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The rental vacancy rate across Melbourne rose to 1.7 per cent, up from just one per cent in March 2023 when overseas migration was peaking.

That put rental vacancy rates almost back to the pre-pandemic five year average rate of 1.9 per cent.

Mr Lawless said the rental property sell-off was likely due to a combination of high taxes, low yields, poor capital gains and serviceability challenges from high interest rates.

He said investors tended to chase capital gains rather than rental returns.

"With Melbourne home values down 3 per cent over the calendar year and 6.4 per cent below the market peak in March 2022, it seems that investors have been attracted to the better capital growth opportunities in markets like WA and Queensland."

[…]

Property Investors Council of Australia chair Ben Kingsley said the fall was driven by four main factors — investors selling up due to high interest rates, increased land taxes put in place by the state government to help fund the COVID recovery, tenancy reforms that ended no-fault evictions, and investors who had been in the market for a long time who were now cashing out.

He said the fall in rental bonds was "further evidence that the Labor government has made the lives of tenants in Victoria a lot harder" by causing an "exodus of investors providing private rental accommodation in Victoria".

Mr Kingsley said Victorian renters had only been spared rent rises because of the government's capping of international student numbers.

However, if that cap was removed post-election, he expected rents to rapidly rise.

"I would be very, very worried as a tenant that I'm going to be paying higher rent in Victoria over the near-term," he said.

TL;DR: Yes.

Being a law-abiding protester in Australia has become more difficult with each passing year, experts say, and some fear the right to protest is being slowly eroded.

Over the past two decades, at least 49 laws affecting protest have been introduced in federal, state and territory parliaments.

Most recently, Victoria announced a raft of proposed protest restrictions on 17 December, following a series of antisemitic attacks in Melbourne.

David Mejia-Canales, a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, said the public should be "very, very, very critical" about such legislation. 

[…]

Ohad Kozminsky, executive member of the Jewish Council of Australia — a group formed in the last year by progressive Jewish academics, activists and lawyers — said the laws were counterproductive.

"There are laws against hate speech. There are laws against firebombing and the destruction of property. We don't need additional laws to fight that," Kozminsky said.

The proposed measures also include banning protests outside of places of worship, something that Kozminsky also thinks is misguided.

"Religious institutions, irrespective of their denomination or their faith are legitimate sites of protest. We saw that perhaps most strikingly in the protests that took place in response to revelations about institutional, historic and contemporary sexual abuse of young people, of children," he said.

Mejia-Canales said: "If the premier thinks that these measures criminalising peaceful protest is going to fix antisemitism and other forms of racism, then she's deluded.

"This will not do that." 

Some fantastic advice here:

I have lost count of the hours I have spent trying to implement standard time-management tools, only to ignore countless reminders to take a break while debugging code or staring at the screen, feeling nauseous, trying to ‘eat the frog’ — that is, do the hardest task first.

Instead of managing time, I now manage my motivation by setting daily and weekly goals. On Monday, I add to my planner goals for each day of the week — no more than one big task per day, as well as smaller tasks, and mark the urgent ones. I avoid adding tasks that will require focus on days I know I’ll be prone to distraction. I switch non-urgent tasks between days if I’m just not in the mood to tackle them.

I start my day early so that I can have some distraction-free time, during which I can hyperfocus on tasks I find most motivating, such as writing or analysing data, or cross urgent tasks off my list. The positive kick then helps to keep me going through the day.

[…]

It is not always easy to identify the sources of stress, let alone determine what changes in behaviour or perceptions might help in adjusting to new situations. I try to be kind to myself when everything feels overwhelming or when I fail to keep up with expectations. I know that by patiently embracing this path, I will eventually, but slowly, regain my balance.

I realize now that a career in science can be a great option for naturally curious, creative, observant, tenacious and highly energetic minds. But accommodating these individuals requires acknowledging diverse ways of thinking, working and communicating, and promoting inclusive working environments. All would benefit from this approach, neurotypical and neurodivergent alike.

“By and large, the education system is not designed for people like me,” says the researcher. She says that sitting still for hours on end, following a set timetable and learning things in a more or less predetermined way that she couldn’t prioritise herself was terrible for her. “It made me so angry that I had panic attacks, was afraid to go to class and had to repeat a year of school.” She ended up skipping classes and instead studied subjects she enjoyed in a café. Since her teachers were worried about her, they let her carry on. “But it didn’t occur to anyone at the time that I might have ADHD,” says Bastos. She now knows that her brain “simply works differently to other people. I can accept myself as I am,” she says. It took her a long time to get to this point.

[…]

“People with ADHD notice many things at the same time,” she explains: “You’re easily distracted if you’re doing something you’re not motivated to do. But if I am very interested in a task, I can spend days on it non-stop, even forgetting to eat and drink,” says the scientist. “If you can’t learn to set your own boundaries, you won’t get anywhere.” Feelings also play a major role: “I am impulsive and get excited, but then I also fall hard,” she admits frankly.

When she was finally diagnosed with ADHD in 2022, “it was a turning point for me,” she says. “On the one hand, I was able to better understand and communicate my own needs, which also made it easier for those around me to understand me,” she says. “I also want to emphasise that medication is very helpful,” she adds. 

[…]

To raise awareness of ADHD and develop resources, she has contacted the Office for Equality, Diversity and Family Affairs. She is also involved in a national initiative to reduce the stigma around mental illness in science.

But that’s not all: ultimately, the aim is to bring greater inclusion and diversity – including neurodiversity – into academic institutions. “Research clearly shows that diverse teams are more creative and deliver better results because they bring in more perspectives,” she says. “In climate and environmental research in particular, we need solutions to problems that are complex and affect everyone. We still have a lot to change.”

