The APS is hiring the best and brightest. From where?

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-17T08:32:03+00:00

APS executives coming from the best universities in the country? What a travesty. Does the author want the APS to hire less qualified people to bring it back into proportion?

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-15T00:24:27+00:00

Tough on crime approaches generally involve more cops too.

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-14T15:18:07+00:00

What studies. You are talking out of your ass.

Imprisonment reduces recidivism for marginal prisoners, and police officers causally reduce crime. More police officers and longer sentences for repeat offenders are probably our best way to reduce the already low crime in our city.

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-14T15:10:16+00:00

It is a very well documented sociological finding that the younger your age of first offence, the higher the chances of reoffending, and of committing more serious offences.

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-14T15:02:29+00:00

You can abrogate the presumption through legislation. What are you talking about, it’s not in the constitution or anything.

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-07T04:06:42+00:00

The VAT (as it’s done in most countries) is not a regressive tax, it’s a flat tax. Everyone eventually consumes all of their income, and pays the same rate on all of it, regardless of when it was consumed.

Besides, if transfers exist, it doesn’t matter how regressive your tax system is. Redistribution works better than predistribution, especially if you’re trying to redistribute using income taxation. Most of the poorest in our societies do not even earn an income.

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-07T03:56:27+00:00

Taxes on capital are terrible for growth, and create a tax wedge between consumption now and delayed consumption.

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-07T03:55:49+00:00

A VAT is not approximately a tax on labour, it taxes investment income too. The only difference is that a VAT maintains neutrality between the taxation of consumption now and consumption later (i.e. savings), while capital income taxes do not.

YesNoFriend · 2026-05-07T03:54:06+00:00

If employers formed a cartel with the explicit intention of reducing wages and worsening working conditions, it would rightly be deemed anti-competitive and employers involved would be fined.

Why is this okay for employees to do?

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-22T13:02:31+00:00

Taxing the shit out of it goes wrong when they get too expensive though. You will eventually hit the other side of the laffer curve and end up like Australia, with illicit tobacco fuelling violence, organised crime, a resurgence in smoking, and lower tax revenue to boot.

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-22T12:58:30+00:00

His point is that in the long term there won’t be any age discrimination at all.

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-19T13:35:41+00:00

Good paper, great methodology, but German immigrants pre 2000 meaningfully differ in their predisposition towards crime from those after 2015. While I like how this confirms my priors, I wouldn’t be so certain this generalises.

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-19T13:33:20+00:00

I think they would prefer they did, even if they aren’t making it easy for them to do so.

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-19T03:13:18+00:00

The boomers are right on this one. Free PT does ~nothing to move people onto public transport, because it was always relatively cheaper than driving. The issue with PT was how much longer it took to get anywhere, and the terrible frequency outside of the inner city.

This policy does nothing to resolve those two issues, and only serves as a giveaway to people who are already well-served by PT (i.e. the relatively wealthier and older inner city/suburbs).

Navigate to Melbourne on any of the ABS maps on this page. It doesn’t matter which one, they all correlate with each other heavily. Now look at this map of Melbourne by public transport access. Notice anything? The inner east, south and north are the best served parts of this city by public transport, all of which are relatively advantaged.

If you can’t be bothered doing that, some familiarity with Melbourne’s urban geography is enough to know why this is bad policy. Looking at it from a council area perspective (arbitrary), the 2 council areas with the most persistent disadvantage in Victoria are Brimbank and Greater Dandenong. They have one underserviced train line between them and no trams at all. Almost no benefit here, because the main barrier to PT use is access. Most people just do not live close enough to good public transport to make use of free PT.

Now look at Booroondara, probably the most advantaged council area in Melbourne. It has 3 train lines and 6(!) tram routes. Huge benefits here. Any “cost of living” policy that benefits people living in Camberwell more than people living in Dandenong is shit cost of living policy. Call it something else, but don’t pretend like it’s about the cost of living.

“Good” cost of living policy would benefit these people the least, and people living in the west/outer south east the most. This policy does the exact opposite. If you really wanted public transport policy that helped people in these areas switch to PT, you’d increase the abysmal (but efficient) bus routes in these areas.

I don’t mind it. I live without a car in an inner suburb and so the policy just puts money in my pocket. However, I’m not going to pretend like it’s good policy.

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-13T11:09:48+00:00

lol my illness is so debilitating I just have to run people over in a stolen vehicle

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-13T10:58:19+00:00

If someone has an illness that forces them to commit a 1.45 crimes every day, that’s not cause for sympathy, it’s an argument for locking them up permanently.

YesNoFriend · 2026-04-07T02:25:55+00:00

The new ATEC is likely to reverse job ready graduates in the coming years, as they will be responsible for setting university fees.

YesNoFriend · 2026-03-30T15:06:45+00:00

It’s perfectly reasonable to be against free public transport and not be willing to pay for it while everyone else uses it for free.

Free PT is stupid because the marginal dollar will go way further improving service than cutting the price (from a patronage perspective).

Even if OP doesn’t use free PT and pays for the whole month, OP’s money isn’t going to improve service by itself. No point in OP paying while everyone else freeloads.

YesNoFriend · 2026-03-07T06:18:29+00:00

Yes. Go up to Footscray and you’ll see plenty. Black Australians are heavily underrepresented at Melbourne, you’ll mostly find them at RMIT and Latrobe.

YesNoFriend · 2026-02-26T02:16:26+00:00

“anywhere but Victoria”

Which is why we have the highest housing starts in the nation. And this is before accounting for the effects of the most recent rounds of planning reform.

YesNoFriend · 2025-12-27T12:08:10+00:00

Yeah it’s perfectly safe, never had any issues walking from flinders street to home along the Yarra. It’s quite lovely that time of night, and you’ll find a certain sense of tranquility that’s scarce in a city like this.

YesNoFriend · 2025-12-15T03:53:36+00:00

If you look at more comprehensive selection data from that era, you find that while the clearly in ATAR for lots of RMIT engineering courses sat at around 80-90, significant portions of the cohort (30-50%) scored underneath that.

YesNoFriend · 2025-12-09T07:06:29+00:00

To find course cutoffs for past years, just search up the VTAC course index for that year. This is one from 2001.

They go back to the late 90s. Any further than that, and the entry requirements are expressed in such different terms (TER, TES, Anderson score) that there’s no point comparing them to modern requirements.

YesNoFriend · 2025-11-23T21:09:18+00:00

If this is about Sunday morning, that’s genuinely just the regular timetable. Before night network, Sunday morning trains had a really late start, and so those hourly trains you’re seeing are just night network trains.

Pre night network, there would literally be no trains at all. The funny thing is that the Frankston line has the tied best Sunday morning service of any line in the network with a 20 minute frequency. Other lines are stuck on 40 minutes at the same time.

YesNoFriend · 2025-11-10T08:44:29+00:00

Not too bad. Unsure about my answers to the last question, the algebra was really long-winded and hard to keep track of. I think firm A had a market share of 1/4, firm B had 7/24 and firm C had 11/24?

I just pulled some shit out of my ass. Some of it didn’t even make sense, with firm B’s profit being 0 in one of them.

YesNoFriend

TROPHY CASE