If it’s peaceful it’s peaceful. When I check the dictionary under “peaceful” it doesn’t say anything about business.

Or rather they’ve decided what areas they’ll mess around for years while nothing gets done until this farce finally gets canned.

Nuclear power’s already much more expensive than every other mainstream option, and the gap is widening every year. In twenty years time it’s going to be so much more expensive it’ll be ridiculous. No one’s going to want to buy power for several times the cost of all the other options.

The idea’s not only dumb - it’s completely commercially unviable.

It just seems dumb at this point. Nuclear energy is so incredibly expensive compared to the alternatives. Most countries are moving away from it due to it being commercially unviable. And yet here we are with the NLP acting like it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

I know they see it as their duty to push the opposite of whatever Labor’s doing but they don’t seem to care that it’s just a bad idea.

“We’re already doing very little but it’s WAY TOO MUCH!”

At what point do Labor realise “Are we the baddies?”

I work in software and we’re permanently work from home. (I don’t want to name my employer but they’re a medium sized company)

I’m literally one of those people who you say is vanishingly small.

It’s not even a “the world is bad and I don’t want to subject my child to that” kind of decision. It’s more like a series of thoughts over the years: “is this the right time to have a kid?” and it’s never a good time.

Why not start them off in the way you mean to continue? It’s not like there are any significant downsides.

Compulsory is such a good system. It doesn’t take long. It’s on a weekend so it’s not inconvenient. You get a sausage at the sausage sizzle and you do your vote. There’s a real holiday atmosphere. And it produces much more representative results. Brexit wouldn’t have happened if they had compulsory voting so there’s no denying it’s valuable.

The producer who was lumped with this was horrified and handed in his resignation the next day. I don’t think he was happy with the situation.

It’s a fair point but my intention was to bracket the possible returns.

More than an inconvenience - they cost hundreds of millions in additional road wear every year which we all pay for.

I guess I was addressing the “living in poverty” part of the parent comment and the suggestion to downsize in your follow-up. I thought you meant to downsize to get some money to pay the bills. But it seems like you’re saying to downsize to get a house which is easier to maintain?

I worked in the superannuation industry for a while. I wouldn’t say that super is exactly a scam but it’s a terrible mess and the fees we pay on super in Australia are insane. Basically we have a lot of parasites taking a cut and that ends up making the standard funds poor investments. Median returns on the super funds are around 5.6% pa (over the last ten years for the standard “balanced” option) at a time when stock market tracking funds have appreciated by over 8% pa. A lot of that is being lost in inefficiencies and fees.

By comparison Americans with a 401k invested in the NASDAQ would have made 17.3% pa over the same period.

We’re getting a terrible deal with superannuation, and for many it’s the difference between retiring comfortably or retiring in poverty.

Aside from anything else, I’ve seen a couple of examples of downsizing up close and in neither case did it end up with them making very much money on the deal. They just ended up with smaller places.

In the first case they ended up with a small apartment which they actually ended up having to sell some of their retirement investments to be able to afford after selling a large family home in the outer suburbs and paying all the costs associated with selling.

In the other case she moved from a large family home in the outer suburbs into one of those “retirement communities”. The whole thing’s a massive scam. You “buy” the unit but you don’t actually own it, you only own a leasehold on it - something they didn’t make clear to her at all. You’re not allowed to even improve or renovate it. They impose rules on you much like a rental. And when you move out you’re not allowed to sell it - they contractually reserve the right to sell it themselves and pay you a massively discounted amount for it. Essentially they steal half the value of what you originally paid in a time when house prices are going up as well. It’s straight up exploitation of people who are old and struggling to even do everyday tasks, let alone understand complex contracts.

Toyota really screwed up in deciding that Hydrogen was the energy of the future. Even when everyone else in the world went with electricity they persisted in their failed vision. It’s a shame that an otherwise great manufacturer should fall victim to such massive hubris but honestly I think their days are numbered as a major vehicle manufacturer.

There’s no chance that hydrogen’s going to be a long term success for them and with all their eggs in the one basket it looks like they’re dead men walking.

I expect to hear in a few years that Carlson has been on the payroll of the Russians for years.

Ah, I see

Police weren’t happy about gay pride back in the 1970s and it seems they haven’t really evolved since then.