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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • International student intake as a ratio of housing supply is the main issue. If dwellings were being built at the same rate of international student intake, then affordability or vacancy would not be a problem.

    Look up your local universities (they’re all non-profit organisations with financials reported in the ACNC) and realise just how much their business model has become funded by international students. Here’s a few examples:
    University of Melbourne: 69% of tuition fee revenues comes from intl students
    University of Queensland: 70% of tuition fee revenues comes from intl students

    The universities also receive government funding, pay no income tax (because they are “nonprofit”), and don’t need to contribute anything to the housing problem that they are feeding. It’s time for them to help carry the burden - they should either provide housing or help pay for it.



  • When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don’t think that you can really associate Carlson with being “free press”. This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-interview-b2492192.html

    “Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd – we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

    The BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, wrote on X: “Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”

    Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist and author of a book about the KGB, described Mr Carlson’s claim as “unbelievable”.

    “I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow,” she wrote on X.


  • I think it’s more about the web visitor cost. Handling traffic and API calls becomes a financial problem when there are a growing number of companies using bots to scrape data. Larger companies are moving their content behind paywalls, which acts as a bot filter, and have also identified that they can generate a revenue stream from subscriptions and API connections. Old content on the web is not deemed to have much business value, so it’s a decision of either charging for it or scrapping it.



  • There’s quite a difference between rapid prototyping on software/hardware versus the human body.
    Musk’s approach to developing engineering advances has worked well in the software, aerospace, and vehicular industries. Development on inorganic things is much more predictable, we can isolate variables, and it is easier to understand cause & effect. If you screw up some software on an inorganic system, your program might crash, your rocket might explode, or your car won’t start. These risks can be anticipated and costed fairly well, therefore rapid prototyping has an acceptable risk/reward ratio in that environment.

    The human body, on the other hand, is an extremely complex system that we still don’t fully understand. Each person is a unique variation on the model and that changes over time depending on upbringing, diet, exercise, and life experiences. Applying the same engineering approaches from inorganic industries has a much higher risk once you cross into the medical realm. If you have errors in a medical situation, you risk sickening, injuring, or even killing a person. The risk/reward ratio is skewed towards ensuring that human life is protected at all costs.

    Using SpaceX as an example, the first three launches failed spectacularly and a fourth failure would have ended the business but fortunately the fourth test was a success. If you’re suggesting that we apply the same risk-taking to Neuralink, are you suggesting that it’s acceptable for the first three patients to die, as long as the fourth is a success?


  • I wouldn’t call it propaganda or even news - it’s just theories at this stage.
    What we can speculate about is motive to deceive. Russia has been incurring some notable losses from Ukrainian anti-air defences recently, so there would be a motive from the Russian side to portray those anti-air defences as either ineffective or untrustworthy so as to try and sway public opinion about its use.

    Claiming that POWs were onboard the plane aligns with that motive but it also raises questions such as:

    1. The plane was reportedly shot down after taking off from Belgorod, so if it was carrying POWs away from Belgorod, what was the intended destination? It doesn’t seem logical that Russia would fly from Belgorod into Ukraine (unless they were stupid or taking the risk).
    2. Why not transport POWs to Ukraine by road or rail, given that Kharkiv is only a 90 min drive away?










  • I’ve lived overseas and I disagree.
    Australia is no more racist than some other developed and developing nations, and there are countries with more racism than Australia.
    Travel to different cities in the US and notice how neighbourhoods are subtlety segregated by race.
    Talk to any European about their thoughts on gypsies.
    Ask Japanese about their thoughts on Koreans.
    Look up the usage of the word “keling” in south east asian cultures.

    What we have in Australia is perhaps a more overt style of referring to cultures or differences, but the barriers to integrate with Australian culture is much lower than other countries. For some migrants that have come from cultures where they had a racial privilege (e.g. caste systems), it could now be confronting to them that their standing in Australia is lowered and equalised.

    The way that we establish social bonds (banter, joking around, jabs, insults etc) can also be confusing to foreigners and be perceived as racist, but it’s an old UK way of establishing camaraderie by proving that you can dish out an insult but also take it as well. Like stand-up comedy material, this method is being tamed as time goes on.

    One final indicator of racial division is the level of mixed marriages. If it was a serious problem, we would see low levels of marriages between different countries of origin. In the EU, the rate of mixed marriages is about 8% (1 in 12). In Australia, the rate is 3.5x larger at 29%.