That is fascinating - I had no idea the deposits were due to organics. I thought it was to do with some of the iron core solidifying on the surface after the impact.
The area these are found are extremely high in Iron content. There are a number of high grade iron ore mines nearby. I wonder if there is any link between the high iron content and the formation of these rocks.
But if I service your car perfectly. Leave it in a better state than you brought it to me in, and then you crash it because YOU made a mistake then no I'm not to blame.
Stimulating the well will not cause a fire. You need an ignition source in an oxygen filled atmosphere. I have no idea what caused this particular incident but it could have been anything from an electrical fault causing a spark, a failure in a relief valve seeing heat build up to flash point or something as stupid as someone smoking a cigarette nearby. Just because some rocks got broken up hundreds of meters below the ground (and yes that is what fracking is) previously doesn't mean that caused the problem.
Because it isn't an ecologically sensitive spot. The dumping location is in a low current location where there is natural build up of silt. While there will definitely be silt plumes when this is deposited, because it is a low current area it won't travel far and then once on the bottom won't go anywhere else.
There isn't a need to process it into blocks, it will settle very rapidly. We are talking about a material that is already sitting on the ocean bed and subject to more current and wave action than it will be once moved. The lighter, highly mobile material has already been removed by nature. Then it will be treated to remove any chemicals that may have come from run-off or commercial activites in the harbour.
Finally as for taking it to deep sea there are two major reasons. The first is you would need much much larger ships to do the work and the amount of direct pollution made by the process would go up. The second is that you are operating in reef conditions, which mean no matter what there is the risk of accidents. The further you make the boats travel, the larger they are, and the further they go the higher the risk of an accident which could see significant amounts of silt being deposited where you really don't want it and also see an uncontrolled dumping of oil. A small oil spill from a holed fuel tank on one of these ships is immediately orders of magnitude worse than the risks from silt.
It's one of the main reasons for doing this project in the first instance. make the harbour and the channels safer.
As an Australian with some ability to read and the knowledge that this "waste" is sand sucked up from the seabed a short distance away I am absolutely ok with them making navigation channels and harbours safer for really really big ships full of fuel oil, gas, coal and other shit that I REALLY REALLY don't want to end up on the reef.
It is being sucked up out of the shipping channel and harbour (ie off the ocean floor) and then being transport basically no distance and put back down in the main area silt builds up. Also current flows are AWAY from the reef.
This will have orders of magnitude less impact than the floods we have do.
I had never heard of Perfect Dark before now. I can see how that would chew it up. It wouldn't be viable on a metered connection (not that it is viable speed wise on any connection available to me).
But if I got that answer I would think he would be excellent for a client management role! That response is incredibly sharp, shows a sense of humour and an ability to not come up with a boring answer. I don't believe I could have come up with that witty a rejoiner in the middle of a stressful situation (ie a job interview)
Not only that, but in Australia anyway ornery is a very unusual word to use. It demonstrates a very good vocabulary and probably an interest in the written word and communication that so many people lack. If the tone of the conversation was right this response would stand a person in good stead.
The fact that the original article sees it as the opposite is a bigger reflection on the original author than on the questions.
The key to TPG and others is whether you are connected directly to their DSLAM. If you are on a RIM, which a huge number of people are, you are stuck on tesltra wholesale.
I have that situation. TPG, AGILE (Internode iiNet), Optus, & Telstra all have DSLAMs in my local exchange but I am on a rim so I'm stuck.
And seriously why would you have issues with these questions? You might think they are silly, but perhaps that is the point.
There are going to be lots of crap things you have to do at work. Crap things "you" think are pointless and stupid and, despite what you may think, your employer knows that you don't want to do these things. They have their reasons even if you don't agree with them. If you respond like a cock in the interview you will be a cock to work with.
Also lets take the tennis ball question, one that is so well known that I had never heard it before. It is a behavioural question. If the person sitting opposite me answers it accurately due to knowledge of aerodynamics it actually tells me very little. However if the person tries to guess, or freezes, or says "I have no idea" all tell you quite a lot about how they will approach their work.
