softveda

That and most of the pay phone booths are now free public WiFi hotspots.

A Victorian lawyer has become the first in Australia to face professional sanctions for using artificial intelligence in a court case, being stripped of his ability to practise as a principal lawyer after AI generated false citations that he had failed to verify.

Company tax could be slashed to 20 per cent for firms with revenue below $1 billion, but businesses would be hit with a world-first “cashflow tax” to encourage them to invest in Australia and capture a share of the enormous earnings of tech giants such as Netflix and Apple.

The commission estimates its plan would deliver an estimated $15 billion boost to the economy.

While cashflow taxes have won support among academics, no country has introduced one to replace traditional company tax.

Proponents argue they are more difficult for large companies to avoid, particularly multinationals that may sell intellectual property or move debt between their international subsidiaries to reduce their overall tax burden.

Tech giants such as Apple, which in 2022-23 paid $141 million in tax on $481 million of taxable income despite reporting $12.6 billion of total income, and Amazon which reported $6.5 billion in income across four entities and paid $125 million in tax, meet their legal tax requirements in Australia.

So code that was untested (the code path that failed was never exercised), perhaps there is no test environment, and not even peer reviewed ( it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected.) was pushed to production, what a surprise !!

The current government in Queensland Australia announced 50c fares for 6 months trial. There is an election this month, the gov declared it will be made permanent, the opposition which is tipped to win has so far maintained they will also keep it. It has boosted PT travel significantly.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/11/the-b...

I am in Australia. We are somewhere in between, not as strong as Germany or Western EU countries but infinitely better than US. When some of us were laid off by a US tech firm in 2023 they had to give us prior notice for consultation and not cut off our access immediately like they did in US. This allowed us a week to understand our rights and find out the mistakes in their offer. They had to go back and come back with a new better offer as per Australian laws.

In Australia we have codified National Employment Standards which are strictly enforced. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/national-e...

After five years of pursuing a class action lawsuit against Uber on behalf of 8000 taxi operators, Andrianakis stood on the steps of the Supreme Court of Victoria on Monday morning following a historic settlement of $272 million – the fifth-largest class action settlement in Australia’s history. ... The class action, brought by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers in 2019, was filed on behalf of more than 8000 taxi and hire car owners and drivers who said they lost income when Uber entered the Australian market.

All Australian companies with greater than 100 employees had their gender pay gap data released for the first time. Previously only aggregated data was released.

That is very high. Australian providers offer free incoming SMS even when roaming internationally. The charge is only for data which you can disable. Vodafone Australia has $5/day roaming.

This is how it is in India.

I am Australian of Indian origin who also visits family each year. I had no such issues you mention (except the google region change). My Australian bank allows cash withdrawal from ATM without forex fee, most shops in Tier1&2 cities I go to accept credit cards. Verification is through in app notification, I get a local SIM. My Australian SIM has free incoming SMS.

The only issue is some places now accept UPI payments only.

This is your bank's problem. I am Australian, while roaming internationally incoming SMS is free. Next my bank sends in app notifications, not texts.

I worked in a Digital team 4 years back where the team was building voice channel apps for our customers on both Amazon Alexa and Google Dialogflow. Alexa NLP engine was less sophisticated we had to give it hundreds of prompts and intents. Dialogflow NLP engine required a handful of prompts for the same thing. But when it came to integration with backend APIs and support Alexa was far ahead. Despite having Dialogflow enterprise Google support would suggest to ask in StackOverflow. Amazon support on the other hand was excellent. We needed support for mTLS with the backend APIs, Amazon supported it as they understood enterprise. Google just shooed us away, their support wouldn’t even escalate this.

Github education is broken. They have automated it and it doesn’t work in edge cases. There is no manual intervention. I got denied because - my university is in city A and I study online in city B. It detects my location automatically and denies because I am not in my university campus. Wtf. - they have an alternate to upload some documents to prove otherwise. Whatever documents my non-US university has is declined by their ML. Also you cannot upload pdf docs. Need to take a picture of pdf to upload.

