shads

joined 1 year ago
[–] shads@lemy.lol 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I wonder which assets Rockliff, Ferguson and Barnett already have buyers lined up for?

Between this and DOGE lite it's fun that the Tasmanian populace will be paying for the stupidity of voting in the liberals for years if not decades. I can't wait to hear how we need to vote in the party of strong economic managers at the next state election from the entirely captured media.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 16 points 1 day ago

Thousands of words of waffle to try to be apologists for those poor unfairly maligned property investors who were just doing their best when they took advantage of circumstances and taxation benefits to snap up the available supply of a limited resource.

Do they realise that enabling this class of people to do these things without the threat of social consequence is at least in part how this gets normalised.

Not only that but it skews society. My sister owns two properties thanks to an interstate move for work requiring her to spend more than a decade away from the first home unit she purchased. That first unit was on the rental market for a little under a year while my Mum saw out the lease at her rental she then moved into my sisters and is maintaining the unit as though it was her own. She pays the mortgage, pays for maintenance, rates etc. My sister calls the aggregate of these payments rent (I imagine she derives some tax benefits from this but I don't imagine it's super significant and she does pay for things like strata fees herself). Every time she talks to her bank she gets harassed about not deriving enough income from this property asset and that she won't be eligible for more money until she raises the "rent" my mother pays... By a lot. She is currently looking to sell the 2nd house she bought to put the money towards the next interstate purchase for the new requirements of her job and is being told the bank won't extend her a loan until the rent on the unit is increased to a "reasonable" amount.

Our system is broken, badly, and the only corrections I can see that would reintroduce equity will destroy the people who have invested into the property ponzi scheme. Find me a government who would bankrupt a large portion of the population, including themselves, for a better future. I'll arrange an airborne porcine squadron to replace the Roulettes for the next ANZAC day to celebrate.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 2 points 2 weeks ago

My wife and I watched and loved this. Only problem is now she wants me to take up ANOTHER hobby.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

You know I was thinking that rents have been climbing throughout the whole country. Maybe the government needs to take into account that Trump and his cronies are out there ratcheting up tensions internationally and posturing as bullies on a global stage, then apply a small rent increase on US bases on our soil. A lazy hundred billion or so for Pine Gap should cover a lot of trade shortfall and somewhat compensate for the extra risk we are shouldering. When Trump calls to posture about it tell him we will increase troops on the border to prevent fentanyl and crack down on the cartels, then offer him the same price and watch him Art of the Deal™ that into a negotiating victory for himself.

 

This is it, this "balanced reporting" and uninformed electorate is going to lead to Potato Head getting in.

We had a single election cycle of Labor and they didn't manage to completely fix our economy and all the Liberal fuckery of the previous 2 cycles, so we better give the liberals another chance to fuck us harder.

Every time I run into a Liberal voter I ask the same question "What one thing is most illustrative of them being strong on the economy?"

I have never been given a good answer.

PS not a huge Labor fan either but I know which side of the Overton window I prefer to be pushing on.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 3 points 1 month ago

Our government banning wealthy off-shore interests just because they happen to be highly toxic and detrimental with negligible benefits to the citizens they are exploiting...

Sounds like a slippery slope there.

I imagine there are more than a few companies/industries that would see that as a dangerous precedent.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 8 points 1 month ago

And just look at what is happening in the US right now, this statement being arguably true today means nothing about how things will be tomorrow. You can't put the genie back in the bottle here.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

How many of these Chinese government supported companies are being provided a veneer of legitimacy by being officially sanctioned to use on state and federal supplied and supported IT resources? Because Microsoft 100% is. Hell they are even getting to supply training materials to government workers on how best to integrate Copilot into their day to day workflows. I am no fan of the Chinese government but I don't reserve a greater store of trust for US backed Ad-tech companies either and thanks to Five Eyes once one of the aligned governments has your info it's the same as all of them having it. I have only once interacted with an online LLM, run a few self hosted on my own hardware for probably 3-4 hours and realised that they aren't worth the power consumption, and really aren't worth opening a gaping hole into my own privacy. The fact that there are government workers and government organisations who are happily surrendering our data to these companies with no explicit consent sets off more alarm bells than I can express, regardless of the country of origin. And yes I declined the eHealth record and will be doing everything I can to resist digital drivers license because our government is fundamentally untrustworthy and borderline tech illiterate and the IT consultancies they deal with for any IT related infrastructure or services make them look like paragons of virtue and competency.

But that's just my opinion.

Edit: fixed my spelling, sorry to anyone who gets as annoyed by that as I do 😃

[–] shads@lemy.lol 26 points 1 month ago (5 children)

And yet Copilot is busy burrowing into the flesh of the government like a growing hookworm, a large swathe of big business is simply trusting to Microsoft's: "Oh no we keep your data entirely seperate and safe. We don't use it to train the LLM, pinky promise." Whilst ChatGPT keeps showing up in the hands of the most clueless people, "Oh I gave it all my personal info so it could rewrite my resume. How great is AI!"

I feel like this could be solved immediately and easily, make every privacy breach by any company subject to a fine totalling a single digit percentage of global turnover of the company. So for each privacy breach where Copilot is involved that will be... say... 3 billion dollars. They would yank their "AI Solution" from the local market so quickly you would hear a cracking sound.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 1 points 3 months ago

My family has extras cover, for Dental and Optical, that's all we ever use. My wife and I have both used up enough dental to make it worthwhile. But my son is getting braces soon which will basically Max out his lifetime orthodontics cover. So at that point we need to change insurers.

On a tangent I don't get lifetime covers. It seems like they are so focussed on not letting an individual recipient cost them more than an approved amount that they instead cause recipients to jump ship once it's used up without contributing any more into the fund. That seems like a perverse incentive to me, or am I ignorant of some gotcha there?