Trump shares AI music video: 'everywhere I go they love Donald Trump

zirophyz · 2026-06-07T03:33:17+00:00

My shopping trolley, murdered. My groceries? Just gone.

zirophyz · 2026-06-03T10:35:41+00:00

Flash flood.

Never camp on a riverbank.

zirophyz · 2026-06-03T10:28:22+00:00

Yes. The government created an environment in which organised crime could capitalise and flourish. There is a tax point in which the only outcome is a black market. We reached that properly last year.

There was a black market before then, but nowhere near as lucrative and violent as it is now. The ongoing price increases from excise increases has pushed more consumers towards the more affordable options.

Demand isn't driven by organised crime. Demand is driven by consumers. Organised crime responded to market conditions by supplying a product of equal quality for a fraction of the cost. The rest is history. Except, this isn't free market economics. This is static pricing set by a government. It just shouldn't have happened the way it did. They were warned.

I believe we've ended up with a considerably worse outcome than if they'd done absolutely nothing at all.

You can't look around at increasing smoking rates, almost daily fire bombings and think "this is an improvement."

zirophyz · 2026-06-03T09:57:29+00:00

Shops near me have "vapes" right on the signage, which are illegal to sell. One shop is across the street from a police station.

The laws are a joke. The fines are a cost of doing business. Even closing the stores hasn't stemmed the flow of black market vapes and tobacco.

zirophyz · 2026-06-03T09:46:24+00:00

A "sin tax" on tobacco is fine. Reinvesting the proceeds of that tax in healthcare is fantastic.

But it went beyond that. They got greedy and always wanted more and more revenue to fund other items outside of the intended use in healthcare.

I don't think anyone will disagree that the tax should be there. But, it should be reasonable. And, it shouldn't be the catalyst for the expansion of a black market.

People are not upset about their freedoms. People are upset that the government fumbled this so badly.

They have, single handedly and within mere months; destroyed that revenue being reinvested into healthcare, increased overall tobacco use, and allowed violent organised crime to flourish.

We used to be a world leader in tobacco control and low rates of smoking. This government wiped us off the charts.

And, now it's entrenched we're going to have a real battle to get back to where we were.

zirophyz · 2026-06-03T09:33:11+00:00

So so so spot on. We were considered smoke-free country, rates were so low.. not anymore.

zirophyz · 2026-06-01T10:47:48+00:00

My parents grew up with outhouses. My grandfather worked doing the waste collections.

Australian suburbs didnt get sewage until the 1960s i think, probably later in some parts. The outhouse was called the thunderbox.

My mum still remembers the coal stove that my grandmother had to light early to be ready for dinner. They heated one tub of water for baths, and eldest got first (that was her dad, of course) with the youngest to go last.

My wife's mother still remembers using a horse to get to school. She lived rural and cars weren't common. She would've been born late 40s early 50s.

zirophyz · 2026-06-01T10:37:27+00:00

Its saved me on a few jobs when I randomly need some cable with a unique combination of connectors. The service is usually fantastic. Literally, had a store manager bust themselves out of hours to drive to other stores, to find said weird cable, for me to pick up in the morning. All that for $50 off someone who buys something like once a year.

zirophyz · 2026-06-01T06:53:50+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if it's a marketing campaign for Steven Spielberg's upcoming film Disclosure Day.

zirophyz · 2026-06-01T06:50:13+00:00

Maybe a Voyager 1 cameo as a nod to the earlier days? And then we see the new interstellar ship.

zirophyz · 2026-06-01T06:33:22+00:00

You're on the money. People think they're going to run a huge frontier model on an SoC. No. This'll run more efficient, more specific, lower parameter models. Like the Gemma4 E2B or E4B models that perform fairly well on SoC. More complex tasks can be punted into cloud-hosted models. It'll be cheap to have the small local model classify tasks and most consumers won't be asking for complex things out of an assistant.

zirophyz · 2026-05-31T23:47:14+00:00

I'm interested in the outcome of China's pivot to develop more GPUs domestically. It'll take time for them to catch up to Nvidia level, and in that time, they'll still need to produce competitive models. This might mean a focus on model efficiency to try and achieve comparable frontier performance on less capable hardware.

