u/a_cold_human

I'd assumed that Bogan Shire in NSW might have had something to do with it at some point. Possibly as a derogatory term from a neighbouring region. 

In any case, they put up The Big Bogan in Nyngan (in 2015, when the word was already firmly established in the Australian vernacular). 

What a shame. 

Reality always has the final word. 

Read up on James Ashby. He's one of the slimiest people in Australian politics against a really strong field. Even the Liberal Party wouldn't have him. 

Depends where you are. If you're waiting for an evacuation flight, you don't have to stay in Tokyo. You just need to be near an airport where the plane can land as it'll be chartered flight.

Fukuoka (for example), is much cheaper than Tokyo, and that's still a very large city (fourth or fifth biggest depending on how you count). Possibly you could stay at a much smaller city like Kochi or Takamatsu, which both have airports that can still manage to land a Boeing 777 (because the 1980s bubble resulted in a lot of over investment). 

However, it's possible that the plane could be smaller and does a number of hops for fuel before landing in Australia. In which case, lots of small cities in Japan have airports, and accommodation and food would be quite cheap. Especially for a longer stay. 

You can make booze with just about anything that has sugar in it. Fruit, jam, lollies, juice, jelly, custard powder etc. If that was the criteria by which prisons banned things, Vegemite would be fairly far down the list.

Yeast speeds the process along, but you can get yeast from things other than Vegemite. I'm not even sure if the yeast in Vegemite would be live given the salt content. 

This. 

Exactly. Even the best doctors of the day couldn't save them. There were plenty of queens who had miscarriages, had children that didn't live past a few days, or died in childbirth. Medicine today increases survival rates far beyond what would have been imagined to be possible a few centuries ago. 

"We're just trying to do the best thing for the country and for satire," Mr Nicholson told 7.30.

The man wouldn't know satire if it bit him on the arse, stole his lunch money, and did a nationally televised victory lap around the MCG. If he thinks trying to do the best thing for the country involves making fun of people's medical conditions, he could do us all a favour and go die in a ditch somewhere. 

Social media. Especially Facebook.

EDIT: Note that Facebook have been accused of electoral interference in the recent Brazilian presidential election, including by the UN. 

Notably, the interference was in favour of the conservative candidate, Bolsonaro, who has been endorsed by the sitting US President. 

The description (hyena like, tusks showing) is possibly the reason why this taxidermied head looks the way it does. The taxidermist would not have seen the actual animal, they'd just have the body (possibly sans bones) and a description.

See also: overstuffed walrus, heraldic lion. 

With the Iran War continuing, it will only get worse. The increased price of diesel increases the price of everything that needs to be transported. Not only that, reduced output of nitrogen based fertiliser means reduced crop yields, which in turn drives food prices up.

Australia should be investing in developing more self reliance so that we are less vulnerable to shocks. Strategic reserves in case there is global disruption as is happening now. The pandemic revealed that this is a real risk, and that the hyper capitalist, global free trade model has some serious vulnerabilities. Not just disruption like war and pandemics, but also things like the US putting up trade barriers without warning and for no discernable reason other than their domestic politics. 

Pushing an agenda u/VPackardPersuadedMe? 

This you? 

Perhaps you should go back to complaining about immigration in the UK and other UK topics instead of pretending you know anything about what's covered and what isn't in the Australian curriculum. 

To be fair, Japanese and Vietnamese have borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary, although imported across wide period of time such that the meanings and pronunciation may have diverged. 

Which makes learning Japanese difficult as kanji usually have multiple on'yomi, and kun'yomi which change depending on context. Which also helps linguists develop theories about historical meanings/pronunciation of various words. 

Vietnamese and Cantonese have a lot of similarities due to centuries of being neighbours/borders changing/Chinese occupation. Even though the languages are not mutually intelligible, a Vietnamese person can pick out Cantonese words in a conversation and vice versa. 

Also, it's a myth that you need to speak the language to "engage" with our Asian neighbours.

Well, part of it is so that there's a cohort of Australians who can develop higher levels of proficiency to work in the diplomatic and intelligence services. For that, Indonesian, Chinese, and Hindi should be the main focus. 

Literacy in Chinese is hard because there's not really a shortcut to learning all the characters, and you need at about 2000 to have a basic grasp, 4000-5000 to be fluent, and 7000+ to deal with higher, more specialised contexts/topics. There's no alphabet, so you either know it or you don't. 

