Personally I think the whole system of replacing the point of origin with a name needs to be overhauled. Allowing a name as well is fine, but the practice of delivering messages that can't be replied to is pretty poor.

Rather than have to futz around with a different number or website to go to, I should be able to just reply "STOP" if (for example) Dominos keep spamming me with Pizza offers I don't want.

God I hope Pauline and one nation are just a stupid blip and that poll that put them ahead is a mirage though. She's doing the same bullshit playbook as the UK and US - 'elites' are destroying Australia by driving immigration! Meanwhile the richest woman in Australia is in the background holding the marionette's strings.

Western Australia has had four referenda on the topic since 1975, each time preceded by a trial period where daylight saving was observed, and every time it has been rejected and the state has switched back to no DST.

Ah, it appears I read your up-thread comment inside-out. I thought you were saying landlords would sit on the properties empty. Rather the point you were making is that existing tenants won't give them up.

My fault, but you can see how that interpretation is weird I hope.

> Ok so 2/3rds of the way through your case you've already moved the goalposts.

No goalposts have been moved, your assertion was that renters lose out because there won't be many properties for rent, as they will be occupied by 'legacy' tenants.

My assertion doesn't conflict that specifically - if you create market conditions that are less profitable for landlords you therefore have fewer of them using their greater access to debt to outcompete would-be owner-occupiers. As a result the population of renters drops as they become owners. So pressure comes out of the sector. In some markets demand for homes is already so far above production capacity and available land that there is no conceivable impact of removing 'investors' on the production rate of new dwellings.

Perhaps rent-control is a poor mechanism to achieve this. Other mechanisms exist.

Landlords who can’t operate within the imposed constraints, those for instance who have debts they used to get into the game in the first place, might simply be forced to leave the business.

In many markets this is actively desirable.

Surely they are more likely to sell if they can never be leased profitably? This would put that capital to better use.

Your assumption there is also that the class of ‘renters’ is homogenous and wants to rent. In some cities there is a significant class of people who are forced into continuing with renting because of supply constraints on homes for sale, which are exacerbated by landlords with superior access to leverage buying up stock and pushing up prices. In this situation the landlords actually create their own market.

A comparative shortage of rental properties and of landlords could be very desirable, as it implies more owner-occupiers.

It also implies more capital flowing out of real-estate and into productive industry, which one would assume is also desirable for a thriving economy.

When supply is constrained by the availability of builders and materials, then some landlords dropping out won’t make a lot of difference there.

The truth of the situation here is that there is more than enough demand for new housing anyway, directly financed by wannabe homeowners, that ‘investment’ goes 90% into existing stock, not new builds, and that investment properties actually create rental demand as investors crowd out would-be owner-occupiers from both existing houses and new-build opportunities.

In Melbourne, where measures to reduce the attractiveness of investment have already happened, the price of housing has levelled off comparative to other capitals in Aus, and rental availability has actually gone up.

The underlying problem is of course supply, but there appears to be a limit to how fast the building industry can actually build more stock, so with huge demand and limited supply, we don’t need to encourage as much speculation or landlordism in the market to get more built. All it does is add heat and pump prices.

Last year during fledging season their baby was near the side of the road, in the grass looking lost/hurt/exhausted, so some kind but misguided passers-by (it’s normal, they kick ‘em out of the nest to try and make them fly) picked it up and were going to take it to a wildlife hospital. Mum was watching them from a tree, quite distressed.

I persuaded them I’d look after it and get help if needed, and took the baby back up to the house, then sat down outside and tried to give it back. Baby was by this point clutching my hand and nestling in to me. Mum wandered up, took a look at me holding her kid and I could almost imagine her saying “Ah, yeah you look after him for a while then, I need a break” because she seemed to relax, then went back to the other adults and had a feed before coming back for him!

Why does that matter? If it's bad for politicians to usurp that power, it's already bad for corporates to have it in the first place.

