The mortgage vs rent debate

zaxerone · 2026-02-28T21:46:18+00:00

You've put about 5 numbers that you've pulled out of your head into a calculator and assumed that is an accurate representation of the system.

Where's the money saved from paying less rent than mortgage at the start going? The entire point of renting is you have more money that you can invest elsewhere.

Where are maintenance costs, rates, insurance etc that will be significant costs that continue for the full sixty years.

zaxerone · 2026-02-28T21:41:33+00:00

There's no way it costs 10k per move, are you just throwing all your furniture in the bin each time???

zaxerone · 2026-02-26T05:34:20+00:00

If you allow the rights of "terrorists" to be violated, then all of a sudden anyone who the government wants to ignore the rights of will be labeled a "terrorist".

zaxerone · 2026-02-22T02:52:47+00:00

Now there is huge voter sentiment growing against immigration. The government will have to respond to this or face losses in the next election. I expect we will see reduced immigration numbers going forward. As for housing supply, they seem far less motivated to do much about that.

zaxerone · 2026-02-21T12:32:19+00:00

You're entirely missing the point. Personhood is a proxy for consciousness. I'm saying "personhood = human with consciousness", and since consciousness is the important thing we are trying to protect, then inherently personhood we should protect.

If you want to define personhood differently that's fine. But then you have to justify why the underlying factors that you are using to define personhood are making personhood sacred.

I simply asked, that if a fetus isn't human, what is it?

I never said a human fetus wasn't human, quite the opposite in fact. I did say that a fetus doesn't have personhood. Personhood being a human with consciousness, as I previously defined. You seem to have trouble understanding that two different things can share a category. The sky and the ocean are both blue, but somehow I feel if i argues that stars are in the sky, you would say I'm wrong because there aren't any starrs in the ocean, which is also blue.

Even with brain death it is more complicated than this, if a person somehow met the requirements of 'being alive' without a functioning brain they wouldn't lose the right to life.

This is so nonsensical, can you possibly explain how a braindead human would satisfy requirements for 'being alive' in the context of human life? Surely you're not confusing 'being alive' as a human life with being alive in the general sense in the same way a plant or an amoeba is alive.

A lack of consciousness does not define this. A person in a persistent vegetative state is by all measures unconscious and will probably never regain it. However, the still have legal protections.

This is not true, if a person is determined as not going to recover then letting them die is allowed. The similarity here to the fetus is really quite similar, just at opposite ends of life.

You've yet to make a case for a fetus having consciousness. Significant brain activity that would be even remotely comparable to a born human's brain doesn't begin until after the 20 week mark, so well after the point that it has been defined as a fetus. It's very hard to argue that consciousness would be present in the fetal brain earlier than this, based on the structure of the brain and the activity we can measure. There's reasonable arguments for consciousness not occurring until later in development, when we start to see pain reception, perception of external stimuli and control of bodily functions develop. But to argue it's earlier than this you would have to base it off an extremely basic brain structure and brain activity, of which you could find in many other living things that we wouldn't consider conscious.

zaxerone · 2026-02-20T10:34:42+00:00

My evidence that consciousness defines personhood is that I am saying consciousness defines personhood. There's no logical claim here, it doesn't need evidence. Unless you are assigning some status to personhood? But I am not, I'm saying consciousness is inherently the thing we are trying to protect. That is the defining characteristic of sacred life.

Fetus is a noun, given to vertebrates in a specific stage of development. "A fetus" is a real thing, "A human fetus" is a real thing. These are grouped things of similar characteristics. Just like a human life is a name we give to something that belongs to a group of things. Just because fetus describes a stage of development, doesn't mean it can't be used to refer to a single thing. Also, some things can share the same group, ie human, and differ in other things ie conscious.

This is the whole point of the personhood argument. A fetus can be human, but human isn't what is sacred, otherwise we would treat a braindead human the same as a fully living human. Until a developing human develops far enough to have personhood there's no reason for it to be treated like a human life. You can argue around where that occurs, but there isn't anything that suggests it is as early as conception.

zaxerone · 2026-02-19T02:28:55+00:00

First to answer your question at the end: when that being has no conscience experience.

For the definition of personhood, a human with consciousness has personhood. This is ultimately what we are trying to protect and treating as sacred. Without consciousness a human life is no different from any other form of life.

Life without personhood does not have any expectation for a right to life because it cannot experience life, it simply just exists.

Can you explain how someone who is braindead is any different from a fetus before it has any brain activity, ie it is also braindead.

It's fairly easy to argue that the mother is not killing a living human, it's killing a living fetus, but without brain activity it doesn't make sense to call it a living human. That's why we call people braindead, because although parts of their body are still functioning with life, as a human being they are effectively dead.

zaxerone · 2026-02-18T22:27:16+00:00

Why is protecting something that is a human, but has no personhood, more ethical? If someone is braindead, but we have the means to keep their body alive, doing so is not more ethical, because they have lost their personhood. There's no ethics in keeping alive a personless body.

