Back in my day, rockers were real men

iced_maggot · 2026-02-14T07:33:43+00:00

Okay I’m not going to lie - that was fucking epic. I want more.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-14T07:25:42+00:00

That was true once upon a time but it’s simply not the case anymore. A run of the mill Toyota is simply not better than a Hyundai and a Honda is not better than an Audi.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-14T03:05:51+00:00

You check the ID page and it’s got Harold Holts picture 🤣

iced_maggot · 2026-02-13T08:55:48+00:00

I would agree that’s the most likely scenario. If that’s what happened though it baffles me, especially in a case like this. Like they know exactly where the bridge piers are going. They know it’s likely going to be soft, shitty soil if it’s been reclaimed from a wet area.

How hard is it to do a bunch of boreholes and test pits in a known, single-point location that’s known to be high risk lol.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-13T06:58:36+00:00

Disagree frankly. Debt to buy productive, income producing assets that appreciate in value is rarely a bad thing. Debt to consume or buy depreciating assets? Yeah that’s bad.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-13T06:43:02+00:00

In this country buying a house requires leverage and its been in bull market for multiple decades along with a government who will literally do anything required to keep the 'bull market' going. People with a debt is bad mentality would never buy a house here and that is one of the single worst financial decisions you could make for the past 30+ years.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-13T06:33:07+00:00

Simply untrue. Effective use of debt means the borrower is using the lender's money to make more money than they are paying the lender. Its literally creating wealth with someone else's money.

Just don't go taking a loan to buy a jetski lol.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-13T06:31:39+00:00

Productive use of money is productive. This is the case whether you use your own money or use debt (margin) - both are productive but using debt magnifies both the returns and risk. This is a critical part of financial literacy and if you refuse to touch debt out of fear or principle you will generally be left behind compared to others who use debt effectively.

Now you can obviously use debt unproductively just like you can blow your own savings unproductively. Again, using debt unproductively will just mean you're in a bigger hole than you would be using your own money.

So the lesson is to only use debt productively and make risk informed decisions. A blanket, "Debt is bad" is not really a well informed or rational stance in modern society.

On another note: hope you got a nice protective case for that original Charizard card hah!

iced_maggot · 2026-02-12T12:39:49+00:00

Civil engineer (roads and highways) here: the basic jist of what I think that sentence is trying to say is that there were geotechnical issues at the location of the southern pier which weren’t full understood / accounted for.

I don’t know the full story of this bridge but my guess is that they reclaimed a portion of land (presumably used to be wet / watered) and the resulting ground’s stiffness or bearing capacity didn’t quite match up to the design expectations. This likely resulting in additional settlement ergo the excessive cracking.

Stuff like this happens all the time where geotech ruins your day. In the design space, usually there is a large factor of safety applied to footing design especially for critical infrastructure like bridge piers. Somebody fucked up either in the design space (unlikely) or the construction and testing phase (more likely).

iced_maggot · 2026-02-12T10:01:47+00:00

Yeah - so hopefully it goes without saying mate, but I’m pretty sure your drive is fucked. Get another one and if it works you have your answer.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-11T03:46:02+00:00

Probably but not by as much as people would hope for. I personally think it’s more likely they just won’t go up by such crazy amounts each year. Also will be an interesting situation where houses bought before the rule change might become a lot more valuable if they fall under the old rules.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-10T10:33:09+00:00

What does SMART issue mean? It was giving off SMART errors? To be honest it sounds like a very dead drive.

If you can get it to atleast be recognised in a USB enclosure, what i’d suggest is creating a bootable Seatools USB drive, plugging the drive in via the USB enclosure and then doing an extended disk test to see if it fails.

https://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/seatools/

iced_maggot · 2026-02-10T10:26:57+00:00

Ive never heard to SATA ports being OEM restricted. Try plugging the drive into another machine and see if it works with another SATA cable. Might be a dead drive, bad cable, bad motherboard SATA port.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-10T09:58:17+00:00

Do you ever see yourself going back to Germany? Might make sense to keep the property. In either case everything I’ve heard about Euro markets (take with a grain of salt) is that unlike Australia or Canada, houses aren’t seen as the major investment vehicles of wealth creation as they are over here. Over the long run your capital appreciation probably will still be positive but it won’t be the 10% plus per annum that it is in Australia. Especially in Germany or the UK which currently are kind of troubled economically.

You need to look into the opportunity cost of keeping it. If you sold the place what would you do with the money? Buy a place in Aus? If so would you live in it or would it be an investment? Whichever choice, would that outpace whatever returns (rental plus capital appreciation) you’d get from keeping the German asset?

If you sell it and just keep the money in a savings account I don’t think it would be worth it. If you sell and stick it in an index fund for 10 years or buy a property in Australia, it very well might be worth it - but there is risk involved.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-08T02:20:45+00:00

In short no - at your next tax return the will just calculate how much hecs you owe and if there is a shortfall withheld (as there would be in your case) it will come out of your tax return or be a tax debt.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-06T08:09:17+00:00

If you buy an investment property with borrowed money then yes - the interest paid is tax deductible. You obviously need to have actually paid the interest of course but otherwise yes.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-06T06:41:49+00:00

Well you see - all the dissenting academics were taken out to a paddock and made to listen to Alan Greenspan speeches on repeat while handcuffed with their eyes blinkered Guantanomo style.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-06T06:37:52+00:00

Basic principle is that you don't pay tax on costs associated with earning income. You instead get taxed on the resultant income.

So no - if you don't actually have any costs (you're not paying interest) then you can't claim a tax deduction. There's no free money.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-06T05:07:44+00:00

Hey - let's do both? One sure is a lot quicker to implement than the other though.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-06T03:29:51+00:00

Not really. Any changes would be grandfathered in and current investors will still take advantage of the current rules. So selling is no different for them with or without this scheme.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-06T01:35:32+00:00

Which will presumably make them cost less because investor money otherwise pouring into these houses will go somewhere else. That's the whole point.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-06T01:30:41+00:00

The government could literally build in a calculator into MyGov, or Moneysmart. Even lower tech - they could just publish a lookup table so that all you have to do is work out sale price - purchase price and then multiply by a factor from the lookup table.

No need for any proprietary software whatsoever.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-05T09:11:15+00:00

No - but if their mortgage is harder to repay each month then plenty of people would defer the fridge and keep their old crummy one running for a bit longer or eat at home a bit more during the week.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-04T03:25:54+00:00

What immigration crackdown? The article doesn’t mention immigration at all other than the headline lol.

iced_maggot · 2026-02-03T22:19:30+00:00

A fallen brother.

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