sydneyjohn57

Thanks Cobber.

A couple more in the vicinity of the 1st shot which is obvious because of the facade of the hotel on the left. Photo taken on the footbridge across the railway station from my mobile phone of the time.

This taken 28 September 2017

 

These from 28th Dec 2015

With nothing much open and lots of time to fill during the current lockdown I have been going through some old files on the computer and phone, deleting some rubbish and also appreciating some of the photos that I have taken.

My photography skills are basic... point and shoot cameras and mobile phones are my limit. I am sure some of our more experienced photographers on the forum may also contribute as I guess everyone has plenty of time on their hands.

Herewith a couple from me :

A view on my way home from my local pub at about 7pm 22nd March 2019

 

6pm, 6th June 2019, Boracay

 

 

Masai Mara, Kenya, July 2000.... Unfortunately the camera made allowance for the low light. It was actually spectacular.

 

Philippines, January 2006... taken on a Nokia dumb phone

 

I'm just experimenting on something else from that Philippine trip which I will post a bit later for critique.

 

 

 

Its only now after listening to it again without watching that I hear the crickets as a constant background noise. The cockatoos of course are the noisiest with the intermittent magpie. Nowhere else in the world would you hear that combination.

As I can't go to the pub each evening as I did  before the lockdown, I have a couple of drinks on my balcony as the sun goes down. Sunset at 5.21pm here in Sydney today and as I sat drinking my cold beer this was my view, actually it was more about the sounds... so if you turn up the volume......

 

20 years ago I went on a safari in Kenya and after that I will never step foot into a zoo again. Wild animals belong in the wild. I'd post some photos here but don't want to thread fuck Annat's post.

1 hour ago, Woodie said:

Virgin Australia looks to be in real trouble here. Not that Virgin is a competitor on the BKK run, but it will be one of many that go down unless the government bails them out.They are 4 Billion in debt and have asked the gov for 1.4 Billion to help out.

Just like to point out that only about 13% of Virgin is Australian owned via the sharemarket so I honestly hope that Aus gov does not bail them out. Their shareholders are Etihad (approx 22%), Singapore Airlines (20% approx), HNA  Group (Chinese airline approx 13%), Nanshan Group (Chinese airline approx 23%) and Virgin Group (UK approx 9%). If the airline is running at a loss ask the owners (shareholders) for more money.

Sorry to thread fuck.

This is an interesting graph (as at 9pm 11th April) of the age spread of the virus in Australia, specially the numbers of young people in their 20's:

10 hours ago, snoopdawg said:

the River Kwan

Was that an exhibition by Quinn of his artwork?

Here in Australia they have now set a limit for non essential indoor gatherings to 100 people which will affect larger restaurants, pubs and clubs.

Until 6 months ago my local pub was owned by a family group who have 6 or 7 pubs but has now been taken over by a large organisation that have 80 venues. The licensee has been retained and I asked him yesterday what will happen as the bar never has more than about 50 patrons at any one time. He said that he was awaiting a call from head office but likely the pub will close before Friday. Their reasoning that they are unable to keep patrons more than 1.5 metres away from each other especially in the restaurant with a family group and in the poker machine room where the machines are mostly lined up next to each other.

I advised him that they are mad to close the whole venue as they will lose 100% revenue and likely still have to pay full time staff for a while. My suggestion to him was to close the restaurant, move tables in the bar area and keep suggesting to patrons to remain at a distance from each other. In the poker machine room (aka engine room as it is the main income generator and gives the pub its $34 million value) just shut down every 2nd machine.

He did take my advice re poker machines and advised head office of 'his' plans so I will find out around 4pm after I walk to the pub to find out if its still open.

I am predicting the next shortage in Australia is going to be packaged beer!!!

These were forwarded to me an hour ago and show the scene in Angeles last night.

 

I've just received an email from Cebu Pacific that they are grounding all planes from tomorrow(18th March) until 14th April due to the "Enhanced Community Quarantine" measures of the Philippine Government.

This, shutting down of travel to and from Manila as well as all bar & business closures throughout the country will have a massive economic effect.

59 minutes ago, bumblebee said:

According to the poster on FB, this is the popular Temple bar area of Dublin on Saturday night, and then tonight, Sunday, at the same time. 

Strange that the same push bikes should still be there?

Australia.

I am now retired and live alone in suburban Sydney and have not changed my routine at all as yet. Each day around 4pm I walk to the pub (not the closest to me but only 1.5 klm away) have a few beers with friends and walk back. I have not noticed any discernible change in patronage and in the streets only ever see very few people wearing masks and those mainly Asian.

