ZingerMuncher9000

The well-off people sending their kids to private schools consume less public $$$ than the well-off people sending their kids to public schools and if you are not ideologically blinkered you know this.

More than half of all tobacco and over 95% of vapes sold in Australia are now illicit. The black market is worth AUD$7 billion a year, around 40% of Australia's entire illicit drug economy, more than cannabis, cocaine, heroin and ecstasy combined.

With today’s announcement of service increases to the Burnley and Clifton Hill groups, Melbourne will soon have a mostly 10-minute minimum weekday frequency across all of its core rail corridors A big chunk of the remaining 30+ minute gaps will also soon disappear, not bad! 👍🏻

BREAKING: We're adding more evening and weekend train services and building more trains here in Victoria. More trains, more services - and with half price PT, cheaper to ride all year.

I think a huge part of the reason why no government has been able to enact difficult pro-growth reforms is that the average voter still believes we remain a rich country. You hear this in politicians’ rhetoric “the sixth richest country in the world”. We’re the sixth largest economy but now far from the richest. Per capita we’re tanking down the rankings. One of the reasons why Poland or China have been able to have growth miracles in recent years is they think like a developing country. They know they were poor and they have to build to get rich. We think we are rich and that we don’t have to build anything anymore, or that when we do, it has to be the most expensive possible version of what we build. Bat tunnels. Fish Discos. Kittiwake hotels. We think we’re rich so we can afford to chase some wealth creators away, afford to mandate public biodiversity net gain on every development in the country, and afford to ratchet up state pension spending five times faster than the rate of growth in the economy. We’re suffering from acute ‘rich country delusion’. It’s only once we realise we’re far poorer than we should be that we can start to fix this nonsense.

Good piece with a simple thesis: The girlboss lifestyle would not exist if it were not massively subsidized. Cheap immigrant labor to do their cooking, cleaning, and child care; student loans and the whole higher ed sector; email jobs that don’t need to exist; etc.

We give authoritarianism too much credit for China’s success.

Ralph Lauren can be Marshalls cheap or designer expensive

India is more of a core Anglophone society than Australia tbh. Average university educated Briton or North American could not tell you the name of a single Australian writer but they could tell you about Kipling, Rushdie and maybe Tagore.