Driving, gymnastics, break dancing (ESPECIALLY break dancing)... Anything that can't be timed or measured or otherwise objectively decided should be removed from competition.

How do you quantify "style"? How do you ensure there is not biase from judges based on their knowledge of the competitor, be it country they are representing, or personal connections, or racial / religious opinion? How do you fairly compensate for what your personal opinion considers "worth" more when it comes to a trick or routine compared to another?

Swimming, running, jumping, throwing things a distance are all things that can be measured and ruled against a standard that every competitor uses. It's fair and it's removed from any bias.

The Olympics are supposed to be about competition between athletes and shouldn't be affected by popularity or politics, which anything with an interpretive aspect to the result will suffer from.

So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.

Callum feels the familiar vibration of his mobile phone. Another text from Sportsbet.

...

Callum hasn't placed a wager for more than a year. Sportsbet is still trying to lure him back into action with an almost daily stream of text messages.

...

I actually had the opposite experience to the complains in this article..

I'm not really a gambler, but I did fire up SportsBet for my first ever bet in my life during State of Origin. I put in $50 and lost $10 on Queensland. Then I found the horse bit and selected some random horses and apparently I'd won $100 so I took out my original $50, then threw away the rest on random horses and greyhounds, and Queensland at State of Origin again.

Outcome? Zero dollars lost, and a couple of games worth of funsies thinking I was going to become a tenionaire with my 1.xx odds win.

Sportsbet sent me one SMS, and I replied STOP.

Sportsbet sent me one email, and I hit unsubscribe.

I haven't received any communication since - no sms, no email, no push notifications, no anything.

Not sure I'm fully on board with people claiming its all SportsBets fault they're gambling and being preyed upon IN THIS SPECIFIC WAY.

I do say their constant spam during any sports match of any kind on free to air television is an absolute disgrace though.

What a pair of clowns (ALP and LNP)...

Also I really hate TikTok.

There are currently no rules at either the state or federal level to stop political parties and candidates from using AI-generated material in election campaigns.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-22/qld-premier-slams-opposition-for-ai-generated-tiktok/104126936

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-23/labor-questioned-over-ai-generated-tiktok-of-peter-dutton/104131228

In short: A new North West town for 8,000 people will no longer be built as part of a massive renewable energy project when it re-seeks environment approvals. The federal environment law has been criticised for rejecting more renewable projects than fossil fuel ones. What's next? The proponent behind the North West energy project expects to submit an environmental application this year.

...

It would have been halfway along the lonely stretch between tourist mecca Broome and the iron ore shipping capital of Port Hedland.

A new town for 8,000 workers, their families and all the services and additional people you would need for such a population in Australia's remote North West region.

A town built using the latest in sustainability principles to service one of the world's largest renewable energy projects which covers more than 6,500 square kilometres of spinifex-dominated sand plains.

With a 26 gigawatt capacity — which is enough energy to meet a third of Australia's demand in 2020 — the Australian Renewable Energy Hub wind and solar project would have created green hydrogen and ammonia for export.

Well that was the plan.

I bought a torch that has a 365nm UV light, which I believe is UV-A?

When doing a poke around my house to see what I could see with UV, I noticed that my freshwater fish tanks looked "cloudy" / "milky" under UV, yet they are crystal clear under normal light.

I checked tap water and bottled water with the same torch and they do not react and look perfectly clear under both UV and normal light

I also have an auto top off for one of the tanks which is full of ~50L of a mix of RO water and tap water treated with dechlorinator and this also does not react.

I have 3 tanks inside of various volumes (700L, 150L, 20L) and various stocking levels which all show the water as a pale flourescent green colour under UV. The colour is uniform and completely spread out through the water volume, not concentrated on any area or in layers or whatever.

The currently empty 20L tank reacted the least, leading me to believe that it may be some sort of organic material that is causing the UV light to react so much?

I got half a dozen dwarf chain loaches to compliment my 6ft community tank... And the stupid things have spent more time in the weir and the sump than they have in the tank.

I literally just fished three of them out of the sump, and the second I put them back in the tank one went directly to the overflow and straight in to the weir again. At some point it'll reappear in the sump.

I don't even think they'll grow big enough to stop being able to squeeze through the weir guard so I guess they live in the sump now.

Some real estate dickhead just rang my mobile (which is not advertised anywhere) saying they were "just in the area" and wanted to do an appraisal on a house we own in .

It's an agency we don't use for any purpose, have never used for any purpose, and have never approached for any reason.

Is there some sort of legal issue with some smarmy sales knob looking up property owner details and cold calling them?

Makes me feel all gross that their grubby mitts are pawing through my deets somewhere in the hope of being able to stick a tongue up my bum and get a taste of some back door cash.

I'm sure this will go nowhere, but it would be nice if it did. It would surely flow on to other states given right?

I worked at Franklins way back in the day and their profit margins ran at about 5%. It would be interesting to know if the profit margin has increased significantly or not.

This is probably the most important part, IMO:

Queensland Fruit and Vegetable Growers association chief executive Rachel Chambers said farmers fear retribution if they make a complaint to supermarkets.

"Growers don't trust the system that is in place that they can escalate these behaviours to," Ms Chambers said.

"They are fearful of commercial retribution, which is their entire business, their life and livelihood, so the process is broken."

Conservative politicians are dominating Facebook advertising about changing the date of Australia Day, analysis shows.

After Woolworths announced last week that it would no longer stock Australia Day merchandise due to declining demand, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, condemned the move as an “outrage” born from the retailer’s “woke agenda” and said most Australians likely thought the same.

Now several conservative politicians are paying for advertisements on social media platforms lobbying against changing the date.

An example business I was looking up just now... In Google Maps and the first page of Google Search etc it shows then as having 4.5 star review average over 693 reviews.... But if you click and get the sidebar pop up, it shows reviews from the web which are far less flattering.

This seems to be super common. Google reviews are always glowing, but other sites are far less favourable. What's the most likely reason for this?

• Google results are more realistic because Google prompts for reviews more frequently and thus more people are likely to leave a review which gives a more realistic result? Whereas the only people going to TrueLocal and Product Review are the very unhappy customers?

• Or that Google is completely gamed by SEO "experts" who spam fake reviews for cents and thus make Google Reviews completely bollocks by overpowering any genuine reviews with paid glowing testimonials?

If its the latter, I feel Google needs to solve this cause at the moment I have zero faith in their review system.

(I've blanked the name just because that's not really the point of this post.)

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