Haha. We have plenty of moron politicians. But typically all our legislation is usually written by public servants with expert advice and lawyers, and even they get it wrong sometimes. The politicians direct what they want, but most of them have never written a law. I assumed it worked this way in most places.

All good mate, I mostly just try and stop the spread of misinformation on Aus gun laws. Most people don’t know much about them.

The leaver actions are fast. The main difference is that you can leave your finger on the trigger for a pump and are meant to take it off for the leaver action, though you could do it with your non trigger hand. People are also buying left handed bolt action shotguns to get around this, though it’s more awkward. All our shotguns have a capacity limit, usually 5 or less. It looks like these guys modified their barrel mags to hold more.

You’re not wrong about wasted ammo, reliability and reload speed, but you have to think about the worst case scenarios. Situation: close range, large dense crowd, shooter with an unreasonable amount of ammunition, and best luck in the world with no jams or reliability issues. That’s the formula for mass casualties. This is what our laws are effective at protecting against, primarily by limiting the rate of fire.

Can’t believe the guts that must have taken. Absolute legend.

Yeah no shit mate. That’s why pump shotguns are also under a cat C licence here. The legislators weren’t stupid, they basically categorised things on fire rate and public danger.

The Adler lever actions are very questionable in my opinion. They are almost as fast. Though the one I tried would jam all the time. Lever actions like that weren’t a common thing in the 90’s so it slipped by for a while.

And saying that a bolt action is potentially worse than a semi auto is some full on American bulshit. Sure things can jam and go wrong, but in the worst case situation with aresholes like this firing into a dense crowd where aim doesn’t really matter, faster shooting is more casualties.

A cat C license (self loading) is a lot more difficult to get than a cat A,B licence. So far this has worked, no semi auto terrorist attacks since Port Arthur. Thank fuck these guys did not have semi auto weapons.

I honestly wouldn’t have much issue with them removing the cat C licence, effectively banning semi auto outside of military use. But it certainly has some legitimate use cases in feral animal control.

Never heard of this but are they deliberately made to taste bad? Seems like a clever idea. The nicotine is there if you need it but the terrible taste puts you off.

That said, cigarettes smell awful to me and people keep going so I can’t imagine how bad they would have to taste.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07209

I can’t stand these popular science articles that just cherry pick phrases from a paper. tl;dr it’s a very promising result but more observation of other galaxies or other mass consistent observations is needed before we should believe this.

However, the signal from the MW halo alone does not constitute the definitive proof of dark matter annihilation. Detection of annihilation signals from other objects or regions with consistent WIMP parameters will be crucial for the final confirmation. Gamma-ray observations of dwarf galaxies in the MW halo are fascinating from this perspective.

I would say the most exciting part is this gives us a mass range to optimise the search with earth based detectors. Start looking for 0.5-0.8 TeV masses.

It was in the first 5 min that he mentioned it and it’s a clear example of available data that clearly shows a cancer correlation with radiation. I don’t see how this could be a case of people handling it well.

Let’s be very clear. I’m not saying this LNT wrong and I’m also not saying it’s right, but that we don’t have enough info to know one way or the other what the effects are in the low dose case. It’s an area of active research where it is almost impossible to get good data.

There is very clear data showing people do not handle radiation well. Plenty of data from Japan that shows a clear correlation of increased cancer rates with increased radiation exposure rates. This data is statistically significant as there were a lot more people than usual getting cancer.

Getting statistical significant data at lower radiation levels is very hard, as the shot noise goes way up as cancer rate deltas go down to near zero. We just don’t have enough data to know for sure what the correlations are, and no ethical way to get it.

In the case where you are trying to distinguish a shift in cancer rates at the 1 in 1000 level it is statistically insignificant, because your now measuring hit rates in the single digits and trying to distinguish that from other cancer causing factors that are probably at the 1 in 100 level or less (i.e, old people get breast and prostate cancer).

It is about safety limits in the sense that we should not be changing them to solve a PR issue. The accepted principle is ALARA. Governments do allow radiation generating devices and infrastructure usually in that framework. The PR issue is not a result of this safety framework, really it’s more of an education problem. Most people will never understand radiation or statistics well enough to have a good grasp on this. But I think it is getting better. Most people I talk to take issue with the cost of nuclear more than the radiation, especially here in Aus where we have no existing industry. My understanding is even the French are struggling to keep it economically viable, especially when it’s dry.

