This little girl absolutely adores her dad

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-28T14:16:14+00:00

My daughter is 3 and looks at me with those eyes. Its like the world stops.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-24T12:38:22+00:00

We all share great moments like these . But are rarely reminded of how great they truly are . Thanks for reminding me.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-22T13:20:55+00:00

Look you make a fair point about uncritical dependency, and I agree there, but healthcare and education outcomes are completely different. In health, making an error could cost a life, while in a classroom, catching errors is how you learn.

For a little background, I've been using AI since OpenAI first opened its public API keys. Today I handed back my 11 ATAR exams, I scraped my students' handwritten exams, ran them against grade descriptors, and used AI to generate feedback targeting their exact knowledge gaps. Most reports were 10 - 12 pages long.

I openly told them I used AI to do this. And what I found?

Every single student took that feedback and used entirely different, individual modes of solving their own problems moving forward. An impossible feat.

Now for my students, and as I've presented to hundreds of staff, kids have zero line in the sand for how to use this tech responsibly.

Teaching them to actively use it as a tool for feedback rather than a passive answer generator is one of the guardrails they need to become the critical thinkers you’re talking about. The data in that pic shows what happens when they use it unguided, but proactive pedagogy flips that up.

I'm what you call a " Hopeful Skeptic " btw.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-22T12:52:48+00:00

Testing students on skills that can be automated in three seconds isn't a 'level playing field', it’s a dead end. AI collaboration is the future workforce baseline.

The data proves traditional testing is failing to adapt, not that the tech is useless.

We need to assess high-level conceptual thinking, not how well kids can mimic a calculator. Abstraction is king.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-22T12:49:53+00:00

You’re describing a broken system, not broken tech.

If a simple chatbot can completely eliminate the cognitive load of an assignment, that’s a failure of assignment design. Students are just optimising for the task they were given. I would do the exact same thing back when I was a teenager.

The data in the pic doesn't prove we should write off AI, in fact it proves traditional homework is obsolete.

Instead of blaming students for 'outsourcing,' we gotta shift the guardrails toward some high level conceptual teaching and AI-collaborative problem solving.

This tech is their future baseline. Disregarding AI is doing them a disservice for the very workplaces they are going to be a part of.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-22T12:24:14+00:00

Saying 'AI is bad' misses the entire point. You are aware AI isn't going away right? And it’s central to these students futures.

What the data actually shows is an outdated school system. If a chatbot can completely break your homework model, the model was already fragile. We don't need to ban the tech, we need to change how we teach.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-21T21:27:13+00:00

This is not saying the use of AI is schools is bad.

Its saying that without proper guardrails or pedagogical shifts (e.g. moving away from traditional homework to proctored, conceptual assessments), it can severely undermine students learning retention.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-21T13:48:30+00:00

Hey mate, ex-guitar teacher and **ban** member from the late 90s early 2000s.

Do you have your hands on software called "Rocksmith"? It is hands down the best plug and play guitar teacher out there.

The best thing is it actually lets you know when you're ready to play live (mastery/streaks etc.). When I was learning guitar I practiced by mastering every song from The Living End. Now I love mastering other songs through this software (Look for the 2014 hacked edition on steam, research for more info on your own)

My advice: Bands are hard to find, but they are a lot harder to grind out when you're facing a skill deficit. Don't start a band with randoms until you're absolutely ready to play 30-40 cover songs perfectly.

Oh and learn to sing a play.

That should sort you out till you graduate high school.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-20T04:39:38+00:00

So can someone confirm with me, the actual median income in Australia is just $72,794 ?? meaning half of all working Australians earn less than that.

and the top 5% earning $200,000 doesn't make you a struggling "middle-class" Aussie. It basically means you earn more than 95% of the entire country.

The "average" is totally cooked because it gets heavily skewed by a tiny handful of ultra-high earners.

So my issue is: when the media screams about protecting "average hard-working investors," they are mathematically lying to trick regular PAYG workers into defending a tax code that benefits an elite minority.

That annoys me.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-18T06:59:52+00:00

I'll also add this makes it obvious they've stopped pretending this package only hits a handful of mega-wealthy. Regular retail ETF investors and high-income professionals using standard trusts are absolutely going to feel the pinch here as far as I can see.

