Photographer and open source software fan. I’ve also made a few tutorials at http://youtube.com/@AnAustralianPhotographer
Blog: https://anaustralianphotographer.wordpress.com/ Webshop: https://anaustralianphotographer.threadless.com/ where you can buy prints and other merch featuring my photos.

  • 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 6th, 2024

help-circle


  • Australia is its own country, however we still have ties and the King/Queen can cause a ruckus if they want, however recently we’ve been left to our own devices. I see people over in the UK as ‘Royal Watchers’ and monarchists, and dont see any similar level of affection for the royalty here. Sure when we get a visit, crowds will turn up, but im confident the size relative to the population over time has declined.

    Not exactly a historian, so could be a wrong with this. In WW1, When Britain went to war, a lot of the people had the intent to follow and saw it as a duty to ‘defend the empire’ . In WW2 i think we had a bit more independence and remember a story about a troop ship being redirected to fight the Japanese rather than fight the Germans. That was was seen as a lot closer to home with the bombing of Darwin and fighting on the Kokoda track.

    Now, i think the population would be totally indifferent.

    We have the King and Queen on our coins, and the Queen is on the $5 note, but notable australians are also printed on other notes.

    To pass new laws in our Federal Parliament (i think state parliaments are similar but there might be exceptions), it needs to be voted on by the House of Representatives (151 elected politicians from 151 geographically organised electorates with roughly an equal number of voters. e.g. NT has two electorates which is effectively Darwin and the rest of the NT. An electorate in Sydney might only be several suburbs while a country electorate in WA could be a third of the state). it also needs to be voted on in the Senate which consists of 76 Senators ( Each state elects 12 Senators (QLD,NSW,VIC,TAS,SA & WA) while territories each get 2 (ACT & NT).

    Once its past both the house and the Senate, it also needs Royal Assent by the Governor General. The Governor General can refuse to give assent but i cannot point to a time when this has happened. The Governor General can also reserve legislation for the Queens Pleasure which defers approval to the Queen.

    The Governor General is not elected, and appointed by the Queen/King. I understand that convention recently has been that the Queen meets with the Prime Minister and appoints whoever the Prime Minster recommends. I think the Queen can change who is appointed as Governor General at will, so theoretically could call them to direct them to not give royal assent to particularly controversial legislation.

    Right now, the Queen or King could take a seat in the Senate if he or she wished, but not in the House as it was seen as to be for the people. He or She wouldn’t get a vote, but I guess it would only be to give royal assent as soon as a bill has passed. If it happened, it would make national news.

    Was there an Australian Revolution ? We floated the idea somewhat recently, and there was a referendum (a vote to change the countries constitution) on whether to become a republic. For it to pass it needed a majority of votes and a majority in the majority of states/territories. I think the wording was that we replace the governor general with a president elected by the people. It didnt get up, and the idea has been left alone since.

    I think if you ask most Aussies, the like being in the commonwealth as we get more medals at the commonwealth games than the Olympics and they enjoy thrashing the Poms at Cricket/Rugby / Othersports.

    As for our relationship with other commonwealth countries, I wouldnt say theres anything really special there except for New Zealand and this probably dates back to the ANZAC Corps and Gallipoli which is seen as our emergence of a country (i dont want to speak for NZ on this one). We might make fun of our ‘cousins’ across the ditch but i’d like to think that if something seriously went wrong, we’d be ready to lend them a hand in a heartbeat.

    Edit: Im not aware of Royalty having any power like the United States presidents Executive Orders, however the Queen can dissolve parliament which ends the term of everyone in the House of Representatives. The parliament still exists, but Australians need to go have an election, and the same people might get re-elected. There was an issue in 1975 where parliament wouldnt pass legislation to fund the government so the Governor General stepped in to cause an election. it has been called ‘The Dismissal’





  • While I don’t want to say this is a perfect solution, it is a free solution, and one id checkout early, that said I’d still recommend shopping around to see what best meets your needs.

    You could get a Gmail account for the business/ website and then register for a free WordPress site. WordPress is both software you can download for self hosting and a website service where they take care of everything (for free or a price. The free version may end up with the website having ads served to viewers and only has limited upload).

    As for design, there are a few free as well as paid templates. They can also get your site a domain like yourbusiness.com , but you can get a free subdomain at WordPress like yourbusiness.wordpress.com

    If you wanted to go complex, you could self host or hire a virtual computer to host from a cloud provider, but things like making sure software is up to date and security patches applies are up to you. You might already have a server / network attached storage device which could be the server and get the domain linking to it and have your router forward incoming traffic to it, but it depends on how hands on you want to be.



  • My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.

    I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.

    Although it feels like I’m still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they’d be very different. Today’s seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there’d be something new I’d likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.

    The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.

    It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.

    Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.

    I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.

    I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.