surreptitiouswalk

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'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.

You know Drs as PhDs (starting in the 14th century) predates it's usage as a medical practitioner (19th century). Every PhD still calls themselves Drs.

It's not manipulation if it's your own ignorance that causes the misunderstanding.

A similar thing is happening with the stage 3 tax cuts and people thinking Albo can be an authoritarian dictator and just delete that policy since he's the PM, ignoring that it's a piece of policy that won the Coalition the unwinnable election of 2019.

I'm no fan of the tax cuts myself, but he also can't just do what he likes as PM without consulting his colleagues and convincing the electorate. PMs are not dictators here and nor would we want them to be.

And he stopped being the PM the second he took a microstep on climate change. So that's really proof that he didn't have any real power.

Not to mention high speed till roads allows governments to mandate trucks be forced to use them, which makes free local free roads less dangerous, more durable and less congested.

I've actually gone back to using cash when most merchants are Charing a 1.5% card fee. Fuck that shit.

It's funny in a sad way that 2FA was supposed to be real secure but like all other security, the human element is the biggest weak point, and the custodians of it (telcos) are asleep behind the wheel.