No it's not an exact science, yes a lot of it has as much reliability as homoeopathy, but you are making a decision to hire someone on a piece of paper that is going to be at least partially false, the word of people that person has personally picked (no bias there!) and the gut reaction based on a couple of hours of talking to that person.
Having hired close to 40 people to work directly for me over the past 8 years I can tell you that I HATE the hiring process. And after hiring a number of people that have been downright toxic to my business I now work on the premise that I will say no on even the barest hint the person I am talking to is a wanker. I'm sure I have missed some amazing talent now as a result but missing someone brilliant is a small price to pay for not getting a terrorist (terrorist - Good outcome, bad attitude).
Sorry I got my bits and bytes wrong. That is 3640 kilobytes. Just checking Netflix website and they say 4.7gb per hour for their HD 3D. That means a total of 112gb per day if you watched it non stop. So basically you need to have 3 tvs showing HD 3D all day to do 300gb.
Also I must be using the wrong torrents. I almost never max out my shitty 8mbit connection on torrents. Usenet I can of course.
utorrent at 1.5Mbytes / second is still only 130gb.... That leaves 170gb.... Add 2 movies a night and that is say another 24gb. Leaves 146gb....
As I said - no question it's technically feasible - I just want to know how you use that much data daily, regularly. It would be easy to do infrequently - eg. your 800gb porn collection. But if they have hundreds of movies I would have to assume you aren't watching all of them over 2 days.....
That means on your downstream you are sustaining 3,640 Kb/s for the entire day. Not that this isn't possible I just want to know what you are using it for. I just can't think of a usage case.
If you are streaming HD video to multiple machines you would still not hit that level of throughput. I'm fascinated. Like that would be 15-20 high quality 1080p movie rips.
And then to send that much data! Are you walking around with a highres camera strapped to your head uploading continuously?
Though $200 for 100gb seems a little harsh even by Aussie standards let alone the US "I want it all" standards. I'm on 300gb for $130....
That said I was one of the original Optus cable internet customers where you got unlimited internet over HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coax). That was great for a few years and then they introduce their fair usage policy which was you couldn't exceed 10 times the average user. This was a bitch to monitor as you had no idea what an average user did and I apparantly was not an average user. Then finally they brought in a 3gb per month limit. There wasn't even other plans to choose from. Fortunately at that time we saw an explosion of ADSL2 providers and optus had to compete to keep their customers and now their HFC is one of the best value options (as long as you aren't badly contended).
I did a huge amount of research on what system to go for when I was looking at doing the same.
The final result was that KNX represents the best system to go for. It is the only open standard meaning you have many many manufactures (as opposed to CBUS) it integrates with pc systems allowing you to do 100% customisable setups and its wiring is simple.
You have to run a seperate cable to every device you control but given you are building this is easy. The cable can support (off the top of my head) 128 devices on one cable. Each device is individually addressed and the on/off status is reported back meaning you can still use manual style switches with no problems.
As others have mentioned make sure you data wire your house as well while you are there but this is a different question.
Expect however to spend $20k+ if you are going lights, access, hvac, sensors, etc. If you want to keep your costs low during the build period run the cable where ever it is needed and add the devices later.
Australia has a vested interest in strong IP laws as believe it or not Australia generates income due to those laws. Yes it spends money as well but it isn't one way. What chance do you think the CSIRO would have had in collecting its wireless patents royalties if we didn't have an IP law agreement with the US? (Don't confuse this with my believe copyright laws aren't broken in their current form)
As for China and it's claims on the surrounding areas, this is a chicken and egg situation. China feels pressured by the US so it makes claims on territory surrounding it. The US feels pressured by China so it economic policies and military positions are shifted to push back against China. Then China feeling pressured organises a military exercise to show how strong they are. Then the US flys B52 bombers through airspace claimed by China while saying "come on Bring it". Then China does....
You get the picture. The only real question is who felt the pressure being applied first and was that pressure real. Usually these things start from nothing and escalate.
