Land contracts build tenant wealth and drive people toward home ownership. 20-year-old you, with no capital and working a minimum wage job, should be able to enter into a land contract and start building wealth.

20-year-old me had no capital, remember? The shabby apartment I lived in back in the 90's was worth less than $100k, but 20% of whatever that number was would still have been well beyond my means.

The flag video post taught me a new word: réchauffé. We're not having réchauffé tonight, but we have réchauffé at least once a week.

I'm sort-of following the idea here - and I appreciate that there has been actual thought behind it.

I'm missing a couple of points though:

1. Why would a landowner enter into this arrangement instead of just selling the property to someone with the finances to buy it outright from them?
2. Who underwrites this? Even a Banks with Billions of dollars in their reserve will make me commit a decent percentage of the property's value in the form of a deposit. If you take that away, the landowner is taking a huge risk by entering into this contract. I guess that feeds back to point #1, but assuming an altruistic landowner who just wants to help people - they're gambling their most valuable assets against my ability to slowly dribble money at them. If their tenant loses their job or something and can't afford payments, what happens?

I can't conceive the land not belonging to someone, no. That's not how our society works. And before you break that, I'd want to take a good look at what you'd replace it with. Because the objective facts are that this system is the best thing tried so far.

Mao did none of those things. He was a destroyer, not a builder. He dabbled and experimented through the Cultural Revolution, and was directly responsible for millions of deaths as a result. After killing everyone with an education he could get his hands on, he used Soviet know-how to start moving from an agricultral to Industrial nation. Forgetting in the process that those agricultural practices were feedign his population. Whoops!

I have no idea why he has such a following. Is it because he tore the whole system down? Is it because he wrote some essays? China didn't start developing until years after Mao left office.

I don't know what your point is. China was a shitshow. Both before and during Mao's time. I don't live in such a place though. And I absolutely would not want to go from where I am now to being under Mao. He'd kill me for being an "intellectual" for a start.

I don't think China was better under Mao than it was at any point before him. And it was worse under Mao than at several previous points.

There should be a law against owning properties you don’t live in.

I'm trying to picture what this looks like. Who do we rent from if we can't afford to buy a house in this alternate vision of the future? There is no way that 20-year-old me working at servos had the capital to buy a house. I had zero savings and a low income.

I see you invoking the Maoist uprising in another comment, but I'll be honest - the years following that uprising were hard for a huge swathe of the population (not to mention fatal for Millions more). I would not want to live through a Chairman Mao. Modern China happened despite Mao. Not because of him.

Just looked into this. They're tiny - I assume they're designed for those people who don't have proper laundrys? The one I'm looking at looks like it's designed to be used every day with whatever you wore yesterday. I'd fill that thing with the clothes I wear in one day.

Still, I did live for a time in a unit that didn't have a laundry. This would have been useful in that place. Then again, so was upgrading to a bigger place that could hold a washing machine!

Meanwhile, it's still the middle of the working afternoon here. Jealous of your timezone right now.

Ooh! I hope my local Coles does the same thing - for the same reason!

I used to dance. I made friends quickly in Melbourne by getting into the local Salsa scene. In fact looking back, just about all the friendships I made in Melbourne were either people I worked with or danced with.

That's on them, then. They advertised 18 months, and then bait-and-switched you to 6. They can't be surprised if that doesn't work for you.

Won't it end up in some sort of Police auction at some point?

The acts of the judiciary are by design entirely independent of the government. We can't blame the government for that.

Rehab and support, as well as mental health does come under the government's remit, however. That said, the support and recognition in these areas has improved immensely since the introduction of the NDIS. IT still isn't perfect, but it's the best it has ever been and is still improving.

The cost of living stuff, I'm right ther with you. It's costing me a fortune just to live in a 3-bedroom townhouse in a reasonable area. I'm paying more to rent here than some jobs on seek are even offering. And I'm hoping to save for a deposit on a mortgage somehow. Which is going to be extra tricky, since I don't plan to still be in the workforce in 30 years.

But, the truth is: The ludicrous cost of housing benefits far too many Australians for the government to want to tweak that knob too much. If it were suddenly possible to buy a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs for $400k again, the net-worth of a massive chunk of Australians would halve overnight.

Do you think the Government should make it illegal to invade people's homes and kill people? I thought that was already against the law.

I shouldn't giggle at this image, I'm sure it wasn't funny for you. But I can be a little juvenile sometimes.

Forget the roads, they've demolished several city buildings to make this thing.

*removed externally hosted image*

Pasta salad - it's hot in Perth.

Maybe consider really jazzing it up with KDE, Cairo and Compiz Fusion?

Every year without fail, there's all this noise about Jan 26th in the two weeks leading up to the date, then the conversation fizzles out again until next year. And then we do it again next year.

What even is the debate? Polls have repeatedly shown that while we absolutely want a day to celebrate the country, we aren't particularly attached to January 26th. There is no real significance to Australia for the date, it's the day the English arrived in Sydney. At best, it could be called "Sydney Day".

We can't have it on Foundation day, that's already a public holiday (yes, the holiday matters to us). Personally, I'd vote for a date in Winter. There's presently a big gap between June and September where we would welcome a public holiday. First Friday in August would work nicely. I like the idea of it always being a Friday because some people already have Mondays off and they miss most of the long long weekend bonuses.