surreptitiouswalk @ surreptitiouswalk @aussie.zone

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2 yr. ago

If it's known that cars are less manoeuvrable and have poorer sight lines, why do motorcyclists insist on gunning it past cars and swerving into the next lane before they've fully cleared the car they're trying to overtake. Not to mention the constant overtaking from the left, which is a completely moronic thing to do. If they're weaving in and out of traffic rather than just staying in their lane and spot, they're far less likely to sneak up on a car unawares and get hit.

That is entirely on them.

Surely they have more incentive to drive safe coz the price of having an accident is so much higher for them (physical injury, maiming and death).

Honestly any business that uses an ISP email address just looks amateurish to me.

Surely what it demonstrates is once you have foreign citizenship, don’t go back to China? That’s not good for the Chinese economy.

I don't even think it's necessary to go that far. This should be "don't work in a political position in/for China".

Let me put it another way, where do you think her loyalties lie before her arrest? China or Australia? If you don't think that matters, I'd urge you to examine what citizenship means.

I'm not claiming any moral high ground, I'm merely staying that she worked for a Chinese media organisation and that essentially makes her part of China's political apparatus. That makes her at risk of being a political prisoner.

Also as Raltoid said, she's spent 37/47 years of her life in China. Coupled with her career choice, her government is the Chinese Government, not the Australian government despite what her papers say.

Extra speed of build is a pretty good draw card even if it is 30% more expensive, and just diversifying the range of materials available for building high rises is always good for the industry. It'll be interesting to see where it ends up!

My guess is they came to an agreement that their product offering is different enough that they can trade under the same name?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/27/fast-food-chain-wendys-plans-roll-out-in-australia-but-potential-naming-clash-looms

This might be harsh but I have little sympathy for this woman. Remember she was the news anchor at CGTN from 2012 - 2020 and based on Beijing at that time. CGTN is a state owned news (i.e. propaganda) outlet. She was an Australian Citizen prior to taking that position, so surely she should be aware of what she was walking into a conflict between Australian values of freedom and the oppression that the CGTN apparatus represents.

Instead of being an ethical and fearless journalist, she picked money, clout and prestige, betraying the very principles of the country that she's pleading for sympathy from now.

The fact that the role become a poisoned chalice is entirely predictable. It's disappointing that our government is now having to expend political capital for her.

I'm not sure what point you're making, but someone sitting on 10 properties with a total networth of $20M cannot spent any of that until they sell the property. That's $20M is on paper wealth. That $20M only becomes real wealth when they sell up, at which point it attracts CGT.

In that case, if the renovation wasn't deducted off primary income by negative gearing, it would be deducted off the CGT tax when the property is sold as it could count as a capital expense.

https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Capital-gains-tax/Property-and-capital-gains-tax/CGT-when-selling-your-rental-property/#Capitalexpenses

I think the focus on negative gearing is a bit of a distraction. As many have pointed out, properties are only negatively geared because they are losing money, which makes them looks like poor investments in the first place.

What people miss is on a whole, property actually makes money through capital gains on sale of the property, which will easily offset any of the operating cost that's been accrued. Note though double dipping doesn't happen because what has been deducted on negative gearing is taken away from the initial value of the property, thereby attracting more capital gain tax at the end.

The primary problem is, land value and hence property value naturally rises over time and is unavoidable. As cities grow, they spread out or they get more dense. Therefore an single property will be demanded by more people as it closer than more properties (as cities spread, or more city centres crop up nearby), and lower density than nearby buildings (as density of the area grows). No amount of anger will change the fact that land is a scarce resource, particularly convenient land. And so that price signal is important to allow that land to be used as efficiently as possible (you couldn't want a giant farm near a CBD when it could house and cut commute costs for 50k people).

What we really should be doing is discouraging profiting off this natural and unproductive growth in value. Perhaps this could take the form of having a different capitals gain tax tier explicitly for residential properties. The other aspect is changing the primary residence exemption to be that you have to have lived in the property for at least 50% of the time you've owned it for, rather than just the last 12 months. Though overall, this would need to be designed carefully to prevent disadvantaging people who are simply wanting to upsize, or simply to relocate to an equivalent location.

I mean if you take that to the extreme you're arguing for very high density living, which I'm not opposed to, but councils seem to be against that by default.

Apartments are extremely small already so I'd argue they need to be bigger for people to even consider having families in. 1 bedroom apartments are like 60-70m2 which is terrible for 1 person, and 2 bedroom apartments are like 70-80m2 ish. There's no space for even a dining table and a couch. You have to choose one or the other. Who would pick apartment living as a long term option, rather than just a stepping stone home, in these conditions?

I'm sorry i just don't agree with the view that PhDs should always have to add a disclaimer of "oh but not that kind of Dr" every time they use that title.

I'm not sure why you referred to the APHRA guidelines on protected titles. Is your point that medical practitioners should have the term doctor protected for them? They already have protected titles under the law and it explicitly does not include the term doctor.

Or is your point that PhD doctors should have to spell out their area of expertise because that's a dumb argument too. What decides the area of expertise you annotate? The department you obtained the title from? What if your area of research, while sponsored by that department, is actually in an entirely different field? What if the topic of research doesn't have a clearly defined field? So in the end it's completely meaningless, which is why people don't append a Dr title with a field. In this instance either the author or her editor through writing her bio, or you through reading her bio, has judged that her speciality is "comm". But someone else could claim that's wrong and misleading as you have done.

You know Drs as PhDs (starting in the 14th century) predates it's usage as a medical practitioner (19th century). Every PhD still calls themselves Drs.

It's not manipulation if it's your own ignorance that causes the misunderstanding.

A similar thing is happening with the stage 3 tax cuts and people thinking Albo can be an authoritarian dictator and just delete that policy since he's the PM, ignoring that it's a piece of policy that won the Coalition the unwinnable election of 2019.

I'm no fan of the tax cuts myself, but he also can't just do what he likes as PM without consulting his colleagues and convincing the electorate. PMs are not dictators here and nor would we want them to be.

And he stopped being the PM the second he took a microstep on climate change. So that's really proof that he didn't have any real power.

The "Non-Emergency" part of NEPTs might have something to do with that. The drivers are not paramedics. They have a first aid certificate at best.

There's something not right about the article. It's talking about non-emergency patient transport but referring to a bus crash with trauma patients. Whatever their bosses told them, the NEPT interviewed were not going anywhere near that incident since they're not paramedics and are not trained to provide clinical assistance, so their shift with Victoria Ambulance is completely unrelated to the incident.

And the quote referred to how Nick felt gutted about transporting patients to doctors appointments like it's a waste of resource. That's literally the point of NEPT. The staff are not paramedics and the vehicle are not ambulances. The NEPT at best would've been involved with transporting uninjured children at the incident, which Victoria Ambulance had already arranged with a bus (which is far better for traceability and logistics than a dozen NEPT being called).

The general point of private operators not meeting their contractual obligations is fair. The government just needs to enforce its contract better and apply penalties if they don't provide the number of staff they're obligated to.