FormulaNova forum posts in last 60 days

jdfoils said..
So how do I get back to the legacy site.again? Got it at home but of traveling now.

classic.seabreeze.com.au

Paducah said..
This isn't a new thing. Was on a trip in the Antarctic this past (their) summer and onboard were a couple of Australian researchers taking samples trying to determine which populations of birds had been affected by the flu. Spent a dinner with them discussing their work. Bird and marine mammal (seal) populations in the colder southern climates have been severely impacted by this.

Yes, the media makes money by hyping stuff up but this virus is nasty work and has already demonstrated its impact on animal populations.

www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bird-flu-wiped-out-nearly-half-of-the-females-in-the-worlds-largest-elephant-seal-population-drone-images-suggest-180987699/
www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/birds/bird-flu-antarctica

It's a bit worrying if you google 'why are seals dying from birdflu'. It makes you realise that it is jumping to a new species. The implication is then that if domestic birds catch it, then the exposure to humans is much higher, and therefore the chance of it jumping to another species (ours) is higher.

I think it was on TV recently where they were discussing zoonotic viruses. I.e. they are relatively benign in their host species, but sometimes very aggressive in other species.

Subsonic said..
While they're at it, if they could trim the top off tern island point back to the kite beach and replant some nice salt bush to hold everything in place, that'd be money well spent (well, from our perspective).

I remember seeing the area after a storm washed away the whole point. It was sort of amusing as it was a restricted area due to Tern nesting, but mother nature wasn't reading the sign and washed the whole thing away. It was full of shrubs and grass, but it didn't hold it together. I think once those winter storms get going, not much can stop it.

AI is pretty dodgy if its just relying on content out there on the internet. There have been a few times lately where I have been asking Google AI things and it comes back with answers that I know are wrong. Strange thing is that you can challenge it and it comes back with 'you were right to call that out, I am wrong. because...'. It doesn't give me much confidence, and less confidence when people use it assuming that it is correct and don't apply simple filtering to it.

Is that all it is though, just a clever bunch of algorithms that scrape its info from the internet and try and respond with a half sensible answer? Mind you, its still probably a bit better than some of the people I have worked with over the years... or maybe the same.

That said, it does help distill information easily, and if you do apply a bit of skepticism to it, you can get things done pretty quickly. I used it to generate some Arduino code recently and I was pretty impressed with how quick it was and how flexible it could be. I then approached some programming tasks that are less common and it stumbled badly. It would generate errors all over the place, most likely because it is scraping bits and pieces from all over the web, but doesn't really understand what it is that its putting together. I think if it has proven information to work from it is okay but if it has to try and generate original content, it can't do a great job.

hilly said..
How do I qualify to immigrate to Australia?
Prospective applicants must be invited by the Australian Immigration Department to apply for the visa. Applicants wishing to emigrate to Australia on the Skilled Migrant Visa must have an occupation listed on the Medium and Long-term Strategic Skills List (MLTSSL) or Short-term Skilled Occupation List (STSOL).

Why do people talk in such an indirect way? Do you have a point too?

I just googled this and you as the applicant must submit an expression of interest before you can be 'invited'. You/they are making out as if its a more exclusive process than it really is. It's an application, even if they aren't calling it that. It's not like the government here individually asks people out of the blue if they want a visa.

These skills lists are another can of worms. You might have categories where you really want people but you can't get them. You might have other categories where you want people and get a huge amount applying. Does this lead to a balanced intake of a variety of skills or do they just fill a total quota?

I stopped believing this stuff when I saw that hairdressers were on the skilled list. Surely if you can't get enough people to want to be hairdressers here, something is wrong.

Doctors on the other hand are always in demand, but I think the medical profession has their own requirements on intake. Probably set to ensure that the quality of candidates is high, but possibly also to protect their own industry.

Meh said..

Mark _australia said..
Ok I wanna know why we never needed immigration to fill some jobs decades ago. Smart kids became doctors and stuff. Some of them made coffee or flipped burgers while at uni. Dumb kids dig holes at 14 and never went to uni. We had a full spectrum.
are aussies now too good so we need servants? If we cut immigration greatly and cut welfare would more Aussies go get the service industry jobs? I dunno just musings but it seems weird everything worked well right up to the last 20-30yrs..?

"Between 1949 and 1974, over 100,000 people from 32 countries worked on the Snowy River Scheme, with more than 65% being immigrants."

Net overseas migration in 2024-2025 was 306,000. 2022-2023 was 538,000. 2023-2024 was 429,000.

1.273 million people in 3 years, although some of that was because of Covid delays.

But thats a lot of people to build a Snowy River Scheme. Do we have any super large infrastructure projects at the moment?

I felt sorry for some guy driving an Uber a while back. He explained to me that he came to Australia and got a degree in something computer related and then a PhD. He couldn't find work in Melbourne and moved to Perth, got made redundant and then started driving Uber. It's not easy for these guys, also because of the sheer volume of people they are competing against for the same pool of jobs.