Buy with what money?

Show me the reputable bank that will loan the entire cost of a house, to someone who obviously can never pay off that loan on their current income. And I'll show you a bank that's going to collapse from unserviced debts.

A big advantage is cash works when it's offline.

It's weird how that happens, huh?

Housing prices inflate, the rent goes up. Housing price growth slows, the rent goes up. Housing prices come down, the rent goes up.

I've yet to hear anyone involved in real estate tell me coherently what could ever cause the rent to come down.

Our current inflation, for many years, is not caused by rising worker wages. We know that. Instead, it's caused by excess corporate profit-seeking.

It's easy (and intentional) that blame is diverted from the guilty parties, to the Reserve Bank for these mistakes.

The RBA have exactly one tool, one dial they can twiddle: raise or lower interest rates for so-called “cash loans” from the Reserve Bank. That's it, that's all they have. If a problem can't be properly addressed by doing that, there's nothing helpful the Reserve Bank can do.

So, it's not the RBA's responsibility to get us out of this mess; they cannot. But it is the responsibility of our Federal government, who can act but pretend they have no power, and leave the RBA to take the heat.

They enjoy being able to point to the RBA, whom they know cannot help. This shields them from responsibility to take effective action.

The problem (as correctly identified by the article) is not workers' wages rising; wages are falling way behind inflation and have been for a long time. The problem is caused by unreasonable expectation of profits by corporations and their shareholders, in a time when everyone else is financially suffering. They raise prices with no justification and with full impunity, everyone else suffers and they extract more wealth from the rest of us.

Tax those excess profits robustly, quickly, and inescapably (here's one example of many how this could be done); and watch our current inflation fall, as they stop price gouging, stop laying off workers, try to find a way to keep going with normal profits instead.

The federal government can do it with the stroke of a pen. Make them do it.

Yeah, let’s push small landlords out of business

What landlord will go out of business with these proposed changes? Exactly how?

Instead of chopping it up and getting no rental income for significant periods therefore bringing in less than ten years of rent. Less income than a lease agreeing to ten years of continuous tenancy and rental income.

I asked you exactly how. How does a signed ten year lease, committing to ten years of steady rental income to the business, push a landlord out of business? You can even continue to raise the rent during those years!

it has come to light that Tim Lutze has killed himself last week

Come to light where? If it's in the light we should be able to see it pretty clearly, but the writer of that post spent multiple paragraphs yet couldn't bring themselves to link to a reliable source for the fact.

I have no idea whether the man is or isn't dead. I see in that post a whole lot of assertions and other verbiage, but no way to verify any of it. I'm certainly not just taking the word of a post on Xitter.

You're asking what I would expect to be available? Certainly more than what we have now: absolutely nothing anyone could verify.

Distraction into the muddy topic of whether he took his own life or not, is way premature: we have not even established the man died at all, regardless of cause.

I am saying: There is an assertion that a man is dead, one of the most definite true or false facts we deal with in the world. And yet all we have to support that assertion, are loads of paragraphs with nothing to verify that pretty basic claim.

The matter of whether he is dead is not a matter that needs much evidence. Either we have evidence the man who was alive last month is dead today, or we don't, and should not be saying or accepting any assertions to that effect.

A simple police announcement would be enough for outside parties to confidently state Tim Lutze's death as fact. Nothing verifiable at all, is not enough for anyone to state it as fact.

What source (that you’d consider reliable) would discover and report on it?

If they have publicly verifiable evidence for their assertions, they can point us to that. They didn't.

If they have publicly verifiable reporting that makes those assertions, they can point us to that. They didn't.

If they have a secret undisclosed source, they don't know what they're asserting, and they can't honestly tell us it's a fact. It's hearsay and speculation about the death of a real person, which Xitter is already a cesspool of.

That they then go on at length as though it's uncontroversially established the person is dead, when nothing like that has been established? That's exactly the kind of conspiratorial red-yarn kookery that the NSN engages in. It's wrong when the NSN do it, it's wrong when anyone does it.

if they made their homes more energy efficient

Assertion misses the point: Most Australians whose homes need to be made more energy efficient, are renting and have no agency in doing anything like that to their homes.

Telling those people "you could save on your power bill by modifications to your home”, is just cruel. We know our homes are energy inefficient, we can't make the changes required.

