Yeah the speed with which the social media minimum age law was passed was astonishing. The public had just 24 hours to make submissions, and those submissions—thousands of them—were given just 4 hours of consideration by the parliamentary committee.
Not an invasive surveillance power, but an extremely untransparent piece of rushed legislation that's already proving an abject failure as predicted by the many critics.
Yeah just a casual interest. Not enough that I'd really call it a hobby, and certainly not a career. But a little more than a few random titbits. This video's not a bad quick intro to the reasoning I used in my previous comment.
The gambling industry, facing its own potential ban
Considering how key this part is to the point, it's rather understated in this article.
In September 2022, Australia started a Parliamentary inquiry into online gambling. In June 2023 the inquiry handed down its full report, including 31 recommendations. 2 of those recommendations included a phased full ban of all advertising of online gambling.
Parliamentary rules require a response to inquiries within 6 months. 30 months later there still has not been any official response.
ants...having no stinging capacity
But that's like...one of the defining features that a 6-year-old could tell you about them?
Fish could be defined as the most recent common ancestor of tuna and herring, and all of its descendants. That would exclude sharks and lungfish, but would include most other groups that we unambiguously recognise as fish, while excluding tetrapods.
Yup. Birds are reptiles! If you want to define a monophyletic clade that includes crocodiles and lizards, there is no way to do that without also including birds. To define a clade, you take the evolutionary tree and make a "cut" somewhere on it. Everything below that cut is part of the same clade, you can't selectively remove some branches but not others, unless it's by changing where you make your single cut.
So in this diagram:
The green circle notwithstanding, you would usually define reptile as a cut at the "C" on the diagram. You could put the cut at Lepidosauria, but that would mean crocodiles and turtles are no longer considered reptiles either.
A more zoomed-in look would show that after crocodiles and birds branched apart, you also get another branch where pterosaurs branch away from dinosaurs, and that birds are one of many branches and subbranches of dinosaur.
uh, slugs are bugs
I'mma be honest, I would not instinctively agree with this.
Sure, but we're having this conversation in 2025, after phylogenetic classification has long since taken over as the way we describe the relations between species.
Birds are unambiguously reptiles.
Mammals are not reptiles, but are the most closely-related animals to them.
as far apart as you are from a reptile
That would mean...not very. Reptiles are an extremely broad and diverse group, containing everything from penguins and crocodiles to tuataras and pythons. Mammals are the most closely-related extant clade that is generally not considered "reptile", to reptiles.
Arachnids, on the other hand, are more distantly related to insects. Crustaceans form their closest relatives, followed by myriapods (centipedes & millipedes). Only then do arachnids appear.
The English term is "atomic number".