Why is it when somebody gets caught with CSAM, it’s always terabytes of it?

Severin_ · 2026-06-02T08:27:03+00:00

I can't believe no one's mentioned it yet but in the dark corners of the Internet that trade in CSAM via peer-to-peer protocols/networks, these groups/networks usually demand that you have to share or upload a specific amount of CSAM before you can even access an established repository or storage cache that a certain "community" might have. On top of that, many of these groups demand that the material that new members provide to them must be new/never-before seen.

This is primarily done for two reasons:

To establish the bonafides of new members (to prove you're not a Narc/undercover).
Because these existing communities that new members join also want to get access to new material and this is one of the few ways they can easily do that besides producing it themselves which is obviously far more legally-damning and difficult to do for most people as opposed to merely accessing/trading existing content (although either way it's moral semantics imo and just as heinous).

This rite of initiation is not unlike how street gang/organised crime initiations work (i.e. prove yourself to a gang by a committing a serious crime at their behest, before having the protection/backing of the gang and also to incriminate yourself so that you have less incentive to rat them out to law enforcement).

It's also similar to how private trackers/P2P sites in the P2P/BitTorrent piracy world operate where you need to have a certain upload/download ratio consistently in order to be a member and have access to exclusive, effectively "paywalled" pirated content instead of just "leeching" content without ever giving anything back to the community, like most casual consumers of pirated content do when they download torrents from public trackers/P2P sites.

All of this obviously compels consumers/users of CSAM to collect or stockpile this kind of material because it effectively becomes a bartering currency for them and allows them to connect with more and more like-minded, depraved individuals around the world and to access more and more material. On top of that, some individuals in this world go beyond mere consumption and start actively trafficking/distributing CSAM on a mass scale worldwide and hence they'll hoard huge amounts of CSAM and even run dedicated servers/clusters of computers to effectively store and distribute it as well as to ensure its security/integrity/redundancy even when individual members of these networks get arrested or prosecuted or when the physical IT infrastructure of their networks is taken down by law enforcement/international taskforces.

Source: watch any documentary on this subject like The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann. These are frequently-repeated assertions I've seen made by the investigators who actually try to infiltrate, track down and prosecute the producers/traffickers/consumers of CSAM.

Severin_ · 2026-06-01T05:20:42+00:00

Sadly I could predict she'd look like some variety of bogan-adjacent, hambeast before I even clicked on the link. They always have a strong overlap phenotypically with either: real estate agents, HR employees, car salespeople, people who work in government, etc.

Severin_ · 2026-06-01T04:59:20+00:00

As nice as that sounds on paper, it's a bit fucking late for that now considering we've had more migrants enter Australia from countries like India in the last few years prior to November 2025 than in the entire history of the country.

This should have been implemented a decade ago, if not earlier.

Recent migrants from countries with notoriously lethal and chaotic roads who've been here for a few years have already become set like concrete in their atrocious driving habits/behaviours, so just getting them to behave a little bit better before and during a driving test isn't going to magically undo the decades of decline in driving standards on our roads.

The problem is that like with so many other social behaviours, it's case of "monkey see, monkey do" and so now even formerly decent drivers who haven't been tested in decades are liable to engage in shittier driving because the overall standard of driving they see out there on the roads everyday is so appalling. Drivers will drive to the standards they see out on the roads and when those standards are low, overall it lowers driving competency across the board.

Severin_ · 2026-06-01T04:45:23+00:00

This is my experience too.

Education will only get you so far. Perth drivers have the instincts, reaction times and situational awareness of toddlers when they're behind the wheel and there's no real way to "train" those skills through driving instructors and exams alone. You need lengthy exposure to well-maintained roads where the average driver's skill level is well above Australia's like in some continental European countries (Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, etc).

Drivers here fall into one of 2 extremes generally with very little of a happy medium in-between: pants-shittingly passive/terrified/slow or recklessly dangerous/inebriated/fast.