Energy density should have little to do with cost. We have a lot of empty space, and we really don’t need to capture all that much sunlight even with 20% efficiency. 20% is just fine when photons from the sun are free. The true cost savings with solar is not in the panel cost, it’s that a dozen people with a TAFE degree can build a 500 MW generator in a paddock in 3 months, that operates with minimal maintenance. Nothing can beat this.

Economically viable superconducting links are indeed a long way off but I would bet we see them before commercial fusion. In fact, we already have, they exist in a number of grids, mostly as tests and demonstrations. In east coast Aus, we lose close to 50% of our generated power to transmission lines. You take away transmission loss, and you can build a global grid. Aus can power the EU and NA in their nights with solar. It’s never cloudy everywhere at the same time.

Yes, and it’s a statistically insignificant amount of data with a strong genetic correlation that can’t be taken out. The scientific result is we still don’t know, more data is required. But how do we ever get such data?

I mean what’s the hypothetical other option here? We increase the background rate in a city of 10 million people to say, 200 mSv/year for five decades and do the experiment to see if their genetics can handel it to get statically meaningful data? For all we know right now it could be fine, or thousands of people get cancer that otherwise would not have, no one has the data to know. It’s a pretty unethical study.

Even if you removed all safety requirements from the nuclear industry (never going to happen) it will still be expensive, there is too much infrastructure, too many systems, control loops and moving parts. The reality is solar just wins in cost and it is probably only going to keep making headway over the rest of the generation tech out there. Given the development rate of batteries I expect solar/batteries will become the power generation standard simply though economic drivers more than anything else. I doubt it’s possible to beat that gravity contained fusion, and if we ever get cheaper superconducting links, then it’s basically game over for everything else.

But we will always have reactors. We need the medical isotopes, and let’s be real, they will keep breeder reactors for bomb fuel.

GitHub, hahah. Teenagers these days. The government must be concerned about the psychosocial harm caused by unaccepted pull request.

Get some denture tablets, unflavoured or a flavour you don’t mind, put two in the camel back and fill it up. Let it sit for a day and rinse out. Repeat a few times if needed. Helps strip a lot of the residue manufacturing solvents out. It won’t be perfect but it will be a lot better.

There are variations of the Skull and Crossbones here that have specific meaning?

Trangia don’t have the heat capture rings but it looks like you can mod Optimus burners to work in their aluminium wind shield kits. Got a lightweight aluminium set to give it a go.

Thanks for the tip.

Excluding the rather silly clip on ring thing, all the TX type pots look to be plastic coated. Possibly not the kettle but I want access from the top. The Optimus terra range is great but again, stupid Teflon coatings on everything.

Also to the temp drop issue with gas, I didn’t watch the whole thing but a strong recommendation is to get a burner that can also run on kerosene for cold weather trips. Even propane sucks in the cold, liquid fuel will run rings around it.

It’s a skill that takes practice and experience more than any golden tidbit of knowledge. Food is wide and varied, what works for one thing won’t work for all.

There are lots of general pointers, use more oil or, make sure the pan is hot first etc etc.

One of the biggest misconceptions that people have from Teflon is food sticking and releasing and worrying about that. With Teflon, at least when it’s good and new, nothing ever sticks, at any point, ever. This is not true of anything else. Your steak will stick, for a while, and then it will let go once the protein has cooked a bit. Your pancakes will need to cook for a while before you can get them to release from the pan etc.

Part of the skill is the implements you use and learning to release various foods from the surface. I like a wooden spatula for bulky things, but I also have a thin polyamide spatula for trickery stuff. The sharp edge on that helps a lot without damaging the pan. You can also use temperature changes to get food to release.

Lastly, sometimes some food sticks. Don’t sweat it. It’s still edible, don’t let it ruin your meal and learn as you go.

Finding a non teflon coated aluminium pot with a heat capturing coil for lightweight hiking is impossible last I looked.

Just removing teflon from stuff is a huge pain too, it’s dangerous to burn it off, I might try and sand blast the Teflon off the one I have. I have to research how bad that is, probably makes way too much toxic microparticles. But it really shouldn’t be so hard to find food appliances and cookware not coated in this crap.