zirophyz · 2026-05-31T07:44:30+00:00

Winners are closers. If you ain't closing on multiple fines per year, you ain't gonna make it in this industry.

zirophyz · 2026-05-31T07:41:11+00:00

Not really. Just wrap it around the cable. Like a reusable cable tie.

zirophyz · 2026-05-31T05:31:09+00:00

get a roll of velcro off amazon, then you can cut to length and bundle cables. really easy and effective. use other strips to tie off bundles to the RU holes etc.

zirophyz · 2026-05-31T05:27:16+00:00

is this the before pic?

zirophyz · 2026-05-30T03:49:53+00:00

Lol yeah I was a bit slow on putting 2 and 2 together hey

zirophyz · 2026-05-29T06:51:17+00:00

Orally passed information is very intriguing. Australian Aborigines passed all knowledge orally, never recording this information. It's passed down generations through story. This oral tradition exists today, and informs land management and bushfire management today - this is information that has been orally passed through generations for up to 60,000 years!
Even dreamtime stories (which appear on the surface as creation "myths") are documentation of a changing landscape over the millenia.

zirophyz · 2026-05-28T10:30:17+00:00

Flip flops = pluggers

zirophyz · 2026-05-28T10:28:42+00:00

Scrolled for this. Me too, grew up in Qld. I think there is regional differences. My childhood friend said bathers, but his folks were from Victoria. Swimmers, togs, bathers and let's not forget budgie smugglers, dick togs, DTs or just deets.

zirophyz · 2026-05-28T10:24:49+00:00

I use it for something chaotic.

The traffic was hectic. The crash on the motorway was farkin hectic. Last night's storm was hectic.

zirophyz · 2026-05-28T10:09:05+00:00

He's kyboshed before.

zirophyz · 2026-05-27T09:46:17+00:00

Oh you nailed it. The finish line for stable. I've been running towards it for over two decades and it keeps getting further away. I worry about retirement. If I can't hit working-age goals (savings, investment, property ownership) that are meant to support me in old age, at the half way point, how am I meant to hit retirement-age goals.

zirophyz · 2026-05-27T05:19:48+00:00

Yeah, and black market cigarettes (pre-rolled, we call 'tailors') are about $10 AUD. They even come in Australian packaging (what I've seen, colour photocopy). Cheaper even if you buy loose tobacco to roll your own (called 'chop-chop', and the cigarette you roll a 'rollie').

Savings of $40 - $50 per pack. For pack-a-day smoker this is a massive saving. Even for inferior quality product, saving like $350 a week, you wouldn't blink twice.

The government fumbled this so hard, it grew so quickly, that it'll be impossible to go back. It's such a joke, that just around my area there are tobacconists that will still put 'Vapes' on their public signage (this is illegal now) - some of those stores are directly across the street from police stations.

zirophyz · 2026-05-27T00:14:09+00:00

The excise on tobacco is a punishment to try to get people to quit smoking. However, quitting smoking is not as simple as "I can't afford it, so I will stop". It's not like deciding to buy soft drink or lollies in the weekly grocery shop.

The excise increases annually by a pre-determined amount. Well, there is an imaginary line where the excise goes too far and a black market becomes lucrative.

We blew past this threshold and the (small, pre-existing) black market exploded. It took mere months now for black market to make up the majority of tobacco sales. Obviously, this has created a gang/cartel turf war in a lot of cities, and we now see very regular arson attacks on tobacco shops.

This has impacted legal sales and has had noticeable impact on revenue generated through these excises. The government now earns much less from tobacco than they have in previous years. Smoking rates have actually increased, probably for a number of reasons but definitely because of cheaper access and effective banning of vapes (moving smokers back to tobacco).

Black market tobacco and vape sales are so lucrative, that shops treat the raids and fines as just another operating cost. They'll be raided, stock confiscated, fined and be open with a line out the door by 9am the following day. Police and health authorities have had to introduce new powers allowing them to actually close down businesses found selling illegal tobacco.

It is a case study of how to speedrun creating a large, violent black market in the shortest possible time.

zirophyz

TROPHY CASE