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Joined 1 year ago
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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.


  • 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’ve been thinking about this perspective for a while now, so it’s good to see the topic raised in the mainstream media. If you compare a business investment or buying shares in Australian companies with investing in property, there is much greater value to society and positive flow-on effects from business investing.
    A business can use the investment to hire staff, produce more goods / services for export, and growing revenues mean more tax revenue for the government.
    With investment properties, the owner buys a property by outbidding someone who may have just wanted a home and they then proceed to charge that same group with a rent burden. No additional jobs are created from the investment property and a cost burden is placed on the renter, reducing their disposable income.

    As a society, we need to start thinking about investment properties in the way that we would think about fossil fuels. We know it is easy and it makes money, but it’s bad for future generations and we need to transition to alternatives.





  • Great article, thanks! The last few sections really make it seem like a dumpster fire.

    So, in simple terms, the value proposition is that the retinal scan will generate a unique ID of a person in the system and ensure that a person cannot be registered more than once. This will then allow the system to be used for tasks like authentication or ensuring fair distribution of tokens. Another potential use case mentioned is something like the administration of Universal Basic Income (UBI), whereby the system would verify that people receive UBI and cannot claim duplicate payments. You could also extend that idea to things like government ID.

    The privacy concerns would probably prevent a roll-out in most Western markets, so it will be interesting to see if they can generate enough business in other markets.





  • A lot of the tech companies were slammed by investors over the last two years for missing their earnings and many of them are still struggling to go back to 2021 optimistic growth rates. The layoffs last year have also cost them a lot of their best talent, so the quality of innovation, decision making, and execution has suffered. You are now left with a bunch of older executives who never really understood that it was their younger talent that was the core of their company’s success, so they fall back on older methods like increasing prices and cutting costs to try and lead the board / shareholders into thinking that their ridiculous executive salary packages are somehow justified.