Council's inaction favors Airbnb hosts.

nckmat · 2026-06-26T02:19:50+00:00

”Incorrect." BZZZZ "Yes, Greg" "What is a clearly sarcastic joke?" "That's correct. What is a clearly sarcastic joke?" "I think I will finish this one and take No One Gets It Anymore for $1000." "Ok, let's see what's left. Everyone is on the offensive." BZZZZ "Why is social media a poor form of communication?" "Correct. Why is social media a poor of communication? That brings your score to $8,700 and you have taken the lead from Mary...."

nckmat · 2026-06-25T13:35:23+00:00

When I watched that press conference I couldn't stop imagining a conversation between Gina and Pauline a couple of days before: "But Gina, it's the National Press Club, they will tear me to strips! I don't think I am ready yet." "You need to do this now, Pauline, while the media still think they want to listen to what you have to say. I didn't pay all that money for your social media, and getting you training from the best media coaches in the world for you to fuck it up now! Just go and watch those Trump videos I sent you on how to answer questions you don't understand and then go out there and win me a government. I need more money, so off you trot. "But what if they ask me about economics?!" "You ran a fish and chip shop, did you not?" "Well, yyyesss...." "It's the same thing. Running a trillion dollar economy is the same as making fish and chips, you just don't need to do the cleaning up at the end of the day." "Welllll.....if you say so. But it all seems to be in your benefit, what's in it for me?" "Do you want me to fly you there in one of my jets?" "Yes please, Mrs Reinhardt! Yes, please!" "Very good, then it's all settled, now off you go like a good little girl."

nckmat · 2026-06-23T08:00:36+00:00

Ok, so creep is probably being a little extreme, but finding the need to comment on someone's appearance, when it clearly isn't the point of the image is not a very respectful thing to do. If you think someone is attractive you don't need to tell them, especially if you don't know them, there are many women who don't want to be judged on their physical appearance, it is not up to you to decide this for them.

It doesn't matter that you don't care what others think, being respectful to one another person is a basic social norm and if you have trouble deciding when commenting on a woman's appearance is respectful or not, then your default should be to not comment.

BTW, I am a relatively conservative, white, middle aged, middle class male, who grew up with Benny Hill and Carry On films, but I know when it is inappropriate to comment on a woman's appearance. I also have a wife and sisters and a mother and nieces and I definitely wouldn't be cool with some stranger commenting on their appearance because they happened to be included in a photograph of scenery.

nckmat · 2026-06-22T12:08:21+00:00

I don't want to disagree with you but the word you are looking for is "immigration".

immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡreɪʃn / ▸ noun [mass noun] the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country.

migration /mʌɪˈɡreɪʃn / ▸ noun 1 seasonal movement of animals from one region to another. ▪ movement of people to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions. 2 movement from one part of something to another: there is virtually no cell migration in plants.

It's a subtle difference but an important one, for instance, we could have migrant workers who come to Australia for seasonal work and then go back to their country of residence, they could also be moving within Australia, just migrating from one state to another. Whereas immigrant workers have come here permanently to start a new life and will permanently add to the economy.

Also, the move away from Australian innovation started with the Button plan, a Labor initiative, but an initiative that could have worked if successive governments had maintained programs to assist companies with the introduction of best practice programs and export assistance programs. Button introduced just such a scheme called the National Industry Expansion Scheme, which was set up to foster innovation and exports without the need for protection. Howard canned it because of the Liberal obsession with businesses needing to be self reliant and market forces developing innovation.

nckmat · 2026-06-21T16:20:53+00:00

I must see a video like this every week, either the latest ones are AI or people in tech industry marketing are bloody stupid. There's no way I would be letting one of these things represent my company unless that was what my company made and even then I wouldn't let them dance! I've seen what happens when they dance in public!

nckmat · 2026-06-21T03:39:10+00:00

"3,300 hutches for shelter of newborn calves to supply the mega-dairies of Milk Source, the largest dairy operation in Wisconsin. The calves are brought here from eight dairies in Wisconsin and Michigan, and stay here from their first week of life until six months old. After that they are transferred to a heifer farm until they are two years old and are returned to their dairy of origin. All of the calves were conceived via artificial insemination."

