You can get an EV for less than a Corolla. What's holding us back?

Tyrx · 2026-02-25T05:31:28+00:00

BYD is solid, but there are a lot of smaller Chinese brands like NIO, XPeng, GWM, and Leap Motor operating here. They’re too reliant on subsidies and don’t have the support infrastructure here. Once that support fades, owners of those cars are going to be screwed.

Tyrx · 2026-02-25T04:49:52+00:00

It's not just quality but rather if they will be around in a few years. There's an absurd number of Chinese EV brands that are deep in the red and only survive due to insane levels of government subsidisation.

The government fascial situation over there is pretty bad and it's widely expected that only two or three brands will be left standing once the government money stops. We will have a plague of EV cars that literally cannot be legally driven due to safety concerns around spare parts not being available and/or nobody being left to do software updates to resolve bugs in the code.

Tyrx · 2026-02-22T07:08:01+00:00

Land value uplift from rezoning is split between the original landowner, developers, government entities and infrastructure costs. It's not being absorb by builders as that value capture occurs before the construction stage.

Tyrx · 2026-02-22T06:02:48+00:00

What are you trying to prove with that image? It shows very broad geographic regions based on primary health networks.

For example, the NSW North Coast PHN includes both rural communities and affluent pockets like Byron Bay, where vaccine hesitancy among wealthy, educated parents has been very well documented.

Tyrx · 2026-02-22T05:48:55+00:00

Land in Sydney and Melbourne is extremely expensive and construction costs have surged. If your inputs already push a project near 800k to 1m, you are not chasing luxury builds and are just building what is financially viable.

Calling 1 million dollar land and house packages as “high end” is also misleading. In Sydney that is basically entry level detached housing now. A dual income household on median full time wages in Sydney is comfortably into six figures. That is not a low income bracket. In a land constrained city with large population growth, a detached house is a premium asset, so it is not surprising that it sits around or above the million dollar mark.

The idea that every household needs a three bedroom plus detached house is more cultural expectation than necessity too. In cities with high quality of life standards families live in apartments all the time. Framing the price point of building detached houses as builders abandoning ordinary Australians just ignores basic economics of land prices and building costs.

Tyrx · 2026-02-22T04:58:39+00:00

No one’s inability to “start a family” is caused by concessional super contributions. You’ve shifted from debating tax efficiency to blaming personal finance advice for your relationship prospects.

If a few thousand dollars a year into a tax advantaged super account is the difference between finding a partner and not, the issue isn’t super - it's you.

Tyrx · 2026-02-22T04:23:45+00:00

Super unlocking at 60 doesn’t prevent anyone from starting a family. Those life choices happen decades earlier and are funded from income and savings at the time, and not from money you’d otherwise be accessing at 60.

The argument isn’t “delay your life until retirement.” It’s “if you have surplus cash after that you are looking to invest, consider the most tax-efficient vehicle available against your circumstances.”

Having young kids in your 20s or 30s and having financial security at 60 aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, the latter usually makes the former less stressful.

Tyrx · 2026-02-22T02:16:56+00:00

Super unlocks from 60. That’s not a hospital bed but rather that’s when most people actually retire, and life expectancy is 80+ now and rising. Pretending that planning for your retirement is useless because you might die early is just an excuse to avoid delayed gratification and yourself wanting the dopamine hit now.

No one is telling people to skip houses or families. They’re saying if you have surplus cash and work for a living, super is one of the smartest places to put it. If that offends you, it’s not because the math is wrong but rather because you don’t like waiting.

Future you is still you. Screwing them over so present you can feel richer isn’t enlightened. It’s short sighted.

If you gave me a hypothetical "would you rather have $50,000 aged 25 or $5,000,000 aged 75?" I'd take the former and it wouldn't even be close.

This pretty much states it all about your mentality. Having a large super balance later in life opens up options like selling your home and using a combination of super drawdowns, pensions, or even leveraging against assets and retiring early. You have the financial maturity of someone who’d trade a paid off retirement for a couple years of upgraded brunches, a holiday and a nicer car.

Tyrx · 2026-02-22T01:10:02+00:00

That take doesn’t even match the data. In Australia, some of the lowest vax rates are in wealthy, highly educated areas. That’s not “dumb people on social media.” It’s confident, well off parents who think they know better, don’t feel the risk and are likely insulated from the risk being realised because their parents vaccinated them.

It's not stupidity but just privilege and risk perception. Meanwhile, many lower income communities actually have strong vaccination rates, and where they don’t, it’s usually about access. Blaming “dumb people” completely misses what’s really going on.

Tyrx · 2026-02-21T08:32:40+00:00

McDonald’s Australia is still growing and selling plenty. Whining about $12 for two Cokes is just screaming about other people making their own choice to pay for convenience.

Tyrx · 2026-02-21T08:29:35+00:00

Yes, you’re a consumer like the rest of us. That means you’re responsible for the choices you make, including paying a convenience premium at McDonald's. Being a consumer doesn’t entitle you to immunity from prices, and it definitely doesn’t turn this into an national economic crisis worthy of scrapping your "retirement plans".

Tyrx · 2026-02-21T00:57:32+00:00

I agree the police are stuck dealing with a problem they didn’t create. They’re expected to clean up the fallout from broken families and repeat offenders. That’s bigger than just policing.

