Most of the kids were like 15-16yo's - seemed to be a bit heavy handed response. There were full armed riot police with shields & kids had been pepper sprayed and police using quite a bit of force. Not sure why they couldn't resolve this without all that being done, these weren't serious criminals.

My 12yo daughter & her friends were almost caught up in this - had gone to the beach & needed to go to the supermarket only to find it shut down with armed police guarding it. Luckily they had the sense to leave & go home. Seemed to be just a bunch of teenagers getting drunk & doing stupid stuff.

Yep it's a pitb & clearly a renewed focus to push people into the fb environment. Have switched to Teams for some of my contacts however this isn't really that appropriate for those without o365 accounts particularly friends.

We skipped Halloween decorations this year... But based on previous form I'm sure our festivus stuff will take until late Feb to remove. We normally tell people they are also they for Chinese NY if asked.

I did the KWS check for BluSky - the only SM that has actually done a check for me. It only did a photo/camera based check & very explicitly said it would not store any data when check was complete (and actually had a 'deleting data' progress step as part for the process). I still have DMs here.

I think you have forgotten that you can’t effectively censor the entire internet - they tried that already and found out. Unless the company has some form of Australian business entity they are completely out of reach of Australian gov being able to do anything or impose fines. Then there’s dark web

Our sympathies are also with those whose children said "Can we put up the Xmas lights, I'll help" & then got bored and abandoned the task around 2 minutes later leaving the father to do it all by himself.

Noticed quite a few businesses that significantly downgraded their customer service & offerings (without reducing the price) during Covid - which was excusable at the time. But then they never reinstated any of these things & upped prices a lot since then - that's just profiteering & poor service.

It's not like the alcohol ban though. What they have done would be the equivalent of only banning 6 very specific alcohol products and leaving other 1000 odd alcohol products on the shelf with no restrictions at all.

I don't honestly believe it's helping at all - in fact I think they have just made it all much worse.
There's a saying in IT - 'If the user reports a problem, fix the problem don't blame the user'. This is a classic 'blame/punish the user' response/solution & all the experts told them this too.

Good quote - but I'm sure they also broke a lot of laws too.

#typo Daily Mail