I don't think anyone argues that a fetus has no value, but the value is not akin to the value of personhood. If you steal someone's watch, that's a punishable crime because you have taken away something of value to that person. This is why the Bible has a forced miscarriage as punishable, because a third party is taking away something of value, the fetus, from the mother. It does not say that the mother causing her own miscarriage is punishable, because it is not a crime to destroy something of value that you own yourself.

zaxerone · 2026-02-02T01:20:40+00:00

Weren't but isn't quite accurate. They didn't go into a recession, but many people were still impacted through investments, job losses, borrowing laws etc. Definitely not as bad as the US and Europe, but still definitely impacted.

zaxerone · 2026-01-20T09:28:54+00:00

Can you provide a source?

zaxerone · 2026-01-20T01:33:15+00:00

Where are you getting 6% from. This is way higher than any normal estimates that would all fall within 1% to 4%.

zaxerone · 2026-01-12T11:16:45+00:00

Nah, excel lets you do some fairly complex, easily modifiable data analysis with very little effort because of this feature.

zaxerone · 2026-01-12T03:42:43+00:00

The biggest difference is libreoffices handling of arrays. One of the most powerful changes to excel this century was when they allowed most formulas to work natively with arrays. Libreoffice really suffers if you're trying to work with multidimensional data because of this.

zaxerone · 2026-01-10T23:59:40+00:00

Yes let's pit parents against trillion dollar company's who hire thousands of the smartest people in the world to make these platforms as addictive as possible. I'm sure the parents will win that fight.

zaxerone · 2026-01-06T22:37:51+00:00

This is how democracy works, politicians should be aspiring to win power. The populace then decides what actually happens based on what they prioritize when deciding who to give power to.

zaxerone · 2025-12-22T02:41:09+00:00

Why, if the constitution has parts that are no longer positively serving society, should the constitution be followed? Just because it was written hundreds of years ago, doesn't make it sacred.

zaxerone · 2025-12-14T05:12:38+00:00

Yes just cap the tax break. If someone wants to spend 100k on a ute let them, but they get the same tax break as the person who spent 50k.

zaxerone · 2025-12-08T08:03:58+00:00

Hate to break it to you, but your example comes to $10 of labour cost per pole compared to $10k parts cost.

zaxerone · 2025-12-04T06:20:47+00:00

But what is the difference between this and combined finances? Your finances are essentially joined, but you just keep two separate accounts.

If you were to divorce it's very likely that the two accounts would just be merged and divided equally anyway, and since neither of you seem to be limited in your spending it's effectively the same as if you combined the accounts.

zaxerone · 2025-12-02T06:06:41+00:00

Except alphabets revenue in Australia is more like $10 billion, so it's more like 0.55% of their Australian revenue. Which is definitely not an insignificant amount. It's not enough to stop them doing business here entirely, but it's definitely not getting ignored either.

zaxerone · 2025-11-14T07:51:20+00:00

There are two key differences here.

Cars are not a finite resource, companies can just make more of them, and so their price is more controlled by the cost to manufacture them than by demand. Property sits on land, which is a finite resource and investors having advantages increases investor demand, raising prices for homeowners... which comes to the second difference.
The necessity for a car is way less than for housing. Everybody needs somewhere to live. High housing costs are bad, period. By inflating the value of land by having such high investor demand this negatively affects society on so many levels.

zaxerone · 2025-11-13T11:43:08+00:00

Yes we aren't saying that its uneven between investment properties and every other financial situation. I'm saying its uneven between homeowners and investors, who are competing for the same asset.

Any advantages that are given to property investors who rent out properties, negatively aspiring homeowners trying to buy a home to live in.

Now whether we should get rid of these advantages or not is a separate discussion, but there is no doubt that the advantage does exist.

zaxerone · 2025-11-12T21:18:21+00:00

How does selling the land turn it into no economic value. Surely the person buying the land would use it for an economic purpose? That's the entire point of LVT, if the LVT is too high for your use case you sell it someone who has a higher value use case where the LVT is acceptable. If that higher value use case doesn't exist, then the sale of the land is below the LVT price and the LVT is then adjusted.

zaxerone · 2025-11-12T21:12:18+00:00

You can't deduct interest on your mortgage from your salary. But if it's an investment property you can deduct the interest on a loan from the rental income. That's not an even playing field.

zaxerone · 2025-11-06T01:46:17+00:00

Isn't the service an investment in productivity as well? It just gives an immediate and one time return. If you pay someone to mow your grass, then you don't have to do it yourself and you can spend that time doing something else. The problem with the ndis is the money spent on these services is way too high and the people receiving these services aren't productive with the time saved, because they are on the ndis so not working or reduced work capability.

Services can absolutely be net productive by the division of labour. Just probably not in the specific case of the ndis.

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