Interesting stuff

Yeah there's a fair bit of that double-dipping going on - some people are going to get a pretty good bill when the ATO catches up with them.

And according to old mate Zeihan in Blowin's link:

"For most of the developed world, mass retirement and complete consumption collapses aren’t simply inevitable, they’ll arrive within the next 48 months."

Back to Larry Blair, does the footage of the Coke contest heat with WL and himself exist on the net anywhere? Youtube used to have it, waves were absolutely smoking too. Was location that sandbar at North Steyne? The times I drive past I have a look to see if it's as good, no luck so far.

Larry is a great surfer.

This'll 'please' some posters re: housing in Aus......from the ABC - "Interest-only loan reset hurting borrowers despite the rate cuts"

Retired police officers Peter and Bronwyn Dwight built up a large property portfolio to fund their retirement.
"After I got interested in property investing, I read so many books on the matter and I decided to create a goal to make a goal for 30 properties," Mr Dwight told 7.30.

"I think we got up to 16 income-producing properties and that meant we didn't quite reach our goal."

"But, hey, we set a goal for Mars and we landed on the moon."

Most of their properties are currently in interest-only periods.

"We went with interest-only mortgages because they provide a cash flow, you're not paying off the loan, as such," Mr Dwight said.

They took out a 30-year loan with the Commonwealth Bank on one of their properties.

For the first 15 years, they only paid interest on the loan — with three separate five-year interest-only periods.

When the most recent interest-only period reset this year though, the bank would not give them another interest-only period.

So they faced having to repay the principal in just 15 years.

"If it was going to revert to the principal and interest on the current interest rate that they had, the payments would have gone from about the $2,000 per month up to close to $7,000 a month," Ms Dwight said.

"Which just wouldn't have been financially viable for us to maintain, it would have forced us into having to consider selling a property before we were ready to do so."

After over "14 or 15 applications" to different banks, the Dwights were able to finally secure another interest-only term.

Inspirational aspirationals!

From what I know Johknee it’s a timebomb. Huge numbers of property investors took out interest only loans including 10s of thousands boomers with SMSFs. As your story mentions they need to be renewed periodically and the banks will increasingly take a hard line in renewing given the times. Of course one of the main beneficiaries to these arrangements are mortgage brokers who get fees and ongoing commissions each time a loan is renewed. The sort of parasitic industry that didn’t exist just a few years that was utterly savaged in the Banking RC, not that the government did anything about it.

"But, hey, we set a goal for Mars and we landed on the moon." x "Apollo 13"

Those guys got refi - they can continue to live the dream.

So come September when rent moratorium/repayment moratorium ends, what then? Is that the Kaboom? Do we see renters chucked out? Do we see landlords liquidating properties to get their repayments down?

Party On.

If you're thinking of buying a house, I'd be waiting until Spring.
Who knew there might be a problem with hundreds of thousands of people deliberately running losses on a rental properties for tax purposes?
Smoko ran the anti-negative gearing fear campaign pretty strongly last year, and D Day is in September. I understand that a shit load of LNP MPs have multiple properties that are negatively geared. Shame if a few of them went bankrupt and weren't allowed to sit in parliament. We all know that it's not going to happen because their big business mates would bail them out, but we can dream.

It's quite surreal, there is no consequence any more.

Both sides of politics are up to their snouts in property, lots of Labor people got skin in the game in the inner suburbs

What's the bet the aspirational pigs - let's call them Joh & Karen - voted for the current federal government?

Actually, I'd wager Joh went Liberal and Karen went One Nation. Big business and bigotry! Match made in heaven!

Yew!

Australia! You're standing in it!

Yes Guy Smiley, Labor MPs have negatively geared properties but there's a few libs with 10+ properties. I'm sure Gina would be happy to buy a few at generous prices just in case a LNP MP's finances got a little tight.

Ask yourselves, can you think of anything that Scomo and his merry fellows wouldn't do to keep propping up the property market?

Carn Blowin, there's much more to this than just bloody immigration.

Migration of any flavour isn't likely to be too popular for some time I'd say. They'll have to find another way to prop up our economy...

This is pretty funny

All this crap about a housing crisis when Joe and Karen and their fellow baby boomers have 13 investment properties. the ABC estimates there are 730,000 interest only property loans . Majority would be property investors and if they weren’t investing and driving prices up there wouldn’t be a housing shortage.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-19/coronavirus-combines-with-end-to-...

yep that's definitely an input distracted

change of subject, watch as Argentine coastal air patrol overflies 400 factory ships strip mining their squid from within their national waters, and also a marine sanctuary:
(in Spanish)

https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/aguas-nadie-400-barcos-extranjeros-depre...

Where are the boats from VJ?

The Guardian refers to the boats being from East Asia but could probably interpret that as China.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/01/stealth-plunder-of-a...

....a bit assumptuous there distracted...

a bit bloody downright racist possibly...

"The Guardian refers to the boats being from East Asia..."

sounds like possibly a fair assumption though...

the guardian's new polite word for china,?

I could be wrong, but I'd put money on china...

"...Republicans throughout this time were usually as bad or worse on these issues, but Democrats have lately positioned themselves as the more aggressive promoters of strong-arm policies, from control of Internet speech to the embrace of domestic spying. In the last four years the blue-friendly press has done a complete 180, going from cheering Edward Snowden to lionizing the CIA, NSA, and FBI, and making on-air partners out of drone-and-surveillance all-stars like John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden. There are now too many ex-spooks on CNN and MSNBC to count, while there isn’t a single regular contributor on any of the networks one could describe as antiwar.

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.

The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?

