A big advantage is cash works when it’s offline.

Buy with what money?

Show me the reputable bank that will loan the entire cost of a house, to someone who obviously can never pay off that loan on their current income. And I’ll show you a bank that’s going to collapse from unserviced debts.

It’s weird how that happens, huh?

Housing prices inflate, the rent goes up. Housing price growth slows, the rent goes up. Housing prices come down, the rent goes up.

I’ve yet to hear anyone involved in real estate tell me coherently what could ever cause the rent to come down.

You can utilize AI without a data center

This is a symptom of using the over-broad, deliberately vague marketing term “AI”.

If you can create (train) it without huge-scale violation of consent, without huge scale copyright infringement, without huge scale badly-treated human labour for labelling and refining, without huge-scale electricity and water consumption?

Then it isn’t the “AI” being discussed in the article and therefore irrelevant to the point.

Also worth noting: (some of) those outside Australia seem largely to be responsible for the rise in One Nation popularity, by automated bot farms spreading racist lies on social media.

They are polling uncomfortably high, which puts them way too close to power. Worth taking seriously in order to effectively combat them.

Stop penalising teens for wanting to socialise.

Stop demanding we identify ourselves to unaccountable private actors, merely to socialise.

Instead: Penalise the platform corporations that make an environment friendly to predators, abusers, scammers, and extractionists.

Keep penalising those corporations, until they learn to stop. Or go out of business because their business model is incompatible with our wellbeing.

For one thing, I want our society to welcome children, not dehumanise them as “semen demon”.

We don’t have enough people now that want to help. Go to any nursing home and see that we need to import the help.

Don’t want to help? At the pay rates and job conditions on offer, that’s right.

An obvious solution is to raise the offered pay (by whatever means; the government can certainly afford to subsidise this) and improve the job conditions (by regulation enforcing proper treatment of workers).

There are plenty of people already here willing to work, if the work is properly remunerated and stable and dignified. If the job is worth doing – as we both agree it is – then let’s show that, by making it feasible for plenty of people to have a dignified life doing that work.

Because we all need help as we get older.

Yes, we do. Why do we need more births for that?

There are still plenty of people being born, and growing up and entering the work force as adults. We (i.e. society, i.e. whoever holds the purse strings) can offer better pay and better job conditions for those workers, so that it’s a more appealing career for the people who will already be looking for jobs.

Better help for the people who will be born anyway. Not pushing for more births.

GDP merely measures the sum of economic transactions (“activity”) during a period.

It is blind to the distinction between socially beneficial activity (preventing illness, educating children) versus socially harmful activity (selling tobacco, mining cryptocurrency); all of that counts as positive GDP.

It is blind to anything (e.g. doing your own housework, raising your own children, growing your own food, reducing your consumption of stuff generally) which can’t be measured in financial transactions.

GDP is always a useless measure if we’re interested in what’s good for a society.

But it’s pretty good for measuring how wealthy stock market gamblers are feeling. So, for as long as our political leaders represent those interests and not ours, GDP persists.

It takes continual effort to offset the Coriolis effect down under.

if they made their homes more energy efficient

Assertion misses the point: Most Australians whose homes need to be made more energy efficient, are renting and have no agency in doing anything like that to their homes.

Telling those people "you could save on your power bill by modifications to your home”, is just cruel. We know our homes are energy inefficient, we can’t make the changes required.

What’s needed is legislation that mandates the landlord must pay for those improvements, before they take any more money from the renter.