Linkage

Things Katy is reading.

The rental and housing affordability crisis in Victoria

for Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee (Victoria)  

Given that for most Australians their largest asset is their home – or, for some, a portfolio of investment properties – and it is often tied to long‑term financial plans, measures that are even vaguely thought to threaten property values are treated with ‘extreme caution by our politicians’.

It is also difficult to overstate the importance of continually rising house prices to the Australian economy. In 2022, Australia’s ‘big four’ banks – ANZ, CBA, NAB and Westpac — held around $1.87 trillion in home loans. No other country’s banks are as heavily dependent on residential property with housing in Australia having been referred to as ‘the cash cow of the banking sector’.

Also of interest to the Committee throughout this Inquiry was the way in which property is discussed in the media. Outlets such The Age, for example, flipped daily between stories lamenting housing unaffordability and those celebrating strong growth in property prices. Auctions are reported as if they are exciting sporting contests with results celebrated when they ‘soar’ past reserve prices. Similarly, when the Housing Statement was announced in September, the Australian Financial Review warned that the policies risked dampening house prices, valuing rapid growth in house prices over increased affordability. Housing is a human right, and that fact lies at the heart of Inquiries such as this. All Victorians should be able to access safe, secure, quality and affordable housing. The housing choices that people can make are inevitably shaped by their own circumstances, the  broader nature of the housing system, and our social and economic priorities. One question that this Inquiry has faced is whether we want a home ownership society or a landlord society.9 Victoria, along with the rest of the country, is trending towards the latter. As rates of renting increase, so must security of tenure, liveable rental homes and greater consumer protections. But the goal of home ownership should never be out of reach for Victorians.

via The Guardian

Losing the imitation game

by Jennifer Moore 

The intersection of AI hype with that elision of complexity seems to have produced a kind of AI booster fanboy, and they're making personal brands out of convincing people to use AI to automate programming. This is an incredibly bad idea. The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code. They're positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it's only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it's not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they'll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it. No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it. No one can explain what they expect it to do. Every choice made in writing software is a choice not to do things in a different way. And there will be no one who can explain why they made this choice, and not those others. In part because it wasn't even a decision that was made. It was a probability that was realized.

But it's worse than AI being merely inadequate for software development. Developing that mental model requires learning about the system. We do that by exploring it. We have to interact with it. We manipulate and change the system, then observe how it responds. We do that by performing the easy, simple programing tasks. Delegating that learning work to machines is the tech equivalent of eating our seed corn. That holds true beyond the scope of any team, or project, or even company. Building those mental models is itself a skill that has to be learned. We do that by doing it, there's not another way. As people, and as a profession, we need the early career jobs so that we can learn how to do the later career ones. Giving those learning opportunities to computers instead of people is profoundly myopic.

This Experiment Undid Our Cities. How Do We Fix It?

for YouTube  ,  Strong Towns  
Remote video URL

When we replaced our traditional pattern of development with the Suburban Experiment, there were some unforeseen consequences. Why did we do it, and how can we fix it?

On Top of Everything Else, Henry Kissinger Prevented Peace in the Middle East

by Jon Schwartz in The Intercept  

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Government should reclaim some employment services, shift away from harsh compliance, inquiry finds

in ABC News  

A parliamentary inquiry has laid the foundations for government to reinvent unemployment services, finding the system has become obsessed with "kicking people off welfare", instead of helping them.

The government-dominated committee, established in the weeks after the government's 2022 federal election win, has called for a shift away from intense compliance measures and the return of some privatised job services to government.

Its chair, Julian Hill, said the ground-up review was the first of its kind since employment services were privatised 25 years ago.

Mr Hill wrote that in that time, the sector had degraded into a system that was not helping people find work and was neglecting employers.

"It's harsh but true to say Australia no longer has an effective coherent national employment services system," Mr Hill wrote.

via David Marler

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

by Spencer Ackerman in Rolling Stone  

Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work. 

He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Greg Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians and others.

[…]

The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order. 

The Doom Loop

by Advait Arun in Phenomenal World  

Recent coverage of insurance markets has highlighted the industry’s involvement in the so-called “climate risk doom loop”: looming climate risks and worse disasters are raising the price of insurance for real estate and infrastructure assets, exacerbating their owners’ vulnerability to future disasters and feeding into higher insurance prices in the future―or the withdrawal of insurance coverage altogether.

Rising insurance prices and the credible threat of insurer divestment from higher-risk areas will constrain investment in both homes and businesses across vulnerable communities. Yet more people are moving into higher-risk areas, and some politicians fear backlash if they let insurance companies deny these communities coverage. In response, state leaders in California and Florida have sought to prevent divestment by directing their insurance commissioners to adjust pricing regulations, invite competition in insurance markets, or derisk insurers by imposing disaster-risk fees on all insurance purchasers regardless of risk.

Private investors, meanwhile, believe the insurance industry should follow price signals: if firms can identify the climate risks an assets could face, and investors price those risks into building and maintaining costs, then market actors will invest prudently.