As I have no car, I walk everywhere and go to the supermarket a couple of times each week and see evidence of panic buying as toilet paper & tissue shelves have been bare for a fortnight. (luckily I bought an 8 pack 3 weeks ago so have a few months supply as one roll lasts about 3 weeks).

At 62 I am not eligible for the aged pension as it is only available for me at age 67 and then subject to a means test. I am living off my superannuation pension which I built up over many years by salary sacrificing and topping up as much as I could. Since 25th Feb the balance in my super fund has dropped around 7-8% which hasn't concerned me too much but will do if it drops much further.

For the last couple of years I have done my traveling around May to July and would normally be booking something around now but will wait a while to see what happens elsewhere before deciding as I would like to get of here when the colder months of winter hit July to August.

Anyone arriving in Australia from midnight tonight (4.5 hours from now) will have to self isolate for 14 days. We'll see how that goes and how it is enforced.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/

As of March 9, 2020

We are aggregating sparse data from various sources. Where a source is official, the entry is clearly marked. Even official sources don't always report daily. Some report weekly but, in order to provide a set of comparable data, estimates are provided based on the latest available data. Estimated values are clearly marked.

48 minutes ago, seven said:

1 hour ago, xyzzy said:

I don't see a lot of good data on Australia

Good point. Nothing from Oz or Africa. Very few from South America.

https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert

In Australia

As at 06:30 hrs on 14 March 2020, there were 197 confirmed cases of coronavirus (COVID-19), including 3 deaths, in Australia.

• 1 in the Australian Capital Territory
• 91 in New South Wales
• 0 in the Northern Territory^*
• 35 in Queensland^#
• 16 in South Australia^#
• 4 in Tasmania
• 36 in Victoria^*#
• 14 in Western Australia^#

*Note that under National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System reporting requirements, cases are reported based on their Australian jurisdiction of residence rather than where they were detected. For example, a case reported previously in the NT in a NSW resident is counted in the national figures as a NSW case.

# Includes Diamond Princess repatriation cases: Qld (3), SA (1), Vic (4), WA (2, including 1 death).

Further details:

• 15 of the initially reported cases in Australia all had a direct or indirect travel history to Wuhan, China
• 10 cases, including 1 death, are associated with the Diamond Princess cruise ship repatriation flight from Japan
• 18 cases are reported to have had a direct or indirect travel link to Iran
• 92 cases are reported to have had a direct or indirect travel link to other countries and regions.
• 32 cases, including 2 deaths, do not have a reported history of overseas travel
  • 8 of these cases are associated with an aged care facility in NSW. 2 residents of this facility have sadly died
  • 2 cases are either directly or indirectly associated with attendance at a workshop
  • 22 cases are close contacts of known cases, with further details pending
• The likely place of exposure for a further 30 newly reported cases is under investigation

Of the 197 Australian cases reported, 27 of these cases are reported to have recovered.

3 hours ago, Jimmy Cargopants said:

An Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman, Welshman, Frenchman, Russian, Spaniard, Mexican, American, Norwegian, Swede, Albanian, Italian, Indian, Moroccan, Dutchman, Brazilian, Kenyan, Kiwi and a Belgian walk into a Pattaya bar…

The barman tells 'em: "You can't come in here without a Thai."

Great, us Aussies are exempt !!!!!!!

11 hours ago, Jimmy Cargopants said:

What did I say  .. and what's a pee between friends 555

Oh come on Jimmy. Surely you knew you can't pee in Quinn's, BBG's, or Soihound's corner of the world without permission from one of them.

3 hours ago, rxpharm said:

Here's a humorous take on the situation from John Oliver

"This video is not available".

Taken down by youtube or not available in my country I wonder?

2 hours ago, xyzzy said:

It take something like 30 days for a container to get from China to Charleston, South Carolina so they really haven't seen the slow down yet. But expect it soon which will cause some parts shortages

Yesterday I was speaking to a crane operator who works at Botany Port, Sydney's main container port and he says that they have seen a definite slow down in arriving ships and the midnight shift has been cancelled which basically means that workload has reduced by a third.

Glad it all went well, speedy recovery.

I have it but have always taken extra precautions. Don't use my correct name or date of birth, have registered with an email address that is used for social media only, never had a photo of myself on it, use freebie add-ons Fluff Busting Purity (Google it) & Ad Blocker Plus on my browser so do not get any sponsored items or ads and whilst online I only now use a paid VPN. On all my devices I have disabled location for all apps and only allow a map app to use location when I need to use that app.

Christmas before last my sister gave me Google Home apparatus which I politely declined so she took it back and gave me a store card to same value.

Interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald today: "Facebook will now show you exactly how it stalks you"

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/facebook-will-now-show-you-exactly-how-it-stalks-you-20200129-p53vna.html

The article originally appeared in the Washington Post but I'll copy into here anyhow

Ever suspect the Facebook app is listening to you? What we now know is even creepier.

