Starfighter

2/2 focus on your relationships with the people around you. your family hopefully love you, hang out with your friends, ride your motorbike, jump into a hobby you're tempted by.

tbh i'm not sure if you've looked your own death in the eye and i'm not going to ask on a public forum, but if you have then thank you for still being here and no matter how ugly the decision to live was, it was the right one. if you haven't had those thoughts, then know you are a valuable human regardless of socio-economic status.

either way, the road back is built on small things. there is very little you can do about the orange man or the australian prime minister of the week, but you can make your mum a coffee and take her for a walk.

you will have many relapses into despondency and i reccommend reaching out to a professional or a friend or whoever, but there is a road back.

1/2 no one is 'too analytical', you're using that as an excuse to accept your unhappy status quo.

the world has always been a mess tbh, and we keep stumbling on. one day we'll stop, but don't sit around waiting for it. optimism isn't a natural state, it's a choice.

without wanting to assume or preach, you sound like you're looking for big picture, global scale explanations to your personal unhappiness. as enjoyable as it would be, marching the bankers to the guillotine or buying a house isn't going to make you happy in the way you need to be happy.

you sound really bloody miserable atm, and to stay sane i suggest keeping your view small scale. so what if you can't buy a house or land a job in your field of study? i don't work in my field of study, and tbh i cbf switching careers now i'm experienced in my job. i've had to grind to get near house deposit levels, but the house will bring its own chains if i pursue it.

that was a lot to digest, and im not going to pretend to know economics like uppercut does, so for a pure economic debate i think you'll get more nerdiness fun elsewhere.

instead i'll focus on your last couple of sentences.

there is always hope. young people have and do create something from worse, and eventually we inherit the throne. hopefully our kids will meme on us less than we meme on our elders.

Seems these industries and investors have a god-given right to get rich. They've delayed anti-money laundering legislation for over 13 years that would force accountants and RE agents to report sus transactions. It is thought that $1 billion a year of foreign property investment is likely money laundering. They've successfully kept in place a ridiculous tax discount making it far cheaper to rent out a house than live in it. They got the govt. to put in place a 'first home buyers grant' or $20k, prices instantly shot up $80k (1/4 or less deposit). Now they're lobbying for a $40-50k grant, that will see prices shoot up by $100k or more, in a depression. It's a direct subsidy to an unsustainable industry. They're lobbying intensely to take immigration to record highs. The RBA spruiks property in their reports. I know central banks are corrupt, but WTF?

The main problem is that immigration is crucial to our economic mismanagement. Since the GFC the govt and RBA decided that housing would be the main driver of the economy creating a massively bloated construction sector. Loose monetary policy and high foreign investment enabled a huge bubble in the East. This didn't happen in Perth and Adelaide to nearly the same extent as they've had less population growth. The immigration is the spark for the speculative fire.

There are actually tens of thousands of vacant investment properties in Mel and Syd. They rely on population growth to keep pressure on land prices. If you cut immigration prices might fall 25-30%, and this isn't acceptable to those invested in this distorted, heavily subsidised market. These people have huge sway, and include a lot of our politicians and senior public servants. There is a powerful lobby group behind the bloated real estate and construction industries.

Last night I actually realised how wrong Spark's 'clinching argument' with that chart was. The much lower looking bump actually represents twice the number of people as the higher one form the late sixties. Resources are constrained by absolute changes, not relative. You can argue about the carrying capacity but issues will come in well short of that. The green movement has meant no major dams have been built for Syd/Melb for decades and our electricity grid is just barely scraping by in summer, destabilised by irregular renewables and the loss of old coal stations. We need to fix those problems first.

I've read the papers Spark was talking about, and some recent, Aus specific-ones. Basically the immigration 'bump' is small but there is a labour (hence wage) dilution effect. If you take the 50 we had very cheap land, few regulations, a huge potential to grow, hence the extra growth from immigration would well outweigh any wage dilution.

It's not the Menzies era anymore. We're highly regulated, very expensive (the cost of commercial rent is a huge issue) and major projects take twice as long to approve and complete as in the US or Europe. Heck, it often takes six months to get permission to extend a patio. We simply don't have the growth potential, hence big working-population increases dilute wages with no growth. The business environment needs fixing, especially in the Eastern states.

From a classical economics view, greatly simplified, growth occurs from the value of people's production going up, something that occurs though saving, investment & entrepreneurialism. The idea of aggregate demand is meaningless as ones ability to demand is generated through ability to produce (Say's law) so 'demand deficiency' is not possible. Merely adding jobs won't do it, nor will just adding people, but that does come with real costs. Hence the population can grow without any growth in individual wealth.

The jobs issue is not 'jobs Australians won't do', the issue is skilled mig. visas for jobs which have huge labour surpluses. Geology is one such job, many jobs I applied for get 30 applicants a position. The industry association I was a member of had a figure that 1 year in-field unemployment for graduates is 80%. This is common in STEM here. Skilled visa holders aren't bringing anything in that isn't there already.

2/2

in terms of land pressures, i can't speak for australia but over here a lot of foreign ownership was white rich lister characters buying their 43rd holiday home (you should have seen the piece on billionaires and their doomsday bunkers in nz) or businesses owned by certain genocidal authoritarian governments purchasing farmland. your everyday fish and chip shop worker can't price you out of the property market because he's in the same boat as you.

1/2

the gfc was created by people giving out dumb loans and loving assets that didn't physically exist, and the covid crash has been caused by well...covid, and international tourism and business travel is the main spreader. australias main importer of covid was a gaggle of boomers on a fancy boat.

immigration is an easy target for complex problems, because every good populist tory knows nobody likes a brown person with ideas above their station, and this distracts from things like predator landlords buying everything they can in an unregulated industry which prices many out of the market and to use a very current example, businesses who have long touted the glory of the free market begging for socialism (but only for themselves) at the slightest sniffle in an airport.

Unfortunately I don't see that attitude going away any time soon. I don't know about you, but over that past couple of years, especially since I started reading about the influence of the derivatives market, I think the whole system will need to come crashing down first. And on this case immigration is a crucial part of those people gaming the system in their favour (I can explain more if you want).

It's hard when the ones who say they're saving everything are the ones preventing you from saving for a rainy day, and I don't have anyone to vote for either. I don't the problems going away after the disease, and it's something that really keeps me up at night.

Would you like me explain my view from an economics standpoint? I discovered classical economics, including its pre-Samuelson textbooks about two years ago and it explains why I made the post I did. I think it provides a good explanation of the past twenty or so years too.

the gfc happened in my final year of high school, the mining boom crashed in my final year of uni (not a huge disaster but prevented me from obtaining work in my field) and now just as i've reached the nz middle class, covid has crashed our economy.

all of these were preventable. the little people will always be the victims of those who can afford to fail. immigrants aren't the enemy, the enemy is the people who directly caused these events through their neglect, selfishness and stupidity.

what i've learned is to save for a rainy day, never ever trust a money person and always use my vote to prevent the people described above from continuing to rig the game in their favour. you've probably seen the bleating from certain sections that a blip in the precious economy isn't worth saving tens of thousands of lives.

the sooner we purge the idea we live to serve the economy and rewrite it to being the economy serves the people, the better off we will be.

i'll listen. it is good you've still got your job, even if you're not feeling it.

that sucks man. i can listen if you want to talk.

are you ok?

Hey mate, read your post about how you're getting on. Hope you're doing ok. Look after yourself.

As a fellow Earth Sciences survivor, good luck with your exams mate.

I did postgrad and still didn't get a job in the sector so I feel your pain.