I always hated CFLs. I have 2 left and they are on my list to get rid of. The warm up time. The flicker, the horrid colour. I also found they didn't have the stated life.
But I have fallen for LEDs. As far as I can tell they are simply brilliant. The light it nice, they are cool to the touch, instant on and after close to 2 years of a complete shift to them I have none that have appreciably changes in brightness or have failed. At my electricity cost that means I am now well ahead.
Also where I live it gets hot. Today is 34c outside so the last thing I need is more heat than necessary indoors. It is expensive enough getting rid of the normal heat without adding lighting heat to the problem.
Which I totally understand but whether you can screw in a nasty cheap filament incandescent isn't going to have any impact on the availability of speciality bulbs. As you said those bulbs aren't disappearing because of energy laws, they are disappearing for different reasons - ie falling demand perhaps?
Traditional photography is going to become more and more expensive as less and less people do it. Film is already much harder to buy than it used to be. It is only to be expected that the more specialist equipment in a shrinking field will become harder to find as well.
I build classic motorcycles. Because they are no longer made the parts are sometimes a bitch to find. This is the cost of my hobby.
Expanding though. Erasable internet is a very very small segment of internet data traffic. The whole point of something being erasable is that is only to be seen by one particular recipient. Given we are here on Slashdot, while logged into facebook, reading our email demonstrates pretty easily that ephemeral internet activities only make a tiny percentage of the total data.
We are still going to shop, browse, email, and post. Erasable internet is irrelevant to this.
Mine 27 cents per kwh.... So using your own example 90kwh per bulb per year is $24.30 or roughly the price of a complete LED replacement fitting per bulb per year....
Even taking the price out though I am really really glad I have got rid of incandescents. I have gone to "daylight" 6000k bulbs and fittings throughout. Now when I go somewhere with yellow light I find it dim and also gives me the impression of being dirty...
I don't have any incandescents in my house and haven't for ages. That said they have basically been un-buyable in Australia for quite some time.
Spend a pittance and replace your old horrible light fittings with flush mount LEDS. Get more light, less heat, no flicker and instant on. I live in the country so have fairly ordinary power quality. Every day my UPSes will beep and whinge about power level fluctuations but because I now have a small transformer on every light I can no longer see it.
I do not for a second believe that people are that concerned about a couple of dollars to get their knickers in this much of a bunch about the price of a couple of bulbs or fittings. I bet most of you buy your food as you need it as opposed to planned bulk buying. I bet you all waste hundreds of dollars on useless crap.
Do yourself a favour. Get rid of your incandescents where you actually use them, fit a load of LED fixtures and ask yourself how you ever lived with that dull light for all those years. Stick the bulbs you pulled out in a cupboard and when that loft or cavity light doesn't turn on in the stupid one in a million usage case that people are arguing you have a stack of spare bulbs you can use in it.
Because we have seen a backlash against the phone / Tablet / PC industry? Electronics are now use and chuck and are even designed with that in mind (non user replaceable batteries for one).
Also 3d printing requires resources and is only efficient on single print runs. It will remain quite a bit cheaper for a long time yet before 3d printing competes with mass production.
I have a neato robot vacuum. It is on literally every day. If you offered me something that could be the robo-maid from the jetsons I don't know how much I would spend on it but it would be quite a lot. Oh the dream of a machine that would clean the kitchen and change my bed sheets for me!!!!!
I have never heard the term desert effect storms. We had some impressive dust storms back in 2009 that hit the east coast cities but not sure that is what you mean.
Australia has always been a country of extremes. It either floods or it bakes. I suppose it makes it kind of interesting. I do think though that there is a misconception internationally as to what Australia is really like. My wife is english and before she came to Australia she thought australia was all dry and flat. And while there is definitely some of Australia that is like that the size of the place seems to be lost on people. Australia is bigger than continental europe by quite some way and we have everything from tropical rainforests to snow fields. I have lost count of how many times I have had international visitors who come to brisbane and say "can we drive to the Great Barrier Reef" or Cairns or can we do a day trip to Melbourne not realising the sheer distances involved.