Facebook is giving us a new way to glimpse just how much it knows about us: On Tuesday, the social network made a long-delayed "Off-Facebook Activity" tracker available to its 2 billion members. It shows Facebook and sister apps Instagram and Messenger don't need a microphone to target you with those eerily specific ads and posts - they're all up in your business countless other ways.

Even with Facebook closed on my phone, the social network gets notified when I use the Peet's Coffee app. It knows when I read the website of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg or view articles from The Atlantic. Facebook knows when I click on my Home Depot shopping cart and when I open the Ring app to answer my video doorbell. It uses all this information from my not-on-Facebook, real-world life to shape the messages I see from businesses and politicians alike.

You can see how Facebook is stalking you, too. The "Off-Facebook Activity" tracker will show you 180 days' worth of the data Facebook collects about you from the many organisations and advertisers in cahoots with it. This page, buried behind lots of settings menus, is the product of a promise CEO Mark Zuckerberg made during the height of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal to provide ways we can "clear the history" in our accounts.

Facebook's new tool isn't nearly as useful as your web browser's clear-history button - it doesn't let you reset your entire relationship with Facebook. But along with the transparency, it does give you a way to unlink some of its surveillance from your Facebook account.

You might be shocked or at least a little embarrassed by what you find in there. My Washington Post colleagues found Facebook knew about a visit to sperm-measurement service, log-ins to medical insurance and even the website to register for the Equifax breach settlement. Even when your phone is entirely off, businesses can upload information about you making an in-store purchase. One colleague found 974 apps and websites shared his activity.

Think of it more as a reminder that we're all living in a reality TV program where the cameras are always on.

There's not necessarily a new privacy violation here. Facebook has been partnering with websites, apps and stores to track and target customers for years. And it's hardly alone. Lots of companies send information about us to ad and data firms. Think of it more as a reminder that we're all living in a reality TV program where the cameras are always on.

Anyone who's concerned about the power Facebook has to manipulate people and shape elections should care about how it tracks us. It's easy to forget in the constant barrage of Zuckerberg's privacy apologies and fines, but here's the reality: Facebook keeps gathering more and more data about us, with few laws restricting how it can use it.

Rivals such as Google don't offer anything comparable to the "Off-Facebook Activity" page.

"Despite how commonplace this activity is across the internet, we believe it's important to help people understand why they're seeing the ads they see and to give them control over how their data is used, regardless of the services they use," says Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow.

But hold the applause: Laws such as this year's California Consumer Privacy Act require companies to let us know exactly what data they've collected about us.

In ugly detail

Regardless, I'll take Facebook's new tool as a win for us. It offers an opportunity to see in ugly detail how Facebook's advertising surveillance system actually works. Chances are, it's not at all like you think.

If all of this sounds confusing, it's not your fault. A Pew survey published in 2019 found 74 per cent of American Facebook members were unaware the social network builds a dossier on each of us to target ads. Facebook makes its surveillance systems so convoluted and, frankly, boring that we're less likely to object. I'm not letting that stop me.

Here's the big picture: Everybody's experience on Facebook and Instagram is different. Your feed might be filled with stories about luxury real estate and ads from Mike Bloomberg, while mine might be NASCAR and Donald Trump commercials. That's because Facebook's software uses the data it gathers about us to tailor what it shows us. Facebook also lets advertisers target messages to the people the data suggests might be most receptive - or, in the case of political advertisers, easily swayed.

'Interest categories'

Facebook uses some data to put you into "interest" categories, such as people who live in Washington, DC, and are into cats. You can see the boxes Facebook has put you in by looking under its "ad preferences" menus.

A part of this is easy to understand. Facebook obviously knows who your friends are, what you "like," and what and where you post. You entered that information yourself.

But there's also a world of information Facebook gathers that you didn't volunteer to the social network - and probably didn't know was being collected.

How does Facebook get this info? The social network provides partners tracking software they embed in apps, websites, loyalty cards and other systems. According to research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Facebook has so-called tracker pixels or cookie-sharing code on about 30 per cent of the top 10,000 websites.

Facebook's surveillance is hard to avoid. It doesn't require you to click "like" or use a "log-in with Facebook" button. You don't necessarily have to be logged in to the Facebook app or website on your phone - companies can report other identifying information to Facebook, which will marry up the activity to your account after the fact.

Your off-Facebook activity isn't exposed to your friends; they won't see it in the News Feed. The social network also doesn't pass your personal information back to businesses - they just get the chance to target ads to people with Facebook accounts who triggered the trackers. A company could, for example, ask Facebook to show ads to people who looked at a certain style of shoe. (Off-Facebook activity doesn't contribute to Facebook's dossier of your ad "interests," but the social network might use it to suggest groups, events or Marketplace items to buy.)

