Shared on Facebook with the caption “Doing absolutely no favours to their international reputation, Americans have swarmed social media posts of Taylor Swift’s Melbourne concerts confused by a very obvious detail. Can you spot it?”
It’s an article from the Murdoch right-wing paper “The Australian”, so I won’t link the original source.
Transcription:
Aerial photo of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, surrounded to its North and East by tree-filled parks, to the West by a warm-up pitch, and to the South by a train line with two pedestrian overpasses over it. Underneath this photo is the article title “The MCG show detail that has American Swifties baffled” and byline “by Sam McPhee”.
My people can’t understand that a car is not required to live.
Reminds me of that TNG episode where one planet has gotten the other planet addicted to a drug only they have, so they can have the addict planet make everything for them while they sit on their asses and do nothing except sell them that drug.
Just replace the drug in that episode with oil and honestly it’s pretty accurate for our world now.
When you scratch at the surface a little, the course of Capitalism always bends towards rent-seeking behaviors. It’s enraging how not only are we trapped in this running-to-stand-still circus, but that every single aspect of our lives is getting monetized such that it’s nearly impossible to just not play the game.
This is my particular argument for the need for EULA and ToS law reforms. The concept that they are negotiable for consumers by means of abstinence is laughably outdated. It is unavoidable to have to sign a contract that you have no negotiation recourse over. All contracts are supposed to be negotiable before signing. There are so many abuses and frankly absurd liberties taken in those things that nobody should ever have to agree to just to play a game or use a website.
Seriously, a game publisher/developer having defacto ownership over the code you produce to make a mod for a game is ludicrous. Or a social media site getting the rights to use content for any purpose without limits and in perpetuity is insane.
The British Empire has entered the chat
Or just drugs, pharmaceuticals are doing it too.
I was writing a big long rant. Tldr stuff american "health"care companies, and their bribers/lobbyists
*so long as communities are built for it.
I just bought an e-trike. _
They made everything so far away!
I’d argue that for most of the US it is necessary to have a car. We just have adequate public transport. I’d much prefer that we did, but currently we do not. I suspect one could take an aerial photo of many arenas/stadiums located in densely populated cities in the US and they do not have much parking either.
Also to be fair, we in Australia are far from being some car free utopia either.
We have heaps of car dependant urban sprawl in our major cities where the vast majority of us live. We are also adding more of this sprawl all the time.
On the plus side most of our state capital cities have got decent heavy rail networks which you can park at stations and ride.
Yeah, necessary to have a car in the US. But I like using public transit when possible. Especially when traveling to NYC. It’s slightly faster to drive, but nothing beats the feeling of not having to park.
Plus, parking costs as much as the train ride
We just have adequate public transport. I’d much prefer that we did, but currently we do not.
What
*do not
“Hey Copilot, can you generate me a reddit post, but tailored to be more left to better fit to fediverse?”
Poster doesn’t live in the US
I figured there’d be a parking garage or something just off shot connected to those bridges. Nope.
Also unrelated I went to the stadium’s website and was immediately hit with this:
This place is pretty cool.
Acknowledgements of Country are pretty standard these days. Even quite conservative institutions do them regularly.
I’m trying to imagine a large American company doing this… Would be pretty radical in comparison
I mean they’re still not giving it back, right? It’s an important gesture, but it also doesn’t really change anything.
Actually, it upsets some people who think it’s woke to acknowledge inconvenient truths so it’s worth it for that side of things too!
Also very true of course.
What is about names and pictures of dead people ? Are these tabou in their cultures ?
Also what is the differences btw Aboriginal and Torres ?
good news is that it looks like there’s a neighborhood in the top left that could be demolished to make room for parking and additional lanes
I mean just look at all that disgusting green around it 🤢
Is it the airport that’s missing?
Yeah where’s Taylor supposed to park?
Yeah sure, it’s nice, but not every country can afford a mass ride-in-a-kangaroo-pouch transit system.
Government has started subsidising our Rooways ever since the alert on Dropbears was reduced (their population has been decimated by bushfires and land clearing).
I’m shocked other countries don’t do it, it’s a cheap and effective method of transport, and the fuckers are everywhere!
When I visited Australia, my only complaint was that at the beach, someone told us not to step on blue snails because they’ll kill you. Like, come on. I’m not somebody who steps on snails of any color on purpose. How am I supposed to avoid the murder snails?
The US absolutely can afford it, reduce military spending by 10% That is about 80 billion usd, with 80 billion usd they sure as hell can afford to build some public transport
Sorry but you have clearly never imported and raised giant kangaroos for mass transit. $80 billion is nothing to them. Nothing.
The cost of cars is something like 4.8 trillion annually in the us. Could build everyone transit in a decade if anyone cared.
Rich people transporting with the poors?
Will never work.