Adelaide is pretty lush and verdant with more than enough rainfall to supply the population (though almost all their rain lands in winter and it pretty much doesn't rain in summer). I don't know if you have ever been there but there is a bloody long way from Adelaide to the desert... It is why it is one of our best wine and agriculture producing regions. I don't think you have too much to worry about there. The main problem is it's Adelaide, tiny and pretty boring......
Brisbane doesn't need the dam now, or really at any near term (50+ years) future. They took a different approach. Basically we have a 200ML desal plant which is not even on (it is kept running enough not to break down) and we have a network of water recycling plants which can reclaim 90% of our waste water that, because people are squeamish, are currently inactive. As a note for people all waste water in Brisbane is treated and then released into the Brisbane river where it flows out to sea. The plan with the Advanced Water Treatment plants is that the waste water from Brisbane and the Gold Coast would be passed through and 2 of 3 treatment plants and then pumped back to Wivenhoe dam where the primary water treatment plant collects its water. So essentially the water would be triple filtered before you drank it again.
The problem with all these systems though it that they USE electricity rather than being able to be used to create it via Hydro.
But as for Australia being a wasteland I would dispute that. There are certainly big chunks of it that are dry but I have driven across the south of the USA from LA to Miami and a lot of that was a lot drier and waste-landier than most of Australia.
Guess it depends on your decor as well. Our friends have white porcelain tiles throughout and when they only had white walls it felt extremely stark, when they painted some of the walls in feature colours though that problem disappeared. Our house is a mix blend country and ultra-modern (I know sound weird but it seems to work) we have lots of stainless steel fittings and kitchen bench is black caeser stone etc. But we have timber skirting boards, timber kitchen cabinets, and timber & leather furniture. Finally our tiles, while porcelain are a sandstone colour. All of it means it isn't an over white super sterile environment.
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That is fascinating - I had no idea the deposits were due to organics. I thought it was to do with some of the iron core solidifying on the surface after the impact.
The area these are found are extremely high in Iron content. There are a number of high grade iron ore mines nearby. I wonder if there is any link between the high iron content and the formation of these rocks.
Of course you are.
But if I service your car perfectly. Leave it in a better state than you brought it to me in, and then you crash it because YOU made a mistake then no I'm not to blame.
Stimulating the well will not cause a fire. You need an ignition source in an oxygen filled atmosphere. I have no idea what caused this particular incident but it could have been anything from an electrical fault causing a spark, a failure in a relief valve seeing heat build up to flash point or something as stupid as someone smoking a cigarette nearby. Just because some rocks got broken up hundreds of meters below the ground (and yes that is what fracking is) previously doesn't mean that caused the problem.
Because it isn't an ecologically sensitive spot. The dumping location is in a low current location where there is natural build up of silt. While there will definitely be silt plumes when this is deposited, because it is a low current area it won't travel far and then once on the bottom won't go anywhere else.
There isn't a need to process it into blocks, it will settle very rapidly. We are talking about a material that is already sitting on the ocean bed and subject to more current and wave action than it will be once moved. The lighter, highly mobile material has already been removed by nature. Then it will be treated to remove any chemicals that may have come from run-off or commercial activites in the harbour.
Finally as for taking it to deep sea there are two major reasons. The first is you would need much much larger ships to do the work and the amount of direct pollution made by the process would go up. The second is that you are operating in reef conditions, which mean no matter what there is the risk of accidents. The further you make the boats travel, the larger they are, and the further they go the higher the risk of an accident which could see significant amounts of silt being deposited where you really don't want it and also see an uncontrolled dumping of oil. A small oil spill from a holed fuel tank on one of these ships is immediately orders of magnitude worse than the risks from silt.
It's one of the main reasons for doing this project in the first instance. make the harbour and the channels safer.
As an Australian with some ability to read and the knowledge that this "waste" is sand sucked up from the seabed a short distance away I am absolutely ok with them making navigation channels and harbours safer for really really big ships full of fuel oil, gas, coal and other shit that I REALLY REALLY don't want to end up on the reef.
