Jeez, some alternative facts from Merriam Webster right there 😂 I’ve never heard a British English speaker (or speakers of any other UK English variant, for that matter) use ‘fall’ to denote a season.

A reputable news source, though, or NewsCorpse/Sky/Ch 9?

I checked the ABC News website, and they’re calling him “MAGA Influencer”, which I’ll accept.

TIL I ovulate every Sunday 😂😅

No flood risk, no bushfire risk and it gets decent rainfall.

As a fellow Australian - where the heck did you find this unicorn of a location?! I’ve been house-hunting (well, land-hunting, really) for over a year, and everything seems to come saddled with a bushfire overlay, flood overlay, or both. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to being stuck in a bushfire zone.

(Note: not asking for you to dox yourself with the actual location, though I am deeply curious.)

Yeah, I tend to use “staff” or sometimes “waitstaff” to describe them, particularly in cafes, where the owner and/or manager might also be waiting tables. “Waiter” or “waitress” I’d mostly use when recounting something that happened while eating out, and I’m trying to specify who’s who in the story.

Hmmm, well, the “wait” in waiter/waitress/waitstaff refers to the act of serving someone, usually in a restaurant or cafe. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wait-on?topic=providing-and-serving-meals.) Like a lot of words in English, “wait” has more than one meaning.

There’s nothing wrong with “server”, per se, other than that we already had an established set of words for that role, and a server was also an existing word for a piece of IT equipment prior to US vernacular shifting (somewhere between the 90s and the 2010s, I think - we’ve always had a lot of US media pumped into Australia, but the vocab used to align on this one when I was a kid, and then at some point it changed).

Not saying Americans should do things the way we do it (vive la difference), just that the linguistic shift still throws me off. It would probably confuse me less if you’d always called them servers.

Of all the American vernacular for job titles, “server” is probably the one that makes my poor Aussie brain glitch most frequently. While you’re wondering why people are bringing you a meal in the office, I’m looking at the same sentence and wondering why diners are being forced to work as sysadmins over dinner.

CommBank winning the Big 4’s race to the bottom yet again? The only thing that surprises me about this is that people still bank with them when credit unions and building societies exist 🙄 (The only exception would be international students, backpackers and working holidaymakers, because I hear CommBank’s probably the easiest institution for foreign nationals to set up an account.)

All good! There’s probably far more people in your boat than mine; it was a pretty natural conclusion to draw 🙂

No one needs the internet outside of work.

As someone with a disability (and no car), the internet has played a massive role in allowing me to live independently, which in turn has a profoundly positive impact on my mental health. There are a wide variety of circumstances in which the internet has enhanced life experience - let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

From Banksy’s 2004 book Cut It Out. Banksy, in turn, ‘got’ it (in its original form) from Sean Tejaratchi’s 1999 essay in his Crap Hound zine. 😅

Ahhh, yeah, that’s a bit cooked. The freedom warriors bit isn’t surprising, though. You’d expect them to be in favour of “the freedom to be as irresponsible as you like”.

Wait, are you saying BAC while driving must be 0.00 in some parts of the States, or am I misunderstanding? It’s 0.05 in most (all?) parts of Australia (except if you’re in a restricted licence category). It’s not encouraged, but it’s legal.

Figured you guys would have more permissive laws than we do.

There’s some truth to that (wonder what percentage of fatalities are hook turn related…?), though most of my “if you can survive” experiences have been with drivers overtaking on the shoulder, overtaking in the right hand turn queue and then making a dangerous turn, losing control of their speeding vehicle in the Burnley Tunnel or on the West Gate Bridge, or deciding that stopping for red lights and/or pedestrians (crossing legally) is optional.

Obviously anecdotal, with a sample size of just one, but these are experiences I’ve had as a driver, passenger, pedestrian, or onlooker from a shop/restaurant/inside a tram. Didn’t happen anywhere near as frequently when I lived in Sydney or Brisbane.

How the heck are Victorians down the bottom? Is it just the sheer size of our population keeping that number in check…?

A friend of mine (EU national married to an Australian, living in Australia) has given up on trying to ship products from her small online business to the EU. The red tape is apparently a massive headache, and that’s coming from someone who’s familiar with both sides of the equation.

Who, Jeff? He made a whole video a while back about how he doesn’t rely on YouTube, and is also on Floatplane. However, he acknowledges that a lot of viewers can’t afford a subscription service, and YT has a massive reach, so he still uploads there, too.

Did I speedrun a midlife crisis in my 20s? 🤔 Never did pickleball, but that’s pretty synonymous with retirees over 60 in my corner of the world.

Huh, I’ve not heard of this, though it doesn’t surprise me.

In the area where I grew up (waaay out in the sticks, with no easy public transport access to the closest AEC office), the AEC tended to send people out to your home on your 18th birthday (or soon after it) and enrol you on the spot. This was decades ago, though, before you could do any of it online.

Local and (some?) state elections, sure. I voted in the NSW state election online while living in London, after having unknowingly missed voting in the previous one while in Tokyo, thereby having the state revenue service after me when I got home months later 😅

Federal still requires you to rock up to a polling place (usually the embassy), or postal vote.