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[SaintsSeptember]

Computer skills and coding are certainly available to kids in the free education system in Australia.
My son originally planned to become a "software developer".
I had grave concerns that coding is one of the most mobile jobs possible.
There are a lot of people in India and China who will happily write coding for a day, and accept payment that wouldn't buy you four beers in a bar in Melbourne.

Anyway i think he eventually worked out that it could be a bit boring, and he's now more interested in cyber-security. ( i think he likes the idea of legitimately learning hacking skills )

 

[bergholt]

Computer skills and coding are certainly available to kids in the free education system in Australia.
My son originally planned to become a "software developer".
I had grave concerns that coding is one of the most mobile jobs possible.
There are a lot of people in India and China who will happily write coding for a day, and accept payment that wouldn't buy you four beers in a bar in Melbourne.

Nah, not any more. Developer salaries in the rest of the world are about 60% to 80% of Australia, and continuing to rise. That's for real developers, if you hire Infosys or similar then you can pay a lot less, but the quality is literally about 20%.

And that's ignoring the US. Rough numbers for a senior developer:

- Melb/Syd $160k package
- India/China/Eastern Europe $100k - $120k
- Germany/UK/most of US $180k
- Silicon Valley/NYC $250k - $300k

Cybersecurity isn't a bad option, but software dev is very very safe going forward.

 

[mightymalaka]

Computer skills and coding are certainly available to kids in the free education system in Australia.
My son originally planned to become a "software developer".
I had grave concerns that coding is one of the most mobile jobs possible.
There are a lot of people in India and China who will happily write coding for a day, and accept payment that wouldn't buy you four beers in a bar in Melbourne.

Anyway i think he eventually worked out that it could be a bit boring, and he's now more interested in cyber-security. ( i think he likes the idea of legitimately learning hacking skills )

Sounds exactly like my son!
Personally have no idea wtf he is on about half the time, but considering his old man and his ways
the young fella is doing very well for himself!

 

[MUFKilda]

Aw hell no; you lot must be mad. The worst we have to worry about is a wasp sting. No, I wouldn't be happy with this.

 

[mightymalaka]

Aw hell no; you lot must be mad. The worst we have to worry about is a wasp sting. No, I wouldn't be happy with this.

Not to mention just how powerful our one eyed snakes are!

 

[MUFKilda]

Not to mention just how powerful our one eyed snakes are!

Venomous?

 

[st_trav_ofWA]

i gotta say growing up i reckon i could count how many snakes i saw in the wild on one hand ... this month alone ive see 4 ... and two of them were big bastards too ... one of them this silly old coot was trying to sho away with is walking stick ... he is very lucky to not have gotten bitten .. seems like in Perth we have had some what of a dugite population explosion, not that they bother me i leave them alone they leave me alone happy days .. its those bloody tiger snakes that are angry feckers , they will legit chase you ... but again most bites happen when people try to kill them and they retaliate ...

 

[gringo2011]

My issue in getting rid of negative gearing, is that , it really isn't giving any benefit that every business doesn't already have.
So it just takes one more possible way for an individual to make wealth away from them.
The next step would be that there are no wealthy people investing in property, but instead there are business consortium's.

It's a Ponzi scheme wealth builder though. Equity is not real money unless you sell it but you can take rental income. Have a look at how many empty shops there are everywhere now. The rents have gone up to justify % returns and pushed businesses out.

The amounts that properties sell for now is insane. A $1.2 million loan will cost about $5500 a month to service, that's $66,000 a year to service. That's a $90,000 a year wage after tax is taken out and with out any rates, bills, maintenance etc taken out. That buys you a fix upper in the inner suburbs now so you need to add a further $60,000 on for a kitchen and bathroom and get handy with the paintbrush.

I'm no expert on money but that's a ridiculously unsustainable amount of money to pay and need readjusting. They need to remove negative gearing but no one wants to.

It means you need two high wage earners and you need to not have kids.

 

[gringo2011]

It's a word called "lagom"... it pretty much runs the whole society and is very much based around a consensus culture and not trying to have too much... looking for balance. Business has to listen to unions, no one, including CEOs work beyond the 9-5. Parents are given a lot of parental leave.... They get a lot right here. The consensus culture can get annoying with the endless meetings and compromise but overall it is a good thing.

It's a pretty good place to live, you still have wealthy people but there are so many tech start-ups here, it's pretty nuts considering the population size. You hear a lot about it being "socialist" but it doesn't feel like it. Personal tax is high (corporate is low) but you don't have expenses like education and health... I certainly feel like I take home more in my pocket every month than I did in Australia

A little story about Spotify that has happened since I came here. Spotify was just this small thing that people in their 20s and 30s would share around Stockholm 10 years ago. You needed an invite to use it and then you'd make playlists and what was good is you'd use those playlists at parties where others had Spotify. It got very popular in the city and an invite was hard to get so there was buzz around it. Then they started charging for it, then spread around the world and have become the youtube of music streaming. It was a very smart way of setting things up and just an example of the way they try and conquer the word as often as possible (and often succeed).

