or hemi-weekly. Or demi-weekly. And yes you can stack them. hemi-demi-weekly means every four weeks.

The question is not whether it's sustainable, we answered that already with a resounding "who gives a fuck"*.

The question is how much money we can get right now.

And the answer for landlords is: everything you have to give.

If they can't get tenants one option is to lower their asking price. Another is to demand that rental subsidies be increased. Or interest rates lowered. Or increase immigration to increase demand. Or build fewer houses. Or something else, anything but accept less money. Luckily that question never comes up because there's a housing shortage and people really, really want a roof over their heads.

This isn't specific to landlords, this is late stage capitalism.

(* look at who people vote for. Is it "we will fight to have a more sustainable society" parties? Or is it "more of the same" either with more harsh or less harsh language? Conclusion: people would prefer what we have now to risking any kind of significant change)

Darleen Tana hasn't been proven corrupt et either. So which standard do you want to use?

Nah, suppliers keep going out of business due to the incredible skill of the colesworth "negotiating teams" so it's really hard to get some items at the price "the boys" are willing to pay.

It's kind of shit that the least awful supermarket near me is the explicitly foreign owned, foreign operated one.

ALDI are explicit about that so it's true at least for them. ~1% for swiping instead of inserting.

switch from spit masks to proper N95 ones and you'll be much better off. If you're lucky people you know will still have half boxes of N95's from back when they were treating covid as a problem. I have half a box from someone that way and another half box promised from someone else "when they remember".

The flip side is that if you can pick common elements of the problem relationships and decide not to do those things you're likely to come out ahead. "this doesn't always fail, but it often does..." and especially "doing things the other way very rarely leads to failure".

boundaries that do not need to be said out loud because anyone with half a braincell can figure it out.

Going off the number of similar stories here, either there's a lot of people without so much as half a brain cell, or these things do need to be made explicit. I'm inclined to making things explicit.

Auckland: houses cost $1.5M and we pay $100k.

Sydney: houses cost $1.5M and we pay $150k-$200k.

NZ IT Industry cannot understand why anyone would leave.

You might want to look at the rosy conditions in Most Glorious Motherland England the Mighty Independent Post-Brexit Powerhouse before you get too carried away with how bad Australia is.

Authoritarianism isn't a left-right thing, and generally fascism is the right-authoritarian version while communism turned out to be left-authoritarian in practice. But fascism is explicitly right-authoritarian right from conception through to genocide.

The paradox of tolerance is very real, and the only solution so far is to say "if you advocate intolerance you need to STFU, or we will shut you down".

No, stamp duty only hits people who buy or sell, which hits everyone who buys anything useful whether they have spare money or not (people buying houses, for example). We need to tax unearned income instead.

Taxing wealth as well might be useful, but it's not working too well for councils because the wealthy turn up to meeting and turn out to vote but poor people don't.

We had that, Labour under Ardern was very keen to talk about fixes to the tax system. They brought a whole lot of good things to the table.

Then they decided not to do anything that would upset rich people, or old people. And then we got a new prime minister who is busy promising to do nothing at all.

My aunt had lovely-looking plastic trim on her new house. After ~10 years it had all turned into fragments of plastic in her garden. I don't know how you'd get around the UV sensitivity of polymers (even "tar" roof shingles fail much more quickly than other ways of protecting metal).

If you're interested in sustainable building there's a lot of knowledge and in many places you can go and look at sustainable buildings that have been around for 500+ years. Think fired clay, stone, even some wood and thatch - but those need regular maintenance if they're to last more than a century or so. But those timescales aren't even considered for most modern buildings.

In Australia "relatively fire resistant" doesn't cut it, especially after we had our very own EPS cladding fires in Melbourne. Our building codes even in cities vary from stringent to "holy shit you what now" relative to even California. Building in what they call "flame zone" means exactly that: your house is expected to survive a flame front passing over. The fire service have opinions.

So much this. Cleaner air, less traffic noise, and my morning bike rides were much more pleasant due to fewer cars on the roads.

I had saved seeds so I spent some quality time digging up lawn and planting stuff. Interestingly despite the "please help yourself" sign in the front garden very few people did. The garden out the back kept me and the neighbours in eggs, silverbeet and cherry tomatoes :) Oh, and pumpkins. So many pumpkins (they tried to take over the whole neighbourhood. I was mowing them ... it was self-defense, honest, officer)

Tax is usually a problem, at least for people who tell the authorities what they're doing. My boss won't let me move back to NZ because "you might have to come into the office".

Which is true, I was in there just the other day. Sunday, to be precise. For less than an hour, stealing shredded paper for the chickens, dropping off ewaste (it's a PITA to find recycling places in Sydney), oh and grabbing some empty coffee jars because they're handy to have. No-one else was on site at the time so that's a win.

I can't believe "comfortable pants" isn't higher up.

That's coz some of us are thinking "pants? Only if I'm expecting visitors".

The discord has a whole series of ongoing discussions of how to improve mines. The new short timeout on them makes them very hard to use effectively, they used to be deadly in PvP but now they're just vaguely annoying.

It's not just having a will, it's also telling your super fund(s) who to give that to as a separate step.

Australia has been there for a long time. The only criminals you're supposed to associate with are paedophiles, going off the who's who at the recent celebration of Pell's death.

Ko Rutene is an example from a few years ago. No criminal record, but failed the character test that Alan Bond passed.

That's when the government get to say "be specific. We are willing to do anything plausible, and will happily implement your proposal".

I really hope so. Because on the face of it this looks like a great opportunity for us to help in a way that plays to our strengths, flushed down the toilet for no apparent reason. Someone really needs to step up and explain why we didn't help.

I assumes they were talking about the VP not the ex-manager.

I had the lucky experience of a similar thing where another very senior management type saw the discussion and intervened. "people have to work 8 hours, and can start as early as 6am". Looks at me pointedly "so you can start at 6am if you like".

The complaining manager used to start at 10am, the latest allowed time, except when they were running late. Or had an errand to run. Or didn't feel like it. I assume they always got their 8 hours in, but I wasn't going to hang round to find out.

rope is cheaper and more readily available. And it's got a tradition of its own.