In which the pond, completely bored by the woke wars, and coked to the eyeballs reptiles, settles for a rehash of ancient technology wars ...

 

Better late than never ...

You'll note the wild-eyed koala bear - how the pond loves to talk of koala bears - is loaded to the gills with pure, undiluted "stop the super steal" white Murdochian powder ... and it's the reason the reptiles have become almost unreadable, such is the monomania, because it seems that's all they've got ...

Where was Brother Stuie? For that you had to head to the likes of the Graudian ...

There's a lot more dissembling, obfuscating, dissembling and straight out lying revealed in that pink-tinged report, and meanwhile, scan today's reptile offerings and what do you get?

Not the slightest sign, not a whiff, of Brother Stuie, Robodebt and the whole damn thing ...

It's true there was cackling Claire doing yet another reptile rehash of the Covid saga, and a celebration of cardboard drones, but there was yet another groaning - the old biddie is really working overtime - and there was a beat-up bout of fear-mongering about an asset sale.

Sorry, there had to be another red card for the groaning. There's only so much groaning a koala can bear.

The reptiles really are experts in this when did you stop beating your wife game ...

Late yesterday it was the same story, with a novel twist ...

Tbe mutton Dutton and the "brutal" super tax ... thank the long absent lord someone can see the funny side, especially in the detail, it's always in the detail ...

As for running Ron DeSanctimonious on his war with Disney, the pond could at least dismiss that as pure, idle reptile trolling, yet another attempt to import the woke wars by a foreign company.

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

“Meatball Ron/ He’s a walking talking beef baton / And he tells you that you can’t say gay / And that Covid will just go away / That’s not OK.
“Meatball Ron / Marinara is his big turn on / Very scared of CRT / Loves to roll around in spaghetti / With extra cheese.”

Meanwhile, on yet another planet ... as reformed conservatives scribble Please Lie to Me, Tucker, with the rider Fox News isn't news at all ...

And they don't have any foxes ...

Respecting the audience in Fox speak meant telling the audience exactly what it wanted to hear and nothing that would ruffle its delicate feathers. In private, Sean Hannity would confide that “Rudy is acting like an insane person,” but in public—to Fox’s vast audience—Rudy’s ravings were laundered and legitimized. In private, Tucker Carlson fumed that a reporter telling the truth—that the election had not been stolen—was “measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”
The executives and others who clung to their integrity, most notably Chris Stirewalt and Bill Sammon, were cashiered. Those who could “protect the brand” by lying were rewarded. Dominion’s thorough airing of internal communications reveals executives who were total cynics, ready to serve the rubes whatever was required to maintain their market share. Fox News President Jay Wallace, after catching a bit of Lou Dobbs Tonight, noted tartly that “The North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”
We know what to think of Fox News hosts and executives. But what about the audience? All of us indulge the urge, at least sometimes, to hear news that confirms our own views. What Fox’s audience must grapple with is that choosing news is not like other consumer choices. It’s not like choosing country music in preference to hip hop or preferring Android over iOS. Getting the truth from a news source is more analogous to getting the straight story from your doctor or financial adviser or home inspector. If your financial adviser told you what you wanted to hear rather than the truth, you’d have a legal case. He or she has a professional responsibility not to mislead you. If your doctor assured you that your skin lesion was benign because he thought this would be more welcome than the news that it was melanoma requiring immediate treatment, the doctor would be guilty of malpractice and you wouldn’t thank him. When Fox News and its competitors lie to viewers, they are endangering not their physical health but their civic health and the good of the nation.
For decades, conservatives longed to get the whole story into the national news, but by demanding agreeable fiction instead of accepting complex fact, they have embarrassed themselves and undermined the case—still relevant—for fair and balanced coverage.

So if you want some Ron DeSanctus coverage, the man who married Casey at the house of mouse, a bit like the drag-banning guv who dressed in drag, why not turn to his war on woke in the Graudian, or the war on woke capitalism in The Conversation ...

Of course we've been here before ...

The pond was reminded that all that glitters ain't gold ...

As for the context? Anything for a laugh ...

The pond supposes it should do something, get on with a reptile reading for herpetology students, but it's getting harder and harder, because there were more red cards in the comments section below the fold ...

No, fuck it, no, absolutely not, not more blather about the woke and witch trials and J. K. Rowling ... the pond has never read a single Potter book and remains proudly defiant and wilfully ignorant, and the caroling Carroll can take the transphobia and shove it where the bigots shine ...

But what then? Spend time with the hole in the bucket man reliving the NBN wars? 

If that means the pond misses out on the laughable notion of the reptiles celebrating the need to get on with the green energy boom time, decades after it mattered, then so be it ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, just look at what keeps happening to the lizard Oz graphics department ... a bit like what happened to the NBN after Malware was done with it ...