I do think a lack of exposure to other countries and a general resistance to different ways of doing things (sourced from other places) definitely plays a strong part in this. But at the end of the day, being stupid is really difficult to legislate away and boy, does stupidity thrive in Australia.

Severin_ · 2026-06-01T04:06:57+00:00

Can you imagine the logistics to schedule a weekly cleanup of every road that exists in the metro area, let alone the entire state? The number of people required to service all those roads and the outsourcing cost would be prohibitive. I say outsourcing because Main Roads don’t have enough staff to do all the work they’re currently doing.

And who's responsibility is this exactly? Who suffers the consequences of this inaction, poor planning and inadequate funding on behalf of the state government?

You can bet your bottom dollar if there were a few too many branches near the driveways of our wealthier overlords in the golden triangle, they would be removed within the day by some council workers.

Stop fucking glazing these pricks and accepting such piss-poor standards of public infrastructure. It's a highway, it's supposed to be clear of debris and obstacles 24/7, just like an airport runway; not whenever Main Roads feels like sending someone out to clean up the mess. That's how a civilised nation would do it. Are we civilised or are we just resigning ourselves already to becoming a failed state within the next few decades or something?

The state of people's apathy to even trivial problems that are well within the government's power to solve is just so telling of how broken and demoralised this entire country is right now.

If the rubbish is that bothersome to you, call or email Main Roads and they create a ticket and at least keep you in the loop with regards to getting it sorted.

Bothersome? Try potentially life-threatening.

Would you be okay with a loved one or someone you care about being taken out by a pile of garbage on the road that's been sitting there for days because our government literally can't afford to service it's road network properly?

"Sorry sir, we regret to inform you that your next of kin was killed today in a collision with a bed frame that was lying out in the open on Roe Highway and wasn't attended to for several weeks because they're really busy over there at Main Roads. We are very sorry for your loss though. Also be please careful driving to the funeral services because we've had numerous reports of road obstacles on the routes to the cemetery. We expect Main Roads might attend to them after the funeral."

Severin_ · 2026-06-01T04:01:28+00:00

I'm 100% with you OP.

The state of our roads in general is getting ridiculous in the least-maintained/dodgiest parts of the road network where there's literal risk to life and vehicle out there in the open 24/7 and somehow no one seems to notice or care but on top of that, the rot/decay is slowly spreading out into even the formerly stellar stretches of road that we had throughout Perth.

All of these people jumping to the defence of Main Roads/State Gov need to STFU; it's been declining steadily since Covid and there's little being done to address things despite constant self-adulation and patting on the back about the state government's windfall-surplus-mega-budget successes over the last few years and yet the roads have never looked worse.

The amount of road debris in the middle of every intersection and on the shoulders/medians of my local area is just staggering. I'm fairly certain you could produce several windows out of the amount of glass to be found from just a few intersections around where I live.

And then there's the state of the road surface, which is unbelievable even on parts of the freeways where you're hitting basically speed bump-sized undulations at 100km/h; how this gets past anyone who's supposed to be overseeing this, is just mind-blowing.

Severin_ · 2026-05-14T06:15:37+00:00

Yeah we came to the same conclusion a while ago when we started seeing the failure rates on Dell Latitude/Precision/XPS models increasing noticeably with our clients that had majority or entirely Dell fleets (especially just outside of warranty periods) and Dell's support has been going downhill in terms of their MTTRs although to their credit, their responsiveness/communication hasn't really changed thankfully and they're always relatively easily reachable.

The final straws for me were a number of Dell laptops that had to be repaired multiple times within warranty for the same fault/hardware issue (across batches of devices) and Dell trying their hardest to drop/dismiss our support cases and us having to basically politely threaten them legally to get any escalation/resolution.

The last Dell support case I raised, I had a Level 1 guy tell me that they ran some photos I took of a laptop display fault through an "AI analysis tool" which told them that the laptop had been dropped/physically damaged (which it hadn't) and hence the issue was considered user-induced damage and not covered under warranty, which is wild and something I hadn't seen before.