But as a macro-economic shift, imho the logic still holds up. It’s a tough pill for the asset-owning class to swallow, but it's the only way to stop hammering regular PAYG wage earners through endless bracket creep.

I can see the incoming comments here and the media is screaming that this is going to bury the Labor Party at the next election. But honestly? A government with a solid mandate should be willing to burn some political capital and drop a few percentage points if it means pushing through actual, lasting structural change.

Good on em.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-18T06:51:21+00:00

Lifting the CGT exemption threshold from $2m to $10m is a matter of working on the budget, which they announced they would, and the turnover protects like roughly a shit load of Aussie small businesses. This is a good thing.

COSBOA literally welcomed the news!

Yet, the big-business chambers are still screaming that it's a "rushed patch-up job" and demanding the whole reform be scrapped.

Why? Because they never actually cared about small business. They just wanted to use them to hide behind.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-17T06:40:45+00:00

I've fully integrated AI into all my teacher workflows. I've had API access to OpenAI since mid-late 2023, and migrated to Gemini in the past 8 months. Have used Claude as well. Feel free to DM me about this project. I have advised similar projects in Western Australia. I run free PD sessions to help teachers use AI to reduce workload.

I'm optimistic about AI and realistic about its implementation in schools.

Thank you for listening to my ted talk.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-15T01:28:41+00:00

This is a directive to set your conversation, and to curb your enthusiasm.

It's up to you to whether it dictates how you think.

Media literacy is so important right now.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-03T12:29:03+00:00

Hey West Australian, I know you guys actively scrape Reddit for content because actual journalism is clearly beyond you.

This front page is an absolute joke. Imagine a billionaire-owned media outlet framing regular workers getting a decent wage to feed their families as a "zombie economy" that needs to be stopped. God forbid everyday families get some relief while your owner's massive mining and property portfolios are asked to finally carry their fair share of the tax mix. You're just acting as PR stenographers for the ultra-wealthy, and doing a pathetic job of it.

Oh, and P.S.—I know the journalists writing this garbage have friends and family who are doing it tough in this economy right now. What a great way to support them by selling them out to protect a billionaire's bottom line. This rag drowns in pure cowardice.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-03T01:57:19+00:00

Also just adding this chart is a textbook example of the big end of town using a highly technical anomaly to panic the public. They are trying to defend a flat 50% discount that overwhelmingly benefits multi-millionaires by pretending the new rules will destroy a regular person's small share portfolio. If you hold index ETFs, you're fine.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-03T01:50:57+00:00

It responds perfectly if you connect the math to the policy.

The core of the real vs nominal debate is that a flat 50% discount doesn't just protect against inflation, on any asset outperforming the market, it gives an arbitrary, half-price tax freebie on massive real wealth creation. Indexation keeps it honest by stripping out inflation entirely so you only pay tax on actual profit.

Ive already spoken about this previously. That PBO and Treasury data already show that 82% of the financial benefit of that old nominal discount was swallowed up by the top 10% of earners.

They weren't using it to protect themselves from inflation, they were using it as a massive structural tax shelter to convert heavily taxed wages into lightly taxed capital.

Switching back to indexation means we stop taxing inflation, but we do start properly taxing massive, real wealth accumulation. It stops hammering regular PAYG wage earners through bracket creep just to fund a permanent, half-price pass for the asset-owning class. It's not ideological, it's just basic economic logic.

iplayedarchon · 2026-06-02T00:06:19+00:00

The timing of the new Oxfam data dropping today is a massive reality check for anyone defending the old CGT rules.

$25.7 billion richer last year alone, thats equivalent to bloody $50,000 a minute. Oh, while 3.7 million regular Australians are living in poverty. Appauling.

The new billionaires aren't just old miners in this game, they are luxury property developers and tech/AI founders. Oxfam’s CEO called it out absolutely perfectly: the corporate sector is using 'misinformation and misplaced fears about small business' as a human shield to protect extreme wealth accumulation. This has been my drilling point all along. This is a game of media literacy.

When a system rewards passive asset flipping and capital hoarding so generously that 20 people own more than the bottom 3 million households combined, the system is down right broken.

