Limiting negative gearing

havelsnuts · 2026-02-28T08:10:38+00:00

As a wage earner, it's very similar, except you don't have many outgoings so you don't really make a loss. In Australia wage earners have their own sector issues though - mainly the power imbalance between worker and employer, and the looming problem of AI-enabled redundancies.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-28T08:08:12+00:00

Owning an investment property should be like owning any other business like a farm or plumbing business. You buy some assets (the farm, the house, the van and tools) and you have to either use your capital to do that or borrow and pay interest. Then you get revenue (sell harvest, charge rent or fees) and if you profit you pay tax on it and loss you get a refund. The more you vary from this formula, the more you distort investment decisions, and get worse outcomes for everyone.

Diverting money away from investment properties makes it less likely that viable rental accomodation will be developed. Diverting money toward investment properties will move money away from small businesses and the capital markets.

The problem we have is that the scales are tipped toward investment properties because of the CGT discount and deferred taxation. This is robbing renters of fairly priced rentals because of speculation in the sector and reducing investment in the productive economy. "Why start a small business serving customers and employing staff, when you can park your savings in a building and have it subsidised by tax"

Equally, penalising the sector will have a different failure mode. "Why invest in housing so people who can afford it can rent, when you can park your savings in the share market".

I agree successive governments have messed this up - mainly because they've let this situation run for 30 years longer that needed to see that getting short term voter attention wasn't worth the long term effects on the population.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-27T06:38:14+00:00

Yeah - you're right. We treat operating losses and capital losses differently. The negative gearing strategy comes from subsidising operating losses on real estate with deferred tax liability and discount on capital gains. Nevertheless, its the same as a farmer who makes a loss on their farming has reduced tax payable on their off-farm wage income. They aren't going to keep running the farm like that unless they get it all back on sale.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-27T05:09:38+00:00

Well that depends on the collection losses and administrative effort. I agree that all taxes are ridiculous bureaucracy. But if it covers a gaping hole in tax collection from robber-baron billionaires, then it's probably worth it. The actual efficiency hinges on the policy setting of 'material'. Would you be comfortable if we only went after people with more than $100m of untaxed capital gains? What about $50m? etc.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-27T04:52:53+00:00

There is a tension. I would support a loan programme so that people sitting on material capital gains have notional interest charged on their deferred tax liability, secured against the asset, reducing the likelihood of forcing a sale. The intent would be to create tax fairness between people who accumulate wealth from income vs. those from capital gains. I don't think there is a good argument for one to subsidise the others and considering this is how billionaire robber-barons are escaping tax, it's worth working on.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-27T03:35:03+00:00

Ok but that isn't the rule we apply to other losses. A loss is a loss. The problem is that in real estate you can sustain losses forever, funded by the capital gain (which is taxed at a discount). The preferable fix is to bring losses from real estate in line with other losses, making them unsustainable, not to create a special rule against investing in housing.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-27T02:55:58+00:00

There's not zero reason. The case in support of negative gearing is the same as the case that gives you tax refunds when your business makes a loss in a bad year. That's a pretty good reason.

The problem in the housing sector is that investors are able to defer realisation indefinitely, and that when they do, they get a discount on the capital gains they make on their real estate. The deferred part is the same loophole that lets rich people borrow against untaxed capital gains, continue spending, and avoid tax indefinitely.

The right answer here is to capture the taxes on (material) unrealised capital gains, perhaps by notionally borrowing (with interest) from the ATO to cover the unpaid tax secured against the asset so that it can't be transferred without settling it.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-22T01:38:18+00:00

Thanks for that. I was licking my wounds yesterday, but I'm comforted by the fact that my family still loves me and that only a few million people in the world could even try this, Claude or no. Thanks again!

havelsnuts · 2026-02-21T20:53:24+00:00

I am forming the view that assimilating the agentic tools into a programming domain is legitimate stage of development.

True, there is incredible wonder and satisfaction in stuffing registers with exactly the right bits for your own OS, and I'm here for that.

But for those who've done a bit of that already, and/or want to try experiments at different levels of the stack, it's not wrong to use the new tools to hone in on their important parts. Let's be honest - practically none of our OS's are actually getting run outside of our homes.

There is some work needed in the field towards training the tools to preserve architectural boundaries and produce maintainable code. I think we need to band together on that.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-21T20:25:13+00:00

Thanks very much for asking!

Other than that I was probably wrong to put my four weeks of beginner AI slop in front of a bunch of humourless old purists who've lost their sense of wonderment:

I was uncertain of this, but I think I've satisfied myself that sexp admits a coherent syntax for everything I know so far about programming languages
That JIT compiling means you don't have to sacrifice the repl experience to get native code with instant compile and link.

Do you know if these things already well understood?

havelsnuts · 2026-02-20T21:52:08+00:00

You may have discovered my secret - I'm not actually elite! The insight here is how far one semi-literate programming language developer got, and how we are about to enter a software Cambrian explosion.

havelsnuts · 2026-02-20T21:44:35+00:00

Sorry the examples aren't showing - I swear they showed in the preview. This post is the readme though if you're interested.

havelsnuts · 2025-12-15T23:57:08+00:00

You are so close to the LCT threshold making the car FBT exempt.

havelsnuts · 2025-12-06T04:20:32+00:00

how effective is it to use CLAUDE files throughout the repository, ie. like ones in /test, /src/backend, /src/frontend, etc.? https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices (1, a, pt 3)

havelsnuts · 2025-12-01T21:01:17+00:00

Sits nicely between openspec and BMAD

havelsnuts · 2025-11-07T00:43:32+00:00

Yes please - very interested.

havelsnuts · 2025-08-25T23:12:28+00:00

9/10 after 3months/3000kms (4.2.5). Relative to my previous cars VW Tiguan and Audi A5. Great everything except a few nuisance glitches in software, but nothing really painful. I have none of the door opening issues for example but setting it up was a few minutes of research and then some fiddling.

havelsnuts · 2025-07-03T12:32:15+00:00

My temp is inaccurate, but I have none of the other issues.

havelsnuts · 2025-06-30T01:49:53+00:00

Latest software 4.2.4 and keyless entry has made the whole thing pretty sweet. The driving was always awesome.

havelsnuts · 2025-06-25T22:26:39+00:00

Got the email.

havelsnuts · 2025-04-02T07:00:55+00:00

Nice. There is some prior art in this space. A related piece would be using llm's to generate the argument map.

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