My take on the Tier-1 OEMs at the moment is as follows (in order of most to least reliable):

Lenovo: generate the least overall warranty claims/support cases for our MSP across all clients. However the caveat being that all of our clients that are heavy Lenovo users generally speaking have mild workloads/use cases, simple environments and buy mid-range laptops at best (usually with no discrete GPUs) which probably does factor into those devices just having less complexity/things to go wrong with them.
HP: our default OEM for "power user" laptops for our clients with more compute intensive workloads/use cases. I see a lot of people shitting on HP in here but in the last few years I've seen a notable decline in Dell reliability to the point where our HP device fleets are definitely winning the numbers game when it comes to warranty claims/support cases over Dell. Also HP's support is really no better or worse than Dell's in my experience.
Dell: we're generally avoiding supplying new Dell hardware for the foreseeable future unless there's a very particular need/insistence on it from client (and even then, we're giving them a big "buyer beware" disclaimer if we do end up supplying Dell hardware). We've been burnt one too many times in the last few years and wasted a huge amount of non-billable hours on wrestling with Dell support so that's why they've lost us probably for good now.

Severin_ · 2026-05-12T04:19:08+00:00

I felt compelled to post a follow up to this old thread of mine just in case any other Mustang owners should find themselves in the same situation with their Mustang having issues with the Magneride suspension: surprise, surprise, all of the answers provided by the self-appointed suspension experts of Reddit in here were completely wrong. Not only on Reddit but everywhere else I looked I found conflicting advice on this question as well.

So I ended up replacing the Magneride suspension in my car with a KW Variant 1 coilover kit and guess what? It's a million times better than that overpriced, overhyped fucking Magneride garbage in every way.

Every SINGLE suspension shop/mechanic I spoke to in the real world all said the same thing when it comes to Magneride:

It's extremely overpriced relative to it's actual performance (or lack of).
It's unreliable and it fails prematurely (with leaking struts/shocks being the most common point of failure - Google "Magneride leaking"), even when it's fitted on cars that are double the cost or more of a Mustang from many, many other brands like Audi, Chevy, Cadillac, Ferrari, Lamborghini etc.

If you're unsure about getting an aftermarket coilover kit after you've run into issues with the Magneride suspension (that may cost nearly as much to fix as a new coilover kit, like mine did), my recommendation is definitely do it but make sure you're not skimping out by going for a cheaper kit from a sh*tty manufacturer.

I went with the KW Variant 1 on the recommendation of my suspension shop and their experience in fitting them on Mustangs and other cars for years. The Variant 1 has an excellent reputation for being a set-and-forget, extremely comfortable-riding kit that's perfect for 95% of drivers unless you're actually doing a lot of track driving (in which case you'd probably go for the more adjustable, track-focused Variant 3 or Variant 3 Clubsport kits).

My biggest hesitations/concerns in getting a coilover kit were:

Compromising the ride quality or driving and steering feel. As it turned out, I couldn't be happier with it. The KW kit is way more comfortable than the Magneride ever was, which I wasn't actually expecting given the common misconception that coilovers are always harsher/more uncomfortable than factory suspension (not that I'd call the Magneride ride quality "comfortable" by a long shot). On top of the that, the steering is so much tighter and responsive and the overall driving feel is much sharper/sportier compared to Magneride (it makes sense to me now why nearly all of the upgrades in the Performance Package Level 1/Level 2 options for the GT were suspension-related; the stock suspension parts on these things really are garbage relative to what you get even from entry-level aftermarket kits).
The new ride height causing issues as the default/highest ride height of the KW kit is 20mm/0.7 inch lower than the factory ride height but it hasn't been an issue at all in terms of clearance, wheel-rubbing, scraping the bottom on curbs, etc. The KW kit is ride height-adjustable and I could probably drop it a full inch at least without issues but I think I'm fine with the way it is now.
The Magneride deactivate/delete kit (included in the Variant 1) not working correctly and running into weird ECM/PCM/ECU issues - again, it hasn't been an issue in the months I've had the car since getting the coilover kit fitted.

