Linkage

A majority of Victorian renters have experienced a "significant tenancy issue", yet only half of them made a complaint due to fears of landlord retaliation, a new report based on a survey of 1,000 renters has found.

The survey by the Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC) found 79 per cent of renters in Victoria had faced at least one problem in the past 12 months.

The most common issues were delays to repairs and maintenance, "unreasonable" rent increases and excessive photos and videos being taken during inspections.

But only 52 per cent of the affected households lodged a complaint, and even fewer — just 2 per cent — escalated their complaint to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).

"What we saw is that there is a broader challenge that even where legal protections exist, renters may not feel safe or supported to use them," CPRC deputy chief executive Chandni Gupta said.

Um… You've heard of the Nazis, haven't you?

During the final day of the hearing on Tuesday, the court heard from a member of the public who observed the rally on December 3, 2023.

Mark Doery was a witness presented by the defence.

"It just looked like a bunch of boys in a group, going for a walk," Mr Doery told the court.

"Nothing stood out as offensive to me, but that's just me."

[…]

"The prosecution has not proved the behaviour of the accused was offensive," Mr Sewell said.

Ultimately, Magistrate Mike Wardell agreed and said he had not been convinced of Victoria Police's case that Mr Sewell's behaviour during the rally was "deeply or seriously insulting".

"Behaviour deemed unacceptably offensive by some, may not trouble others at all," Magistrate Wardell said.

"The test … is whether the impugned behaviour is so deeply and seriously insulting … as to warrant the interference in the criminal law.

"Society is evolving in attitudes all the time … Fringe groups are arising all the time."

This is an absurd claim. As an Australian who grew up in arguably (and famously) the most homogenously small-minded and bigoted part of it, I can assure you that "Russian operatives" did not turn Australia racist overnight via Facebook. Australia is a big box of racist fireworks; forty years of fiscal austerity is the match tossed in.

ASIO is investigating pro-Russian social media influencers who are working with an offshore media organisation to condemn Australia's support for Kyiv, while also using "social media to spread vitriolic, polarising commentary on anti-immigration protests and pro-Palestinian marches", he said.

"These state-sanctioned trolls are more than propaganda puppets; they want to turn hot-button issues into burning issues, tipping disagreement into division and division into violence," he said, giving the annual Lowy Institute address.

A large neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, had also attempted to leverage recent anti-immigration and cost-of-living rallies in Australia, he said.

This is quite sweet…

… but what's really amusing is the response from fellow USians:

Your regular reminder that solving every problem by creating a competitive market of private sector "service providers" does not work.

Just 11.7% of jobseekers in Australia found long-term employment through a job provider in the latest financial year, according to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’ annual report.

Service providers are allowed to claim publicly funded outcome payments when clients have completed four, 12 and 26 weeks in employment – regardless of whether the client or provider found the job.

[…]

Jeremy Poxon, a welfare advocate at the Antipoverty Centre, said the system was failing “en mass” to help get people into meaningful work.

“The government knows full well that this system is failing on this basic metric to help people into work,” he said.

It came as Guardian Australia revealed Centrelink has threatened payment suspensions to jobseekers at a rate of five a minute, despite serious concerns from social security experts that they are illegal.

Poxon said the data showed the system was better at punishing people than helping them into employment.

Every time I search for a solution to a problem for Drupal 10/11, I get page after page of results for Drupal 6/7. By the time of the release of Drupal 8, discussions had moved from groups and issue queues to Slack.

Communities are having the same debates over and over. New members ask questions that were definitely answered six months ago. Teams rediscover solutions to problems they already solved. Users search for solutions to problems that seem to repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

We used to have forums. And forums had one massive advantage: you could find things.

Threads had descriptive titles. There were categories. Search actually worked because the content was structured for retrieval. If someone asked a question that had been answered before, you could link them to the previous discussion instead of retyping everything.

Then Slack happened, and Discord, and Teams, and we all decided that real-time chat was simply better: More modern // more collaborative. More like how humans “naturally communicate” (as if there’s anything natural about the internet itself.)

