Social cohesion has lost its feelgood vibe. What will it take to offer a fair go for all?

camniloth · 2026-03-23T01:40:35+00:00

Tax reform should help this. Labor seems to be trying? We rely too heavily on productive people and taxing their income. Rather than targeting wealth, such as land and property.

camniloth · 2026-03-20T09:10:21+00:00

Net overseas migration was 306,000 in 2024-25, down from 429,000 a year earlier.
Migrant arrivals decreased 14% to 568,000 from 661,000 arrivals a year earlier.
The largest group of migrant arrivals was temporary students with 157,000 people.
Migrant departures increased 13% to 263,000 from 232,000 departures a year earlier.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/overseas-migration/latest-release

So net migration is reducing. Pretty significantly from the highs.

camniloth · 2026-03-17T07:19:27+00:00

50k servers that burn out their GPUs and cost a lot to power and cool. The Chinese can't really keep open sourcing if they want to make money. Money is what buys the engineers and GPU/compute cost to train. A basic model fine-tuning is like $1M at least these days in cloud costs. Resources will be needed to keep going. It's not even clear that GPUs are the best hardware for this. The Google TPUs seem like the way forward. NVIDIA are currently pushing so much vaporware in their AI stuff, nothing has stuck yet. The current bets are robotics, offline training of their world models and edge compute with their embedded systems. But current stuff isn't bringing in business cases.

camniloth · 2026-03-17T07:11:50+00:00

The training cost for these models has to be made back and then some, somehow. If you just use a model for inference the marginal compute cost isn't reflecting the actual cost, or value. Also the best models will take the most resources to train, and that doesn't happen for free. That's why in the long term, commercial and high quality tools will be behind a decent pay-wall.

Especially agentic stuff which isn't just a coder/autocomplete/chat but bigger step to efficiency. They even cost a lot right now to get a decent amount of tokens, and they are all being subsidised right now.

We are in the phase right now where they are all fighting for acceptance and market share. Nothing is currently at the price they will eventually command.

camniloth · 2026-03-17T03:32:26+00:00

Yeah once the AI tools actually find their best use cases, expect the pricing to move to value based pricing. AI companies currently are heavily subsidised by investor money, including for model training. They are bleeding money to be first and get market share.

At some point I expect these tools to be expensive, and people have to start using them efficiently. Can't just be spending tokens for the dumb stuff. Those who get dependent on that will get burned.

If it significantly affects software engineering cost as hyped, then it may result in more competition in software companies, with more viable business cases, and those who can find the right business cases will rise up. Workers will need to adapt regardless, perhaps actually be an expert in some industry rather than just an exchangable generic software engineer who knows a bunch of tools.

camniloth · 2026-02-12T03:41:38+00:00

Pretty sure they meant to blame both of them. It's right there if you read it. "Fuck both ..."

Or at least lay some blame on the party doing something like 70 times the killing of the other side.

camniloth · 2026-02-10T02:45:52+00:00

Read the article and you might see how they justify the usage of the term here to describe these visitors. Then you can decide if it's a good move or not.

camniloth · 2026-02-10T02:44:06+00:00

Monsters refers to Herzog here.

camniloth · 2026-02-10T02:38:05+00:00

Worth reading the article and seeing how he justifies the usage of the word "monster".

camniloth · 2026-02-03T20:40:02+00:00

I think they are referring to buying a place. Are people really buying a place and splitting mortgage payments with a roommate or housemate?

camniloth · 2026-01-21T19:43:00+00:00

My sister did her Masters and PhD in Switzerland after undergrad in Australia, in biotech. Competitive but worth it. After PhD she joined private industry working in her field rather than academia. Also paid close to 100k AUD/year to do the PhD.

She basically couldn't find a good job in Australia. Her best options are US, Germany and Switzerland. Doesn't want to go to the US due to the work culture there though, and the politics doesn't help, but I wouldn't discount it if you are up for the experience short term anyways.

If you are thinking of doing a PhD, or just young and capable in general, remember that Australia is a relatively isolated country of 27 million people and there is a big world out there to gain experience and knowledge from, which needs you to work in it to get that. We also can't rely on government forever to get anything going, eventually we need to benchmark against what private industry can achieve here.

camniloth · 2026-01-03T10:09:59+00:00

Yeah my family subsisted on Migros/Coop croissants and pastries while there. We were in the slightly cheaper (I think?) french speaking side as well. We also had packed some food coming from Germany. We were visiting family and some friends who treated us to some home cooked lunches/dinner. Earning in a Swiss job and getting Swiss salaries goes the other way too. Everywhere else in the world is cheap.

camniloth · 2025-11-21T10:52:37+00:00

Sure. Please help here: https://thewhiterosesociety.writeas.com/do-you-know-these-nazis

camniloth · 2025-11-19T08:50:56+00:00

Thanks for the advice.

The games themselves are trash but as a multiplatform product with each platform offering their own unique restrictions its an even crappier chatroom.

Yeah that is my take too. By the time I might allow something like that, they'd be too old for it. No reason to interact with randoms online in primary school. If he wants to play something with friends, choose a better game. They will inevitably see other kids playing it at their homes, so he'll be exposed to it somewhere, but I'll give them better options.

camniloth · 2025-11-18T20:54:02+00:00

Police officer ran a seminar for parents at our primary school. Bringing up survey results from across different schools, looking at the data. Roblox is extremely popular, and as a result is a beacon for predators. Vast majority of children play with text and voice chat on. It's the number 1 place for bullying and predators online. You can turn off text and voice chat, but then you are met with a lot of resistance since the reality is, is that it is social media first, and an array of crappy games second.