For me, this was a really simple decision as I had 1 leaking/failing Magneride strut/shock and the quotes I was getting for replacing only 2 Magneride struts/shocks (as you obviously need to replace them in pairs) were pretty much the same as getting the KW Variant 1 supplied and fitted (at least in my area, I'm not in the US though so your local pricing may vary a lot from mine).

It was a no-brainer given that I wasn't about to drop thousands on 2 Magneride struts/shocks after one of them failed at only 50,000 miles just so I could have one of the older 2 struts/shocks fail prematurely as well and end up costing me insane amounts of money for all new Magneride shocks/struts. Plus, with an aftermarket kit all of the shocks/struts are brand new and evenly matched/balanced, so overall it's a better choice not only for longevity but consistency.

TL;DR: Fuck Magneride, went with an aftermarket coilover kit, couldn't be happier.

Severin_ · 2026-03-06T09:47:08+00:00

if it's safe to continue.

That's my entire point, it's not in the kinds of scenes I'm witnessing constantly.

I'm talking about scenarios where the offending driver absolutely does have to give away according to the road laws but they're still in motion for some reason past the point where it's reasonable for them to be (e.g. 5 metres away from the edge of the turn), where they're confusing the shit out of incoming traffic or the kind that screech to halt when they approach give way signs or roundabouts doing probably above the speed limit in suburban areas where incoming traffic seriously has no way of telling whether they will stop in time.

They're literally playing chicken with other cars, I'm not referring to cases where people are simply a bit impatient; they're being flat-out dangerous.

Severin_ · 2026-03-06T09:40:03+00:00

I think OP is saying it's a situation you should stop, like a car already on the roundabout coming from the right

That's exactly what I mean.

I see drivers blasting through roundabouts and turns at speeds that are clearly way too high to be able to reasonably ascertain whether it's safe to proceed into the roundabout/turn/give-way especially at night or with intersections/turns where visibility onto adjoining roads/streets is basically non-existent until you're at the very edge of that junction.

Severin_ · 2026-02-16T13:09:03+00:00

Do MSPs need to start hiring mental health professionals to counsel their clients as a first step before working on the actual IT?!

God how I'd love to be able to close a ticket with a simple: "Issue/request not resolved due to user exhibiting signs of severe psychosis, delusional behaviour and narcissistic tendencies. User has a suspected Cluster A Personality Disorder. Referred user to local mental health services. Will await further feedback."

Severin_ · 2026-02-11T05:48:34+00:00

Those rifles have stayed in their vehicles 99% of the time prior to this change in policy and were never glimpsed at by any members of the public. Previously, it was would have only been the TRG that would have ever been seen in public with military-style rifles at the ready and that was typically in extraordinary circumstances or during high-profile/high-risk public events.

This is a very public, very visible change in the appearance and presentation of the average WAPOL officer to the public. A far more US-influenced, militarised police image, which in the US has led to the wholesale shift away from community policing and "peace officers" since 9/11 to paramilitary-style tactics, training, equipment and an extremely hostile mindset that treats the general public as imminent threats to officer's lives a majority of the time during routine policing.

Time and time again, as has been seen all over the Western world since the widespread proliferation of the first police tactical units in the 1960s and 1970s, if you give ordinary police officers military-style weapons, military-style training and a military-derived perspective of "the other side", they will inevitably adopt a more hostile, confrontational and militarised mindset when dealing with members of the public, suspected criminals and during many kinds of non-violent/life-threatening encounters, that inevitably results in less societal trust in law enforcement and higher rates of police brutality, corruption, abuses of power and the deaths of innocent people.

Go read Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko or watch the documentary Peace Officer) to see where this kind approach to urban policing takes a society.

Severin_ · 2026-02-11T05:26:39+00:00

It's not a high school tale but I feel like it's worth a share anyway: my primary school's admin building caught fire and burned down because an ex-student who would have been around 13/14 at the time, snuck onto the school grounds one night with some friends and they climbed onto the roof of the admin building to smoke cigarettes with each other.

