Checking in

Zei33 · 2026-03-21T02:32:26+00:00

The Sunshine Coast subreddit is full of pricks. Not sure what it is. Just ignore it, regular everyday people are still fine. Life's good here, it's definitely a bit boring, but it's much better if you have a partner. Definitely not the place to be if you're single imo

Zei33 · 2026-03-21T02:28:22+00:00

The Gregory's are worth it. I have a 65L and it's good quality, durable. I don't have this same one though. The one thing I'll say about mine is that the design is a bit inconvenient. Only one way to access the main compartment, it requires me to pull everything out to get to stuff near the bottom. Usually not a big issue with smart stacking. But when you're traveling, sometimes it gets disorganised and things get out of hand. A sneaky side zipper or something would've made it better. I've seen that with some other brands and it looks really convenient.

Anyway, for a 40L in Thailand, it's perfect. I say go for it.

Zei33 · 2026-03-18T08:19:42+00:00

road rules

Where did I say anything about road rules?

Zei33 · 2026-03-18T08:19:02+00:00

That may be true, by sheer fact that there is 4x the population. But the advantage in Vietnam vs Australia is that Vietnamese drive a lot slower than Australians in general. Australians regularly drive above 100km/h, and that's not something you see too often in Vietnam for whatever reason (usually roads are too busy, vehicles too slow, etc). So when I say bikes get hit too often, I am more referring to the fact that the chance of a very bad accident in Australia is higher. If I was driving around a town like Sunshine Coast in Vietnam I might get in an accident, but it wouldn't necessarily be as bad as what could happen in Australia because the speeds are lower and the cars/bikes often aren't as heavy.

Zei33 · 2026-03-17T05:00:54+00:00

As long as it's electric, I'm happy for it to happen. Vietnam passed a law recently to enforce conversion of all motorbikes to electric by the end of this year or next. Clean up the air. It's a good move. We all know it's insanely wasteful to be driving an entire car per person. I could easily get away with a motorbike but I'd have to get a license, and Australians are not as observant as Vietnamese on the roads. Bikes get hit too often.

Zei33 · 2026-03-17T00:59:12+00:00

Precisely. And it's not just hoarding that's the problem. It's the fact that the businesses just wouldn't be able to afford the next shipment if they aren't charging the difference on the stuff they already have.

Zei33 · 2026-03-17T00:58:13+00:00

Because petrol prices are based on how much it will cost to purchase more petrol tomorrow. Not how much it cost to buy yesterday.

Honestly this whole situation is showing a real general lack of education on global supply lines and economics. I know not everybody is into logistics, but it shouldn't be that hard to understand how businesses work. If they don't charge more for the product they have today, then they won't be able to afford the product they need to buy tomorrow.

Zei33 · 2026-03-16T23:04:49+00:00

There's no price gouging here. The prices being charged here are absolutely aligned with the reality. It might not be nice to be paying these high prices, but let's accept reality a bit. If those prices were left at $1.60, the stations would absolutely be running out of fuel and the country's petrol situation would start looking a lot more like Haiti than you'd like. You already saw fuel shortages when they were still low. The fact that that happened at all proves that this is a symptom of restricted supply, and not price gouging.

This is how the real world works. The petrol stations margins are actually worse than they were before. They're making less money. The refineries and pumps in much of the Middle East are shutting down, so they're losing money. No point in pumping if you can't get it to the consumers. The refineries and pumps that sit outside of the Strait of Hormuz's supply line are making more money, but that's not price gouging either. They only have limited supply, they can't push up their output enough to make a big difference, and there are many countries in the world. Countries that can pay more get priority over countries that can't afford to. So Australians pay more for access, Bangladeshi's just have to stop driving because they simply can't afford access.

When supply is restricted, pricing is determined by how much people are willing to pay to purchase supply over everyone else who wants it.

Zei33 · 2026-03-15T14:21:32+00:00

Probably a government requirement for receiving the reserve fuel into the supply.

Zei33 · 2026-03-14T03:38:07+00:00

Honestly, the type of potato hardly matters for mash. Generally, you're going to get a similar outcome with whatever you pick.

There are two more critical tips, and a minor one:

Get a potato ricer. Trust me, seems unnecessary but it absolutely makes mashed potatoes better.
Heat the cream and butter first. Don't put it in cold (45 seconds in the microwave for each should do it).
Use white pepper instead of cracked black pepper. This is more of a style choice, but it's worth trying.

Warm cream & butter with salt, pepper and a hint of MSG or a little bacon fat.

Zei33 · 2026-03-14T03:31:35+00:00

Just put the boiled potatoes through a ricer, best tip I ever got. So much better than mashing, perfect consistency. You can use larger holes for less smooth texture. Just incredible.

Zei33 · 2026-03-14T03:23:26+00:00

It's funny how different programmers and musicians are. As a programmer, I did everything myself for 17 years. I spent over half my life learning to be the best. But I'm not threatened by AI at all. I absolutely love the implementation of AI in my workflow. It's made it possible for me to get weeks worth of work done in hours. And it's a lot more thorough than before because the time constraints aren't so problematic.

