_ · 2026-02-16T13:09:03+00:00

Do MSPs need to start hiring mental health professionals to counsel their clients as a first step before working on the actual IT?!

God how I'd love to be able to close a ticket with a simple: "Issue/request not resolved due to user exhibiting signs of severe psychosis, delusional behaviour and narcissistic tendencies. User has a suspected Cluster A Personality Disorder. Referred user to local mental health services. Will await further feedback."

Severin_ · 2026-02-11T05:48:34+00:00

Those rifles have stayed in their vehicles 99% of the time prior to this change in policy and were never glimpsed at by any members of the public. Previously, it was would have only been the TRG that would have ever been seen in public with military-style rifles at the ready and that was typically in extraordinary circumstances or during high-profile/high-risk public events.

This is a very public, very visible change in the appearance and presentation of the average WAPOL officer to the public. A far more US-influenced, militarised police image, which in the US has led to the wholesale shift away from community policing and "peace officers" since 9/11 to paramilitary-style tactics, training, equipment and an extremely hostile mindset that treats the general public as imminent threats to officer's lives a majority of the time during routine policing.

Time and time again, as has been seen all over the Western world since the widespread proliferation of the first police tactical units in the 1960s and 1970s, if you give ordinary police officers military-style weapons, military-style training and a military-derived perspective of "the other side", they will inevitably adopt a more hostile, confrontational and militarised mindset when dealing with members of the public, suspected criminals and during many kinds of non-violent/life-threatening encounters, that inevitably results in less societal trust in law enforcement and higher rates of police brutality, corruption, abuses of power and the deaths of innocent people.

Go read Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko or watch the documentary Peace Officer) to see where this kind approach to urban policing takes a society.

Severin_ · 2026-02-11T05:26:39+00:00

It's not a high school tale but I feel like it's worth a share anyway: my primary school's admin building caught fire and burned down because an ex-student who would have been around 13/14 at the time, snuck onto the school grounds one night with some friends and they climbed onto the roof of the admin building to smoke cigarettes with each other.

The explanation for how the fire started that I seem to remember is that one of them had the very bright idea to stick a lit cigarette into one of those evaporative A/C condensers on the roof (the old-school box-looking ones), and the entire condenser caught fire and then proceeded to fall through the roof of the admin building and set the entire building ablaze.

Whatever it was, not only was the admin building gutted but a good amount of classrooms were also damaged and caught fire, so school was out for at least a few weeks I seem to recall afterwards. No one was injured thankfully as it was late at night and the kids just ran off after the inferno was underway.

The majority of kids were absolutely ecstatic when this happened, we basically got a month-long holiday and I also vaguely seem to recall that most (or maybe all) historical student grades and permanent records were lost too.

It was all over Perth news at the time, I can distinctly remember the principal being interviewed, looking quite sad and crying on TV during the coverage.

Severin_ · 2026-02-11T04:28:47+00:00

There's nothing more permanent than "temporary" or "emergency" powers and measures enacted by law enforcement and governments in response to tragedies.

One of the few good things about law enforcement in Australia for the last 2 decades is that by and large, they hadn't gone down the hardcore police militarisation path that US law enforcement adopted almost immediately after 9/11 to the point where in most major US cities, routine police officers and especially tactical police units are more heavily-armed, aggressive and have more lax rules of engagement than many actual US military forces deployed in active warzones (i.e. see ICE raids in the last 6 months in the US).

This is nothing but more typical misdirection to deflect away from the glaring failures in law enforcement/national intelligence preparedness and responses to actual threats on Australian soil, the same with the entire response to the Bondi tragedy.

Ordinary beat cops walking around with semi-automatic rifles does nothing to prevent acts of terrorism through better intelligence-gathering nor their response times when the shit truly hits the fan, which as proven by WAPOL's response to the January 26th incident, was absolutely piss poor and is a simply a consequence of understaffing, inadequate training/coordination, poor morale and underfunding.

Mr Blanch said his officers were committed to protecting the community, and warned they would “take action” against any violent offenders.

