surreptitiouswalk

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!

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 tried to do a daily thread long ago but got like no comments so stopped.

Sadly the Sydney community on here is non-existent while Brisbane and Melbourne are thriving. To be fair though, the Reddit Sydney community was also non-existent.

I think even a weekly thread will be pretty dead here.

The fastest currently is 25 mins. Over 23km. That’s less than 60km/h average.

I would argue this is due to the clusterfuck that's the approach to Strathfield station and the stretch of tracks between Strathfield and Central. You would get more speed if the lines going across those sections are decoupled, and work is underway to do just that.

That would reduce the dwell time and the trains will have better acceleration and deceleration.

The point of this feature is for transit systems with frequent and close stops, which is more stations.

The last thing we need is for stations to be skipped like they do currently. That’s how we get lopsided development. Everyone wants to live where the trains stop and then areas where the trains skip gets neglected.

I'm not saying do it now, I'm saying do it after the metro comes online. But I could make the same argument for having metro line that's sparsely spaced.

But the general point I'm making is, heavy rail was always designed to move lots of people over long distances, and metros are designed to move few people over short distances. Somehow we're building it back to front. We shouldn't do that.

Metros everywhere else in the world (Europe, Asia) are designed with stations very close together, some within 5 walk of each other. The point is you have high density all along the route so most people are only taking part of the journey, not from end to end.

And if you want 20 min between Parramatta to Sydney, the best way is to have a metro with really close stations, and have heavy rail only stop at Parramatta, Strathfield and Central. Have a metro serve all the intermediate stops.

I think I can buy the argument that more stations are needed. That there are no stations between Olympic Park and Parramatta is ridiculous for a metro system.

But to contemplate canning the project is just dumb.

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.