Why is this modded insightful?
It is being sucked up out of the shipping channel and harbour (ie off the ocean floor) and then being transport basically no distance and put back down in the main area silt builds up. Also current flows are AWAY from the reef.
This will have orders of magnitude less impact than the floods we have do.
I had never heard of Perfect Dark before now. I can see how that would chew it up. It wouldn't be viable on a metered connection (not that it is viable speed wise on any connection available to me).
But if I got that answer I would think he would be excellent for a client management role! That response is incredibly sharp, shows a sense of humour and an ability to not come up with a boring answer. I don't believe I could have come up with that witty a rejoiner in the middle of a stressful situation (ie a job interview)
Not only that, but in Australia anyway ornery is a very unusual word to use. It demonstrates a very good vocabulary and probably an interest in the written word and communication that so many people lack. If the tone of the conversation was right this response would stand a person in good stead.
The fact that the original article sees it as the opposite is a bigger reflection on the original author than on the questions.
The key to TPG and others is whether you are connected directly to their DSLAM. If you are on a RIM, which a huge number of people are, you are stuck on tesltra wholesale.
I have that situation. TPG, AGILE (Internode iiNet), Optus, & Telstra all have DSLAMs in my local exchange but I am on a rim so I'm stuck.
And seriously why would you have issues with these questions? You might think they are silly, but perhaps that is the point.
There are going to be lots of crap things you have to do at work. Crap things "you" think are pointless and stupid and, despite what you may think, your employer knows that you don't want to do these things. They have their reasons even if you don't agree with them. If you respond like a cock in the interview you will be a cock to work with.
Also lets take the tennis ball question, one that is so well known that I had never heard it before. It is a behavioural question. If the person sitting opposite me answers it accurately due to knowledge of aerodynamics it actually tells me very little. However if the person tries to guess, or freezes, or says "I have no idea" all tell you quite a lot about how they will approach their work.
No it's not an exact science, yes a lot of it has as much reliability as homoeopathy, but you are making a decision to hire someone on a piece of paper that is going to be at least partially false, the word of people that person has personally picked (no bias there!) and the gut reaction based on a couple of hours of talking to that person.
Having hired close to 40 people to work directly for me over the past 8 years I can tell you that I HATE the hiring process. And after hiring a number of people that have been downright toxic to my business I now work on the premise that I will say no on even the barest hint the person I am talking to is a wanker. I'm sure I have missed some amazing talent now as a result but missing someone brilliant is a small price to pay for not getting a terrorist (terrorist - Good outcome, bad attitude).
Sorry I got my bits and bytes wrong. That is 3640 kilobytes. Just checking Netflix website and they say 4.7gb per hour for their HD 3D. That means a total of 112gb per day if you watched it non stop. So basically you need to have 3 tvs showing HD 3D all day to do 300gb.
Also I must be using the wrong torrents. I almost never max out my shitty 8mbit connection on torrents. Usenet I can of course.
utorrent at 1.5Mbytes / second is still only 130gb.... That leaves 170gb.... Add 2 movies a night and that is say another 24gb. Leaves 146gb....
As I said - no question it's technically feasible - I just want to know how you use that much data daily, regularly. It would be easy to do infrequently - eg. your 800gb porn collection. But if they have hundreds of movies I would have to assume you aren't watching all of them over 2 days.....
HOW?!?!?!
That means on your downstream you are sustaining 3,640 Kb/s for the entire day. Not that this isn't possible I just want to know what you are using it for. I just can't think of a usage case.
If you are streaming HD video to multiple machines you would still not hit that level of throughput. I'm fascinated. Like that would be 15-20 high quality 1080p movie rips.
And then to send that much data! Are you walking around with a highres camera strapped to your head uploading continuously?
It's because I am on a digital RIM so I am stuck with being on-sold by telstra. I'm with internode - 300gb + nodephone + static IP. $129/month.
Though $200 for 100gb seems a little harsh even by Aussie standards let alone the US "I want it all" standards. I'm on 300gb for $130....
