shads

My father bought his house in the 80s for 1.5x his annual pretax wage. Last time he had his house valued it is worth somewhere north of 15x his annual pretax wage, same job. He is constantly asking when I will be buying my own house. I keep explaining to him, I am in my early 40s and got stuck in the rent trap fairly early, I am not in a position to take on a 30 year mortgage at this point, I will likely never own my own home. Median house price in my area is just under 9.5x my annual pre-tax income, and I don't see how I could support my kids and actually live my life while paying down a mortgage compared to the deal I got on my rental house through sheer dumb luck.

Perhaps if some thought and care had been put into this ridiculous land grab by our government this kind of outcome could have been avoided.

I'm not giving Reddit a single bit of benefit of the doubt here, but by pushing back against this they may be helping us instead of pissing on us for a change.

Instead of using political capital to shove age verification down our throats, imagine if they used that same capital to restrict gambling advertising? Or implement strong data protection and privacy legislation? Or strong laws against IP theft by AI companies? The government could have pursued all sorts of positive policies to materially improve life for us, what we got instead was the conjunction of the masturbatory fantasies of the intelligence community (who have never enjoyed us having any privacy) and knee jerk reactionary conservatives who know best how to raise kids because of "muh feels".

This half baked, vague, wishy washy law has made my kids materially less safe online, all so the government can soft sell the idea that you should have to provide ID for every interaction online.

Ha... Hahaha... Mwuaghahahahahahaha... He he.... Bahahahahahahaha

Just need to crack $12 billion, no challenge there right. For a product people don't really seem as taken by as they hoped.i keep seeing them anticipate breaking even in 2030. If they have sufficiently damaged people's cognitive abilities by 2030, then sure why not. I think the bubble will burst before that becomes even remotely possible.

Wow I wish the media would remember that a strong independent media that is willing to hold the government to account actually makes for a stronger democracy.

Somehow Jonathon Haidt is being discussed as the ultimate authority on this topic because he wrote a book that some pollies read. Not seeing Candice Odgers being brought up, just to grab a name at random. Her take seems a bit more nuanced but we can't do nuance these days.

And meanwhile the truly catastrophic damage is already being done, how many young people handed over their biometric data today? Yes there is a lot of noise in that data, but the politicians are categorically stating that the systems will improve over time, if the scope of data collection is solely for the purpose of performing verification and no data is being retained... How exactly are these systems expecting to improve over time... And the mask is off, "Won't somebody think of the kids?!?!" Is actually, "Won't somebody provide categorised biometric data to the scumbag AI companies?".

Citizens need to start demanding that the eSafety Commissioner investigate these AI companies for misappropriation of data starting today, if the demands are concerted and consistent enough maybe we can keep the government tied up investigating these companies and help them avoid shooting any more toes off in the process.

I genuinely don't think I have anything to add to that. It's all just so petty and tawdry.

On a related note I think it's worth mentioning that this is all accelerated by a 24 hour news cycle and the amount of right-wingers who insist on dragging American culture wars and politics over to Australia, I'm guessing because our own politics aren't dramatic enough for them, which then platforms the worst sort of people.

Maybe that's reaping what we sewed considering we exported Rupert. Now we are importing hate & radicalism on-top of our own domestic stock.

I want to preface this by saying that I don't believe anything could serve as recompense for what those women and girls went through.

But it's a bit telling that they had been caught, tried, found guilty and were actively serving their sentences, yet the mob (or at least elements of it) still clung to that pretence as a way of being able to attack and traumatize an entire community.

I sincerely doubt that this was the first flirtation with racism for many of these people. Violent race based attacks maybe, but not racism on the extreme end of the spectrum.

Slightly off topic anecdote:

I talked with a refugee from sub Saharan Africa once, he was pretty cooked and not super lucid. Talking to a friend later she revealed that she had dealt with him before doing community outreach.

She explained that his parents had got him out of Africa ahead of a little ethnic cleansing and brought him to Australia as a young child. He had then spent the next decade plus dealing with racism, ranging from casual to overt and targeted. Started on drugs at 13 and looked like he was in his late 30s before he turned 20.

I'm certain he was no angel, but I feel like he was forced down a pathway in life by the environment he lived in through no choice of his own. How different could his life have turned out if he had landed in the right community?

I despair that we are really terrible at just living with people from different places and cultures, especially when they make up a minority in our communities.

My MP started off giving this topic a simple once over and agreed with it. Then listened to a bunch of constituents, experts and just the rhetoric from other politicians. He has since changed his stance on it. Also he happens to be an Independent.

Strange how much of the inequity in our current system is related to people who are motivated to vote along party lines instead of listening to the people who put them in their position isn't it?

Not a Sydney-sider or from NSW, was the racial tension that was stoked up to the riots really caused or significantly contributed to by that horrible series of rapes?

For the outside I get the feeling it's a brick in the wall kind of thing. Along with lots of racism, culture clash, opportunistic politicians and grifter shock jocks.

But I understand it's hard to gauge the vibe of a culture from a half a continent away. Even more so doing it 20 years later.

It's so frustrating seeing the government fiddling in the margins to grab headlines rather than, doing something constructive. This is going to devolve into a game of whack-a-mole trying to make it look like it is achieving something other than what it is (normalising the idea of having to dox yourself to access the internet). Meanwhile I have just lost all the passive ability to monitor what my teens watch on YouTube, and the easy ability to check in on their conversations on Snapchat. They have thrown my kids out into the wild west of barely moderated YouTube and dubious chat apps.

If they had implemented strong laws around algorithmic outputs, human moderation, and online harassment then we would have been applauding them for holding the social media companies to account. Instead what they have done is laid another part of the foundation of a surveillance state.

In essence the governments desire to be seen to be doing something is dovetailing neatly with the shit heads that want everything we do online to be monitored, recorded and as a byproduct more heavily monetised.

Also since they are doing this to protect the children, is there a number of children they are willing to sacrifice to achieve their goals. How many marginalised kids have to self harm before they start to ask the question "Are we the baddies?" We already know that social media has had Perverse Incentives at play that have shaped it, so while it sounds hyperbolic I don't imagine it's beyond the pale that the LGBTQI+ kid who lives in a rural area with 0 local support is going to be affected by their online support networks disappearing. The kid suffering from domestic violence suddenly becomes voiceless and can't work out who they trust enough to reach out to. The bullying goes to the all new special app all the kids on the playground are using that is hosted out of another country that doesn't give a shit about Australian laws and becomes impossible to take down as we have just taught our kids to work around the tissue paper blocks the government keeps relying on.

On top of all this, we don't have comprehensive data privacy laws, and while the government says it will levy massive fines against companies that don't take reasonable steps to secure our data, the reality is that they will not, and if they tried to what's to stop the companies deciding that Australia is not an economically sound country to operate in and just up stumps and leave rather than paying the $85,000,000 fine?

This is all just the surface level thoughts I have of this debacle.

Discussing the best way to diversify your portfolio to realise safe and sustainable yields?

With charts?

Why do they do that to themselves? She effectively has 2 medicine balls strapped to her chest. I doubt they feel good at all.