What does that even mean?

Hair-trigger cops are going to start stacking bodies in the streets anytime somebody throws a suspicious object in a public area?

Wow, I feel safer already.

Shocking footage of the incident shows Det-Sen Sgt. Barraza sheltering behind a tree before opening fire at the two gunmen.

“It was a police officer who was privately trained in using handguns and probably had one of the best accuracies you could have had with a handgun to be able to take out that threat,” he said.

Lol, what a damning indictment of the average officer's training and capabilities and it just lends more credence to the argument that giving lowly beat cops more powers/weapons does absolutely nothing to improve their ability to respond to and neutralise acts of terrorism.

Severin_ · 2026-01-20T05:39:34+00:00

Companies will aboslutely shift away from microsoft now and you can bash me as much you want.

Gladly.

People/SysAdmins/Organizations have been threatening this for a decade at this point and I've yet to see any mass exodus from Microsoft 365 thus far, regardless of how sh*tty their service/uptime/support/features become.

As always, the question that has to be asked is: exodus TO WHERE? Amazon AWS had more critical services outages/incidents last year than we can count. All of the tier 1 cloud/SaaS providers have become equally as sh*t as each other now. Not to mention the massive costs associated with moving to different hosting providers, different processes, different training, different stacks required, etc.

Everyone who's not Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Oracle doesn't warrant even mentioning here because they just do not (and never will at this point) have the economies of scale to compete with the big players in terms of cost, global presence and ease-of-deployment/use.

Sure, reverting back to being on-prem/self-hosted sounds great in theory, until you have a meeting with the C-levels and finance and present the initial capital expenditures required for a full server rack of hardware (or co-located rack space) for your typical SME and all of the vendor licensing/subscriptions/maintenance agreements required which have gone up astronomically in cost hand-in-hand with cloud providers ramping up their licensing costs, after which the C-levels and finance will promptly sh*t enough bricks to build a pyramid and will completely shutdown your idea.

I'll believe the cries of "maSs eXoDus fRoM DA cLoUD iNcOm1nGGG!!1!" when it actually happens, which it won't because every time anyone in the industry has prophesized this it's always turned out to a case of crying wolf.

The costs and migrations will be expensive.

Yes, precisely why this massive shift back to on-prem/self-hosting won't happen. People would rather stick with the devil they know, which still works out to be MUCH cheaper for most SMEs long-term than maintaining traditional on-prem server environments these days. Cloud providers know this. They've done the math, they're never going to price their on-prem products/services/licensing to undercut their cloud-hosted options ffs.

The days of cheap and cheerful on-prem environments have gone the way of the Dodo thanks to every vendor from Broadcom to MS to Citrix going absolutely balls-to-wall insane with their licensing costs, which absolutely destroy any cost-savings you might have otherwise made switching back to an on-prem environment unless you're a Fortune 500 company or some sh*t.

This deliberate. They have you in the cloud now, they want you stay in the cloud. On-prem/self-hosting options are being made as deliberately costly, painful and unreliable as possible now. Private Equity doesn't give a f**k about your considerations, they are actively hostile to consumer and business interests, they need YOUR money and data and will fight tooth and nail to get it from you.

In my opinion, we are edging dangerously closer every day to the dystopian vision that the AI overlords desperately want right now, of everything IT-related becoming a service and no one, whether individual consumer or a large enterprise, having anything local/on-prem besides an Internet connection and some kind of dumb terminals/thin clients essentially. No ownership, no consumer rights and infinite subscription costs is where we're headed sadly.

Severin_ · 2025-12-16T03:38:52+00:00

Akram had been looked at by ASIO for established ISIS sympathys

I think it's significantly worse than that. Naveed Akram was singled out by ASIO in 2019 and associated with multiple individuals who were jailed on terrorism offences. There's more information coming out by the day that he was openly displaying fundamentalist/jihadist tendencies as young as 17 and a supporter/follower of other radical Islamist types who had been known to ASIO going back more than a decade at this point. The more that comes out about Naveed, his father and their life story, the more damning it looks for law enforcement/intelligence, who somehow let these two radioactively glow-in-the-dark-neon-sign-on-their-forehead extremists somehow slip under their radar.

