MacroKangaroo

@TB1Kinobe God forbid things get done quickly. Oh the horror. Be thankful your house prices aren't 17x earnings. And after being thankful for that, thank speed of construction for allowing you and your children to afford homes. Thanks

25 years ago after engineering school I was involved in a residential construction project where speed was the focus. I did not know the scale or how widespread it would get. None of us did We were young. I have been out of it for over 10 years now with the deepest regrets of contributing to this process at a high level. I don't care if anyone sees this or even gets one like I just wanted to say I'm sorry.

@Nirgal451 That’s a planner not council

@Macro_Kangaroo A council decision. This was previously large industrial blocks. Most of the streets are new. This The Rope Walk Park (B).

Not putting parking here is a choice.

@HenryTarquin @pegobry_en There absolutely is "better concrete". And you could make it look like the photo with coatings. In fact, you can almost perfectly mimic marble or granite with concrete with the right mixture and coatings But the brutalist design is terrible either way.

@pegobry_en There's no such thing as "better concrete". Whatever the second image is made of, will (a) depressingly reveal itself to be concrete when we take three steps closer, and (b) start to look as ratty and dystopian as the image on the left in two months, two years tops

One reason why brutalist architecture looks like this is because brutalist architects didn't care about future generations and so didn't care that the concrete would look like mud 20 years thence, which also tells you about what brutalism is about

@peterrhague The problem is the strength of concrete they use for this is porous. You would need to use a high strength concrete that is used on bridges then seal and paint it. The best fictional example of brutalism is seen in Andor season 2 on Coruscant

I think public opinion on brutalism would massively change with better concrete.

@slsandpet Tafe (or education) is not the bottleneck for workers in construction. Unprofitable companies do not hire. Fix profitability and you fix apprenticeships. Regulations, zoning, and approvals are the main culprit here

Brought to you by the Liberal party closing down TAFE You were repeatedly warned

About 3% of my entire life is spent verifying that I am indeed me on every device

@DrCameronMurray As a builder it seems about right. It would be between 30-45% taxes

The idea that “44% of the cost of new home construction is taxes” is just made up monash.vic.gov.au/files/assets/p…

@matt_barrie But won't less mortgages lower supply of homes? Which would then worsen the shortage, increasing prices, then increasing inflation?

Inflation will continue to be high while new mortgage issuance grows. New bank lending is money creation. If you want inflation to stop you need to get the banks to write about $150 billion less in home loans per annum and the government to cut $90 billion in spending.

@AvidCommentator Apparently the inflation is driven mostly by house prices. If that's true it makes you wonder what the cash rate can do given all the incentives to buy homes

Expectation of multiple rate rises ahead confirmed 👇

@econoadabsurdam Let's Coruscant this place. I want giant spaghetti tunnels, massive skyscrapers, gigantic trains, piping hot energy plants, disgustingly huge dams, I don't care. I'm sick of these enviro-conservative rulers

it is amazing that I can circle some 800,000 square kilometres of space and the most common response is "hey now, we couldn't possibly touch that" who says conservatism isn't popular

@GaryWinslett Agreed. Make it legal to build. We want to, we can. It’s just barely legal that’s the problem

All of these are good. We need all kinds of more housing, in all kinds of places.

@pandainapear Working on it

1 million more of these in australia would fix many things

@tomhfh It's all in the details. I promise to develop terraces like this as soon as Australia decides to stop making it illegal almost everywhere

Before and after. Which would you rather to live in? Which would receive more community consent? Literally everybody knows the answer.

@BenPennings And the government is spending more now, as a percentage of GDP, than 1950-1980. So we don’t really have any coin to go around unless we cut something else

“Fewer than 2% of homes being built now are for social housing, down from 15% in the 1970s, and 22% in the 1950s.” theguardian.com/australia-news…

@SustainableTall Because it's illegal in most place in Australia due to zoning laws.

When detached houses are built this ridiculously close, why not just build terraces?

@AvidCommentator This is a zoning problem. Clearly, this should be zoned for townhouses. Builder's are having to build side-by-side, two separate walls and structures, simply because its illegal to build townhouses almost everywhere in Australia

Modern Australian homes at times have all the visual appeal of a 1970s East German apartment block...

@Falliblemusings I had a passing knowledge of evolutionary biology and it literally hurt to read 'Sapiens'. And it got worse with the sequel. His entire 'scientific' understanding is just popular psychology mixed with ancient history. Neither of which is particularly accurate

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time. But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay. That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions. Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design. After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples: On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion." On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over." On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us." On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed." On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two." This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty? And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it. Now compare Deutsch: "Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature." "Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow." "Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved." "We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be." Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence. The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children? Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct. Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going. Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

Candle-making was once a licence and it was illegal to make your own candles at home. All licences are made up. Don't assume you need government approval to be good at something. And especially don't assume government approval makes you any good, either

@CTankie1917 Well if population is wrong then GDP would probably be wrong also

So Chinese GDP per capita is actually 3x larger than stated, and China is as wealthy as Western Europe?