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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Yeah, let’s push small landlords out of business

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

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.

Asked about the Coalition’s plan […] and whether that meant some low-income Australians would have to accept substandard housing, Bragg told ABC radio: “Yes, definitely … it’s more important to have a house than to not have a house. And so, given the affordability crisis we have in the housing system, we need to just build more houses.”

A total non-sequitur. Yes living in a house is better, yes we need to build them. Why not build them to (or better than) the robust safety standards we have now?

Neo-liberalism’s answer is: oppose spending any money to improve real people’s lives. Unsafe housing is cheaper.

The truth: Australia issues Australian dollars any time they choose to. If high-quality, safe housing can be built by spending Australian dollars, the federal government can always choose to pay. No need to “find” the money anywhere, they can pass a bill to spend the money and it’s there.

They just don’t want to.

travelled several kilometres unmanned

Still safer than today’s driverless road cars.

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.

What the hell is this value judgement? Why are lower housing prices unilaterally “worse”? I’d think that, for people who need homes, lower prices are better than higher prices. ABC representing only the wealthy land holders in this headline.

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.

They are polling uncomfortably high, which puts them way too close to power. Worth taking seriously in order to effectively combat them.

Stop penalising teens for wanting to socialise.

Stop demanding we identify ourselves to unaccountable private actors, merely to socialise.

Instead: Penalise the platform corporations that make an environment friendly to predators, abusers, scammers, and extractionists.

Keep penalising those corporations, until they learn to stop. Or go out of business because their business model is incompatible with our wellbeing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.