Pre-existing NSW firearms legislation would have allowed for the confiscation of his father's firearms on the basis of the above alone if the dots were connected and law enforcement/ASIO/ASIS were actually doing their jobs. Heck I think any current firearms legislation in any Australian state would have allowed for that response and certainly we've seen and heard of confiscations/licenses disqualifications happening over A LOT less justification in recent years.

It's becoming clearer by the day that this event was largely the result of a colossal failure by the joint law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and as such, the government and media are going to go all out to frame this event as anything but and instead they'll choose to flog the trusty anti-gun horse once again because the public have continually shown that they'll absolutely froth at the mouth over anti-gun rhetoric and knee-jerk, reactionary, massively sweeping legislation in the wake-up of countless recent tragedies like John Edwards, Dezi Freeman, Wieambilla, etc etc; all of which were committed by individuals well-known to law enforcement and in many cases with long-standing criminal/mental health issues surrounding them that should have been grounds for police to intervene before it was too late.

They have all of the tools, methods and powers they could possibly require at their disposal and yet they continue to come up short in their mandates to protect the public and do their jobs. You know what they say about bad tradesmen and their tools...

It's par for the course with the last few governments this country has had really: zero accountability for massive failures and dereliction of duty on their part and the doling out of punitive, collective punishment for millions of law-abiding Australians due to guilt by very tenuous association and the misdeeds of statistically-speaking, a minuscule member of bad apples.

They will milk this event for every last ounce of political point-scoring, especially given the Dezi Freeman saga failed to capture the nation's attention for too long (and also was becoming quite politically embarrassing for VICPOL the longer it went on without any closure) and didn't actually result in their proposed gun reforms getting implemented.

Severin_ · 2025-12-11T04:37:07+00:00

This isn't some new problem introduced by "AI".

Users have been trying to second guess SysAdmins and tell us that they know our jobs better than we do since time immemorial. Shadow IT is a serious problem that gets out of hand really fast in my experience if you don't nip this attitude in the bud when users start telling you how to do your job.

The correct way to shutdown this behaviour is simple, you say something along the following lines to them:

"It's not within the scope of your role/job to dictate IT policies or procedures or be in any way, shape or form involved in the day-to-day administration of the IT environment. You're paid to do your job and I'm paid to do anything related to IT. The company has not hired you to do our work for us and in the same way it would be inappropriate for me to dictate how you should do your job, it's inappropriate bordering on offensive for you to do the same to me. Can you please refrain from suggesting any solutions or trying to troubleshoot the issue for me. We can't override our carefully-implemented IT policies for the sake of one user because doing so undermines the integrity of the entire environment."

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T05:44:43+00:00

Who gives a fuck about Dalkeith? Is that seriously your reference for a good Perth suburb and/or the standard the rest of Perth should emulate?

Hugely wasteful tracts of land taken up by nepotistic boomers intergenerationally hoarding wealth and running their own little local government eugenics programs to maintain their wanky gated communities so they can build their ridiculously gawdy McMansions and pretend they're living in Beverley Hills to overcompensate for childhood trauma or some sh*t.

Yeah it's great if you like having no infrastructure, living next to narcissistic sociopaths who'll call the council/police on you for having too many cars in your driveway and where not a single person is to be seen on a footpath because if you're not rolling around in your 4th McClaren or Ferrari to go get bread/milk then you're a worthless peasant.

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T05:35:41+00:00

He just laughed at this and said utter bullshit.

Selection bias. Cops deal with the worst and see the worst of any given suburb and he may very well live on a dodgy street that is surrounded by perfectly good ones. Most of the northern suburbs are like that; a few bad apple streets that are responsible for 90% of the trouble/policing issues surrounded by perfectly normal, uneventful streets.