That said I was one of the original Optus cable internet customers where you got unlimited internet over HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coax). That was great for a few years and then they introduce their fair usage policy which was you couldn't exceed 10 times the average user. This was a bitch to monitor as you had no idea what an average user did and I apparantly was not an average user. Then finally they brought in a 3gb per month limit. There wasn't even other plans to choose from. Fortunately at that time we saw an explosion of ADSL2 providers and optus had to compete to keep their customers and now their HFC is one of the best value options (as long as you aren't badly contended).
I did a huge amount of research on what system to go for when I was looking at doing the same.
The final result was that KNX represents the best system to go for. It is the only open standard meaning you have many many manufactures (as opposed to CBUS) it integrates with pc systems allowing you to do 100% customisable setups and its wiring is simple.
You have to run a seperate cable to every device you control but given you are building this is easy. The cable can support (off the top of my head) 128 devices on one cable. Each device is individually addressed and the on/off status is reported back meaning you can still use manual style switches with no problems.
As others have mentioned make sure you data wire your house as well while you are there but this is a different question.
Expect however to spend $20k+ if you are going lights, access, hvac, sensors, etc. If you want to keep your costs low during the build period run the cable where ever it is needed and add the devices later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KNX_(standard)
Why have my mod points expired!
Australia has a vested interest in strong IP laws as believe it or not Australia generates income due to those laws. Yes it spends money as well but it isn't one way. What chance do you think the CSIRO would have had in collecting its wireless patents royalties if we didn't have an IP law agreement with the US? (Don't confuse this with my believe copyright laws aren't broken in their current form)
As for China and it's claims on the surrounding areas, this is a chicken and egg situation. China feels pressured by the US so it makes claims on territory surrounding it. The US feels pressured by China so it economic policies and military positions are shifted to push back against China. Then China feeling pressured organises a military exercise to show how strong they are. Then the US flys B52 bombers through airspace claimed by China while saying "come on Bring it". Then China does....
You get the picture. The only real question is who felt the pressure being applied first and was that pressure real. Usually these things start from nothing and escalate.
I always hated CFLs. I have 2 left and they are on my list to get rid of. The warm up time. The flicker, the horrid colour. I also found they didn't have the stated life.
But I have fallen for LEDs. As far as I can tell they are simply brilliant. The light it nice, they are cool to the touch, instant on and after close to 2 years of a complete shift to them I have none that have appreciably changes in brightness or have failed. At my electricity cost that means I am now well ahead.
Also where I live it gets hot. Today is 34c outside so the last thing I need is more heat than necessary indoors. It is expensive enough getting rid of the normal heat without adding lighting heat to the problem.
Which I totally understand but whether you can screw in a nasty cheap filament incandescent isn't going to have any impact on the availability of speciality bulbs. As you said those bulbs aren't disappearing because of energy laws, they are disappearing for different reasons - ie falling demand perhaps?
Traditional photography is going to become more and more expensive as less and less people do it. Film is already much harder to buy than it used to be. It is only to be expected that the more specialist equipment in a shrinking field will become harder to find as well.
I build classic motorcycles. Because they are no longer made the parts are sometimes a bitch to find. This is the cost of my hobby.
See subject.
Expanding though. Erasable internet is a very very small segment of internet data traffic. The whole point of something being erasable is that is only to be seen by one particular recipient. Given we are here on Slashdot, while logged into facebook, reading our email demonstrates pretty easily that ephemeral internet activities only make a tiny percentage of the total data.
We are still going to shop, browse, email, and post. Erasable internet is irrelevant to this.
I want your power price!
Mine 27 cents per kwh.... So using your own example 90kwh per bulb per year is $24.30 or roughly the price of a complete LED replacement fitting per bulb per year....
Even taking the price out though I am really really glad I have got rid of incandescents. I have gone to "daylight" 6000k bulbs and fittings throughout. Now when I go somewhere with yellow light I find it dim and also gives me the impression of being dirty...