Thanks to the "Off-Facebook Activity" tool, I now know that Home Depot told Facebook when I visited its online store, viewed an item or added an item to a shopping cart. The Atlantic shared the pages I viewed and devices I used, which it says inform its distribution strategy and help it target campaigns. The Washington Post says it stopped using the Facebook tracking pixel, along with some other social-networking trackers, on content pages as of October 24.

The Buttigieg US presidential campaign says it used the Facebook tracking pixel to target ads at people who have visited its website or engaged with its donation link. Peet's Coffee didn't respond to my questions.

Ring, which is owned by Amazon, let Facebook know when I installed or opened its app. Spokeswoman Yassi Shahmiri says Ring uses the information to "optimise our marketing campaigns on Facebook," including advertising less to people who already own the product.

But is that a good reason to share information about my doorbell with Facebook? Shahmiri says Ring doesn't share specific camera data, such as a motion detected at your door. But Ring does ping Facebook when I open the app, which is almost always when there's someone at my door. Guess I was foolish to presume what happens on my doorstep stays between me and Ring. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all tech with the same critical eye.)

Facebook says it puts limits on the information organisations can share with it. For example, they're not supposed to pass along health and financial information. But it's unclear how well Facebook polices this. Using forensic software, I found Facebook tracker code on the website for an HIV drug. Nancarrow, the Facebook spokesman, says that "a health site with a Facebook Pixel does not mean that they are sharing sensitive medical information with Facebook."

Don't businesses worry we'll find this to be oversharing? Most probably never thought we'd find out. Facebook says companies are required to provide us "robust notice" that they're sending data about our activity to the social network. But I found very few explained this tracking in clear terms.

Facebook wants to paint surveillance as totally normal. Zuckerberg often says people want to see "relevant" ads. I wonder whom he's asking. About 81 per cent "of the public say that the potential risks they face because of data collection by companies outweigh the benefits," according to Pew.

Here's what you can do:

You can do a few things to fight back against Facebook's surveillance, some of which haven't been available before.

The new "Off-Facebook Activity" page includes ways to ask Facebook to cut it out. From that page, click on "Clear History" to tell Facebook remove that data from your account.

After you've done that, you still need to inform Facebook you want them to stop adding this data to your profile in the future. On the same "Off-Facebook Activity" page, look for another option to "Manage Future Activity." (To find it, you may first have to click "More Options" - sorry, I know they're not making this easy.) Click that, and then click the additional button labelled "Manage Future Activity," and then toggle off the button next to "Future Off-Facebook Activity."

While we're adjusting things, I also recommend changing one other bad Facebook default setting. Under the settings menu, go to "Your Ad Preferences" (click here to go directly). Under the heading "Ad settings," look for "Ads based on data from partners." Make sure it is set to "Not allowed."

The ultimate fix: Say farewell to Facebook and Instagram forever, and close your accounts.

Now I have to share a bummer: Changing these settings doesn't actually stop Facebook from collecting data about you from other businesses. Facebook will just "disconnect" it from your profile, to use the social network's carefully chosen word. Mostly they're just promising they'll no longer use it to target you with ads on Facebook and Instagram - which means you'll be less likely to be manipulated based on your data.

So what can you do if you don't want Facebook collecting all this data about you in the first place? That requires more hand-to-hand combat.

On your computer, use a web browser that fights trackers, like Mozilla's Firefox. Or go even further by adding an ad or tracking-blocking extension to your browser, such as the EFF's Privacy Badger. My account tallied much less off-Facebook activity than most of my colleagues because I use Firefox along with Mozilla's Facebook Container add-on, which prevents Facebook's software from connecting with other sites.

In smartphone apps, where tracking is also increasingly common, tracking even is harder to stop. A few services, such as Disconnect's Privacy Pro, scan app activity and block tracker traffic, but they may also interfere with the way apps function.

Or there's the ultimate fix: Say farewell to Facebook and Instagram forever, and close your accounts. So far, though, that's not a choice most people have been willing to make.

9 hours ago, Annat said:

Photos (never have worked out how caption the actual photo anyone help me?)

I download photos mostly on computer so it may be different on a phone. I type a caption hit enter then add 1 pic, then hit enter to insert a blank line, type next caption hit enter add 2nd pic and so on.

9 hours ago, Annat said:

I have no problem on LBP so why a problem on here, bit of a waste of time if you trying to report and cannot downloads portaits, site programme must be lacking something

Just a thought, can you copy what you have pasted at the other forum then paste into here?

18 minutes ago, alaskanbear said:

Then zombies take over , OMG what will we do. 

Move to Alaska ?