Meanwhile, while our Henry - who had skin in the Malware game - blathers on about the wonders of copper, the pond can report that the constant HFC drop outs which were a feature last month seem to have smoothed out a little, but no doubt return, because what else can you expect, given the fucked copper sitting idle and regularly drowned in the ground, and the aged HFC network, still used because Malware thought it was the cheapskate thing to do ...

On the upside, reliving these wars, it turns out that Thucydides isn't much use ...

Um, speaking of NZ rather than Thucydides, as it seems the pond must, is it true that a report landed with a thud back in 2022? Is it true that the New Zelunders are aiming for 87% coverage by way of FTTH?

What's that? A joke about copper being the speed you get when you get copper? A celebration of FTTH?

Strange, the pond had expected them to be pitching the wonders of copper ...

Fucked from the start, with Malware doing the most comprehensive fucking, and the pond remembers those wars, and the reptiles' role in it, with some bitterness ...

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has proclaimed that Australia doesn’t “need” the National Broadband Network project and the billions being invested in the initiative would be better spent on “our roads, our rail and our ports” under a Coalition Government.

“I think that federal and state Labor governments have left us with a serious infrastructure deficit,” Abbott told the ACE Regional Radio Network in Victoria yesterday, “and one of the reasons why I’m so hostile to the National Broadband Network is because it’s a $50 billion investment with borrowed money that we don’t need. What we do need is much more money being spent on our roads, our rail and our ports and that’s what will happen under the Coalition.”

Abbott’s comments this week are not the first time the Opposition leader has called for the NBN project to be scrapped and its funding spent instead on transport infrastructure. “That $50 billion could fully fund the construction of the Brisbane rail loop, for instance, the duplication of the Pacific Highway, the Melbourne to Brisbane inland rail link, the extension of the M4 to Strathfield, and 20 major new teaching hospitals as well as the $6 billion that the Coalition has proposed to spend on better broadband,” the Opposition Leader stated in May 2011, referring the unpopular broadband plan his side of politics floated during last year’s Federal Election.

In January 2011, Abbott described the NBN as “a luxury that Australia cannot now afford”, calling at the time for the NBN’s capital funding to be re-allocated towards the Queensland reconstruction effort following the state’s disastrous flooding, as well as towards similar problems in Victoria.

You wouldn't want to get to FTTH by starting from there, but that's how we ended up here ...

As for Uncle Elon and Starlink, if our Henry's idea of a lower cost is $139 a month, then the long absent lord help us all.

That's what members of the pond's extended family currently pay, because there's currently sweet fuck all by way of alternatives ...

Starlink plans will set you back $139 per month in Australia. You'll also need to pay $924 in hardware fees. Starlink is currently offering free shipping and handling but has previously cost $115. If you order now, you'll get free shipping and pay just $450 for hardware.

There's also Starlink Business, a high-end service that costs $374 per month with a once-off hardware fee of $3,740 and $155 in shipping costs. This is a decent jump in price but offers a more powerful antenna and includes 1 TB of Priority Access and unlimited Basic Access starting April 2023 with download speeds of up to 350 Mbps and latency of 20-40ms in Australia.

The price of Starlink's standard plan and Starlink Business is pretty steep compared to Satellite NBN... 

Well yes, but Satellite NBN is completely useless, though it does provide a reminder that rolling out the full to overflowing intertubes in relatively compact NZ is different to doing the job in a sprawling country.

But all the same there's no excuse for the comprehensive fuck-up of the rollout of fibre produced by successive governments in Australia, advised by clowns and loons who haven't read their Thucydides of late ...

Here's a certainty. The only ones having a last laugh are dropkicks and knuckledraggers of the hole in the bucket man kind, pocketing a little loose change for sitting on panels and chortling about copper and multinodes, while the system went to hell in a handbasket ...

While on the technology theme, the pond thought it should offer a bonus from the lizard Oz editorialist, remembering the way that the reptiles were firmly behind the onion muncher back in the day ... what with Chairman Rupert deeming fast, reliable broadband a threat to his business model ...

For the life of the pond, it couldn't understand why the reptiles were fussing... surely a little cardboard and rubber bands would do the trick ...

The pond prefers a little barbed wire stolen from a nearby fence, and a plentiful supply of stockings - give it a go and see how your internet connectivity improves - but still, there's something richly wonderful about the lizard Oz editorialist blathering on about the US being a world leader in vaccines.

Apparently the lizard Oz editorialist hasn't still caught up with the anti-vax sentiment running like a pox through News Corp and Faux Noise. Where's Killer Creighton when he's needed?

