shads

@shads@lemy.lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Investor' is a dirty word for first-home buyers — but are they the real villains?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know all the ins and outs of her financial situation. But I do know it’s been a point of contention. And she is not the first property owner I have talked to who has been pinged for not charging enough rent as far as a bank was concerned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Investor' is a dirty word for first-home buyers — but are they the real villains?⁩ ⁨⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Had a big thing written out, didn’t like it when I read it back. So keeping it simple, I equivocated to try to deflect some of the potential rough replies from the cultists who have already drunk the Koolaid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm, not meaning to get my conspiracy hat on here but do we think this could relate to the fact that Microsoft now has a quantum computing chip that they can hype to their investors to show they have the next big thing in the bag?

  AI has served its purpose and is no longer strategically necessary?

  Since they are only spending investors money it doesn’t matter if they burn billions on leading the industry down the wrong path and now they can let it rot on the vine and rake in the next round of funding while the competition scrambles to catch up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could Musk's unpopularity in Australia impact the election?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 of 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If everyone had access to healthcare the net benefit of treating the mental illness and other disabilities holding them back would easily cover the cost of the healthcare itself.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This may come across as naïve, but I also wonder if the excision of all those “essential” layers of needless bureaucracy, might not free up some resources at a societal level to allow a more complete or holistic physical and mental health care system to emerge. After all we need to figure out something for the eye watering numbers of people who are employed directly or indirectly by the Insurance industries to do with their new found free time.

  Hell, couple UHS with large scale tax reform and we might find that there are advantages at all levels of society to providing for people whatever their needs might be.

  But then maybe I am a pathetic utopist who just needs to realise that Capitalism is simply the perfect structure for us all to live under.