What's needed is legislation that mandates the landlord must pay for those improvements, before they take any more money from the renter.

Also worth noting: (some of) those outside Australia seem largely to be responsible for the rise in One Nation popularity, by automated bot farms spreading racist lies on social media.

It dates back at least to the 1980s, during the Hawke era.

A Labor party that cast unemployed workers as “bludgers”. A Labor party that concocted a Neoliberal Accord with the ACTU to suppress the rights of workers, as a means to keep wages (and worker power to negotiate better conditions) down. A Labor party that devastated social support by making unemployment benefits far more difficult to obtain.

All this was an “unleashing” of the private sector the effects of which still rage around us today.

https://jacobin.com/2020/10/australia-labor-party-neoliberalism-accord

Because we all need help as we get older.

Yes, we do. Why do we need more births for that?

There are still plenty of people being born, and growing up and entering the work force as adults. We (i.e. society, i.e. whoever holds the purse strings) can offer better pay and better job conditions for those workers, so that it's a more appealing career for the people who will already be looking for jobs.

Better help for the people who will be born anyway. Not pushing for more births.

For one thing, I want our society to welcome children, not dehumanise them as “semen demon”.

via @[email protected]:

Brave British police captured another dangerous terrorist today

https://freefree.ps/@faab64/115164525096428263

You can utilize AI without a data center

This is a symptom of using the over-broad, deliberately vague marketing term “AI”.

If you can create (train) it without huge-scale violation of consent, without huge scale copyright infringement, without huge scale badly-treated human labour for labelling and refining, without huge-scale electricity and water consumption?

Then it isn't the “AI” being discussed in the article and therefore irrelevant to the point.

Arming your child with basic financial information […] can help them avoid poor choices later in life

Yeah! Financial information like:

• The Australian government can always pay as many Australian dollars as they choose, for anything. They are not financially constrained, they issue the currency directly, at will. Don't ever believe their lies about being unable to pay for good government services by waiting to “balance the budget” or “find the money”, it's bullshit.

• We can tax the wealthy more than we tax working class people, we've done it many times in the past. We can tax the excessively wealthy even more than that, and thereby remove most of their wealth. This fights inflation and restores financial power to the normal people with normal amounts of money.

• Joining your worker's union gives you collective labour power, to counter the collective financial power of the plutocrats running the employers and making your job miserable. Better job conditions and better income are some of the benefits to be had.

• Housing is a human right; treating it as a financial investment is incompatible with that right. Australia has more than enough housing for its people, anyone has a right to a safe stable comfortable home, without any requirement to financially support someone else (or their bank)'s wealth. End the exploitative housing market and your finances can go a lot further.

Good financial information like this is available, and I advocate teaching it to young people.

We don’t have enough people now that want to help. Go to any nursing home and see that we need to import the help.

Don't want to help? At the pay rates and job conditions on offer, that's right.

An obvious solution is to raise the offered pay (by whatever means; the government can certainly afford to subsidise this) and improve the job conditions (by regulation enforcing proper treatment of workers).

There are plenty of people already here willing to work, if the work is properly remunerated and stable and dignified. If the job is worth doing – as we both agree it is – then let's show that, by making it feasible for plenty of people to have a dignified life doing that work.

GDP merely measures the sum of economic transactions (“activity”) during a period.

It is blind to the distinction between socially beneficial activity (preventing illness, educating children) versus socially harmful activity (selling tobacco, mining cryptocurrency); all of that counts as positive GDP.

It is blind to anything (e.g. doing your own housework, raising your own children, growing your own food, reducing your consumption of stuff generally) which can't be measured in financial transactions.

GDP is always a useless measure if we're interested in what's good for a society.

But it's pretty good for measuring how wealthy stock market gamblers are feeling. So, for as long as our political leaders represent those interests and not ours, GDP persists.

Any other actions I can take?

As with so many problems imposed by powerful groups, the effective actions we can take in response must also be group action.

Join Australian groups resisting the build of LLM data centres. Join groups pressuring Australian politicians to implement privacy laws (all LLM tech depends heavily on violating our privacy). Join groups in your professional field resisting LLMs in our workplaces. And so on.

Individual action is only a small effect, and tends to send no message (because you're effectively opting out of something, and to the extent you're successful, you're thereby not considered in any decision about you). Take positive action by joining groups that actively and loudly resist changes hostile to us.