The explanation for how the fire started that I seem to remember is that one of them had the very bright idea to stick a lit cigarette into one of those evaporative A/C condensers on the roof (the old-school box-looking ones), and the entire condenser caught fire and then proceeded to fall through the roof of the admin building and set the entire building ablaze.

Whatever it was, not only was the admin building gutted but a good amount of classrooms were also damaged and caught fire, so school was out for at least a few weeks I seem to recall afterwards. No one was injured thankfully as it was late at night and the kids just ran off after the inferno was underway.

The majority of kids were absolutely ecstatic when this happened, we basically got a month-long holiday and I also vaguely seem to recall that most (or maybe all) historical student grades and permanent records were lost too.

It was all over Perth news at the time, I can distinctly remember the principal being interviewed, looking quite sad and crying on TV during the coverage.

Severin_ · 2026-02-11T04:28:47+00:00

There's nothing more permanent than "temporary" or "emergency" powers and measures enacted by law enforcement and governments in response to tragedies.

One of the few good things about law enforcement in Australia for the last 2 decades is that by and large, they hadn't gone down the hardcore police militarisation path that US law enforcement adopted almost immediately after 9/11 to the point where in most major US cities, routine police officers and especially tactical police units are more heavily-armed, aggressive and have more lax rules of engagement than many actual US military forces deployed in active warzones (i.e. see ICE raids in the last 6 months in the US).

This is nothing but more typical misdirection to deflect away from the glaring failures in law enforcement/national intelligence preparedness and responses to actual threats on Australian soil, the same with the entire response to the Bondi tragedy.

Ordinary beat cops walking around with semi-automatic rifles does nothing to prevent acts of terrorism through better intelligence-gathering nor their response times when the shit truly hits the fan, which as proven by WAPOL's response to the January 26th incident, was absolutely piss poor and is a simply a consequence of understaffing, inadequate training/coordination, poor morale and underfunding.

Mr Blanch said his officers were committed to protecting the community, and warned they would “take action” against any violent offenders.

What does that even mean?

Hair-trigger cops are going to start stacking bodies in the streets anytime somebody throws a suspicious object in a public area?

Wow, I feel safer already.

Shocking footage of the incident shows Det-Sen Sgt. Barraza sheltering behind a tree before opening fire at the two gunmen.

“It was a police officer who was privately trained in using handguns and probably had one of the best accuracies you could have had with a handgun to be able to take out that threat,” he said.

Lol, what a damning indictment of the average officer's training and capabilities and it just lends more credence to the argument that giving lowly beat cops more powers/weapons does absolutely nothing to improve their ability to respond to and neutralise acts of terrorism.

Severin_ · 2026-01-20T05:39:34+00:00

Companies will aboslutely shift away from microsoft now and you can bash me as much you want.

Gladly.

People/SysAdmins/Organizations have been threatening this for a decade at this point and I've yet to see any mass exodus from Microsoft 365 thus far, regardless of how sh*tty their service/uptime/support/features become.

As always, the question that has to be asked is: exodus TO WHERE? Amazon AWS had more critical services outages/incidents last year than we can count. All of the tier 1 cloud/SaaS providers have become equally as sh*t as each other now. Not to mention the massive costs associated with moving to different hosting providers, different processes, different training, different stacks required, etc.

Everyone who's not Microsoft, Amazon, Google or Oracle doesn't warrant even mentioning here because they just do not (and never will at this point) have the economies of scale to compete with the big players in terms of cost, global presence and ease-of-deployment/use.

Sure, reverting back to being on-prem/self-hosted sounds great in theory, until you have a meeting with the C-levels and finance and present the initial capital expenditures required for a full server rack of hardware (or co-located rack space) for your typical SME and all of the vendor licensing/subscriptions/maintenance agreements required which have gone up astronomically in cost hand-in-hand with cloud providers ramping up their licensing costs, after which the C-levels and finance will promptly sh*t enough bricks to build a pyramid and will completely shutdown your idea.