Conversationally, it's easier than a lot of other languages as the grammar is less complex than other languages, and it's more a matter of mastering the tones and practice (which applies to any language). 

Arguably, the standard approach we take to learning Chinese (teaching reading/writing at the same time as speaking/listening) might not necessarily the best for everyone. Once you understand what words go together, literacy could be easier as you could guess from context what a word you didn't recognise might be. 

That's just a bit of linguistic silliness, like Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. 

Exactly. Assuming a country would expend a significant amount of military resources to invade Australia and defeat the ADF, it'd still have to occupy the place against a population that didn't want them here, and extract all the resources they'd need to make it worthwhile to invade in the first place.

Controlling Australia as a military base fairly pointless as it's a strategic backwater. The only reason you'd do it is if you needed to invade New Zealand because you'd have neutralised Indonesia in some fashion in order to invade Australia in the first place. If you hadn't neutralised Indonesia and a number of other South East Asian countries (depending on which direction you were coming from), good luck getting ships full of Australian resources back to wherever it is you came from because your shipping is going to be highly vulnerable and you'll need to escort them thousands of kilometres to make sure it's not attacked. 

Even the US bases in Australia aren't really frontline bases. They're points of presence which support US forces in the First Island Chain. You don't base strategic bombers in places where they can be easily struck if you can help it, and the same goes for nuclear submarines and satellite surveillance. And their presence doesn't guarantee that the US will step in and help us if they're attacked. You can ask the Gulf States about how that's working out for them. 

It used to be what you described. It was absolutely a conservative broadsheet  newspaper, but it had some journalistic standards, and some actual journalists. These days, it has neither. It's just junk. 

New Caledonia has a population of 300K, and the vast majority of Australians have never been there. 

Indonesia has a population of 288 million and a significant number of people have been to Bali at the very least. Developing our relationship with Indonesia is important, especially as it develops and the world becomes less stable. It's also more likely to develop than West Africa is, and would remain more important even if West Africa were to develop, purely due to geography. 

Not discounting the French as being irrelevant, but the places where French is important are a long way from Australia. 

Hindi is the majority language in India, but English is the lingua franca. With that said, it's possible that if Hindu nationalism continues and India becomes more authoritarian, they may eventually force Hindi to be the national language as China has done with Mandarin.

I don't see entrepreneurs flocking to India for opportunity, nor do we lack the domestic crowd for engagement.

They do, but they're usually people with Indian heritage and existing connections within the country. For everyone else, India makes foreign investment difficult and unrewarding. Navigating the bureaucracy, needing to bribe people to get things done in something resembling a timely manner, and a structurally broken legal system makes it an unappealing place to invest. Well run international corporations lose money there regularly. Of course, this won't always be the case, but from a purely economic perspective, Hindi isn't necessarily the best choice of language. Culturally, it's a different case. 

Of Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi and Japanese, Indonesian at least uses the Latin alphabet (unlike the other three), doesn't have grammatical gender like Hindi, and doesn't require brute force memorisation of Chinese characters/kanji as is required of Chinese and Japanese.

It's certainly the easiest of the four for an English speaker to pick up. 

Their software development hasn't quite kept pace with the rest of the industry, and software is where most of the improvements to phones has been happening.

They also haven't been taking as many risks as they did when Jobs was in charge. They have a strong brand that people will more of a premium for, and no CEO that can project a reality distortion field anymore, so strategically, it makes sense to not take risks with the brand. 

Regulatory changes are what has been driving the adoption of induction cook tops. China and Europe are the places where uptake is highest, driven by policies to reduce carbon emissions, improve public health, and to electrify in order to improve energy independence.

They're still fairly expensive in Australia, but if they become more standard in other markets, the price should come down over time. It's unfortunate that Australian buildings standards don't focus on energy efficiency and seem to favour developers who are keen to build cheaply and quickly, passing on the cost of keeping housing at a liveable temperature to the residents who need to spend money on air conditioning and heaters. 

Citroën had self levelling suspension in the revolutionary DS which was first made in the 1950s. They also produced a number of cars with monocoque bodies. As did plenty of other car manufacturers. 

There was four wheel steering on the Nissan Skyline which was released in the 1980s. It might existed in other cars before that. 

Not sure about the electrics of the Cybertruck, but they certainly didn't learn how to make a car that doesn't rust in the rain, which is something they worked out how to do in the 19th century, and pretty much every other production car built since the 1970s (at least) doesn't do that. Even the Delorean, which has stainless steel panels, doesn't rust in the rain.