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Australian Risk Tolerance and Insta-shaming

Other things happened but I just went back to the same beach basically. It was delightful.

B R

B R

— 4 min read

9 April, 2023 | Sydney, Australia

I returned to Bondi beach for some more reading in the sun and also to take the Coastal Walk I had been recommended.

Rather than taking the bus this time, I though I would give the biking infrastructure a try. This mostly did not go well.

That’s about $12 USD, which is honestly fine for the travel distance and time but getting a rideshare back last time I was there was only like $15; which is criminally low for the aggregate impacts in my opinion.

Biking in Sydney is really just like biking in most car-centric cities. The dedicated infrastructure/paths are completely disconnected from each other. The signage is virtually nonexistent - for a good full kilometer, I was going down an awful uneven sidewalk when there was a good path on the other side of the road behind some trees.

Sincerely, why do you bother with a 3m bike lane like this? This isn’t even the smallest one I encountered. Courtesy of Google Street View.

The beach was again lovely, but I didn’t stay nearly as long. Instead, I started on a hike that goes along the coast along a picturesque cliff.

Bondi Beach there on the right.

It’s worth noting how all of the things you might seen in a similar path in the US - warning signs and restrictions on leaving the path - were entirely absent. Australian culture somehow combines huge restrictions on naughty/violent speech and a level of risk tolerance off the charts in other contexts.

It’s hard to see, but there was a couple that just wandered behind that outcropping and plopped down, right on the edge of a 100ft drop into waters that would definitely whisk your shattered body away from the shore forever.

I was told Australians are the most gambling prone population per capita in the world, and I can believe it.

This coastline around Sydney is basically one half-moon bay after another, and this walk has you going between something like four of these. There are beachgoers at each location, but substantially fewer and few (if any) lifeguards - keeping with the theme above.

And what old public area would be complete without a history of misogyny and the allusions to the destruction of an effective public transport system?

My walk and bus-ride back was uneventful, except for two oddities.

I..what? I went in of course. I’ll take some Irish convenience. But it was just a normal convenience store.
With new Large Language Models (LLMs), every random local bank you’ve never heard of can have a dumbass pointless cinematic universe.

But! I did find a bar closer that just happened to be (1) fairly queer and (2) empty - at least on Easter. Because of this, I was able to strike up a nice conversation with Lucas, the proprietor of the Grove Bar and meet one of his regulars, Kevin.

Lucas is a transplant from America, having come to Sydney more than five years ago to find employment in what he hoped was a city of opportunity: “I would move to Melbourne now”

Kevin is the first (but far from the last) younger person that shamed me for not having Instagram. It’s not fucking happening people. Besides the fact Facebook/Meta can eat shit forever, I’m never doing this:

I’m about to give you a bunch of free content and expand your social graph for free. How about instead you eat my entire ass?

I could probably fake this out somehow but I absolutely cannot be bothered. The sooner these people learn, to their apparent consternation, that I am pushing close to 40 and not 271, the better.

  1. This seriously was the guess from an Air Force guy a couple of days ago in Osaka. The lights were pretty low in that bar. If it feels like I am kinda rushing through Sydney, it’s because I cannot wait to talk about Japan. ↩

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