I argue that insurance is a woefully inadequate financial tool for coping with the impacts of climate change. Improving insurance markets does little to address the fact that the core drivers of the “climate risk doom loop” rest in the design of capital markets, which are structured to direct investment away from vulnerable communities when they most need it.

via Cory Doctorow

A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?

by James Boyle in Duke Law Journal  

Right now, it seems to me that, in a number of respects, we are at the stage that the American environmental movement was at in the 1950s or 1960s. At that time, there were people-supporters of the park system, hunters, birdwatchers and so on-who cared about what we would now identify as "environmental" issues. In the world of intellectual property we now have start-up software engineers, libraries, appropriationist artists, parodists, biographers, biotech researchers, and others. In the 1950s, there were flurries of outrage over particular environmental crises, such as proposals to build dams in national parks. In later years, the public was shocked by burning rivers and oil spills. In the world of intellectual property, we currently worry about Microsoft's allegedly anti-competitive practices, the uncertain ethics of patenting human genes, and the propriety of using copyright to silence critics of the Church of Scientology. We are notably lacking two things, however. The first is a theoretical framework, a set of analytical tools with which issues should be analyzed. The second is   perception of common interest among apparently disparate groups, a common interest which cuts across traditional oppositions. (Hunter vs. Birdwatcher, for example.)


What kinds of tools am I talking about? Crudely speaking, the environmental movement was deeply influenced by two basic analytical frameworks. The first was ecology, the study of the fragile, complex and unpredictable interconnections between living systems. The second was welfare economics, which revealed the ways in which markets can fail to make economic actors internalize the full costs of their actions. The combination of the two ideas yielded a powerful and disturbing conclusion. Markets would routinely fail to make economic actors internalize their own costs, particularly their own environmental costs. This failure would routinely disrupt or destroy fragile ecological systems, with unpredictable, ugly, dangerous, and possibly irreparable consequences. These two types of analysis pointed to a general interest in environmental protection, and thus helped to build a large constituency that supported governmental efforts to that end. The duck hunter's efforts to preserve wetlands as a species habitat turn out to have wider functions in the prevention of erosion and the maintenance of water quality. The decision to burn coal rather than gas for power generation may impact everything from forests to fisheries.

Mysterious woman tells school board that Scholastic book sparked porn addiction

in Popular Information  

It's all true girls! If you see a cartoon illustration of one kiss you'll be on a slippery slope to living in your bedroom, with a bin full of exhausted AA batteries, and an excess bandwidth bill you'll have to sell a kidney for.

On November 14, a 20-year-old woman named Lanah Burkhardt appeared before the school board of the Conroe Independent School District in Texas. Burkhardt told the board that, when she was 11, she read a Scholastic book that introduced her to "a single kiss." According to Burkhardt, her exposure to this Scholastic book was directly responsible for her developing a debilitating addiction to pornography.

Burkhardt said that after reading the Scholastic book with the "single kiss," she "looked for other books that gave me pleasure." This "led to internet searches" that Burkhardt will "never forget." By the time she was 13, Burkhardt says her porn addiction left her depressed and suicidal.

[…] 

Burkhardt's appearance was promoted by SkyTree Book Fairs, a newly formed organization marketing itself as "an alternative to the sexually explicit content distributed in Scholastic's book fairs." 

While SkyTree Book Fairs presents itself as an independent non-profit organization, it appears to be a hastily assembled offshoot of Brave Books, which publishes children's books by right-wing pundits and pseudo-celebrities.

[…]

Neither Brave Books nor Burkhardt disclosed that Burkhardt is an employee of Brave Books. According to her LinkedIn profile, Burkhardt is the company's "public relations coordinator."

Burkhardt's employment was first reported by Frank Strong. It is unclear how an 11-year-old Burkhardt obtained the Scholastic book that allegedly caused her porn addiction. It appears she was home-schooled. Burkhardt did not respond to a request for comment sent via Facebook.

via Steve Herman

A rural post office was told to prioritize Amazon packages. Chaos ensued.

in The Washington Post  

In bigger cities, Amazon has its own distribution network, which takes some of the pressure off the post office. But in rural areas, where carriers drive miles of lonely routes in their personal vehicles, the arrangement has caused problems.

In the mountains of Colorado, biologists in Crested Butte are struggling with the delay of time-sensitive samples, the Denver Post reported in September, while mail carriers in Carbondale say they are overwhelmed by Amazon packages. Other Minnesota towns including Brainerd and La Porte have been hit hard by Amazon in the past, carriers said. And in Maine, carriers organized a symbolic strike in protest of the Amazon onslaught a year ago — though a postal audit found that the delays were caused by staffing issues, not prioritizing packages.

In Bemidji, the mayor has complained to local members of Congress, who say their ability to control the post office is limited. Last week, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) sent a letter to DeJoy to ask about reports that “Amazon is interfering with timely deliveries and stretching the agency’s already-overburdened workers too thin.”

“As Postmaster General, you are responsible for ensuring that the Postal Service meets its service standards, and it is clear right now that things are not working as they should,” said the letter, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post. “Entering into contracts that your system cannot support is a breach of your responsibilities.”

via Sam Litzinger