I'd rather politicians use power in a way that includes democratic oversight than, say, Peter Thiel doing whatever the hell he likes.

From the left, it gets accused of cow-towing to right wing interests, not holding conservatives and corporatists to account and generally being far to easy on the like of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.

From the right it gets called all sorts of names, my dad (unfortunately a convert to GBNews in his 70s) rails at it for being lefty garbage that won't speak the truth about immigration and other 'issues' he has been programmed to care about by the ragebait he watches. Of course part of the hate from the right is to do with Murdoch and his belief that it constitutes unfair competition.

Me, I listen to Radio 4 from overseas and generally the coverage is pretty neutral AFAICT, if a little prone to 'bothsides' arguments where one side is clearly nutty as a fruitcake.

(Sidenote - it really is sad to watch an intelligent man who was impressive in his globe-spanning career now get angry in front of 'news' services featuring smug, lippy anchors who tell him immigrants in boats are coming for his stuff. They couldn't afford the price of entry to his leafy London-outskirt suburb in the first place...)

If the "you might like" "why not follow" "reels" and other crap was gone, I guess there could be some sort of revival. But it might be too late.

Because instead we've splintered into various discords, and those sorta-aquaintanceships that old fb was quite good at keeping alive have basically fallen away.

  - I introduced to the thread first
  - You quoted incorrectly
  - Doesn’t contradict the other sources given
  - Doesn’t support your arguments

Please do explain further, preferably with reference to the comments above that show the figures you quoted aren’t a good match to illuminating the claims you made.

How does that source support the notion that median-and-lower earning people can realistically save $25k per annum, per person, or trivially become millionaires with a bit of discipline?

> Most people retire on far less than 500k even and are doing just fine

Soooo .... walking back all those claims about everyday folks being able to become millionaires just by showing up to work?

> The average is weighed down by students and retirees.

What's your source? For a start these appear to be the wrong way round - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...

And beyond that... yes? These figures are for all households, not necessarily households with people in full time work, which is a pre-requisite to looking at your claims properly. As such your household income figures don't give us a good picture to evaluate them.

The figures I quoted were for people in full time work, much more relevant to your statement, and no, they aren't weighed down by anything.

> If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.

Why would I do that? Your claim was that people could become millionaires over the course of 20 years by saving $25k per annum. The median person in full time work would have a very hard time doing that as shown by the figures I gave you. And they are better off than fully half of other full time workers. Unless you have some compelling (sourced) figures about lifetime earnings that negate this, it doesn't really help us.

> It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.

Wow, OK.

Well firstly I'm not American, I'm British, soon to be Australian and might eventually become Irish (by descent) as well. No US in the picture though. Never had a state handout in my life, and my net worth is already well over your target threshold.

What I have (that you seem to be missing) is empathy for people who don't have it so good and a basic understanding of figures.

You're talking about median earners putting away more than half of their pay.

If we look at full time workers that may go up to about $1200 per week or (after federal income tax) about $57k per year - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

So you're still looking at 43% of every pay packet. And 50% of full-time workers will be paid less than that.

This is beyond discipline and much more than simply getting up and working hard, and more like living in self-imposed poverty, putting on hold anything resembling building a life, buying a house etc.

The fact is putting away $25k a year is the reserve of the privileged, not something achievable just by getting up and working hard for most people.

If it was that easy, every office cleaner or bank clerk would be a millionaire.

> living in literally the best time ever to be a human being

Sure, but we're also watching the rise of a new oligarchy, and their latest innovation appears poised to put a lot of people out of work, making their lives materially worse.

The great Gnome 3 rollout did this for me... to be fair I guess that was a decision of the distributions, but it was in concert with the developers who decided to make a hard changeover, EOL the gnome 2 line there and then, and (deliberately?) scupper the possibility of installing both 2 and 3 on the same system.

Either way it sucked and that pushed me to Xfce, which I still use on linux. But it goes to show it can happen in FOSS.

My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?"

She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal.

When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers.

As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.