That Arden station facade is absolutely huge. But why? Why spend so much money on such a large facility when the Paris metro gets by fine with only using this much space. It just feels like it's more inconvenient for the users since they have to walk an extra couple of hundred metres for no good reason. And it looks unnecessarily expensive both in building costs and real estate when a smaller entrance would do just fine.

The main point is to disentangle those lines from the city loop. That way more services can be run and since the lines will be independent a problem on one line won't bring down the entire network any more.

If it's peaceful it's peaceful. When I check the dictionary under "peaceful" it doesn't say anything about business.

Or rather they've decided what areas they'll mess around for years while nothing gets done until this farce finally gets canned.

Nuclear power's already much more expensive than every other mainstream option, and the gap is widening every year. In twenty years time it's going to be so much more expensive it'll be ridiculous. No one's going to want to buy power for several times the cost of all the other options.

The idea's not only dumb - it's completely commercially unviable.

It just seems dumb at this point. Nuclear energy is so incredibly expensive compared to the alternatives. Most countries are moving away from it due to it being commercially unviable. And yet here we are with the NLP acting like it's the best thing since sliced bread.

I know they see it as their duty to push the opposite of whatever Labor's doing but they don't seem to care that it's just a bad idea.

"We're already doing very little but it's WAY TOO MUCH!"

This was a really interesting bit of history. Thanks Philip.

At what point do Labor realise "Are we the baddies?"

More time to do what exactly? Soft plastics are effectively unrecyclable. There are no commercial scale recycling plants in Australia which can recycle soft plastics. And even if we did build them the depolymerisation process which soft plastics require takes so much energy it'd be more environmentally sound to landfill it anyway.

The whole thing's a mess and really the only solution is to stop producing as much soft plastics.

I work in software and we're permanently work from home. (I don't want to name my employer but they're a medium sized company)

Even more interesting is how all of Geelong is excluded from Melbourne's count when Gosford's included in Sydney's count, despite neither place being continuously connected to the larger city, Geelong being closer to Melbourne than Gosford is to Sydney, and Geelong having just as large a proportion of daily commuters as Gosford.

The reality is that Melbourne's population outpaced Sydney a long time ago and the boundaries are only just starting to catch up.

I'm literally one of those people who you say is vanishingly small.

It's not even a "the world is bad and I don't want to subject my child to that" kind of decision. It's more like a series of thoughts over the years: "is this the right time to have a kid?" and it's never a good time.

I did a double-take at “Australia’s biggest city” referring to Melbourne

It overtook Sydney about a year ago when the ABS revised the statistical areas: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-65261720

Based on these new boundaries Melbourne's had a higher population than Sydney since 2018.

Among scientists there wasn't any significant doubt twenty years ago. It was just spin doctors trying to pretend otherwise.

Why not start them off in the way you mean to continue? It's not like there are any significant downsides.

Compulsory is such a good system. It doesn't take long. It's on a weekend so it's not inconvenient. You get a sausage at the sausage sizzle and you do your vote. There's a real holiday atmosphere. And it produces much more representative results. Brexit wouldn't have happened if they had compulsory voting so there's no denying it's valuable.

Three hours? Our plumber was "too busy" to show for two weeks running.

The producer who was lumped with this was horrified and handed in his resignation the next day. I don't think he was happy with the situation.

It's a fair point but my intention was to bracket the possible returns.