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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • In my limited experience I cannot stress enough how much I prefer small regional airports.

    Walk in, bags checked and through security in 5 minutes, walk a short distance through an area that’s not crowded and not full of shops, and be seated near the gate with a coffee a few minutes later. After a short wait, because you don’t need to get there an hour or more early, walk across a bit of open tarmac to a plane that’s not bursting at the seams, then take off after hardly any taxiing. So good.





  • Wish that was the case in AU, ours is paid upfront in a lump sum and is non-refundable. If you refinance above 80% you pay it again, in full, upfront. If you pay the loan down to below 80%, doesn’t matter, no prorata refund. It’s 20-30k down the toilet, just in LMI. That’s on top of the 50-80k in stamp duty also pissed away :(

    To make it worse, many add the LMI to their mortgage, so they pay interest on the higher balance. It’s also a deterrent for people to refinance while they’re within that 80+% LVR bracket, so shopping for a better deal is mostly pointless. Banks aren’t just disinterested in pushing for a better deal, they’re actively incentivised against it.




  • Australia seems to be doing its best to ditch it. Medicare levy plus a surcharge above a certain wage, but that surcharge goes away if you have private health cover. Health insurance companies have zero incentive to set premiums below what that surcharge would have been, particularly when, if you take up private health after you turn 31, then there’s a govt loading on it. Gap charges (ie the cost over and above that covered by Medicare) grow every year, bulk billing is disappearing, the public hospital system is constantly being underfunded, etc.

    Just privatise healthcare, what’s the worst that could happen?

    / looks at US healthcare, and how well privatising just about everything else has gone for us so far




  • She makes some good points, but only focuses on Google’s monopoly being an issue. It is, but there’s no mention of privacy concerns, the oversaturation of ads, space being created for ads by deliberately worsening the UX, etc. The industry itself is a shitshow.

    The issue isn’t so much that Google has a monopoly on the enormously invasive data that’s collected. The issue is that it is being collected.