Partner at Straight Bat Private Equity. Tesla co-owner. Lifetime student of economics.
Melbourne, Victoria
Joined April 2009
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An incredible A/B test has been conducted over the last 20 years. Take note - you can't legislate to prosperity, but you can legislate it away.
I'm German.
16 years ago, the EU and US economies were neck and neck.
Today, the US economy is 50% larger than the entire EU combined.
Here's the devastating truth behind Europe's ongoing economic suicide 🧵:
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This is such a good point.
At the height of the British Empire, the British government employed just 40,000 civil servants … globally!
Without computers, software, phones, email, GPS or modern banking, these 40,000 people ran the largest global empire in history.
Today the UK government has over 478,000 earning an average of £30,000 per year. These people have every advantage at their fingertips from fast communication through to process automation. And yet, they can’t manage to run a small island.
What do these people do? What would happen if someone got rid of 90% of these jobs?
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This is something my wife and I observed recently after having our first child - it certainly is time consuming and challenging, but it's WAY more managable than the narrative perpetuated in society. I'm retrospect if I had known it was like this I would have started sooner!
It’s really sad how many people without kids I meet who have heard that having a baby is absolutely gruelling, endless, exhausting work. Sure, it’s a challenge and a change of pace, but it’s nowhere near as bad as is often suggested. We’ve got to stop being so down on parenthood!
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I find it fascinating that there are so many people that HATE app ordering at restaurants. What's not to like? It is clearly a process flow optimiser:
• Eliminates physical menus
• Integrates payment and ordering process which removes a whole step from the restaurant process
• Removes the 'waiter attention' / 'ready to order' matching problem (if you have ever been a waiter you know how significant the cognitive load of this task is to your role)
• Removes waiter order-take error
Given above optimisations, one would expect app ordering would increase the productivity of restaurant labour significantly.
Has anyone seen analysis on the productivity impact of these apps? I am guessing the app investor pitches themselves would be full of this sort of data?
Can we get rid of ordering food at a restaurant table via an app please??
It completely kills conversation
It’s frustrating
Why aren’t waiters taking orders?
We are not in a pandemic anymore
Ridiculous cost saving
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Nail this to the door of Parliament House.
Australia is a sad, pathetic country.
There are no companies, just real estate agents and public servants.
Where is the innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship?
It’s been crushed by taxation and regulation.
Everyone is too afraid to do anything because they don’t even know what they’re allowed to do anymore.
So they just clock into their government job and watch footy on the weekend.
Who is creating anything?
We have abundant natural resources, a beautiful and inspirational country-side.
We live on a massive, isolated island.
Australia should be world leading in every field.
It should be a utopia of free thought, free enterprise, and innovation.
But instead everyone is spiritually crushed by the nanny state.
You can’t fish or hunt or start a business or speak or build without seeking permission from some goblin in the public service.
A leech. A parasite. Who only exists to suck the life out of you.
We need libertas. Freedom.
Remove the shackles and people will do amazing, awe-inspiring things in this beautiful land.
But they can’t. They’re locked into 30-year mortgages that take away the majority of their take home pay.
Slaves to Commonwealth Bank just to own 200 square metres of land in Preston.
They have nothing left at the end of each month to experiment with.
So they’re forced to be a wage slave at one of the 8 companies that exist in this country.
Because it’s impossible to run anything apart from a large company in Australia.
The small ones can’t afford the compliance costs.
Nobody understands the thousands of pages of legislation they need to comply with the run a company.
We had this amazing opportunity and we fumbled it because everyone voted away their freedoms in exchange for some fake safety.
The penal colony never ended.
We asked for it to continue and it did.
There is tonnes of this sort of chartlighting about property prices. I think out of context they are misleading, given the range of confounding variables.
As example "house" prices (as opposed to home prices) - it's well evidenced that as population centres expand land for houses is increasingly converted into multi-family dwellings. This reduces the supply of houses in the market, which naturally due to scarcity pushes up their price.
Two ways to reduce the confound.
1) Narrow sample to houses in population centres that have not increasingly urbanised / densified (I.e. no population growth)
2) Include all homes in your sample, or focus only on apartments (which don't tend to become more scarce over time on a population-adjusted basis)
See example charts from total residential (houses plus apartments) in Messina, Italy - an urban centre that has not experienced population growth in some years. Hard to argue that there has been a collapse in housing affordability / inflation in asset values....
You think housing prices will keep going up because you've seen it all your life. But this is a historic anomaly that is likely to reverse soon: Prices might start shrinking in many places.
This thread is the case against investing in housing:
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Why do Aussies seem to be spending like mad despite all those rate rises? Here are the stats:
- 35% of households have a mortgage (1/3 own WO mortgage, <1/3 rent).
- 70% of mortgages are variable.
- 70% x 35% = 24.5% get hit by a rise
Three quarters of Aussies don't feel it!
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It is interesting to note the rise of the 'sauna is good for you' narrative coinciding with the 'global warming induced extreme heat wave risk is bad for you' narrative. I provide this observation for the benefit of stand-up comedians looking for new material. The bit writes itself.
Sauna Thread
Sweating in the sauna decreases all cause mortality by 40%, detoxification, relief muscle soreness, improved brain health, get a clearer skin and deeper sleep.
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Interesting take from Bloomberg that in the US the relationship between interest rates and the economy may have inverted - i.e., raising rates actually stimulates the economy.
I see some logic in the unique economic enviroment of the US:
- huge goverment deficit means rate rises increase interest income into the economy (which is essentially fiscal stimulus)
- fixed home mortgage enviroment means minimal home-owner impact from rate rises (a key transmission mechanism)
- mega-corporates have huge net cash balances so rate rises actually increase profitability (other key transmission mechanism running opposite from theory)
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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I would argue most western democracies are somewhere in the complacency (Australia?), apathy (United States?) or dependence (some European states?) stages.
Can we break the cycle? Or are we fated for bondage?
The stages are as follows:
“From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; courage to liberty; liberty to abundance; abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency; complacency to apathy; apathy to dependence; dependence back into bondage”
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