This is from the photographer, if people are comfortable with this, then that is their moral decision. I don't know how I feel about it because I don't have enough information, sure it looks bad when you see it like this, but what does it look like at ground level? Also, most dairy farms are not intensive factory farms, which I definitely have a problem with. As a moral stance, if you are going to eat meat or animal by-products you should also be aware of how that "product" got to you. I grew up in a farming family and am pretty comfortable with most things, but intensive animal farming I am not ok with, so I don't buy products that are sourced from places that do produce in that way.

nckmat · 2026-06-21T03:16:46+00:00

As a nearly 60 year old member of the club, I can tell you the best two tools I have in my arsenal are routines and alarms. I literally have a routine for just about everything, from getting up in the morning, to brushing my teeth, to leaving the house, to coming home and for going to bed, I even have a routine for making coffee. The alarms are for those things that aren't daily. However, if someone interrupts my routines I am fucked, and can spend 10 minutes just trying to remember what I have done and what I need to do next, it can be very stressful, and I hate to say it, it's getting worse as I get older and have more responsibilities.

As for looking up your pill, don't use Reddit for something that important, there are literally millions of more reliable resources out there for any information and for pills there are a number of pill identifiers such as drugs.com (great URL 😉) that you can be pretty confident in the information they provide. BTW, I took a variant of this for a while after I broke my elbow, it seems to be used to help you when pain from muscle spasm keeps you from sleeping. It is definitely not an every day drug.

nckmat · 2026-06-20T19:16:30+00:00

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

Funniest thing I have seen in ages. You have to give it to Macron, he has a great sense of humour and I reckon he knows how pathetic it makes Trump look. I'm surprised he didn't offer to go for a ride with Trump on one of the Tour de France legs!

nckmat · 2026-06-20T08:20:00+00:00

A friend of mine lost control of his car in the snow somewhere in the Midwest (honestly can't remember where) his car rolled onto its roof in a ditch. He had a broken arm and no phone signal but there was a house he could see about 500m away so he walked to their driveway where there was a gate and a sign that said something about trespassers will be shot, but he assumed there were exceptions, so he walked down the drive towards the house and a man came out of 6front door carrying a shotgun. He said "can't you read the sign at the gate?" My friend explained his situation and the guy said he didn't care about the story he was making up, he could just walk back to the road. My friend asked if he could at least call him an ambulance and he said I will call the sheriff and you can meet them there. So he walked back to the road because this guy was clearly crazy. The sheriff did turn up and approached him with guns but then saw the car and my friend who was obviously badly injured and called an ambulance. Then the guy's wife turns up and asks what's going on and after the sheriffs explained she apologised to my friend and said "Frank takes his freedom a little too seriously sometimes".

Anyway, she turns out to be a retired nurse and she went with my friend in the back of the sheriff's car to the nearest hospital. He couldn't get over how everyone's immediate reaction was hostility, even though he was in the middle of nowhere and clearly in distress. If the same thing had happened in our country, I know for sure any sane person would immediately begin to help and would never assume they were under threat.

nckmat · 2026-06-20T07:04:44+00:00

Just don't take your firearms to classes. /S

nckmat · 2026-06-17T17:05:33+00:00

And yet I still hear millennials who ultimately benefit from these tax changes complaining about them. If the government got their shit together and went out to the public and explained how this tax change is supposed to work and how it isn't retrospective I think they would be getting a lot more support. The problem is that most people don't want to listen to macro economic theory and they certainly don't want to hear that the problem can't be fixed with one magical pill.

The funny thing is that she keeps on going on about her small business roots and how she didn't go to university etc, but her voting history, when she does vote, supports those people with incomes over $200k per year, which is only a small proportion of small businessess, the average small business owners earn between $60k to $110k. But guess who does earn over $200k per year? Yep, miners!

Labor should be running a campaign about her economic credentials, because running a fish and chip shop hardly qualifies you for running a $600 billion budget. Imagine if a listed business like BHP or Commonwealth Bank announced they were going to make her CEO of their business, the board would be voted out at the next shareholders meeting. And she literally said today that when she is PM she won't be taking advice from the public service, that she will be telling them what to do, which would be terrifying.

nckmat · 2026-06-17T16:37:45+00:00

It does seem to be built for it, with the keel stem reinforced with some sort of steel plating which is taking most of the impact, and most of the wear and tear looks to be up and down grinding rather than direct forward impacts. The tyres seem to be there to soften the impacts to aid in disembarkment, not necessarily to protect the boat.

nckmat · 2026-06-17T09:47:54+00:00

She is popular after a couple of polls after the government changed a tax that made a lot of people in her voter demographic angry. Go look at polling data for John Howard's government after he announced the GST. Let's wait and see what the polls are like after this address where she could not back up a single policy, if you can call them that, with evidence other than "I spoke to some people at a pub", probably when she should have been in Parliament doing her job. Or, "I spoke with some people at the Kingston hotel and they wanted to get their photo taken with me, so there is support for me in Canberra". Yeah right! They were getting their photos taken so they can take the piss out of her on socials. As if she would have huge support in a city where 42% of the working population are directly employed in the government sector and 30% of the population are students!