In May 2023, Newsweek interviewed researcher and medical physicist Joanna Harper, and asked her to estimate the number of transgender athletes competing in US sports.

“While we don’t know the exact number of trans women competing in NCAA sports, I would be very surprised if there were more than 100 of them in the women’s category,” Harper replied.

That number is even smaller when it comes to middle school and high school athletes. Newsweek also spoke to Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, a leading voice in the bid to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

Yes, that’s right. Not 5000, not 500, not even 50 – just five trans student-athletes. All of this legislation, work, lobbying and anger – is aimed at preventing a tiny handful of young people from playing school sports. 

The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. […]  At its height, the coalition boasted 40% of global banking assets. And at the time of its launch, its co-founder, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, described the NZBA as the “breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs”.

So far a breakthrough remains at large. In evaluating the NZBA, the benchmark that ultimately matters is that of curbing global emissions and fossil fuel expansion. On both of these points, it’s not clear that the alliance has had any effect. Banks’ targets have been met with widespread criticism concerning lack of transparency and inconsistent or questionable methodologies, and recent research shows little to no difference between the financing and engagement impact of NZBA members and non-members. A separate study found banks that self-present as eco-conscious lend more to polluting industries than those that don’t. Impressively, there has been an overall uptick in fossil fuel financing since 2021 – after the group was formed.

But this raises a critical question: if these alliances were voluntary, non-binding, and seem to have done close to nothing to hinder banks financing fossil fuel expansion, why are banks bothering to quit?

The answer is always, in finance, a calculus of risk. At the time of NZBA’s founding, banks faced considerable reputational risk for being seen as climate laggards. The wind was in the sails of governments and institutions touting climate action, and banks acted accordingly. Today, on the back of record fossil fuel profitability, a protracted backlash against “woke capital” and the second coming of Trump, the calculus has changed.

[…]

In a statement published on 31 December, GFANZ announced it would drop its requirements for members to publish firm targets, allowing “any financial institution working to mobilise capital and lower the barriers to financing energy transition to participate” and earlier this month announced it would no longer work as an umbrella organisation, but a stand-alone body working to “mobilise” climate finance. For a project that still retains many prominent European banks within its ranks, the crumbling to pressure and change of direction was remarkably swift. More cynically, it might be read as an admission that all these “targets” and “disclosures” never meant much at all.

I will accept Bill Moyers as a credible witness:

We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This is a tough read.

Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump appointee, justified his preliminary ruling in Keohane v. Dixon under highly questionable legal and scientific grounds. He repeatedly misgendered the plaintiff while citing nonsensical claims about the medical treatment for trans people that go against WPATH guidelines and all known medical science on gender-affirming care, such as labeling gender dysphoria a “short-term delusion.”

Winsor also professed support for “psychotherapy” practices that are much more akin to “conversion therapy,” a long-debunked practice which doubles the risk of suicide of trans people forced to take part.

[…]

Under the new FDC policy, women face having “their heads forcibly shaved and receive disciplinary action for possessing any female undergarments and makeup.” According to a legal declaration filed on behalf of Michelle Ward, a trans woman in a Florida prison:

   The loss of my hair, along with female undergarments and makeup, has been earth-shattering for me…I stay awake crying many nights.

Forced head shaving beckons back to the dark history of Native American residential schools in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which mandated Native American boys have their hair cut to conform their appearances with Western gender standards.

The purpose of this policy was to humiliate Native American children and rob them of their basic humanity and connection to their culture and tribal identities. The stories of the women described in this article show that the intentions behind the FDC policy are no less cruel or dehumanizing in their nature. 

As global temperatures increase, Earth’s water cycle is changing. Over the past 50 years, this has led to an expansion of Earth’s tropical and subtropical zones. Tropical areas are moist and lush, but dry at the northern and southern edges.

These dry edges are pushing towards the poles. Regions that used to enjoy a gentler Mediterranean climate, as shown in the map below, are turning into dry subtropical zones.

They include highly populated regions, such as Southern California. Similarly, parts of Australia including Perth and much of southeast Australia has dried in recent decades, in a pattern consistent with tropical expansion.

Image

In addition to being The Sunniest Girl on the Internet™, Mimsy is able to break my heart and reduce me to tears. She does it on a regular basis, but in a good way.

My wife got me a cabbage patch doll as a solstice gift this year. I’m 47 years old. I started bawling as soon as I opened the package. This… is a complicated story.

[…]

I bawled. I held her against my chest and I cried, hard. I think I scared our kids a little bit. My wife gently prompted me to explain the significance of the gift, of the doll. I tried; I failed. And sorry to only say this now, near the end of the story, but I’m not going to be able to explain the full significance here, either.

I couldn’t put her down. Eventually the kids wandered away to do their own teenager things and my wife settled into one end of the couch to read. I leaned up against her and cuddled my doll. I was there for hours, cradling her, shifting her from one baby-holding position to another. I smelled her hair (it smells like yarn). I kissed her forehead.

I named her Elizabeth. I’ve always loved that name, especially because it has so many variants. I strongly suspect that she’ll end up being called Lizbet for short.

Because here’s the thing: when I hold her and I close my eyes, I’m an eight-year-old girl again. If I think about my parent’s house, I’m there. Eight years old and in a yellow play dress I never got to wear. Cradling Elizabeth. Hugging her. Talking to her. Watching television together. I’m an eight-year-old girl again but this time I got what I needed and I wasn’t too afraid to accept it.