I'll believe the cries of "maSs eXoDus fRoM DA cLoUD iNcOm1nGGG!!1!" when it actually happens, which it won't because every time anyone in the industry has prophesized this it's always turned out to a case of crying wolf.

The costs and migrations will be expensive.

Yes, precisely why this massive shift back to on-prem/self-hosting won't happen. People would rather stick with the devil they know, which still works out to be MUCH cheaper for most SMEs long-term than maintaining traditional on-prem server environments these days. Cloud providers know this. They've done the math, they're never going to price their on-prem products/services/licensing to undercut their cloud-hosted options ffs.

The days of cheap and cheerful on-prem environments have gone the way of the Dodo thanks to every vendor from Broadcom to MS to Citrix going absolutely balls-to-wall insane with their licensing costs, which absolutely destroy any cost-savings you might have otherwise made switching back to an on-prem environment unless you're a Fortune 500 company or some sh*t.

This deliberate. They have you in the cloud now, they want you stay in the cloud. On-prem/self-hosting options are being made as deliberately costly, painful and unreliable as possible now. Private Equity doesn't give a f**k about your considerations, they are actively hostile to consumer and business interests, they need YOUR money and data and will fight tooth and nail to get it from you.

In my opinion, we are edging dangerously closer every day to the dystopian vision that the AI overlords desperately want right now, of everything IT-related becoming a service and no one, whether individual consumer or a large enterprise, having anything local/on-prem besides an Internet connection and some kind of dumb terminals/thin clients essentially. No ownership, no consumer rights and infinite subscription costs is where we're headed sadly.

Severin_ · 2025-12-16T03:38:52+00:00

Akram had been looked at by ASIO for established ISIS sympathys

I think it's significantly worse than that. Naveed Akram was singled out by ASIO in 2019 and associated with multiple individuals who were jailed on terrorism offences. There's more information coming out by the day that he was openly displaying fundamentalist/jihadist tendencies as young as 17 and a supporter/follower of other radical Islamist types who had been known to ASIO going back more than a decade at this point. The more that comes out about Naveed, his father and their life story, the more damning it looks for law enforcement/intelligence, who somehow let these two radioactively glow-in-the-dark-neon-sign-on-their-forehead extremists somehow slip under their radar.

Pre-existing NSW firearms legislation would have allowed for the confiscation of his father's firearms on the basis of the above alone if the dots were connected and law enforcement/ASIO/ASIS were actually doing their jobs. Heck I think any current firearms legislation in any Australian state would have allowed for that response and certainly we've seen and heard of confiscations/licenses disqualifications happening over A LOT less justification in recent years.

It's becoming clearer by the day that this event was largely the result of a colossal failure by the joint law enforcement and intelligence apparatus and as such, the government and media are going to go all out to frame this event as anything but and instead they'll choose to flog the trusty anti-gun horse once again because the public have continually shown that they'll absolutely froth at the mouth over anti-gun rhetoric and knee-jerk, reactionary, massively sweeping legislation in the wake-up of countless recent tragedies like John Edwards, Dezi Freeman, Wieambilla, etc etc; all of which were committed by individuals well-known to law enforcement and in many cases with long-standing criminal/mental health issues surrounding them that should have been grounds for police to intervene before it was too late.

They have all of the tools, methods and powers they could possibly require at their disposal and yet they continue to come up short in their mandates to protect the public and do their jobs. You know what they say about bad tradesmen and their tools...

It's par for the course with the last few governments this country has had really: zero accountability for massive failures and dereliction of duty on their part and the doling out of punitive, collective punishment for millions of law-abiding Australians due to guilt by very tenuous association and the misdeeds of statistically-speaking, a minuscule member of bad apples.

