Hi all, sorry for being a bit slow on creating this new thread.
I have a few updates but I’ll post them in separate comments so they have separate comment chains.
Census
I’m working on a census survey like lemmy.ca did here. I didn’t have access to the original survey questions but I’m trying to align with their survey so we can compare against it. Though not everything is relevant so some things will be a bit different. I’m planning on doing this some time around the instance birthday at the start of June, and repeating it each year as Lemmy.ca does.
I’ve been fighting with lemmy a bit recently, it’s going down randomly and I’m not sure why. I have started disabling things to see if I can isolate it. The main one you might notice missing is the automod that handles spam, so if you see spam please report it and I’ll handle it manually.
Nice idea! Any thoughts on presentation? A post with info, links, and screen shots would probably be easiest, but maybe we can do better?
I’ll try to think of some major things that have happened in the last year.
Looking back through old posts I’m feeling sad about all the cool people who have slowly dropped off over the year. But also all the ones who are still here so that’s cool!
In that case probably the strongest argument is that if it were legal, many people would get off charges of real CSAM because the prosecuter can’t prove that it wasn’t AI generated.
That’s not quite what I was getting at over the course of the comment thread.
It one scenario, AI material is legal. Those with real CSAM use the defense that it’s actually AI and you can’t prove otherwise. In this scenario, no innocent men are going to prison, and most guilty men aren’t either.
The second scenario we make AI material illegal. Now the ones with real CSAM go to prison, and many people with AI material do too because it’s illegal and they broke the law.
There absolutely is, however, $5k is pretty minimal so I’m not sure it’s measurable in this case.
In general, with a bit of a lag, when people can borrow more because of low interest rates, house prices shoot up. When people can borrow less, house sales plummet (people don’t tend to sell when they can’t get what they paid for it, so sales fall instead as people stay put - though prices will fall a bit as some people will still need to sell but buyers won’t have much to choose from so they don’t fall back to where they were).
Stuff had a good article on this a while back (perhaps 2 or 3 years) where they compared I think average mortgage payments based on average interest rates for average houses each year going back 20 or 30 years, and I think it was adjusted for average wages as well. But do you think I can find it? Of course not.
Low interest rates mean people can borrow more. If people have access to more money but supply is limited, then prices go up. This is the supply and demand equation, but I think it’s good to test things we think we know. One issue we will find is that the US tend to sign mortgage loans with the interest rate fixed for 30 years, so interest rates changing don’t impact existing owners except when they move. Here in NZ people tend to only get a fixed rate for a year or two, and no major bank offers one past 5 years. Here’s one study “The Effect of Interest Rates and Mortgage Lending on House Prices”.
The abstract states:
We find a surprisingly important role for short-term interest rates as a driver of house prices, especially outside the United States.
The “especially outside the US” part is why I mention the difference in US mortgages vs ours.
And in the actual paper, this is part of the conclusion:
Most empirical studies assume that short-term interest rates do not influence house price growth other than through the domestic cost of borrowing, ie by their influence on long-term interest rates. The findings in this paper suggest that this view might be mistaken: changes in short-term interest rates seem to have a strong and persistent impact on house price growth
Here’s another that takes it a step further and says that purchasing power is the real driver, rather than interest rates in and of themselves.
Real income and the real interest rate have been widely considered as two important determinants of house prices. We find that the purchasing power for housing, which is based on the net present value of future income flows, is a more powerful concept. It is intuitive and realistic in nature for first time buyers who need substantial mortgage-financing. Based on aggregated yearly time series data for Belgium from 1973 to 2009, we find that nominal house prices are cointegrated with the purchasing power for housing.
The interest rates affecting house pricing is because lower interest rates increase demand. Solving the house price issue doesn’t mean keeping interest rates high, it can be influenced on the other side, supply. Which is what you’ve mentioned, the government could build state housing to increase supply of warm dry houses, and this could be a driver of lower prices if done right.
I also feel the need to point out that house prices falling is good for almost all owner occupiers, even though it’s unintuative. And since you have to pay off the same million dollar mortgage regardless of if house prices go up or down, we definitely come into the territory of that trolley problem meme with the trolley flattening a bunch of people and then saying it’s unfair to those people if we stop the trolley now before it squashes the next group - even though whether it stops or not has no impact on the ones already squashed.
I mean, that’s pretty much what that first study says. The international markets they studied had big impacts on house prices from interest rate changes. There was less of an effect in the US, but still a lot more than they expected.
A bill designed to give consumers more control over their data will be introduced into Parliament tomorrow, the minister of commerce and consumer affairs says....
The article is pretty thorough and I think shows that this isn’t exactly some crazy unheard of thing.
At a glance it seems this graph of NZer arrivals in Australia is not unexpected. I’m not convinced the COVID hole is even filled yet? As in all the people that would have moved to Australia but couldn’t because of COVID. Based on this graph it looks like they wouldn’t have all made it across yet.
But the article doesn’t say 26k public service workers, it says 26k people total. So the 26k forecast must surely include flow on impacts of the 4k+ public service jobs lost?
‘Jobseeker’ rolled up all the old benefits into one, so there are people with disabilities who can’t work at all counted in those figures.
Yeah this is the benefit confusion I alluded to, and I was wondering if this was the case. I think things like what I think was called the Sickness Benefit is now part of the Jobseeker support benefit, despite having no requirement to look for work.
The underutilisation rate is arguably a better measure, as it includes unemployed but also people who want more work but can’t find it.
Digging into this, the unemployment rate went from 3.4% to 4.3% between March 2023 and March 2024.
That makes sense. It’s tricky with any survey data really. Over time the helpful question to be asking changes, so you can’t really compare points that are far apart in time.
In the official announcement, they have very carefully and deliberately avoided the term “open source”.
“Open source” has a very specific meaning, and probably the key part for this is if there are any restrictions on what you do with any derivative software you create.
Can you use the Winamp source code to create a new media player and sell it? If there is say a restriction on if you can use it in a company or on if you can sell it, then it’s not “open source” even though you can publish noncommercial software based on it.
My profile has a link to my Matrix account - though I guess it doesn’t help knowing that if Lemmy is down and you can’t get to my profile page. In the past though, the Lemmy.nz Matrix chat has been a good place to mention it. It’s not as active as it used to be but I still get notifications of messages sent in there and others can comment on if it’s working for them.
We have actually had some further downtimes of less than an hour each since this post, I’m still trying to narrow down the cause but I have a theory about what might be causing it.
Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 23/5/2024
Last weeks thread here...
“CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM,” DOJ says after rare arrest (arstechnica.com)
Not cool (sh.itjust.works)
branding makes Strange Bedfellows (discuss.tchncs.de)
Revealed: Govt set to scrap grants to help first-home buyers onto property ladder | Newshub (www.youtube.com)
Pull up the ladder after you.
New tech bill will allow consumers to share data (www.rnz.co.nz)
A bill designed to give consumers more control over their data will be introduced into Parliament tomorrow, the minister of commerce and consumer affairs says....
As NZ unemployment rises, Kiwis are making their way across the Tasman (www.abc.net.au)
Bad in NZ or hyperbole ?
Another 26,000 'will be unemployed' before peak reached (www.rnz.co.nz)
Surely all these people losing decent paying jobs will have no impact on the economy right? Definitely not a recession right?
Winamp is going open source, and it feels like the early 2000s again (www.xda-developers.com)
Down time last night 17/5/24-18/5/24
Hi everyone,...