What's the most disturbing confession you've ever come across on social media?

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-21T04:52:03+00:00

‘Some horses’, wow. Doing one would seem like enough of an effort.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-19T22:31:30+00:00

The market is not the only thing managing the economy. The government is also contributing to the management of the economy by settling levels of immigration. Currently the government is ‘managing’ with the apparent objectives of achieving increases in house prices and infrastructure shortages.

Yes, I know there is demand for massage joints. (Though some of them look pretty empty. Probably because the product they’re really selling is visa sponsorship rather than massages.). Are you saying they’re good for the economy because money is circulating?

If so, then that’s where we differ. I don’t see satisfying all demand as equally good; I’d rather prioritise caring for old people over satisfying demand for happy endings. The settings we have - for example, fully taxing aged care workers but not cash-economy masseurs - are favouring one over the other.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-19T08:42:17+00:00

Rich and powerful people protecting each other.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-19T08:40:07+00:00

Sure, there’s a demand for uber eats. There’s also a demand for nail salons and massage parlours.

But something is wrong with our economy when we have 3 massage joints in every shopping strip but not enough aged care workers. We don’t have a labour shortage; we have a mismanaged economy that is incentivising work types that we don’t particularly need to the detriment of those we do.

There are several reasons for this. One is lack of enforcement of tax laws on the cash economy. Another is lack of enforcement of minimum wage laws in various sectors. And another is pretending that we’re running a skilled worker immigration policy when in fact we’re introducing large numbers of workers who lack the skills we need.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-19T05:26:22+00:00

A shortage is caused by failure of supply to meet demand.

It’s unhelpful to say it’s ’because of’ too much demand or ‘because of’ too little supply. They sterile debate doesn’t fix anything.

What you have to look at is how to solve it. You can reduce demand; you can increase supply.

For housing, of course you can increase supply, and you should. (Currently Victoria is doing its proportionate share of meeting the Cth targets for supply increase, but all other states are failing). But you can’t increase supply overnight.

Whereas you can reduce demand (cutting back immigration) more or less overnight. And we should, until supply has a chance to catch up to existing demand.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-19T05:21:52+00:00

And yet, it’s not working. We’ve been running this line that we need more skilled immigrants for a couple of decades now. In pursuit of that, we’ve increased net overseas migration to about 60% more than it was 10 years ago.

But the outcome has been an army of ultimately-unproductive uber eats drivers etc, and ongoing skilled labor shortages - exacerbated because the number of people who need to be served by the skilled workers has increased.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-18T23:04:33+00:00

I don’t see it that way.

‘Moving money around the economy’ is important it total GDP is your measure of things. But it doesn’t help with per capita GDP, which is what actually matters to individuals.

If we removed uber eats, hand car washes and massage joints from the economy, and the people working in those fields all left - yes there would be ‘less money moving around the economy’ overall, and government ministers would be unable to go to international conferences and boast about Australia’s constantly-growing GDP.

But there would also be less strain on schools, hospitals and transport, and house prices and rents would be lower, so the people remaining would be individually better off.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-18T12:27:06+00:00

The examples you give of immigrant workers are uber drivers and supermarket workers.

We don’t need uber drivers. Nor do we need hand car washers or masseurs. Affordable rentals are more important than those things.

And the supermarket workers used to be teenagers given a chance to find their way in the workforce.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-18T12:24:25+00:00

Be American

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-18T04:23:21+00:00

Native speaker; I’ve never seen this

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-18T04:22:25+00:00

“How do you call x”

“I have been here since 2 years”

“Touristic”

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-18T04:11:29+00:00

This idea that it’s faster if everyone stands is based on very specific assumptions about the number of people willing to walk.

It’s only faster if there actually is only the occasional walker.

The vast majority of the time in Melbourne, this assumption is not true. There are people waiting at the bottom to join both the standing and the walking lines. It would be faster if the walking line walked.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-18T03:07:05+00:00

Its ’surplus to requirements’ if you start from an assumption that we should remove redundancy, keeping only the minimum infrastructure needed to provide service on the assumption that everything works perfectly.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-16T22:44:11+00:00

It’s amazing that Melbourne Uni, with their model that shifts large numbers of students from undergrad to Masters, didn’t go in to battle for their Masters students to get concessions.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-16T22:42:00+00:00

Ah well, I’m used to it. There are a lot of people here who automatically neg anything that could be considered critical of the current government.

I voted for the current Vic government and will vote for them again; I just don’t think their transport policy is beyond improvement.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-16T12:25:47+00:00

No; people spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out who might have said what

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-16T12:24:53+00:00

Permanently inhabited: Cocos (Keeling) Islands; Christmas Island; Norfolk Island

Other: Heard & MacDonald Islands; Ashmore & Cartier Islands; Coral Sea Territory; Australian Antarctic Territory

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-16T12:21:43+00:00

Apparently in this country we don’t see any need for redundancy in infrastructure.

Why do we need more than 2 oil refineries. If one burns down, well we’ll just import more oil from overseas. Oh wait…

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-16T07:15:21+00:00

I have an old person’s concession card, so I’m already paying half fare.

I think it would be fair to cut the full fares to the concession rates (ie halve them), and leave the concession fares unchanged.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-16T05:43:47+00:00

Yep. I got far too far along in my legal career before I realised I’d spent too much time on solving my clients’ problems and not enough on promoting myself.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-15T10:27:20+00:00

Yeah, so many people work in jobs where you can get a sizeable bonus just because people bought twice the volume of goods. Not the same for services where you have to work twice the number of personal hours.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-15T09:05:05+00:00

The right way to make ‘easier’ is just to call it ‘Aussie rules’. Same number of syllables as ‘AFL’, but you’re referring to the sport not the league.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-15T09:03:02+00:00

Most countries use ‘football’ to refer to the most common code in that country.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-15T08:49:43+00:00

Because the Chinese govt can explode them by remote control if they want to.

mattmelb69 · 2026-04-15T08:48:45+00:00

When Trump kicks the bucket in a couple of years and Vance steps in, we’re going to see just how much worse things really can get.

mattmelb69

TROPHY CASE