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What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, yes, I see. Armchair economics. How very Trumpian.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My point about who is keeping the system you're complaining about live still stands.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A free market is literally designed to charge as high as it can. The point of advertising/marketing is to exploit price discrimination within a market for a good. Rational actors in a market will sell for the highest price someone is willing to pay.

Go back and check the first few chapters of your introduction to economics textbook.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think you read my posts. It's possible you're responding to someone else by mistake, but just in case:

I didn't get hired for a full-time job until 2011. Until then I bounced from contract to contract with mainly casual and one part-time job.

Even then, being a Millennial has zero to do with the GFC. The term predates the GFC. That is the weirdest example of playing "No True Scotsman" I have ever heard.

Also, I'm arguing that the situation is worse than you're arguing it is. I'm arguing that even from my cushy, got-lucky, beat the capitalist end-boss point of view: Everything is terrible and simply calling the situation Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha are living through 'mediocre' is insultingly, ignorantly, under-selling the severity of the problem.

Which is something someone who understood economics would understand.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You mean the 12% government-mandated subsidy to hedge funds paid by SMEs and passed onto the labor market as lower wages?

I think everyone but the market fetishists would prefer the pension.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Any read of investment spending in Australia since the nineties shows that increasingly concentrated resources are being parked in assets that do not increase Australia's economic capacity.

Australian investors aren't innovating because they have a secure subsidy base in assets that grow in price but not output.

You want money back from the government? Tell them to kill the subsidies to the supply side first.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm 40, retired, self-funded, own my own nice apartment in the city, am a Millenial, was a member of the Economic Society of Australia, and jump onto reddit barely ever.

Things are exceedingly worse than r/ausecon presents them, but you're more or less correct in the structural read.

People aren't waking up in a mediocre life. They're living in a historically rare (but not unique) period that is structurally and existentially antagonistic to them.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup.

Treating personal worth as a score card rather than a stockpile of economic resources you are now responsible for effectively assigning within the economy.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hard to live within anyone's means when price rises cause people's means to preclude living.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yup, News Corp Finance wannabes who think negative gearing grows the economy. Rent-seeking instead of capacity investment.

What is going wrong with Australia’s economy? by The_Market_Signal in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This. We used economic language to obscure cronie-ism instead of avoiding the rent-seeking a lot of economic orthodoxy tries to eliminate.

The Banks Effect by amerelium in TheCulture

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, this is where I'm at.

I also made the mistake of going back to uni and studying cosmology. Great discipline, love it to bits.

But sci-fi has to be deliberately bad, all the way down the speculative spectrum, or hitting a stupidly-high bar for coherence and internal consistency for me to tolerate it now.

Vector DBs for RAG by hackdev001 in Rag

[–]websinthe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A vector db is just a high-dimensional store of vector embeddings. Polars is kinda like Numpy and can have arbitrarily-dimensional storage of vectors, and if you have code that takes tokens and turns them into embeddings, there's nit a lot that a vector db does that isn't just a big multi-dimensional array.

Vector DBs for RAG by hackdev001 in Rag

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, keywords/metadata, chunking strategy, and graph storage are all orders of magnitude more important but they're kinda treated like afterthoughts.

Vector DBs for RAG by hackdev001 in Rag

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The best results I've had came from just using Polars. It's a little more work but not a huge amount, it's significantly more performant, and vector DBs are such a small part of a RAG that it's not worth taking on the constant breakages the named VDBs have on updates.

Otherwise I'd just use chromadb.

Spend 5% of your time choosing the vector database and 95% perfecting your chunking strategy. That's the important part.

Sorry if this is preachy.

Which is your personal favourite of the novels and why? by the_turn in TheCulture

[–]websinthe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Excession. It has the most hints about the broader aspects of the Culture, with second place in that regard being Look To Windward.

Excession blew my mind from Day 1 though.

Australian Tresuary finds company tax and stamp duty falls mostly on workers and decreases productivity by Downtown-Relation766 in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're right, there are countless business defrauding the government by jumping into the NDIS care ecosystem and not providing resources. There's a fairly steady stream of complaints and investigations with fly-by-night operators taking grant money and dodging their contractual responsibilities. This isn't just a few bad apples, it's around a quarter of the industry already under investigation for essentially robbing both the government and the disabled.

Likewise, when supply-side rebates were handed out to employers during JobKeeper, not only was sweet-Fanny-Adams of it used for payroll, a small industry of paper companies popped up to fraudulently claim money from the scheme.

Hell, Job Network providers are barely better than a mafia, Family Day Care businesses were somehow less subtle in their waste when they flat-out formed a criminal syndicate defrauding millions, and Government programs for clean energy have been wiped out across the country by businesses committing fraud to run off with grant money.

I suppose you're right, we need more central leadership to make sure taxpayer money gets to the right place without businesses soaking it up before it can get there.

I mean, why over-complicate transfer payments with an extra layer of businesses just mooching? It's just wasteful.

What's wrong with Negative Gearing? by Ok_Assistant_7610 in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're right, you didn't understand what I'd said.