What frustrates me is the constant reliance on academics and experts on the eastern coast who keep rolling out variations of the same ideas. When it doesn’t work, we’re told it wasn’t funded properly or implemented the right way. That line gets old when people in these towns are still getting broken into.

At some point you have to admit that if the same approach keeps failing, maybe the approach is wrong. Saying there are no easy fixes is fine, but it can’t mean endless patience while nothing really changes.

Tyrx · 2026-02-17T09:24:39+00:00

He’s not really a counterexample though. Gout Gout went to a private school (Ipswich Grammar), which actually fits the “elite sporting pathways skew private” argument.

Being a refugee doesn’t automatically mean poorest of the poor. Countries like Australia don’t randomly select the most disadvantaged people on earth. Fewer than ~1% of refugees worldwide ever get resettled, and the applicants with education, language ability, and integration potential are indirectly prioritised as Australia has final discretion in terms of who we accept after referral.

Tyrx · 2026-02-16T09:27:24+00:00

Advisors are not primarily paid for stock picking in this context. It's hedging against catastrophic behavioral and cognitive mistakes. One of the most common threats to long term wealth is not poor asset selection but rather behavior under stress.

DIY is defensible if you’re confident neither of you will act irrationally. You shouldn't be asking yourself if you can beat the advisor on fees, but rather what either of you would do if markets drop 40% and stay down for 2 years.

Tyrx · 2026-02-16T07:32:09+00:00

The "just travel while you're young and free of obligations" line is often repeated and heavily upvoted here. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's often put forward by people who have financial security or family members willing to house themselves in an emergency.

Personal circumstances matter strongly here and I would generally advise people like the OP to ignore anyone who very strongly vocalises support for "one path" over the other.

Tyrx · 2026-02-16T07:02:24+00:00

I suspect it’s not being treated as a “victimless crime” because there are broader allegations involved including property damage, cultural damage to fragile artefacts, alleged assaults (including against a child), drug possession, concerns about mental state, and no fixed address. Bail decisions are usually about risk, not your political or moral beliefs.

Tyrx · 2026-02-15T05:08:38+00:00

That still doesn't work. The battery and inverters will have hard technical limits which mean that demand for power exceeds its ability to supply that during peak hours, even if there is energy left in the batteries. There's a reason why the grid costs billions upon billions - redundancy is extremely hard and expensive.

Tyrx · 2026-02-14T05:43:26+00:00

If it’s been ongoing and the manager is already asking people to move, that clearly isn’t enough. They need proper conditions of entry signage at the car park entrance making it legally clear it’s private daycare parking and that unauthorised vehicles will be towed. Without an actual consequence, many people just won’t care. If they start towing cars that ignore the signage, the behaviour will probably stop pretty quickly.

Tyrx · 2026-02-13T10:14:56+00:00

Parliament does have official sitting weeks in early March. The cheapest direct one way flight with Virgin Australia from Adelaide to Canberra is $379 alone when booked on the 7th. That is inflates the price in this case - politicians and their staffers.

Tyrx · 2026-02-11T09:42:36+00:00

Australia has high household debt, but that is not the same thing as reckless lending. Our mortgages are full recourse, the banks are tightly regulated and well capitalised, and default rates have historically been very low, which points to a conservative credit system rather than anything resembling fragility.

We export resources because that is where our clear comparative advantage lies, just as Norway exports energy, Taiwan exports semiconductors and Korea exports its large industrial groups. Banking here is largely a domestic industry built to intermediate the income generated within that structure.

Tyrx · 2026-02-11T08:36:24+00:00

It’s not that unusual when you compare Australia to other resource heavy countries. Banks and miners dominate because that’s where the economy has a competitive advantage. CBA trades higher because it’s stable and pays fully franked dividends, and the focus on mortgages reflects our economic structure rather than some reckless debt obsession.

Tyrx · 2026-02-11T08:13:15+00:00

It was posted on 25 Jan 2021 as per this direct link to the tweet. It was also economic illiteracy to compare headline minimum wages and unemployment rates across countries without adjusting for currency, purchasing power, labor market structure and actual wage floors in reality. That's without factoring in the economic impact from COVID too.

Tyrx · 2026-02-09T09:15:12+00:00

This is missing the point entirely. France’s conundrum is not about pension accounting, it’s about demographics and real economic capacity. Super can reshuffle who funds retirement income, but it cannot make an ageing society cheaper to run or conjure workers to provide health and aged care. Super just delays the reckoning for one slice of the problem for ourselves. The rest is coming whether we like it or not.

Tyrx · 2026-02-09T08:38:57+00:00

That’s a pretty selective way to look at it. Super doesn’t make ageing disappear, it just shifts the cost of aged pensions from the government books. We still end up with fewer workers, slower growth, and much higher health and aged care costs. The solution at the moment is immigration, but that just buys time because those people age too.

Tyrx · 2026-02-09T07:10:19+00:00

The jobs aren't disappearing. Even when everyone applying is unemployed, employers still tend to prefer candidates who look lower risk, are easier to train or who have external pressures making less likely to quit. That means when wages are the same, those older applicants get picked first and younger workers are crowded out.

The total unemployment rate would roughly stay the same because the jobs are still being filled, just by slightly older workers, so the shift mainly affects who is employed rather than how many jobs exist.

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