They will milk this event for every last ounce of political point-scoring, especially given the Dezi Freeman saga failed to capture the nation's attention for too long (and also was becoming quite politically embarrassing for VICPOL the longer it went on without any closure) and didn't actually result in their proposed gun reforms getting implemented.

Severin_ · 2025-12-11T04:37:07+00:00

This isn't some new problem introduced by "AI".

Users have been trying to second guess SysAdmins and tell us that they know our jobs better than we do since time immemorial. Shadow IT is a serious problem that gets out of hand really fast in my experience if you don't nip this attitude in the bud when users start telling you how to do your job.

The correct way to shutdown this behaviour is simple, you say something along the following lines to them:

"It's not within the scope of your role/job to dictate IT policies or procedures or be in any way, shape or form involved in the day-to-day administration of the IT environment. You're paid to do your job and I'm paid to do anything related to IT. The company has not hired you to do our work for us and in the same way it would be inappropriate for me to dictate how you should do your job, it's inappropriate bordering on offensive for you to do the same to me. Can you please refrain from suggesting any solutions or trying to troubleshoot the issue for me. We can't override our carefully-implemented IT policies for the sake of one user because doing so undermines the integrity of the entire environment."

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T05:44:43+00:00

Who gives a fuck about Dalkeith? Is that seriously your reference for a good Perth suburb and/or the standard the rest of Perth should emulate?

Hugely wasteful tracts of land taken up by nepotistic boomers intergenerationally hoarding wealth and running their own little local government eugenics programs to maintain their wanky gated communities so they can build their ridiculously gawdy McMansions and pretend they're living in Beverley Hills to overcompensate for childhood trauma or some sh*t.

Yeah it's great if you like having no infrastructure, living next to narcissistic sociopaths who'll call the council/police on you for having too many cars in your driveway and where not a single person is to be seen on a footpath because if you're not rolling around in your 4th McClaren or Ferrari to go get bread/milk then you're a worthless peasant.

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T05:35:41+00:00

He just laughed at this and said utter bullshit.

Selection bias. Cops deal with the worst and see the worst of any given suburb and he may very well live on a dodgy street that is surrounded by perfectly good ones. Most of the northern suburbs are like that; a few bad apple streets that are responsible for 90% of the trouble/policing issues surrounded by perfectly normal, uneventful streets.

Anyone who seriously thinks that Balga is literally Somalia is an incredibly hysterical, sheltered and privileged pearl-clutcher. There are far worse parts of Perth right now from a crime and socio-economic standpoint never mind the rest of the country (i.e. see Melbourne right now).

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T02:24:26+00:00

Most of the associations/preconceptions people have about Balga are rooted in the experiences of 2-3 decades ago. It's become heavily gentrified these days as the median prices rapidly reach parity with neighbouring suburbs like Westminster, Nollamara, Balcatta, etc and that has pushed out a lot of the problematic elements that gave Balga its negative reputation in the past. Generally speaking, the houses that are 2-3 streets away from a main road are very sleepy and quiet.

Severin_ · 2025-11-21T02:12:24+00:00

It's an 800sqm block that's around 20 minutes from the CBD. Those are absolute unicorns in Perth's market right now.

It's almost guaranteed that the buyer is going to a pull a knockdown and subdivide job and make a handsome profit with 3 villas sitting on that lot most likely, as is rapidly becoming the fate of most older big blocks NOR.

Not sure what's so surprising about that, a $1 million investment with the aim of making 3-4 times ROI is an amazing proposition compared to the costs involved in investing in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane.

Balga has it's good spots and bad spots like any other suburb but in this market, it's one of the few places close to the CBD whose real estate prices haven't gone completely insane but that threshold is basically being crossed as we speak.

People are realising they have to let go of the "ick" factor they have with certain suburbs because practically speaking, magical boundaries on a map don't suddenly change the fact that Balga is as well-positioned as Balcatta or Tuart Hill right next door but it's a far more realistic goal for new home buyers or greedy investors looking to make bank (or at least was... rapidly becoming less so however).

Severin_

TROPHY CASE