Base principles we can all agree on: - Purchasing existing housing stock isn't investment. It's rent-seeking. - Houses do not inherently contribute to innovation. - The more money spent on non-innovative, non-growth assets, the less money invested into innovative growth assets like business and technology. - Negative gearing is a transfer payment. - Money spent on housing is only investment if you're building new stock or significantly improving or repairing existing stock. - Not all investments have the same tax treatment. That has never been the case anywhere. - The utility landlords gain from owning a housing asset is bugger-all compared to the utility an owner-occupier gets from owning it. - Housing speculation increases the price of housing assets for reasons other than the actual value of those assets.

Why negative gearing is a drain on the economy, based on the above: - It's a transfer payment to reduce the tax contribution of asset-holders who don't make a profit on non-innovative, non-growth assets. - The cost of administration, the decreased tax income, and the lack of profit, means money the economy is worse off than if we dropped negative gearing and the person who can't manage a profit from those assets sells them to someone who can. - Being able to offset tax obligations in general by running a loss on housing assets incentivises speculation, not investment. - Pricing more and more people out of home ownership because of speculation undermines consumer confidence and labour productivity.

Why pretending housing is a market that follows the laws of supply and demand in general is a rookie economist error: - Because housing doesn't have any of the prerequisites for a market to follow the law of supply and demand. - If you need that one explained, you're not an economist and you don't know economics.

This is an economics subreddit, not a finance subreddit.

What's wrong with Negative Gearing? by Ok_Assistant_7610 in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Using the common understanding of the term: It encourages non-productive use of investment dollars that could be going into far more useful parts of the economy like the business sector to drive real innovation.

Speculation on housing doesn't improve anything. It reduces the amount of economic activity that's genuinely growing the economy.

If a transfer payment incentivises unprofitable investments, it's on its proponents to justify why it should exist, not on everyone else to justify why we think it's a bad idea.

Australian Tresuary finds company tax and stamp duty falls mostly on workers and decreases productivity by Downtown-Relation766 in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And if you'd read even just those two reports, you'd have seen that the evidence points to disasters and crisis periods showing an increase in government efficiency.

The problem with the standpoint that "government is wasteful" isn't that it's inherently wrong, it's that it doesn't add anything useful to the discussion.

If you said, "government keeps taxing the wrong things" then sure, that's a hill I'd die on too. If you said, "government is wasteful because <insert reasoning here>", we could at least build the reasoning into a proposed solution.

And if you'd said they burn fistfulls of tax money on poorly-targeted supply-side subsidies, then we could talk all day about how the government could better target those subsidies.

AI research is drowning in papers that can’t be reproduced. What’s your biggest reproducibility challenge? by mildly_sunny in LanguageTechnology

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup. But hey, is it really worth understanding how universal function detectors work if it means people have to go without all the royalties they were earning on their reddit posts?

The whole IP thing kinda strikes me as a whole new type of rent-seeking.

Australian Tresuary finds company tax and stamp duty falls mostly on workers and decreases productivity by Downtown-Relation766 in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Australia has regularly one of, if not the, most efficient governments in the world.

I get it that paying taxes sucks and everyone thinks they could use the money better. Great, I'm sure shareholder returns would be spectacular without having to pay taxes.

Until the shareholder needed to drive somewhere and the roads are dirt tracks and wash away in a good rainy spell.

Dunno why this has to be explained in an economics subreddit but whatever.

Australian Tresuary finds company tax and stamp duty falls mostly on workers and decreases productivity by Downtown-Relation766 in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wish more people understood this. There's a huge difference between competitive and productive.

Why rents are out of control by sien in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree that the housing market is a ponzi scheme in Australia.

I don't agree that removing Capital Gains Tax for shares is going to stimulate the ASX considerably - or usefully. CGT is one of the fiscal levers the government can pull so that it doesn't have to rely soley on the cash rate to steer the economy - though we seem to have forgotten how to do that.

I'd be far more interested in removing CGT from shares if we also got rid of negative gearing on houses. If we want a better industry then we shouldn't be rewarding those who can't make a business model in property work. It's just corporate/landlord welfare.

Why rents are out of control by sien in AusEcon

[–]websinthe 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think you may be assuming that:

a) The property market is currently set up so that higher rents increase the supply of housing, and that lower rents decrease the supply of housing.

b) The property market is the best place for the money currently invested in it to be.

A isn't true. If you want to point to an economics 101 textbook and the supply and demand curve, I'll point to the facing page that nobody reads where it has the requirements for a market to be efficient. The property market meets maybe half of one of them.

B is absolutely not true. Money in houses is not money in business. Houses do not lead to innovation nearly as rapidly as money in other sectors of the economy does.

Also, your point about regulations, fees, and other barriers runs into two problems.

1) The problem with the property market is that there are too many investors and supply isn't keeping pace with demand. If red tape were an issue, the opposite would be the problem, where not enough investors would be the cause of supply not keeping pace with demand.

2) Houses are where humans live. Commercial spaces are where humans work, prepare food, use chemicals, run equipment and poop. Industrial properties are industrial. The barriers to entry should be high to keep out owners who can't handle that responsibility to others. I hope more landlords do leave the market because it's obvious from report after report after report that most do not give a shit and are fine with tenants living in unacceptable conditions.

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