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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • If it’s not built to code to code it can pose all sorts of safety hazards to your neighbours or future owners of your property. If you don’t bother getting approval you didn’t bother building it properly either.

    At the slightly more silly end, your shed could lower the value of the neighbours property (because it looks like a meth lab, or just a general hillbilly grotto) and the law holds financial harm higher than physical harm most of the time.

    Edit: also it’s not just you, it’s any meth head who decides to build their own shed. Laws need to cater for the lowest common denominator.




  • Mostly agree with you but some context is required

    Cluster bombs historically have a 30% failure rate. The modern American ones have ~1%.

    Historically they were used indiscriminately against unknown targets in a large area (they’re really good at that), in Ukraine the Ukrainians are using them against known targets and are logging their use so after the war the area can be cleaned of any duds.

    This also isn’t introducing a new weapon to the war; the Ukrainians and Russians have been using their own stocks of cluster bombs from the start, the Ukrainians are just asking for a resupply of the better American ones.







  • I’m pretty sure they plan on selling the apartments. an article I read describes them as premium apartments which make more sense to sell I think.

    But even if they weren’t selling them, woolies (group) is just capitalising on the land they already (or will) own. I.e subsidising the cost of building a Woolworths store. It’ll be run as a business through a real estate agent with all the protections you already have. Probably be better for the tenant as there isn’t an owner with an ego on the other end.

    And there’s nothing stoping you from getting groceries where ever you want. You could even get coles delivery if you wanted.


  • No. We sell our services overseas. Most of our education industry (in dollar value) is international. We provide STEM services, legal services, financial services, etc to other countries etc.

    Taking a step back there is no difference in your question between a national economy and the entire world economy. 64% of the world economy is services.

    So no, services aren’t an inferior category of the economy. Manufacturing is fundamentally a service there are just foods involved. You can fuck up manufacturing by making something you can’t sell for more than it cost to make or even sell for less than it costs to make. This is harder to do with services, or at least feedback is quicker because you don’t hold inventory of services.

    So then how do we grow the economy if all everyone is just doing is Services for everyone else. This is the fundamental problem with capitalism. There are only two ways. Population growth and debt. But that’s a lesson for another day.



  • Not @niknah and I’m gonna guess they think it’s the coming lord and saviour. But it will be a part of technology going forward so kids should be taught what it is and isn’t.

    It’s a cross between Siri and predictive text. It guesses and makes up things in an authoritative voice. So kids / people need to be taught not to trust it.

    It’s basically a blender of the entire internet. It’ll just as likely tell you the pyramids were built by aliens because there are more words on the internet written about that then about the actual construction. Ask about any notable historical figure mainly known by their last name and their accomplishment and it’ll make up a random first name and fictional biography about them. Because all it’s doing is making sentences/paragraphs/stories from their component parts weighted by other words that are likely to go near them.

    It’s not going to cure cancer or even write a Wikipedia article correctly, but it might actually do fictional writers out of a job.


  • For a lot of people, the family home is the only investment they have outside of super. They’re estatic as it goes up.

    Don’t get me wrong, It’s unsustainable that house prices double every ten years when the price of money only doubles every twenty years. But whilst it does nobody wants to rock the boat.

    How do you think so many people afford 80k+ cars? They use the equity in their property and only have to pay mortgage interest rates on it (over the mortgage term too,not a 5 year car loan). Not growing equity will mean they can’t get the 4WD, boat and pool of their dreams.

    There’s a strong incentive for the landed gentry to keep the status quo.