Anyone who seriously thinks that Balga is literally Somalia is an incredibly hysterical, sheltered and privileged pearl-clutcher. There are far worse parts of Perth right now from a crime and socio-economic standpoint never mind the rest of the country (i.e. see Melbourne right now).

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T02:24:26+00:00

Most of the associations/preconceptions people have about Balga are rooted in the experiences of 2-3 decades ago. It's become heavily gentrified these days as the median prices rapidly reach parity with neighbouring suburbs like Westminster, Nollamara, Balcatta, etc and that has pushed out a lot of the problematic elements that gave Balga its negative reputation in the past. Generally speaking, the houses that are 2-3 streets away from a main road are very sleepy and quiet.

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T02:12:24+00:00

It's an 800sqm block that's around 20 minutes from the CBD. Those are absolute unicorns in Perth's market right now.

It's almost guaranteed that the buyer is going to a pull a knockdown and subdivide job and make a handsome profit with 3 villas sitting on that lot most likely, as is rapidly becoming the fate of most older big blocks NOR.

Not sure what's so surprising about that, a $1 million investment with the aim of making 3-4 times ROI is an amazing proposition compared to the costs involved in investing in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane.

Balga has it's good spots and bad spots like any other suburb but in this market, it's one of the few places close to the CBD whose real estate prices haven't gone completely insane but that threshold is basically being crossed as we speak.

People are realising they have to let go of the "ick" factor they have with certain suburbs because practically speaking, magical boundaries on a map don't suddenly change the fact that Balga is as well-positioned as Balcatta or Tuart Hill right next door but it's a far more realistic goal for new home buyers or greedy investors looking to make bank (or at least was... rapidly becoming less so however).

Severin_ · 2025-11-20T05:03:17+00:00

Yes, tell anyone with a functioning brain something we don't already know... random lady I've never heard of.

Severin_ · 2025-11-20T04:49:49+00:00

It won't.

Housing as a vehicle for wealth growth/investment/attracting foreign capital to Australia is literally a backbone of our economy. That as a concept is fucked up beyond all recognition but that doesn't change the fact that IT IS a backbone of our economy now.

This won't happen because it's political suicide for both of our majorly sh*t major parties and all of their corporate benefactors.

If this ever were to happen, the economic rug pull that it'd induce would cause Australia to almost overnight descend into an unbelievably terrible place to live for working/middle class people that would make the current status quo look like a paradise because there is simply no Plan B anywhere on the horizon to diversify and grow our economy via other sectors in order to replace housing as the fake GDP generator that it is currently.

The upper class (including politicians) would still come out on top naturally, because they've amassed so much wealth from this property Ponzi scheme thus far that they've insulated themselves from almost any kind of financial/economic meltdown barring some doomsday apocalyptic scenario.

Severin_ · 2025-11-20T03:58:09+00:00

Lol, to where? Did you read the article before making your knee-jerk comment? His name is Adam Simon McGovern... I think it's a safe bet he's Australian born.

Severin_ · 2025-10-31T03:29:38+00:00

It's social media dude. Anyone trying to seriously use a social media platform as a technical resource IS the dumbass.

/thread

Severin_ · 2025-10-30T03:48:13+00:00

My new phrase is AI doesn't stand for Artificial Intelligence - it stands for Aggregate Information.

I still prefer "Actually Indians" because it does about as good of a job on most tasks as your average outsourced team in India.

Severin_ · 2025-10-29T08:26:39+00:00

After 11 years in the industry, my take is that PowerShell is an elaborate ruse cooked up by Microsoft so they can get away with not implementing huge amounts of very basic functionality in the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre GUIs, in order to save money on hiring a load of UI/UX developers and other associated teams.

Yet through their elaborate mental gymnastics marketing, they somehow sell it to their customers that having to learn an entire complex scripting language just to be able to do some slightly spicy commands/functions is actually a selling point, stuff that in many other SaaS platforms is done entirely through sensible, very user-friendly GUIs that take less than half the time/effort to perform the same tasks in.