No. Read FAQ #26 and 27 https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#usage-limitations

This is not necessarily bad. Australian mines, as an example, have very advanced automation, IOT sensors, safety features etc., compared to India or China. It’s just that Australia imports the technology, but it’s mines are most productive/efficient and that is it’s moat.

Correct, HashiCorp support price is built into its SKU tiers like Bronze, Silver and Gold. They don't charge for support tickets.

100%, Many small street vendors don't have a power connection. They literally have a LED light connected to a rechargeable battery at night. I have seen these sound boxes, they probably come with their own chargeable battery. Display cost would be factor too. But most importantly they can service fast while not taking their eyes off, like when they are cooking (for street food vendors)

Is this a US thing? Unions/store. In Australia the union negotiation is organisation wide and covers all of Australia. The agreements are lodged, certified by Fair Work Australia and publicly searchable. In that case closing one store has no effect.

I am assuming it is Delhi-NCR in India. I got a chance to use BluSmart this week. I am impressed. The driver was courteous and the cab quality was good compared to the abused vehicles used by Uber drivers in India.

- Also no surge pricing. Pricing is fixed by a rate chart based on KM travelled.

The only issue right now is availability. From Delhi airport it is OK but when I tried to book one from the hotel to a friend's place the earliest availability was after 4 hours whereas Uber was 5 mins.

I don't know how it will work in Australia. Here leave accrues by law. Min leave here is 20 days but some companies gives more like 20-30 days. When you leave the job all accrued leave has to paid based on the last salary.

Some more details here https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/they-were-b...

The promise was there:

"In an ideal world, blockchain might compress that T+2 settlement time to real time by allowing payments and ownership records to move simultaneously. A lot of the reconciliation and administrative processes taking place all day in broker and investor offices could be streamlined if everyone knew everything about an equity simultaneously."

But it seems part of the problem is vested interests and not technical.

"At the heart of ASX’s spectacular failure was the unsettling nature of innovation to all those market intermediaries: what the ASX saw as potential savings, registries and other companies profiting handsomely from clipping the tickets on trading and company actions saw as an attack on their revenue bases. Australian investors pay about $1 billion each year for registry services."

The Australian Securities Exchange has officially written off the long-awaited technology overhaul designed to replace its core trading service with a blockchain-based system at a cost of around $255 million.

The license raj is still there for business, except maybe some sectors like tech startups. Yes there has been improvements in citizens life like mobile phones etc. But official harassment and bribery is as prevalent as before. Want to get a passport issued or renewed have to pay Rs 500 to the police. Just last week a mother and her kids died as they were turned away from a govt hospital as they could not show the Aadhar id card. Read the Indian news and this kind of cases as their every week.

In a very crude way, sales is about landing new deals or expanding. Customer success is about securing renewals for existing customer and increase adoption, prevent churn. It is a post-sales role.

Same in Australia, atleast for professional jobs you will need to give your Passport or Citizenship Certificate for verification.

https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/employing-and-sponsori...

What rubbish, the only commitment for employees is to work to professional standards in lieu of money. If you need such long term commitments then hire like executives with retention, i.e. if you let go the employee before the term (except for misconduct/fraud etc.) then agreed compensation must be paid as per written contract, but you won't do it.

Many companies in Australia do not even put years of experience in job requirements as a HR policy. What matters is experience like "has build complex APIs for integration" not how many years you have been building APIs. Then if you are called for interview you will be compared against the other candidates.

One thing I don't understand is why you need more engineers to scale your product usage to higher volume. More machines/infrastructure or even support makes sense but devs no. I have same question for Atlassian, they are hiring like crazy.

This is the norm in Australia. You cannot fire people except for misconduct. Here they abolish your role or department due to business restructuring which is legal. Since your role is gone the company has to provide a redeployment opportunity to the impacted employees to other possible roles in the company. In a honest restructuring this works and some people do get other roles, some managers like to retain staff they like or are buddy with and are "appointed" to other role. After a specified period like 30 days if there is no suitable role for you the company will make you redundant and your will leave the company.