The key to Sweden is the skilled workforce in tech. Education is free in Sweden and the winters are long cold and dark. Kids grow up with coding in their blood. My sister was recently over visiting with her teenagers and we talked a lot about Australia and the future. I for one am very worried about it. I feel like with the internet being so badly dealt with, it will hamstring the country greatly. I also feel like Australia needs an education revolution to get up-to-date with countries like Sweden and to be able to compete with the giant countries that churn out so many tech wokers.

In the economy of the future, your citizens will need certain skills. Having the best schools and universities still being as expensive as they are in Australia isn't sustainable long-term. It maybe in countries with huge populations, but I really believe in the future, the idea that anyone will need to pay to be well educated will rightly have died... Opening up education will be the key to a prosperous economy in the future world as you will need as many bright minds as possible from all walks of life contributing. Tech innovation will be the backbone of many countries. Yes Australia has natural resources but this has made us complacent unfortunately and, unlike countries like Norway that tax their natural resources and have made all of their citizens millionaires, when Rudd tried to put a (rather weak it has to be said) mining tax on our industry that was booming, he wasn't allowed. That could have financed all sorts of things that would have put us in a great place but it was shut down.

Sadly, I see Australia as being one of the more under-prepared countries for the next stage of the world where tech is king, both infrastructure-wise and education-wise. And we are saddled with politicians that sadly either don't know the seriousness of the situation we find ourselves in, don't care, would find it impossible to work with their opposites ideologically to find the best outcome for the country or all of the above.

I think Australians still suffer from having had it so easy for so long. You just need to dig something up and sell it. We don't keep the money ourselves now and don't have plan B. We didn't save anything in the mining boom while countries like Norway put them in a future fund. We give our gas away free pretty much while countries like Qatar get rich off theirs. We also moved away from a socialist system where we had taxes pay for essential services and government run utilities. We really followed the US system that has doe nothing good for their society and will keep paying for it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...0-billion-sovereign-wealth-fund-idUSKBN18T283

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...hore-gas-wealth-is-going-20161009-gryaoi.html

 

[gringo2011]

Computer skills and coding are certainly available to kids in the free education system in Australia.
My son originally planned to become a "software developer".
I had grave concerns that coding is one of the most mobile jobs possible.
There are a lot of people in India and China who will happily write coding for a day, and accept payment that wouldn't buy you four beers in a bar in Melbourne.

Anyway i think he eventually worked out that it could be a bit boring, and he's now more interested in cyber-security. ( i think he likes the idea of legitimately learning hacking skills )

Yeah coding is being taught to millions and coding will get more automated as well. Teaching creativity and abstract thinking will be a much better long term thing. If you can conceptualise Fortnite you get rich, the 300 people coding it in Mumbai are getting * all of it.

 

[gringo2011]

Nah, not any more. Developer salaries in the rest of the world are about 60% to 80% of Australia, and continuing to rise. That's for real developers, if you hire Infosys or similar then you can pay a lot less, but the quality is literally about 20%.

And that's ignoring the US. Rough numbers for a senior developer:

- Melb/Syd $160k package
- India/China/Eastern Europe $100k - $120k
- Germany/UK/most of US $180k
- Silicon Valley/NYC $250k - $300k

Cybersecurity isn't a bad option, but software dev is very very safe going forward.

We know a kid that does security and straight out of uni is working for IBM and is getting paid heaps. I have a mate who works remote for Google in security and he's loaded. I'd be doing that instead. I think the amount of people being hothoused will eventually flood the market.

 

[BigPowerForward]

Aw hell no; you lot must be mad. The worst we have to worry about is a wasp sting. No, I wouldn't be happy with this.

Here you have more chance of being bitten by a Bull ant and those little bastards hurt like ****** .
If you do get bitten by a Bull ant, any Buddhist tendencies that you may have quickly disappear.
You will want to exact revenge by as many means as possible. My size 12 boot on its head in grinding motion is usually where I start

 

[Yawkey way]

Absolute bastards but let’s face it just about everything here has attitude.

 

[MUFKilda]

I'd be constantly be shitting my smalls over there, seeing snakes and spiders everywhere; paranoid and living on my nerves.

 

[MUFKilda]

**** off. Kill everything but the koalas.

 

[Persevering Saint]

Apparently there are fellas out there who get turned on by John Lennon's music.

I know, they're hard to imagine.

 

[BigPowerForward]

**** off. Kill everything but the koalas.

If you come here you should be more concerned about the feral Port Adelaide and Collingwood supportors

 

[MUFKilda]

If you come here you should be more concerned about the feral Port Adelaide and Collingwood supportors

That's true natural history. The missing link discovered; homo boganis

 

[Nutsngum]

It's a Ponzi scheme wealth builder though. Equity is not real money unless you sell it but you can take rental income. Have a look at how many empty shops there are everywhere now. The rents have gone up to justify % returns and pushed businesses out.

The amounts that properties sell for now is insane. A $1.2 million loan will cost about $5500 a month to service, that's $66,000 a year to service. That's a $90,000 a year wage after tax is taken out and with out any rates, bills, maintenance etc taken out. That buys you a fix upper in the inner suburbs now so you need to add a further $60,000 on for a kitchen and bathroom and get handy with the paintbrush.

