elyobo

Guilty.

Never heard of it until today!

The amount of time maybe varies by the location and the visitor, but... how much do you carry that it takes a week to unpack?

Until I started travelling with my wife (and now a child too), one main lesson I learned was "you aren't going to need it" - every time I went travelling it was lighter than the trip before!

1. is a good point, but I wouldn't be too focused on it - just realise that it's ok to do that, so that when you find somewhere you like, or when you're tired from the go go go, you do actually stop and enjoy yourself. Eventually you'll feel like moving on and getting back to it.

I've done three long trips quitting a job first (~20 months, ~12 months, ~6 months) and the first two had several month or more stops, and many week or more stops. A mix is good.

Not sure that we're operating on the same definition of "backpacking" here, it's just low cost travel[1]. On certain visas in Australia you can extend the duration by working in a specified area[2], which is where that form of travel intersects with the food production issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpacking_(travel) [2] https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...

And that's precisely the point; the news orgs benefit enormously from the traffic that Google and Facebook send them.

Expecting Google and Facebook to provide them this traffic and pay the news orgs for it, not the other way around is nuts.

That seems only fair!

> Which measurement was highly effective that could also be done in a country with neighbors.

... All of them? I'm not sure why so many people seem to think water is required to make a border effective.

Facebook and Google have not taken opposite tracks; Google hasn't made deals to pay for linking, a major problem with the legislation. Google's deals are around news content, but FB lacks comparable products to negotiate deals around, leaving them with only a refusal to pay for linking.

Poor choice of words. I would hope that it was better, but not reliably expect that it actually is in reality.

The law requires that they not distinguish between news orgs that sign up to the new legislation and those that don't[1], which strongly incentivises them to err on the side of blocking too much rather than blocking too little.

[1] https://twitter.com/Pollytics/status/1362279552160948225

Uh... he's a right leaning conservative, like both major Australian parties. He's not off the scale nuts like the US, but only by looking through an American lens could you conclude that he was left leaning.

> Also I think Facebook should register as a news agency in Australia and charge news publishers if they re-post content from FB. This way FB also makes money

I like this, I like this a lot.

I would expect that coverage from those not funded by advertising (the ABC) to be better.

I'm taking Facebook's side on this particular issue only (and I don't even like that, because they're - as you note - bad).

I agree with all of the things you want, but this isn't a tax on Google or Facebook (and we need more taxes on Google, Facebook, and their ilk that offshore profits to low tax locations), it's an attempt to tax links.

This is a good read and worth your time - https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/2/17/paying-for....

They can choose to block that, even specifically for Facebook and Google while leaving others alone, just by messing with their robots settings.

If you post a link to content that is being excluded using robots.txt you'll get a link and no full headline, no lead in sentence, no picture - those are the things that the news orgs have gone out of their way to provide to Facebook.

News orgs could already block that content if they wanted using robots.txt, but have chosen not to - indeed, they go out of their way to sprinkle Facebook's opengraph and other metadata to make their content more searchable and present better when shared.

The law is bad. I'm all in favour of our government actually taxing FB, Google, and others that manage to offshore all their profits to lower tax jurisdictions, but a pseudo-tax based (partly) around links is unacceptable.

I hate to stand with Facebook, but in this case I have to.

Yeah, that's what I'm not getting here. If you had infinite inflation you'd only lose 100%.

This was more or less (same reasoning, but not explicitly presented as a caching algorithm) how I justified the state of my room as a teenager.

I'm not sure what you mean by "lost 250% of its value" - that seems impossible, so I guess something has been lost in translation! Can you clarify?

Is an optimist one that thinks it will stay around, or one that thinks it will go away?

Agreed, live on the 37th floor of a 45 floor building - it's not exactly high by these standards, but still decently high. Never hear side neighbours, every now and then I hear something quiet from upstairs.

I used to rent here, the owner was selling, so we bought it instead of moving.

I am, but I'm still a real consumer and I do indeed want these files.

> no real consumer believes or wants these stupid files

Preferences vary. I only buy and read ebooks, as they're vastly more convenient and somewhat cheaper into the bargain.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I do a lot of reading on a kindle and convert whatever I need using Calibre, but PDFs, because of their fixed formatting, are a bit of a nightmare.

The same could be said of Australia's internal borders, which were largely closed as well. Most people will follow the rules, so simply closing the borders will get you most of the way there.

The issue is not whether it's possible - it is - it's whether the cost of doing so is too high. It's a fair consideration to make, but it should be clear that that's the consideration being made, rather than pretending that only island nations have this option.

Population density has something to do with it, you're just mistaken about the population density of Australia where people actually live.

And obviously you can close a land border as well, it's just a matter of whether you're willing to do it. Australia also imposed tight restrictions on most of the land borders between states.

I really don't understand the island fixation that so many seem to have. Is it just accepted that non-island nations are incapable of policing their borders?

The argument is not that the experts failed, but that the politicians did. In general the experts have argued for more "oppressive" approaches, because those are the only ones that have worked.

Population densities are not wildly different between the two countries if you realise that most of Australia is effectively unpopulated and the vast majority live in a handful of metropolitan areas.