[…]

Companies pay for Slack per user per month. The cost of storage is real but abstracted. Meanwhile, the cost of fragmenting and decaying knowledge is completely invisible until it’s too late. How do you measure the time wasted rehashing old decisions? How do you quantify the mistakes that could have been avoided if someone had been able to find that old discussion?

These costs are real and large, but they don’t show up in any budget line.

This is the essay on the Turing Test that I wish I were capable of writing. It takes a while to get up to speed, but when it does it's just delightful.

I am not as suspicious of the spiritual as Searle or Turing, and am broadly willing to entertain the possibility that there is such a thing as a soul that proves the essential difference between the thought of a man and a machine. But this seems beside the point. To my mind, Searle’s Chinese Rooms, though useful in thinking about artificial intelligence in the same way Schrödinger’s Cat is useful in thinking about quantum mechanics, simply puts the cart before the horse. Let the high speed men with paper, pencil, and rubber commence using their rulebook to carry on a conversation, whether in Chinese or any other language, and then we can discuss the metaphysical implications.

One needn’t go as far as souls anyway. Jefferson’s hypothesis—that there is some electrochemical basis to thought—is sufficient to solve the problem. Were it true, the reason computers seem fundamentally blocked from progress on the Turing Test would amount to the fact that they are wholly mechanical objects, while “thought” is as much a biological function as “digestion” or “copulation.” What’s notable to me is simply that the idea is instantly credible in the context of observable reality. I think about my household pets, and even though none of them are close to passing the Turing Test, not least due to their complete inability to use language, they are clearly routinely engaging in something that is closer to thought than anything LLMs serve up. It is possible to communicate with them, albeit non-verbally—if I pick up and shake the container they know contains treats, my cats recognize that as a symbol that I am offering treats, just as I understand that when they stand by the empty food bowl and scream they are asking me to fix the problem. This means that they have notions of both objects and desire. Frankly, on the evidence, I’d be a lot less surprised by my dog learning to use language than I would by my laptop.

Human civilisation is now officially too stupid to be allowed to continue:

There's only a handful of lenders in Australia that are accepting cryptocurrencies as collateral for loans.

While there's no clear and present danger to Australia's financial system, the federal government and regulators are watching them.

"Crypto assets can be highly volatile," ASIC told the ABC.

"Lenders securing loans with crypto may risk the collateral becoming insufficient to cover the loan if the value of the crypto drops quickly.

"For consumers, this means a higher risk of having your loan called back early, and needing to sell your crypto assets to cover a default."

But here's the problem.

The industry's keen to grow, but economists have told the ABC the further the industry grows, the more it will present a major risk to Australia's financial stability.

"What the law needs to do, what regulators need to do, is to ensure that people who are not especially sophisticated, or who don't have the capacity to understand and assess the risks that they might be exposed to aren't sucked in by unscrupulous operators," Saul Eslake says.

The White House will now allow retirement savers to invest in extremely risk and opaque crypto and private equity assets in their 401(k) retirement accounts. These sorts of investments had previously been banned. Why? Because they are risky and opaque and that is bad for retirement savers. Why will they now be allowed? Because both the private equity industry and the crypto industry are always in danger of suffering declines when enough money stops flowing into them, and opening the door to 401(k) money is a faucet of many hundreds of billions of dollars that will continue to keep valuations in those industries high. The shit that the smart investors would not pay for will now be packaged, branded, and sold to regular people who do not know any better. Who will benefit? Private equity firms, dumping their shitty stuff onto the public, and crypto firms, with a bigger pool of buyers for their worthless products. Who will lose? The public. 

These predatory industries have paid the Trump administration enough money to win support for this. That’s about it. Longer explanations are mostly bullshit.

Major banks have now decided to allow crypto to be used as collateral for loans. This sets the stage for a rapid collapse in crypto prices to spread its harm much more broadly throughout the financial system. Do you remember when, shortly before the 2008 financial crisis, the CEO of Citigroup famously said, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance”? I don’t know why I just thought of that.