I'm no expert on money but that's a ridiculously unsustainable amount of money to pay and need readjusting. They need to remove negative gearing but no one wants to.

It means you need two high wage earners and you need to not have kids.

I honestly do not really know where all the money has actually come from to pay for all these homes. Absolute middleclass suburbs (and ones that remain so) are well over a million to get in. Who the christ actually earns enough wage to service these loans?

 

[Yawkey way]

**** off. Kill everything but the koalas.

That bloke doing the voice over needs a punch in the throat, what the hell accent is that meant to be.

It’s pretty funny really a normal person going about their business might run into a red back spider or two in the back yard but that’s about it really. There are plenty of blue ringed octopus and sting rays in the bay but most people would never see them. I’m a pretty keen spear fisherman so I see lots of sting rays their generally pretty docile but some big buggers will follow you for the fish on your float. I once had a blue ringer go for me, I was swimming out over shallow reef to dive and for some reason it was coming down on the current and pissed off blue rings pulsing, I flipped onto my back and gave it two big flippers as I made my escape. They look like something that should be in a salad until they get worked up then the blue rings become visible.

They missed my favourite Aussie the yabby. The brits have a version that has taken a pounding from the American crawfish. The yabby would make short work of both, they grow to a decent size and are fun to catch for kids as well. The funny thing about them is you can catch them by tying a piece of meat to a bit of string and throwing it into the dam, lake or river. The yabby latches on and you pull them out after letting it soak for awhile. The funny bit is all they have to do is let go to get away but they don’t. Oh no up they come to dispute ownership of the bait and they can and will draw blood if they latch onto your finger. They amuse me because they seem to epitomise the Aussie fauna it all has attitude, the crabs here aren’t docile either they will go for you as well haha.

There’s a very funny old kids tv show based on some Morris gleitzman books called misery guts, it’s about an English kid and his family who move to Queensland and meet the locals.

 

[gringo2011]

I'd be constantly be shitting my smalls over there, seeing snakes and spiders everywhere; paranoid and living on my nerves.

We have killed everything in Victoria, when I was a kid we used to see snakes at our country property, I haven't seen one for 10 years. WA is frontier land, they still have wildlife. They even have fish still.

 

[SaintsSeptember]

I think Australians still suffer from having had it so easy for so long. You just need to dig something up and sell it. We don't keep the money ourselves now and don't have plan B. We didn't save anything in the mining boom while countries like Norway put them in a future fund. We give our gas away free pretty much while countries like Qatar get rich off theirs. We also moved away from a socialist system where we had taxes pay for essential services and government run utilities. We really followed the US system that has doe nothing good for their society and will keep paying for it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...0-billion-sovereign-wealth-fund-idUSKBN18T283

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...hore-gas-wealth-is-going-20161009-gryaoi.html

I was pretty informed about things that went on in Victoria's SEC, and it was stuffed. I can 100% see why they went down the privatisation route. SEC was horribly corrupt and people were rorting it for anything they could get.
So after so much shitting in their nest, they cleaned it out.

I tend to see things like a big pendulum, if things swing too much one way , it swings back the other way, but it doesn't stop in the middle, it keeps swinging.

 

[SaintsSeptember]

Here you have more chance of being bitten by a Bull ant and those little bastards hurt like ****** .
If you do get bitten by a Bull ant, any Buddhist tendencies that you may have quickly disappear.
You will want to exact revenge by as many means as possible. My size 12 boot on its head in grinding motion is usually where I start

The Jack Jumpers are shockers, people with a reaction to them tend to have escalating symptoms each time they get bitten. People have had to move to different parts of the country or risk life threatening reactions.

 

[Yawkey way]

We have killed everything in Victoria, when I was a kid we used to see snakes at our country property, I haven't seen one for 10 years. WA is frontier land, they still have wildlife. They even have fish still.

The bay is full of fish gringo it hasn’t been this healthy in years.

Still plenty of snakes from all reports too maybe you’ve just been lucky but the pressure from people and development does impact the wildlife that’s for sure. My sister has a place in the country and one of my daughters spends a fair bit of time in the Bendigo area and their always going on about brown snakes.

In the bay the government got rid of the scallop dredgers and brought out the commercial fishing licences. They have also done some good work on marine parks and re establishing local angasi oyster beds that were torn up by dredging etc. They are working dropping limestone blocks and other material off some of the beaches in port Phillip. You probably see the shells when your at the beach they’re bigger and flater than a pacific oyster shell. The Elwood canal is teeming with small mullet and bream at certain times of the early summer and the bird life around here is fanatasic.

WA is the frontier that’s for sure it’s so far away and so bloody big it will take longer to screw up.

 

[Yawkey way]

I was pretty informed about things that went on in Victoria's SEC, and it was stuffed. I can 100% see why they went down the privatisation route. SEC was horribly corrupt and people were rorting it for anything they could get.
So after so much shitting in their nest, they cleaned it out.

I tend to see things like a big pendulum, if things swing too much one way , it swings back the other way, but it doesn't stop in the middle, it keeps swinging.

I don’t doubt that but it would have been sold off regardless, it wasn’t about how well run it was.