Instigate @ Instigate @aussie.zone

Posts

3

Comments

334

Joined

2 yr. ago

No one is going to crash the economy so you can buy a house I’m sorry.

I think you might have missed where I said this:

I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.

I think a change that’s very easy to make, will have some impact, and would draw far less pushback than more extreme measures would be to have landlords forced to report all of their costs, earnings and capital gains related to their property either directly to the tenant(s) or on a publicly accessible register on a regular basis. Prospective tenants would be armed with more information and would be able to know if their landlords are bullshitting with related to costs. Companies could create lists where they rank landlords based on how much profit they leech from their tenants. People would be able to know if they’re renting from someone who owns one additional property or fifty-three.

It won’t make a massive difference, but it’s a low-cost and fairly easily implementable measure that could be taken as part of a broader suite of measures.

Prussia?

What you say also seems extremely unlikely to me, given that humans who have sufficiently advanced to the state we live in now will be unwilling to accept subsistence lifestyle.

I didn’t predict anything; you’ll note I said that this is what I would hope happens.

I’m not talking about a market failure; I’m talking about trying to take away the whole concept of a ‘market’ applying to residential real estate altogether. Because it’s so intertwined with the value of our economies, taking it away will cause a significant, permanent shrinking of GDP and other economic measures, and I think that’s appropriate given the circumstances we’re in now.

It’s a big and bold move, and as I’ve said before none of us can be exactly sure how it would pan out, but nothing is gained in life if nothing is ventured. We need to try something. I say this as someone who is lucky enough to be able to have a mortgage: it’s inherently unfair that my fellow citizens have to miss out on that opportunity.

At this point Trump is trying to delay everything he can until the presidential election, because he’s hoping that he’ll win again which will give him some kind of immunity against civil and criminal prosecution for another four years. I assume he thinks he’ll get into power and arbitrarily change laws to try to exonerate himself, despite the fact that that won’t really work because he’s being sued/tried under state laws, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to figure that out.

A policy this significant would cause a market crash so massive that it would entirely reshape the market. I don’t think any of us could genuinely guess how it will work out.

My hope is that it would cause a crash so significant that essentially all owned properties that are not lived in enter the market, causing homes to be sold for insanely low prices in order to avoid paying taxes, causing rates of home ownership to skyrocket. The government then needs to buy up anything leftover to rent as social and affordable housing to low-income people who can’t afford a mortgage at that time. Crashing house prices also mean that the value of these taxes drops in absolute terms as well.

Then we have a situation where everyone who has a stable income owns a home, and those who can’t will rent directly from the government at extremely affordable rates. Homes are the object we as humans own that we regularly lease to one another the most - particularly for profit or capital gain. It’s super weird and it needs to stop.

The main issue is that economists would shit their pants because so much GDP growth is locked up in our property markets. It would cause at least a recession, if not a depression, and depending on which country did it, the effects could ricochet throughout the global economy such as during the GFC.

It’s pretty simple, just have a new real estate investment tax that is only levelled on residential properties you own but do not reside in, and that tax needs to be set at a rate higher than the property market is expected to gain. E.g. (with made-up numbers) if the property market gains 5% value per year on average, set the tax rate at 10% of the value per year. There’s an insanely slim chance you can still make money on the investment, but 99+% of investors would dump their properties immediately, leading to a massive crash where average people could suddenly afford to buy the home they’ve been renting.

I would hope that sharing polls showing a trump lead would help insofar as it may motivate apathetic anti-Trump people to get out and vote where they otherwise wouldn’t.

Side note: the only reason he’s ever won anything is because the US doesn’t have mandatory voting. The fact that you have to encourage people to engage in the most fundamental expression of democracy is a little bit baffling.

The kind of people that eat up his “debating” style are people who treat the idea of an open debate of concepts the same way - that is to say that they’d be flipping tables and shitting everywhere themselves. They’re uneducated and hold unqualified and unjustifiable positions, and the only way to maintain those positions is to simply ignore or reject all rhetoric to the contrary.

