It's become extremely common here in Australia too. It's really quite worrying - I have a school age kid, and sometimes his class is 2/3 empty. He only misses school when he's genuinely sick.

...the river that flows upside down...

Washing me down, washing me down.

Oh, and as another user pointed out, the DAB+ radio transmissions here in Australia are very weak and have hardly any range. The rollout has been somewhat still-born, here in Melbourne there's one weak transmitter on a nearby mountain and that's it. In fact, it's actually surprisingly hard to buy an after market stereo that has DAB+ these days - I went looking recently when my current unit started playing up. People have jumped straight to streaming. Which is fine if you can get mobile coverage... but that's a whole other shitshow.

GM has not only stopped making Holdens, they have also killed the brand entirely. There was much mourning.

Cars sold here, from all manufacturers, are given country-specific equipment. It's usually not much, but the type of radio installed is one of them. When Holden's started being sourced from Europe, the factory there was very bemused that AM radios were still a thing they had to install. Sure it's too scratchy and low quality they asked! Yes, they were told, but in some places its the only damn signal you can receive.

Sadly, the last of the V8 Interceptors was destroyed during a high-speed car chase in the late 70's.

HF takes work to install. If you're out in the country side, driving a stock Toyota Camry, and everything is ablaze, being about to hear relevant information on the AM band will literally save lives.

Wot? Looks like someone copied my post for reasons unknown. I'm not in Singapore, and can't possibly comment on the radio there!

My vast nation of Australia has a serious problem with coverage by radio stations, and indeed internet and anything else that needs broadcasting. The vast majority of the population here is concentrated in a few large cities on the east coast. Which means FM radio station signals die out pretty fast as soon as you start driving from the population centres. So AM still has a role here, even if the quality is often sketchy. In fact, it's something of a life saver when there's a major emergency like a huge bushfire. In 2009, when massive fires engulfed large areas of my home state of Victoria, the AM stations of the Australian Broadcast Corporation did nothing but broadcast emergency information. There are terrifying recordings of warnings to evacuate, naming many towns. Or worse still, saying it was too late and to stay in place... Anyway, AM still has a big role here.

I had a vasectomy last year in May. Took maybe 15 minutes. Just had a local anaesthetic. The most complicated part was shaving my scrotum! I visited my local massive Chemist (pharmacy) and was googling "Best way to shave balls" whilst in their male grooming aisle

I'm 51, and I have fathered a number of children. I'm done reproducing, and now I also can't have any accidents.

There are plenty of countries in the "developed" world who will soon be in the same boat. Italy for example. It's pretty easy to see why, there are many impediments to starting a family, most of them to do with housing and economics. If it's not possible to buy a house without both partners working full time, then there's not much time or money left over to start a family. In Japan, at one point real estate was so expensive that banks were offering multi-generational home loans, where a couple's children could continue to pay off a mortgage on a place after their parents retired or died!

My home nation of Australia has a birth rate that's been at or below the replacement level for a while now. In fact, were it not for a steady flow of migrations, then the population would probably already be shrinking.

Notably, this is one option Japan has been opposed to for decades. It's very hard to become a resident of Japan, and they accept only a handful of refugees each year...

Of course there are other factors, such as readily available contraception, and women with more education having fewer children. But these are both social goods. I can't see a way they can turn this around quickly without fundamentally changing their work culture and economy.

It would be excellent if all schools were able to teach computing literacy - how they work, how to use them, how to figure out what to do when things go wrong, how the world wide web is not the same thing as the internet, what a URL is, what an IP address is etc. etc. But making every kid code is not the best idea. By all means, get them to have a play with Python or something (it was Logo back in my day - that's showing my age!). Expecting every kid to be able to, say, build a site in JavaScript or code a game in C# is asking too much. Good programmers are a rarity, I should know, I hire them. And it's a black art that takes a certain mind set. I can see a whole lot kids being completely put off the whole world of STEM by being forced to code.

I didn't realise it was this old, although now that I think about it, I was playing it years ago on a crappy laptop I borrowed from my dad.

One of my favourite quirks is the BigDaddy cheat. It gives the player a Chevy Camaro armed with a rocket launcher! I spawned one once, and accidentally let it an enemy priest convert it. So the AI promptly thrashed me with my own car!

It's actually going to take a lot to make me walk away from 15 years of my random thoughts. I've made friends through Twitter, and even gotten jobs through Twitter connections.

But I've been on many other platforms that have either died, like Google+, or "pivoted" like Foursquare. Or which I have been taken over my nefarious forces. Livejournal was bought by Russian interests, and a few years later explicitly banned all LBQGTI+ posts of any kind. Which, to be fair, was forced upon them by draconian Russian laws. At that point, myself and most other users migrated to Dreamwidth.

So I'm yet to see which scenario will unfold here. I've (re)joined a Mastodon server as a precaution.

And I do wish that Elon would stick to building electric cars and interesting space rockets. And stop acting like a rich entitled spoiled petulant teen. Oh, and the army of Techbros that adore him make me throw up in my mouth a little.