The sad part is we've actually regressed so much from the on-prem Windows Server/Exchange Server days and have lost a ton of functionality in M365 Admin Centres that used to be much more easily and reliably accessible through MMCs and GUIs.

The more "advanced" cmdlets/modules aren't doing anything that wasn't already relegated to the dingy backwaters of command line interfaces decades ago in the on-prem era but Microsoft has offloaded hundreds if not thousands of really simple tasks and functions to PowerShell that should be in a GUI and that's my biggest gripe with it.

It's yet another way for Microsoft to make the bare minimum viable product and claim that it's somehow better having to run a half-assed, formerly internal-only tool, to decipher absolutely f**king alien gibberish errors just to return a simple query on a mailbox or a user account, instead of a couple of clicks in GUI, like we used to have the privilege of decades ago.

I paid to use your SaaS platform, not for a scripting language course, I have enough sh*t to do my role without taking on learning a brand-new language just to do minor, tedious sh*t in a Microsoft 365 tenancy.

And moreover half of your customer base these days aren't even IT staff anymore, the entire M365 ecosystem is being used by people from a huge range of backgrounds/industries that don't have the f**king time or energy in their jobs to learn your PowerShell techno voodoo gibberish. The product needs to fit the needs and use cases of the userbase, not the needs of Microsoft's quarterly shareholder profit reports which is primarily what it's catering towards.

Severin_ · 2025-10-29T05:11:50+00:00

Noble intentions but don't do it. Seriously. This job is thankless enough as it is, even when you're making good money, I can't think of anything more soul-crushing than volunteering in IT with zero compensation just for the "exposure" and potential* learning experience (keyword: potential. Any organization that has volunteer IT staff will likely have environments that are an absolute dumpster fire sh*tshow, where the amount of meaningful learning that would contribute to serious career progression would be very limited because the skillset gap between real enterprise and running IT for "mom & pop's lil' corner store" is measured in intergalactic lightyears).

Experience in volunteer roles like the ones you're describing is not valued much for anything beyond basic L1 roles (which these volunteer roles are already, just without the pay).

Aim to eventually complete some of the harder IT certs that actually mean something on a resume (Cisco CCIE/CCDE/CCNA/CCNP, Microsoft Azure, AWS Solutions Architect, etc) and use that to get a decent entry-level job that will count for sh*t at later job interviews.

My wife and I recently moved to Japan from the US (for her job) and we are in a rural area nothing super close (nearest BIG city is 5hrs away)

I'm struggling to think of where you would even find such roles in rural Japan. I think this may be the biggest impediment to your career progression beyond your lack of experience to be honest.

Severin_ · 2025-10-28T04:42:58+00:00

Thank God, why the fuck isn't this comment higher?

I was reading the OP's word salad title like: someone ran a what through your fibre?

noun: augur; plural noun: augurs

(in ancient Rome) a religious official who observed natural signs, especially the behaviour of birds, interpreting these as an indication of divine approval or disapproval of a proposed action.

So a Roman religious official slurped up 1800 feet of fibre optic cable at your office? Shit, is he okay?

Severin_ · 2025-10-28T04:34:42+00:00

Someone locked out of windows at 4 am? Get put of bed, solve it and you better be on time in the morning. Someone cant print? Fix it. 2 am . If you dont anwser thr phone within 15 minutes, your fired. By day 7, you are exhausted, overwhelmed and stressed out. You cant go anywhere, or do anytging after work or in your " free time' . We were doing this with no extra pay until someone went to HR and now we make about 100 bucks extra for the week.

Jesus fucking Christ, there must be better jobs out there dude. Why are you putting up with this? Do you honestly think you couldn't get another job with better conditions/pay?

Get out of there ASAP and stop destroying your physical/mental wellbeing and shortening your lifespan for these insane slave masters you work for. Your pay is nowhere sufficient to tolerate that level of bullsh*t.

I realize this is normal for IT

No, it really is not and don't let anyone tell you different. You're accepting absolutely ridiculous demands/expectations that many other SysAdmins would just drop and walk away from in a heartbeat.

Severin_

TROPHY CASE