They eat it up because that’s exactly how they’d act when faced with reason, logic, facts or statistics.

That’s a fair call. I just think all reasonable measures should be taken to limit the attractiveness of vapes to children, and that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s not a necessary piece, but I think it would have helped as part of a suite of measures to regulation. I think you’re right in that online glorification definitely had a role to play here as well.

If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.

We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.

The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.

Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.

Some people play those mindgames not because they believe in them, but because they believe that’s how you’re supposed to act when dating. This is particularly common for younger people with less dating experience, and is often introduced/reinforced by media narratives. I think you’ll find that being direct while also very courteous and polite will have the best results as you may catch someone who is actually thankful not to have to go through the rigamarole of silly dating games.

Something along the lines of:

“Hey, so I think you’re really interesting and I’d love to grab a coffee/drink/meal with you sometime if you’re interested”.

If you face any resistance whatsoever, back down politely. Something like:

“No problems at all! Thanks for being direct with me, I really appreciate it. Let me know if you change your mind.”

You’ll put off people who want to be chased but trust me - they never tire of the chase and you definitely will before they do. I’ve been with someone before who needed to be chased and it’s exhausting. This method means you’re whittling down potential dates which may seem difficult at the time but you’ll thank yourself for it later.

Fingers crossed you meet someone you vibe with mate!

Absolutely, you’re right. I work in child protection and it’s honestly pretty common to see grandparents in their thirties. I’m yet to see one younger than exactly 30 though, but I’m sure they’re out there. There’s always a heavy mix of domestic violence, substance abuse, sexual abuse, and sometimes mental health issues at play as well.

NSW Police has released an unusual amount of detail about the crime and the role of the accused, including information that might be considered prejudicial to receiving a fair trial.

Commissioner Karen Webb says she's prioritising transparency.

"It is a complex and unusual matter and certainly," she said "I think it's important that the public knows that I'm happy to be transparent as I can be about this."

Fuck right off. Cops have never chosen to be transparent without being forced to. This is a clear effort to undermine the potential case against him. If it falls down because of prejudicial information leaks, Webb needs to be charged and gaoled for perverting the course of justice.

Ehh, that’s a self-selecting feature there mate. You don’t want to be with someone who communicates through inscrutable clues and then becomes upset if you don’t pick up on them or read them wrong. That’s a recipe for an emotional bad time.

Holy fucking shit mate, I’m a social worker who works with people experiencing violence and fuck you highlighted the issue far better than I ever could. Thank you for giving me the tools to better explain myself when I need to.

Racism is not an immutable concept. People are not either “racists” or “not racists”. Racism is a behaviour that people engage in.

Calling people ‘a racist’ implies that that’s all they’ve ever been and that’s all they’ll ever be. It leaves no room for improvement. Don’t call people ‘a racist’, call their behaviour racist.

People can grow and change. I’ve met a good handful of people who were raised in households that engender conservatism, racism and sexism who have been able to deprogram that bullshit and become well-rounded human beings who care about social justice. When they were young, you’d have incorrectly called them ‘a racist’ and may have driven them further down the conservative rabbit hole.

The way we speak to and about one another needs to get better. We need to identify that people are flexible and have capacity for change if we ever want to see that change. People cannot be bullied away from these positions, they need to be guided.

Your idea is right, but your numbers about population are wrong. Republicans definitely don’t make up 50% of the country given that your voter turnout for presidential elections tends around 50-60% and many who vote Republican in a given year are independent or swing voters who aren’t rusted-on voters. It’s hard to get a 100% clear number on it, but I’d estimate that Republicans only make up around 20-25% of the country at most.

It only seems like they’re 50% of people because they win a lot of elections, but a lot of that has to do with the Electoral College, First Past the Post voting, and a lack of mandatory voting coupled with low voter turnout.

I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.

This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.