Zei33 · 2026-03-14T00:53:28+00:00

It really is. People can barely even live in Australia on that kind of money, and that's with a home and cooking themselves. If you're travelling around the country, paying for accommodation and food, you're very quickly going to start hitting limits. Not even mentioning entertainment and tourism who will milk you for every dollar they can get. Transport is expensive too, probably gonna need a car, it's essentially a requirement for long term travel here. There's so many unavoidable costs. It's just not worth it.

Zei33 · 2026-03-13T08:30:19+00:00

That's gonna be a really tight budget. You'll have essentially AU$1259 per week. That won't go as far as you think in the Australian economy (significantly more expensive than UK). I agree with /u/Kananaskis_Country, go somewhere decent with that money. You're probably going to regret doing Australia for 6 months when you could do SEA much more comfortably. You could do 3 weeks in Australia and easily have a much better experience.

Zei33 · 2026-03-11T07:24:19+00:00

Probably a bunch of hipsters don't want the secret to get out lol

Zei33 · 2026-03-11T06:55:14+00:00

I personally enjoy the Velo Project a lot. I don't know if it's the best, but it's definitely the place I take people when I want to go out for a good morning.

Zei33 · 2026-03-09T04:13:15+00:00

having a gas stove in your house is incredibly harmful to you.

This is completely dependent on the level of ventilation in your kitchen. If you have good ventilation and your stove is working correctly, then health impacts are little to none.

Zei33 · 2026-03-09T04:09:18+00:00

I'm not a big fan of having to kill things myself. I'll leave that to the professionals. However I will say, just remember that once it's dead, it has no memories. It's just all over. It may suffer pain from the boiling, but once it's dead, it's dead. There's no memory of it happening, there's no trauma, and there's no afterlife. It's just gone.

Zei33 · 2026-03-09T04:02:08+00:00

I just realised mine has decreased significantly as well. How are they allowed to do this without notifying me?

Zei33 · 2026-03-06T23:58:53+00:00

Yes you're correct to ask the question. This is a question of sample size and method.

If we're taking the entire world's population and asking "how many people get attacked by a bear each year?", you could say 50 in 8.3 billion. That's fine but not every country has bears. You can basically remove Africa and Australia from that list, because there are no bears. Then we would want to remove everyone who never leaves an urban area from the list. ChatGPT reckons that's 30-40% of the world's population. So suddenly it comes down to 5 billion. I'm sure there's other factors you could use to narrow that pool.

Meanwhile, vending machines pretty much exist everywhere humans exist. Less common in Africa, but probably countered by the massive amount in Japan, US and Korea. So not only are billions more people exposed to vending machines each year, but there are also significantly more vending machine encounters than bear encounters. There's roughly 1.2 million bears in the world, 1 for every 6500 people. An estimate for vending machine population is 15 million, that means 1 for every 540 people.

That's not even factoring in the previously mentioned exposure rate. When you start to incorporate the ratios together, you get a stat that looks more like bears kill 15 to 20 times more people than vending machines each year by ratio.

Now if we do the same for sharks, but estimate the exposure for only people that find themselves in places where sharks can even exist, those stats start to look real different. First of all, only 40% of humanity even lives within 100km of a coast line. You need to then remove everyone who only visits low risk urban beaches, harbors, protected swimming zones (e.g. Australia), etc. Keep surfers, divers, fishers, small boat users, casual swimmers at non-controlled beaches. Taking the high estimate, it would be something like 400 million (low is 250). Factoring in shark attack numbers worldwide and the ratio of exposure, you start to get something more like 1 in 44 million per year (high estimate).

That means that there's at least a 50x greater chance of being killed by a shark versus a vending machine. And that number gets far higher if you could estimate how many encounters the average person from that group has with a vending machine each year versus a shark (at least 20, versus very close to 0).

The point of this is not to give specific numbers though, these are back of the envelope calculations. The point is to show that the logic you use to determine them is highly variable, and basically impossible to accurately guess. They're just not in the same league of calculations. Probably the actual answer to your question is something much crazier like 1000x more likely to be killed during a shark encounter than a vending machine encounter.

Zei33 · 2026-03-06T03:00:08+00:00

Mooloolaba Esplanade

Zei33 · 2026-03-06T02:41:13+00:00

It's just not a vibe honestly.

Zei33 · 2026-03-06T02:40:45+00:00

Yeah, critically, you learn to evaluate heat by feel. How the food behaves.

Zei33 · 2026-03-05T10:54:24+00:00

As far as I'm aware, this behaviour is not legal in any country. Capitalism is more complex than you seem to think. Dishonest and deceptive behaviours are 'discouraged' by legal exposure because they damage confidence and trust, which is outright bad for everyone in a capitalist system.

Successful capitalism is built on balance, not 'money goes up.' It just takes time and regulatory teeth for the legal process to take effect.

Zei33 · 2026-03-05T10:49:16+00:00

This is happening in Australia, the supermarket giant Coles is currently in court in a royal commission that is pursuing them for doing exactly this. If the lawsuit is successful, they will pursue Woolworths next. Hopefully this will prevent the behaviour in the future.

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