My family is in quarantine, I worry about a premature return to work, and sure, I laughed at that Shaun of the Dead photo of Ohio protesters protesting state lockdown laws. But I also recognize the crisis is also raising serious civil liberties issues, from prisoners trapped in deadly conditions to profound questions about speech and assembly, the limits to surveillance and snitching, etc. If this disease is going to be in our lives for the foreseeable future, that makes it more urgent that we talk about what these rules will be, not less — yet the party I grew up supporting seems to have lost the ability to do so, and I don’t understand why."

interesting stuff...

scary developments...

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties

...to those who's reaction is always to dismiss the source, .....constantly, stubbornly, annoyingly, pigheadedly, ...taibbi ain't no right wing nut job...

But you are, Sepp.

Or am I being 'assumptious'?

I just can't get my head around the rape and pillaging of marine ecosystems around the world like this example in Argentina. This stealth fishing technique by what most reports and evidence you see nowadays is being carried out by Chinese fleets around the globe is disturbing to say the least. Just think of the mindset here. You have a bunch of people that decide to take their business to the other side of the world to completely decimate the commercial industry of another soveriegn country. It's like them dropping their combine harvesters in your paddock at night, harvesting your crop then fucking off before daybreak. Ask the Somalis how this selfish business plan worked out for them.

no more than you grammar nazi, not big on poetic license are you?

bloody typical authoritarian english teacher type...

I think you got a sprecial mention in taibbi's article

I bet you're a wiz at Scrabble too, Sepp.

better than you think brown overall boy

Yeah Syppo, it seems like the “progressive” parties in both the US and Oz have either been wedged into supporting pro-authoritarian legislation or actually believe it’s for the best.
As the bloke on the street bleats “if you’ve got nothing to hide...”

If what I saw in Micronesia is anything to go by, the fishing fleets will be operating under plenty of flags. PRC, ROC, ROK, Malaysia...

But, then again, few of the countries other than PRC would have the diplomatic cojones to do it so brazenly in the EEZ of a sovereign nation on the other side of the world...

But,

Didn't you know Gary, the South Sandwich islands are undisputed Chinese sovereign territory. Some Chinese bloke was fishing there in a row-boat in the early 16th century, drew a map on a napkin and claimed it for China. They can't find the map now but doesn't matter because they say it's so.

The other day I posted a link to Matthew Evan’s TV show called What’s the Catch. Recommended. You would be sick if you knew how Asia grows and feeds the prawns on your pizza. Ponds under pig pens so your prawn grew up on pig’s shit or how they dredge the sea floor and grind up whatever they find and feed that to the prawns. It’s absolutely fucking disgusting how this happens and that we allow this shit into the country. There has to be a reckoning and maybe Covid19 is just the start. I get so fucking angry how the environment is fucked over time and time again for the moneeee

In addition to that Guy, I recently watched a doco on the Norwegian salmon farming industry, which I'm guessing the same processes and procedures are replicated around the world.

As much as I love it, I can't eat salmon now.

GuySmiley. I always wonder why they pull people up at customs with food in their bags but then let farmed prawns like you mention into the country. Personally I'd rather eat that weird shit they confiscate at customs than the imported prawns.

@indo - good one!

@ guy - Worked in a chicken factory (in Australia) in uni holidays. Anything inedible to humans in the 6 week old hormone and antibiotic fed chickens was ground up and added to chook feed in the feed mill to be fed back to the next generation of chooks.

Back to those South American fishing boats, I later saw images from space and the conglomeration of boats issues more light than the cities of Argentina, that was a total mind snap to consider.

This stuff was in a 'tragedy of the commons' chapter of a book I read some years ago called 'The Meaning of the 21st Century' by a noted futurist. But I had no idea they would light up like a city. I have fond memories of being on WA cray boat, leave at 3 am in the darkness, you could see a few other little lights heading out to the horizon in the calm morning sea & you knew it was other crews and boats, very mellow as the sun rose (on nice weather day, swell <2m). To imagine this scale of factory fishing is incredible.

VJ we used to go to a mate of mines shack which was about 50km down the coast from JBay back in the 80's. This shack was a 3 hour 4WD mission to get to with candles at night for lighting it was so basic. During squid season the boats would sit about 5km off shore and it was like daylight inside the shack. You could literally read a book it was so bright. We used to collect all the lost squid jigs off the beach and jag them on the split pole walls of the shack as a feature. Can't see too many split poles anymore - just squid jigs. Probably no squid left around those parts nowadays.

VJ a couple of times a year here the Japanese sit offshore catching bioluminescent squid that make their way to the surface in their millions. I could say billions but Vic might take me to task on that as I have no verifiable link. Anyway the boats are rigged with dozens of lights (I think most have changed to LED's now) but are so bright that the fishos can't have one patch of skin exposed or their skin fries.

It's quite pretty looking our my living room window watching them twinkle away out at sea.

edit: appears to be same same Gary, just different parts of the world.

Fuck, Who leaked the memo about Dan Andrews "signing up to become an official tributary/ vassal state of China."?
Blowin is on to us commies in the Victorian ALP. I wonder if he knows about the Vic Government bunker in the Kremlin. Dammit, I've said too much.

If only this were further from the truth...

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/uncategorized/nations-boomers-demand-mor...

The level of entitlement is pretty staggering, though not surprising.

Blowin, I'm just mocking your opinions because that's precisely what your conspiratorial nonsense deserves.
So fucking what if the Box Hill Police flew a Chinese flag on China's national day? Box Hill has a large number of Chinese residents and the police want to have a good relationship with all people in their local area. One flag on one day sends people like you, and the cultural warriors, into an angry moral panic. Fuck, you get triggered so easily.
Dan Andrews signs on to the Belt and Road. You have zero knowledge of what is in the contract, but it's sent you into a frenzy claiming Andrews is beholden to his masters in Beijing. No matter what China does, you disapprove it.
Your racism is just fucking pathetic.