And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.

I don’t agree with your position that my ultimate penalty was congruent with my crime. EDIT: nor that it represented a just outcome.

The area in which I was speeding was a distributor from our major city, with no pedestrian, bike or parking lanes available. I had exactly zero chance of hitting a child running out from behind a parked car because there’s no capacity to park cars on that road nor are any pedestrians present on the road. I was also driving on a wide corner, where speed/velocity can be easily distorted by many factors when measured from a stationary perspective, so I cannot be sure that the reading was entirely accurate. There are no pedestrians allowed on the distributor either; nor is there a walking space or lane. My only chance of causing injury or death to others due to my minimal speeding was in a collision with another vehicle.

This instance is the only time I’ve ever been fined for speeding in my seventeen years of driving. I’ve personally driven ~5km/h over the limit without any further fines or punishments, including past police cars with active LIDAR guns pointed at me and through speed cameras, indicating that there is simply no viable reason to stop and fine drivers who are over the limit within a reasonable margin of error.

Beyond all of the above, I’ll note AGAIN that I was happy to pay the $560 fine (which I deemed appropriate but costly, and costed me $80 for each km/h over the limit while I was earning $13/hour) but fought only the suspension of my licence. I didn’t believe that a single instance of driving 7km/h over the limit justified a suspension, and I still agree with that idea.

My issue was the severity of my punishment with reference to my crime. I definitely committed a crime (yes, I am a criminal), and deserved punishment for doing so, but I disagreed with the severity of that punishment. That doesn’t infer that I learned nothing; nor that I am uncaring of my fellow citizens.

I don’t think I’m a great driver, mostly because I’ve taken Low Risk Driver courses, have a Bachelor in Psychology (including driver/traffic psychology) and am acutely aware of the effects that driving hubris has on capacity - statistics often show that those who rate themselves as ‘better than average’ drivers are more likely to commit traffic offences. I do, however, know that I’m a competent driver which my last sixteen years since this event without demerit should indicate.

By the way, I’ve been a child protection caseworker for almost a decade now, and so to infer that I don’t care for the safety of children might not be the best argument to make.

Not if she’s got the Black Death.

Blood and Wine was honestly amazing. I haven’t enjoyed a DLC or xpac that much since Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I think maybe the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon was a great contender as well, but Blood and Wine just took Witcher 3 to a new level. It truly deserved its spot at the top of the heap.

The logic is that road deaths go up during holiday periods (which is sadly a statistical fact here) so they ramp up enforcement and double the penalties for those periods to try to correct for it. I’m not a huge fan of the idea, but from a purely statistical and scientific standpoint it does at least make some amount of sense. My individual circumstance is a bit of a curveball because my punishment was way outstripping my crime, but I do have some understanding for the idea of double demerits. I think my issue was that what should have been a one-point offence (doubled to two points) became an eight-point offence just because I was on a provisional licence. That part I’m still very salty about.

As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.

Same boat mate - Aussie govt employee myself who has access to flex. Personally I felt it was better when I was working for an NGO and they always gave me the choice between being paid overtime or banking it to flex later. It was nice to get the extra cash when I needed it and extra leave when the time came too. That should be the standard the employee should have the choice between OT or extra leave.

Yeah, I was on my P-plates (provisional licence) at the time where you have can have up to seven demerit points before losing your licence. As a P-plater, every speeding offence automatically is moderated to the maximum value, four points, and because it was a ‘double-demerits’ weekend (for public holidays), that four points was doubled to eight points. I received more demerit points than km/h I was over the limit.

For reference, if I was on my full licence and it wasn’t double-demerits, it would have been one point out of a total twelve. Instead, I got eight points which suspended my licence. Thankfully the magistrate I had was reasonable and granted my reduction - that also meant I didn’t have to pay court costs and I represented myself, so the whole thing cost me the initial $35 court booking fee. I managed to get something that resembled justice out of it, but I’ll still have a bitter taste in my mouth because of the whole rigamarole for a long time to come.

I challenged a licence suspension in Australia when I was 19 years old. I gladly paid the $560 fine but I would’ve lost my licence for three months because I was driving 7km/h over the limit on a ‘double-demerits’ weekend. The magistrate sent me to a fortnightly driver’s course for 12 weeks, all the while I kept my licence, and after the course was over I fronted court again and successfully argued my three month suspension down to four weeks.

I’m pretty sure that going to court over traffic violations is a thing in any country that allows going to court over traffic violations.

FYI in most Australian jurisdictions, you can’t demand that the individual police officer who fined you attend court to defend themselves. That part is most likely a US thing.

I think a good way of calculating their sentence should be in lost Franc-years. That is, calculate all of the lost wages they didn’t pay and force them to serve as many years as that amount would make in minimum wage. If they paid one staff member 1/12 of the minimum wage for one year, then that’s 11 months of gaol. If they paid 10 staff members 1/12 of the minimum wage for one year, that’s 9 years gaol. Take from them (in time) what was stolen from their workers. That’s the only way they’ll understand what they’ve stolen, because they have no value of a dollar, rupee, euro or franc.

I’m with you here, mate. My workplace went 100% remote during COVID and has only gone back to mandating five days per month back in the office and honestly? I think we’d do better with a mandated two days in the office and three days at home per week, mandating days where our team can all work together. I’m a social worker in an intake/assessment/referral position, and I desperately miss being able to look over my shoulder and debrief my case or gain some peer consultation on how best to manage the case I’m on. The one day I’m in I’m almost alone and gain barely any benefit from being in the office.

We have a fair few physically disabled colleagues, for whom I’d recommend a no-limits flexibility working arrangement that works for them, but for those of us who are physically able I think a 2/3 split would work far better. Our attrition rates have gone right up since COVID despite previously having some of the highest retention rates in our Department, and I can’t help but think that some of that is due to us being isolated while needing to rely on one another from time to time.

It’s really sad these days that “my algorithmic feed didn’t show me an article about this thing” has become equated with “no one is talking about this thing”. So many of us live in our little bubbles but still think that it’s fifty years ago and we all read the same three newspapers. We get fed different content based on what we consume; that’s a fact of modern media. If you want to know what’s out there, you need to search for it.

Conversations on a public platform aren’t just for those who speak; they’re also for those who listen. Many people are simply reading these exchanges without engaging in them. I think this discourse is most valuable for them, far more valuable than for someone whose opinion is so ingrained that they’re the one arguing about it.

If Bethesda created a paid mod market where creators could charge for access and Bethesda only took a super nominal amount of those payments to cover transaction fees (say, 2-3%) I would so be in favour of that. I love the idea of passionate creators being rewarded for their work, and frankly it could (and should) create a new employee pipeline for them.

Sadly though, then Bethesda might make 0.01875% less profit this quarter than they did last quarter, which these days is the death knell of the capitalistic venture.

They definitely did learn. They learned that they could charge for mods and people, sadly, will pay. They’ve learned that they can make more money by paywalling what should be essential patches and bugfixes. They learned that the average gamer is willing to be fleeced. They learned that they can run an IP into the ground and still extract maximum cash from it.

They’ve learned. They just didn’t learn the lesson that we here on Lemmy wanted them to learn. That’s a sad fact of being part of a minority community.

One of the more believable greentexts I’ve read, and likely for this reason.

I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.

I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.

I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?

Welp, looks like it’s gonna be yet another Ubisoft cash-grab. Yay.