Ever since COVID-19 vaccines were introduced in late 2020, vaccine resistance has remained a common phenomenon. Lower willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine has been associated with exposure to online misinformation. This column investigates the role of cable news on vaccine scepticism and vaccination rates in the US. It finds that exposure to Fox News reduces COVID-19 vaccination rates, while exposure to CNN or MSNBC does not. Cable media appears to shape beliefs about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. (here)

There's not much point in being clever at inventing vaccines if you have a disinformation network ruining the uptake... Fox News' anti-vaccine coverage looks like it's getting worse ...

Throughout the pandemic, a number of Fox News hosts have sowed doubt about Covid-19 vaccines and railed against vaccine mandates as a sign of looming totalitarianism. But there are signals that the network's openness to anti-vaccine sentiment is intensifying, despite the fact that most Republicans have already received vaccinations. It raises the head-spinning possibility that our best defense against Covid is becoming more politicized even after it’s been widely adopted and proven to be safe and successful.
Most of Fox News’ vaccine fear-mongering and suspicion-sowing has long existed among its popular opinion shows like "Tucker Carlson Tonight." But a Washington Post analysis reported that something “notable” is happening: an increasing tendency for anti-vaccine sentiment to “bleed into” stories tied to its hard-news coverage and the social media posts promoting them...
...As the Post analysis pointed out, for example, the Fox News Twitter account recently seemed to imply that comedian Heather McDonald's fainting during a performance might be tied to her vaccination status (the news story it linked to supported no such claim). Another tweet and article described the story of a woman who got vaccinated in order to attend her daughter’s wedding dress fitting, only to experience substantial side effects (headaches and a spike in blood pressure, which her doctors reportedly attributed to the vaccine). The article was framed in an alarmist tone and lacked context about the rarity of severe side effects.
This development was not necessarily foreseeable. Fox is a company where over 90 percent of employees are vaccinated, and even some of its most abrasive contrarian hosts like Sean Hannity have announced that they believe in the efficacy of vaccines. The focus for some of its pundits has been on opposing mandates rather than explicitly objecting to the vaccine itself as a source of harm. And since most Republicans are at least partially vaccinated, it would seem like the issue could've been primed for becoming less controversial over time. So what’s happening?
One possibility is that right-wing media is responding to perceived Covid policy fatigue — among its audience and the country more generally — and is more inclined to cast aspersions on anything related to changing American life in response to the pandemic. Vaccines are perhaps the most potent symbol of that, particularly as variants and boosters have raised questions of how often people will need to interface with and heed the guidance of a medical establishment that commands low levels of trust among the public. While most Republicans have received at least one vaccine dose, the overwhelming majority of them have not gotten boosters yet. The partisan gulf on vaccines has expanded over boosters.
Fox’s attitude toward vaccines might also be influenced by the early stirrings of the Republican 2024 presidential primary. In recent months, former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have taken different approaches to the vaccines, with Trump initially trying to argue that the vaccines worked and were an achievement he should be given credit for and DeSantis remaining conspicuously quiet on the matter. But more recently it looks like Trump may have caved, sensing that championing the vaccines could be a political liability, and has become quieter on the issue. The emerging analysis on the right could be that embracing vaccines could turn away some of the base.
Lastly, many right-wing pundits have taken pleasure in drawing attention to the limitations of the vaccines as a way to dunk on liberals and their allegiance to vaccines. While scientists have never claimed that vaccines were guaranteed to prevent infections altogether, or would render one immune to future variants, or could completely eliminate the chance of serious illness from Covid, right-wing pundits like Carlson have delighted in using those realities as a way to try to depict liberals as mendacious. Ultimately, they can use it to fuel mobilization against Democrats. The cost of this culture war is of course that conservatives will likely cool further on vaccines.
Vaccines are a potential source of polarization within the right, and some conservative institutions are making the calculation that it’s politically safer — and more profitable — to lean in to criticizing them than to appear to be supportive of them. Let's hope the trend doesn't hold.

And so on and on, and that's what happens to clever countries when you have luddite reptiles setting the pace in climate science denialism, anti-vaccine sentiment, and copper worship ... but there's always killer cardboard, right, front and centre on the tree killer edition, right?

And so to a last gobbet of technology gibberish from the anti-woke home of ludditism and climate science denialism...

... scribbles a News Corp hack, working for a corporation in the vanguard of scientific ludditism ... while singularly incapable of reporting on the news of the day, with the pond forced to turn to cartoonists like the immortal Rowe to find out what's been happening ...

Ah, Asimov's famous laws. How did they go again?

A Brother Stuie may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A Brother Stuie must obey orders given it by liars from the Shire except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A Brother Stuie must protect his own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Yeah, nah, those laws were never going to work for a Brother Stuie ...