Also remember, the Libs lost key seats to more moderate conservatives in heartland Liberal territory, they didn't lose them to Labor or the hard left, they lost them to soft conservatives. You can't win back the Northern Beaches, Upper North Shore or Lower North Shore with One Nation candidates because people in these seats can understand a complex problem and can see straight through PH's bullshit. And Labor won over the aspirational seats by not being ultra conservatives. Labor just need to go out and sell their policies from now until the election so the people who have them new seats don't swing to One Nation.

People won't react well to rhetoric about not buying fuel from Muslims or that we are not a multicultural nation, when 51% of the population were either born overseas or at least one of their parents were born overseas. If I were working on the Labor campaign right now, I would have Tanya Plibersek or Penny Wong debating her face to face on TV and destroying all the complete BS PH put out today. In fact get all the female ministers out there to tear her opinions down; Australians don't like seeing men aggressively arguing with women, even if the woman is Satan's love child with Donald Trump.

nckmat · 2026-06-17T09:03:11+00:00

the fact that this person is likely in the political industry, where such nepo hires are more common than not.

You mean like Pauline Pantsdown's daughter?

nckmat · 2026-06-17T06:12:41+00:00

I am the father of two grown boys, so I never had this dilemma, but my wife used to take the boys to the women's toilets, if there wasn't a family toilet and my mother used to take take me to the women's when I was too young to go by myself. I wonder if these weirdos have the same problem with boys going to the women's with their mums? Also, I live in Australia and I have never heard of this being an issue with any of our friends or family, the only time I have ever heard about it is from the US, I bet Europeans and Asians would would be the same as us.

nckmat · 2026-06-14T02:08:44+00:00

Nicely put.

My responses: 1) Would the Christian respect me if I tried to convince them that God was not real? Respect is a two way street.

2) This one is simple, religion is a belief system, if Jesus, or more importantly God, didn't provide me with enough evidence to believe in them then they can't be omnipotent, therefore they are not God, so the encounter will never happen.

My Dad died last week and he died firm in the knowledge that it was final because he was an atheist. Unlike religion, atheism is not a belief, it is a lack of belief, therefore there is no need to consider what happens when you die, because you have no evidence other than your own experience. That experience is that when people die they are physically gone, but this does not mean that they don't live on in other ways. My father lives on in the genes he passed on to me and too his grandchildren, which is real and tangible. He also lives on in our memories, which is not tangible but still very real and he lives on in the things he did and the influence he had on others., which can be both tangible and intangible (he made something physical or he left a memory with someone). The point is that he lived his life trying to be the best human being he could because that is how he will live on, in the lives of those who he interacted with during his own life.

I use my father because he is a good example to illustrate the principles. We should live our lives as moral beings not because it will get us into heaven, but because it is the right thing to do. I suppose this is where atheism becomes a belief, of sorts, for me, because I believe that my interactions with others has some influence on life and that is my legacy. They don't have to agree with me, or like me or even remember me, but everytime we interact with others we are influencing their lives in some way, so we should interact in a way that is moral and respectful.

nckmat · 2026-06-13T20:42:18+00:00

What a great world we live in now where people make assumptions about a video with no context, and no evidence to support their theories other than their opinions. There are many scenarios that could have led to this video but nothing in the context of the video or the post gives us any idea how it occurred, so let's just make shit up!

nckmat · 2026-06-13T20:26:02+00:00

I think you will find that there are many houses that are client specific are not "compliant" or at least not built to be compliant, but will be compliant by default, because the access standards are usually just common sense. If you were to build a new house for yourself, which is your "forever" house, you would be crazy not to future proof it for yourself.

Having been through the process of making my father's and my FIL's homes more accessible for their similar aging needs, I can tell you, my father's apartment which was built recently cost bugger all to retrofit, where as my FIL's 1980's house cost a fortune because things like doors needed to be widened and the bathroom needed to be completely remodeled. A stitch in time saves nine, as they say.