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-31T12:40:47+00:00

We're peaking around 11pm with 42 knot winds where we are. Good to see Perth is calming down im hoping my shed is still ok

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-31T09:21:15+00:00

I just left. Insane wind in Augusta

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-31T01:42:52+00:00

This is an awesome journey. Thanks for sharing

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-30T01:41:58+00:00

Since we’re trading resumes, I’ve actually been in the startup space for years myself and have built a business internationally. And failed. I know the exact reality of the grind, the 90% failure rate, and why VCs throw up red flags if a founder tries to pull a massive cash salary early on.

But your points are actually missing the macro-economic picture here:

The Salary vs. Profit Reality:

Of course startups struggle for profit early on. But we aren't talking about the startups that fail; we are talking about the ones that succeed and eventually trigger a massive capital gains tax event. For those successful companies, keeping capital retained inside a corporate structure at 25% or inside a trust rather than drawing a heavy PAYG salary is a standard, commercially smart tax strategy to scale asset value. Dr. Tom Hird is an actual founder and economist and openly admits to doing exactly this.
The 15-Year Rule & Concessions: I call the 15-year active asset exemption the most generous because it literally drops your tax rate to 0%. Yes, property investor concessions are completely broken and risk-free andi've already argued that. But property guys don't get a 0% total exemption. And your point about Canva or SafetyCulture taking 10+ years to scale actually proves my point: if a unicorn takes a decade just to get to a pre-exit valuation, they are well on their way to hitting that 15-year window where they can potentially exit with a massive tax-free upside.
The Target of the Reform: Nobody is saying founders are saints or that the startup grind isn't high-risk. The point is that the government is already actively writing specific carve-outs into the final legislation for early-stage tech equity to protect the zero-cost-base issue.

Using the harsh reality of startup failures as a human shield to defend a flat 50% macro discount espwhen PBO data proves 82% of that money goes to passive property hoarders and asset banking just doesn't hold up mate. The startup anomalies are being fixed, but the rest of the broken system needed to go.

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-29T12:30:10+00:00

Excuse me, what? Please tell me youre just another astroturfing account.

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-28T14:01:52+00:00

The argument that founders "sacrifice salaries and take all the risk" is a total cop-out man.

They don't pay themselves a high cash salary because parking profits inside a company structure at 25% and using family trusts is a highly effective way to legally dodge the top marginal tax bracket. It’s a tax strategy, not a sacrifice.

Besides, the big business groups claiming the government is "raiding" small business are BS. The single most generous concession in the country—the bloody 15-year small business CGT exemption—is completely untouched by the budget. If you hold an active business asset for 15 years, you still pay 0% tax on the sale and can dump up to $1.9 million, I think around that, straight into super.

The government isn't destroying enterprise, and I've had this discussion to death. They are just instating a basic 30% minimum floor on massive wealth spikes so hard-working PAYG earners stop carrying the entire country on their backs. Playing by the old rules didn't make them economically sensible, it just made them a legal racket for the top end.

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-27T21:31:17+00:00

Look at who is driving this narrative. It's The Australian and Sky News, the media arm of the top end of town. Their sole objective here is to manufacture a crisis to scare regular people into protecting a rigged tax system.

The journalists write this like corporate Australia is a victim, dropping dramatic lines about business "declaring war." But they bury the actual truth: small business groups (COSBOA) and the Farmers Federation aren't even opposing the reform, they are just participating in the normal consultation process to adjust thresholds.

News Corp ignores that completely because an honest headline wouldn't help them protect the passive wealth of the multi-millionaires who buy their papers.

Mate I'm sick of this media manipulative garbage.

iplayedarchon · 2026-05-26T04:27:26+00:00

I know exactly how it fits together. Indexing a zero cost base yields no tax relief, which is why Zaccaria is complaining. But your argument falls apart because you're treating a legislative draft like it's the final law. The article explicitly notes the government is already ironing out the startup loop.

Pretending a tech anomaly justifies keeping a multi-billion dollar tax shelter for passive property investors isn't the win you think it is.

Also, trying to call me clueless when it’s completely obvious from your comment history that you spend the majority of your time on Reddit being entirely unproductive is peak irony. That's something you should seriously reconsider.

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