I don't have any incandescents in my house and haven't for ages. That said they have basically been un-buyable in Australia for quite some time.
Spend a pittance and replace your old horrible light fittings with flush mount LEDS. Get more light, less heat, no flicker and instant on. I live in the country so have fairly ordinary power quality. Every day my UPSes will beep and whinge about power level fluctuations but because I now have a small transformer on every light I can no longer see it.
I do not for a second believe that people are that concerned about a couple of dollars to get their knickers in this much of a bunch about the price of a couple of bulbs or fittings. I bet most of you buy your food as you need it as opposed to planned bulk buying. I bet you all waste hundreds of dollars on useless crap.
Do yourself a favour. Get rid of your incandescents where you actually use them, fit a load of LED fixtures and ask yourself how you ever lived with that dull light for all those years. Stick the bulbs you pulled out in a cupboard and when that loft or cavity light doesn't turn on in the stupid one in a million usage case that people are arguing you have a stack of spare bulbs you can use in it.
Because we have seen a backlash against the phone / Tablet / PC industry? Electronics are now use and chuck and are even designed with that in mind (non user replaceable batteries for one).
Also 3d printing requires resources and is only efficient on single print runs. It will remain quite a bit cheaper for a long time yet before 3d printing competes with mass production.
I have a neato robot vacuum. It is on literally every day. If you offered me something that could be the robo-maid from the jetsons I don't know how much I would spend on it but it would be quite a lot. Oh the dream of a machine that would clean the kitchen and change my bed sheets for me!!!!!
I have never heard the term desert effect storms. We had some impressive dust storms back in 2009 that hit the east coast cities but not sure that is what you mean.
Australia has always been a country of extremes. It either floods or it bakes. I suppose it makes it kind of interesting. I do think though that there is a misconception internationally as to what Australia is really like. My wife is english and before she came to Australia she thought australia was all dry and flat. And while there is definitely some of Australia that is like that the size of the place seems to be lost on people. Australia is bigger than continental europe by quite some way and we have everything from tropical rainforests to snow fields. I have lost count of how many times I have had international visitors who come to brisbane and say "can we drive to the Great Barrier Reef" or Cairns or can we do a day trip to Melbourne not realising the sheer distances involved.
Adelaide is pretty lush and verdant with more than enough rainfall to supply the population (though almost all their rain lands in winter and it pretty much doesn't rain in summer). I don't know if you have ever been there but there is a bloody long way from Adelaide to the desert... It is why it is one of our best wine and agriculture producing regions. I don't think you have too much to worry about there. The main problem is it's Adelaide, tiny and pretty boring......
Brisbane doesn't need the dam now, or really at any near term (50+ years) future. They took a different approach. Basically we have a 200ML desal plant which is not even on (it is kept running enough not to break down) and we have a network of water recycling plants which can reclaim 90% of our waste water that, because people are squeamish, are currently inactive. As a note for people all waste water in Brisbane is treated and then released into the Brisbane river where it flows out to sea. The plan with the Advanced Water Treatment plants is that the waste water from Brisbane and the Gold Coast would be passed through and 2 of 3 treatment plants and then pumped back to Wivenhoe dam where the primary water treatment plant collects its water. So essentially the water would be triple filtered before you drank it again.
The problem with all these systems though it that they USE electricity rather than being able to be used to create it via Hydro.
But as for Australia being a wasteland I would dispute that. There are certainly big chunks of it that are dry but I have driven across the south of the USA from LA to Miami and a lot of that was a lot drier and waste-landier than most of Australia.
Guess it depends on your decor as well. Our friends have white porcelain tiles throughout and when they only had white walls it felt extremely stark, when they painted some of the walls in feature colours though that problem disappeared. Our house is a mix blend country and ultra-modern (I know sound weird but it seems to work) we have lots of stainless steel fittings and kitchen bench is black caeser stone etc. But we have timber skirting boards, timber kitchen cabinets, and timber & leather furniture. Finally our tiles, while porcelain are a sandstone colour. All of it means it isn't an over white super sterile environment.