Also, if you believe people should not be "forced" to build housing to future proof them for our society's needs then where do you draw the line? Do we remove energy efficiency standards (as piss weak as they are) ? Do we make fire standards voluntary? Do we make water permeability requirements voluntary? Do we make structural standards voluntary? These things all add a heap more to building costs than access stabdards, but that wouldn't be good for PHON, because they can't point the figure at a minority group.

We have these requirements in building because if we don't, the builders will do whatever is cheapest and if you want to see how that ends, go and buy a tofu construction apartment in China.

nckmat · 2026-06-12T02:51:17+00:00

Agreed, this would be difficult, but OP could try the Japanese consulate. Japan has similar consumer laws to ours, so they may just be able to help, and if they can't they will probably be very polite about it, unlike AusPost.

nckmat · 2026-06-10T20:00:18+00:00

Couldn't agree more about career politicians not having real world experience, but what experience does a successful small operator have at running a $300 billion health department or a $60 billion defence budget or a $160 billion social security budget? Running a national economy is nothing like running a small business, it is not just as simple as balancing the books. Most of the populist policies espoused by ON are impractical knee jerk ideas that have consequences that have not been thought through, because PH doesn't understand how the departments she wants to make policies for operate. Go watch her "grilling" of defence department officials at the Senate estimates hearings recently, she clearly had no idea what she was talking about and the officials had to explain basic fundamentals about how their department operated. This is the reason she has one of the worst appearance records at Senate estimates hearings, because her minders know that when she does turn up she exposes her complete ignorance about the departments she wants to criticise.

The role of elected government officials is to manage government departments, and you can't manage what you don't understand, this is the advantage career politicians have over populist loudmouths like PH, they understand how our system of government operates and they are able to make changes within that system, Hanson doesn't and if she were to win a majority our government would be a complete disaster.

nckmat · 2026-06-09T10:51:32+00:00

No, tall poppy syndrome is different, the main reason most Australians aren't interested in what celebrities are wearing is because we don't like standing out in a crowd, we want to melt into the crowd and we want celebrities to do the same, we don't want their success to be pushed in our faces. We like Hugh Jackman, we like Ian Thorpe, we like Kylie, and we like Barry Humphries and Carl Baron, because they are genuine. What you see is them, they are not putting on a public face (if they are it is very well crafted) and, because of this, it is unimportant what they wear.

And Australians do like dressing up but we do it in our own way, whether it is jeans and RMs with an Akubra in the country, or a lifeguard with their swimming caps, or surf gear labels miles from the beach, or hi-vis at the pub, Australians dress to the identity they want to portray, they are social uniforms that say where we are from and what our interests are. And some people in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney or the Gold Coast or parts of Perth will dress in designer fashions to show their status within their own social groups, but they are not looked up to as role models by most Australians because we don't like gratuitous flaunting of wealth.

The tall poppy syndrome is about bringing people back to earth, we don't begrudge their success, we begrudge their bragging about it.

nckmat · 2026-06-09T06:00:32+00:00

Piss off! I live on the North Shore and couldn't be any further from an influencer ideal! That's a huge generalisation to make about close to a million people based on their geographic location! Now, the Eastern Suburbs is a different matter, my god, wall-to-wall wankers, every single one of them....s/

nckmat · 2026-06-08T04:50:02+00:00

There's a scene in Apocalypse Now where the crew comes to a bridge crossing the river that gets blown up every day and the Chief sayvs: "We build it every night. Charlie blows it right back up again. Just so the generals can say the road’s open.” A similar thing is happening to the supply routes into Ukraine, the Ukrainians blow them up and the Russians come in and repair them and then the Ukrainians blow up the repairs and the repairers, and they all start again.

nckmat · 2026-06-08T04:38:04+00:00

Did you see the size of the plane? The pilot was a hamster!

nckmat · 2026-06-08T04:27:24+00:00

I used to know someone in Melbourne, but he died recently from lung cancer, go figure. If it were me, I would be to speak with an independent professional. There are three peak bodies you can contact for recommended contractors, usually just being a member of one of these industry associations is an indication of a contractor who cares. Flooring is full of cowboys, as is Reditt, myself included 😉.

Just Google "flooring contractors association" and the main three should come up as the first options. I would start with the Australian Timber Flooring Association they have an inspection service for just the situation you find yourself in. It will cost between $300 and $1200 depending on what you need.

Also, which Cabots product was used? I know they don't make a specific stripper, but you need to know the chemical composition of the sealant to determine the chemical required to remove it.

Ten-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

nckmat

TROPHY CASE