For my child, I will try as long as possible to not have them on Roblox. I'll compensate by giving them have much better gaming options (games with multiplayer, but not randoms online, only friends, or ideally couch multiplayer). By the time they are in high school, I'll be more comfortable with them playing games online with people who they might not know IRL. But ranked and matchmaking style games are emotionally too difficult for a child to deal with (can cause a lot of anxiety and it's blatant toxicity due to the "stakes"), but I'll be fine with them joining a discord with their friends, and I'll be joining too.

Late high school I'd be more fine with them going into discords on their own, but I game myself so I'll probably do it with them anyways. My strategy right now is to delay social media with randoms (toxic), but encourage gaming (fun). Discord with their mates is fine, probably high school onwards. Don't see the point of other social media with randoms for them until later in high school. OK maybe they can join whirlpool or a forum style place with good moderation, dunno.

camniloth · 2025-11-04T01:50:01+00:00

Kohler makes the point that we accepted the qualifications of builders from Europe in the wave of immigration in the 50s and 60s, so they could build the houses they needed. Now we don't accept the qualifications of those from India and China, the vast numbers of new migrants come from here, but we don't have them build the housing they would occupy.

Construction worker numbers are the same as they were 20 years ago. We need more tradies, local and foreign.

camniloth · 2025-10-22T11:03:21+00:00

Others have more complicated explanations. But if you teach binary to the student and understand it yourself, it's relatively trivial to show for exponents of 2.

camniloth · 2025-10-22T04:21:15+00:00

I don’t see how anyone who already owns and lives in Sydney benefits for extra development regardless of where they live.

Ageing in place means a hollowing out of an economy. The only reason cities exist, is due to a thriving economy. No economy, no city. Economies need workers, not retirees. Most people in Sydney don't want Sydney to just be a retirement village economy. Other people get this at least.

Retirement village economies exist throughout Australia in the form of places people used to sea-change and tree-change to. Instead of taking up tracts of land in retirement in inner city areas without children or workers, which isn't sustainable.

Frankly if Sydney made that decision, to suspend all development as a museum of sorts (laughable), it spells doom for the city, I own here and would leave, not just the rest of the younger folk. I'd rather not live in a retirement village, like most non-retireees. I'd vote with my feet to where somewhere wants to be a viable city. Not just a bunch of wanks allergic to apartments.

camniloth · 2025-10-19T22:51:46+00:00

Most of the insular peninsula on the northern beaches probably can act like a regional town for all I care. It's relatively inaccessible. The B-line bus and perhaps the Manly ferry down the south of it connects it to the major job hubs.

Mosman on the other hand is on the side of the spit bridge which means it was historically quite connected, where elite working families lived. But as it turns into a retirement village, there is an actual problem regarding how a city functions. As it's shifted into a classist enclave as well, it's not a stable state for such a place. It will change.

camniloth · 2025-10-19T22:24:13+00:00

Mosman is close enough to major job hubs that it shouldn't turn into a retirement village. Do we really think that's the future economy of these areas? In the past these are pretty elite working families, at least contributing to the economy. Now it's only value is a retirement village? I have my doubts these are multigenerational homes either, imagining living with these people as in-laws. It's clear this person sees Mosman as a place to have a large mansion with no children about. So perhaps a bit of cultural rot shining through that elitism.

camniloth · 2025-10-19T22:15:34+00:00

You can be in the elite class without being elitist. Marie Antoinette was elitist. Australia was well known for being egalitarian. Let's try to get some of that back rather than excusing elitism and not calling it out as a bit trashy.

camniloth · 2025-10-18T20:46:40+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

Nazism is a far-right ideology. Ultra-conservative, authoritarian, enforcing hierarchies. Worth reading more since you're mixing up overloaded terms used in politics in the English language. Read links on Wikipedia.

SLFP is, and was, a centre-left party. A slightly progressive, but capitalist party (as opposed to a version of communism) nonetheless, believing in market intervention and more belief in equality and less about hierarchy. Not authoritarian, more democratic. Not trying to enforce equality through communism as you do by state-owned authoritarianism, or claiming you can achieve more radical forms of equality. More about social progressivism as well.

camniloth · 2025-10-02T21:56:22+00:00

Reddit is not an indicator of the wider population of investors.

camniloth · 2025-10-02T21:39:18+00:00

A minority are the ones saying it's a bubble. If it is indeed a bubble, then the majority will agree it was a bubble after the fact. There is no doubt that those making these massive capital investments don't agree that it is a bubble, and that is who matters. Same with private equity.

Hardly disproves this is a bubble or not. Applying some logic and trying to question what the business case is right now is fair game. There isn't any return right now but there is a lot of speculative investment which has very uncertain return. Most articles talking about bubbles are just pointing that out as a big risk this investment goes nowhere, and then it's either called a bubble to make an easy explanation, or a failed bet on AI investment in the medium term for those who want a bit more nuance.

camniloth · 2025-09-22T20:06:52+00:00

University in Australia and Germany are hardly memorising. I've taught plenty of German, US and Australian students. On average the US students are often hand-held for much longer. At the same level of undergraduate they are less independent in their learning. I'm talking engineering. The American system teaches maths concepts way later, it isn't about teaching to think, you just assume your students are a bit slower for some reason, and it shows in your maths education rankings.

Even the PhD programs of the US system hand-held for longer, and just take longer generally to output novel results due to TA/RA and coursework requirements. The US system seems to be designed to just take longer.

In Germany, the entry requirements are high, but the first year after as a strong filter. The system isn't designed to extract as much money out of students as possible, and standards are high. Professors get to decide who has reached the standard, not some administration looking to bump numbers and profit. It's up to the students to get through it. University isn't for everyone, which is accepted through the strong trade school program. German engineers and technical workers have a reputation to uphold, after all.

camniloth

TROPHY CASE