The current government in Queensland Australia announced 50c fares for 6 months trial. There is an election this month, the gov declared it will be made permanent, the opposition which is tipped to win has so far maintained they will also keep it. It has boosted PT travel significantly.
I am in Australia. We are somewhere in between, not as strong as Germany or Western EU countries but infinitely better than US. When some of us were laid off by a US tech firm in 2023 they had to give us prior notice for consultation and not cut off our access immediately like they did in US. This allowed us a week to understand our rights and find out the mistakes in their offer. They had to go back and come back with a new better offer as per Australian laws.
After five years of pursuing a class action lawsuit against Uber on behalf of 8000 taxi operators, Andrianakis stood on the steps of the Supreme Court of Victoria on Monday morning following a historic settlement of $272 million – the fifth-largest class action settlement in Australia’s history.
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The class action, brought by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers in 2019, was filed on behalf of more than 8000 taxi and hire car owners and drivers who said they lost income when Uber entered the Australian market.
All Australian companies with greater than 100 employees had their gender pay gap data released for the first time. Previously only aggregated data was released.
That is very high. Australian providers offer free incoming SMS even when roaming internationally. The charge is only for data which you can disable. Vodafone Australia has $5/day roaming.
I am Australian of Indian origin who also visits family each year. I had no such issues you mention (except the google region change). My Australian bank allows cash withdrawal from ATM without forex fee, most shops in Tier1&2 cities I go to accept credit cards. Verification is through in app notification, I get a local SIM. My Australian SIM has free incoming SMS.
The only issue is some places now accept UPI payments only.
I worked in a Digital team 4 years back where the team was building voice channel apps for our customers on both Amazon Alexa and Google Dialogflow. Alexa NLP engine was less sophisticated we had to give it hundreds of prompts and intents. Dialogflow NLP engine required a handful of prompts for the same thing. But when it came to integration with backend APIs and support Alexa was far ahead. Despite having Dialogflow enterprise Google support would suggest to ask in StackOverflow. Amazon support on the other hand was excellent. We needed support for mTLS with the backend APIs, Amazon supported it as they understood enterprise. Google just shooed us away, their support wouldn’t even escalate this.
Github education is broken. They have automated it and it doesn’t work in edge cases. There is no manual intervention. I got denied because
- my university is in city A and I study online in city B. It detects my location automatically and denies because I am not in my university campus. Wtf.
- they have an alternate to upload some documents to prove otherwise. Whatever documents my non-US university has is declined by their ML. Also you cannot upload pdf docs. Need to take a picture of pdf to upload.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/11/the-b...