I went to the Melbourne Cricket Grounds once during the Boxing Day Test Match. Public transportation was a breeze and a stroll through the surrounding parks was lovely.
I got a Team Australia sombrero in the stadium as a silly souvenir and a stunningly beautiful Australian woman said, “I like your Mexico hat!” 10/10 experience. Would take public transport to MCG again.
Melbourne public transportation is great.
They do a huge amount of free trams to the F1 as well when that’s on.
Transport here does have it’s… Interesting moments too. I used to ride a line often frequented by an older Indian woman… Who would get on the team and start screaming at anyone on their cellphone because it was rude. Fun times.
Wow, they are dumb. Obviously the stadium just goes to every ticket-holder’s address, picks them up and drops them off after the event.
You joke but yeah, that’s a thing. Season ticket holders of my local club with a disability can request a free pick-up and drop-off for every match
I want to get delivered to the stadium via drone
Wait wait, Cricket is a game?
I always assumed it was part of Parliament…
For the longest time I thought it was a fictional sport like quidditch but then read the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Cassy Jones from the 80s-tastic Ninja Turtles movie said it best: “You have to know what a crumpet is to understand cricket”.
hey man if you had an eternal dark sky keeping you all nice and cozy then found out there was an entire universe of stars and planets and biology and shit out there you’d be a bit perturbed too.
I’m genuinely not sure if this is a serious question or if it’s a much-improved version of the really lame jokes that I saw from Americans all over Facebook pretending to have no idea what cricket is.
is it really much improved though? well hopefully it gave a chuckle.
Honestly? Yes, it’s a much funnier joke than the ones I was seeing on Facebook. Those were all like “oh, crickets? Must be really noisy!” and other jokes pretending to think people were talking about insects. There were so many of them and they were all inane. This one about Parliament gave me a much better chuckle.
Well, what happens in Parliament is definitely not cricket.
They’re confused by cricket?
We’ll yeah, but that’s a separate thing
I watched an interesting video explaining how to transport 96k people for the show.
Delete the ? and everything after it to remove tracking info.
Be careful telling people to do that, because it’ll break everything if they try to do it with a regular non-shortened URL!
But yes, 100% always delete the ‘si’ part.
Also some sites sign the link in the parameters and removing tracking information renders the link unusable. Those bastards
Yeah true. Facebook’s started doing this. But I was just talking about YouTube links specifically.
Ok. I get the public transportation thing, but, like, how do the rich/wealthy get to concerts and sporting events? Do they ride the rails with the plebes? If they do, I don’t believe it.
Swiss person here. Our country isn’t known for its poverty, and our head of state takes the train, just like everyone else.
Yeah the selling of private planes as a means of transportation has been insane I can’t imagine if we had come up with the idea of selling private Train travel.
They say that a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it’s where the rich use public transport.
And in Australia, when it comes to sporting events at least, that’s the case. Not the uber wealthy perhaps. I’m guessing @[email protected] is correct on that front. But those making 6 or low 7 figures are very likely to take public transport to the sporting ground. It’s kind of just the done thing.
The irony being—and maybe Melbourne doesn’t do this, but my city of Brisbane does—public transport to these events is free. Just wave your ticket and get on any bus or train for a few hours before or after the event.
Our trains are (relatively) nice places. And they’re full of normal, nice people.
Rich enough people don’t need to worry because they get dropped off and picked up by their driver.
They have their driver drop them off?
Yeah Uber is pretty common. People get dropped off.
There’s probably a small underground parking lot.
There’s no underground parking lot but for large gigs that grassy park area is used for car parking.
Ya, that was my initial thought. Still curious though. How does the king of Australia go to Tay-Tay’s concert if he wants to?
She flys him in on her jet obviously.
The King of Australia doesn’t give two shits about Australia. If he wants to go to Tay-Tay’s concert he goes to Wembley Stadium.
Via helicopter. I think you aussies call it a whirly cunt.
Yarra Park is used as parking
Yarra Park, Harry
It used to be. I didn’t think it still was though.
Bold take when your entire country is the size of my fucking downtown.
Australia is the 6th largest country in the world. Melbourne has over 5 million people living in it. It’s likely your downtown is smaller than their downtown.
Do some search next time.
Australia is the size of the contiguous 48 US states bruv. Driving from Melborne to Darwin is like Florida to Maine.
Yeah, fuck me but people really can’t comprehend this planet in size or scope or the concept of sonder at all. As if no other country can be big.
That being said… Australia might be the size of continental US but show me a population density map… From Darwin to Adelaide you might as well be the last human alive for all the civilization you will see. So your travel distance between your 3 main coastal cities ends up making the island feel a lot smaller, if that’s what an uninformed individual thinks of when thinking of Australia.
I dunno he had a dumb take but your country is small in arable land
…What country do you think Melbourne is in?
