What on earth are you talking about. Australia isn't Europe. The overall tax burden in Australia is roughly the same as the US (and I actually pay a little MORE tax in the US, on the same income, than I did in Australia, though the difference isn't massive).
I didn't literal mean 'the average' (or median) home is a million bucks. As you said, the actual average is less than that. I said that a typical, average home (as in, an unexceptional looking home that's not huge, not fancy, etc.) was pushing million bucks, and you could pick up similar homes in the US for a couple of hundred thousand. I was using the word 'average' in the colloquial, rather than mathematical/statistical sense.
Or to put it another way, I was saying that homes that would cost a couple of hundred grand in the US would be approaching a million in Australia if you tried to buy something equivalent. I know because I've bought in both countries.
My home market is Canberra and there has been no bubble burst there so far (indeed, prices have continued to modestly increase in the last quarter, even as Sydney and Melbourne have fallen). $626k in Canberra would buy you a fairly ratty old dogbox in dire need of renovation (or, a pretty nice apartment). For a stand-alone house with a yard in decent condition (comparable to a typical American house you could get for $200k in much of the country), it would indeed be close to a million bucks. My Canberra place is a small 3 bed, 1 bath place built in the 1960s, on 690 square metres, nothing exceptional at all, and is valued at approx $930k AUD, to give an example. Whereas my US place in a similar sized city is easily twice the size, with a bigger yard, and only a touch more than half the price, after currency conversion.
This is true... but it's also true of the US itself. I've applied for (and been granted) professional work visas for both Canada and the US over the last decade and the process was similar in both, in that you had to prove there was no local person who had the necessary knowledge or background to do the work. You also have to prove you wouldn't be being paid substantially differently than the local for the same work.
The US is no different in this regard (at least for the L1 type visas typical for professional work). It's always a pain hiring a foreigner in any country because the company takes on the burden of sponsoring them, processing all the immigration paperwork etc.
Yep absolutely. I moved to the US from Australia a few years ago and holy hell, housing is cheap here compared to much of the world.
A very typical, average suburban home is pushing $1 million in most Australian cities. Here, outside a few bubble zones (e.g. Bay Area), you can pick up similar houses for a couple of hundred thousand. I've lived in Asia (Singapore, Japan) and Europe (England, France) as well, and the US is cheaper than all of them.
Mind you, there is a downside... and that is property taxes. I pay a pretty hefty property tax bill in the US on my place that would not be an ongoing expense back in Australia, so I supposed I have to factor that in. Still it would take many decades of property taxes to add up to the difference in initial cost.
Only in the US though. Elsewhere 'liberal' still means what it always has. This makes discussing politics in different countries difficult at times.
Every time I (Australian) mention the Liberal Party online, I have to add a "note to Americans: this is a centre-right, conservative party, not what you guys call 'liberal'". Pain in the ass.
As an Australian that moved to the US a few years ago and does a lot of flying for work, I'm on the fence when it comes to airport privatisation proposals. One of the interesting differences between the US and Australia is that, despite the fact that the US is generally more in favour of private sector delivery of services (think healthcare etc.), it has overwhelmingly kept its airports publically owned. Most major airports in the US are publically owned, whereas I think every major Australian airport was privatised many years ago.
On the one hand Australian airports are wayyyy nicer than US airports. More modern and up to date, cleaner, more spacious, better and more facilities etc. Nicer places to be in by a long shot. US airports, especially some of the major ones (Newark and O'Hare spring to mind) are very overcrowded at peak times, straining at the seams and generally just more unpleasant places to be in (e.g. what's with those disgusting old seats and claustrophobically low ceilings in Concourses E/F at ORD?)
But why are they so much nicer? Because they charge a lot more and thus have a lot more money to pump into improvements. US airport parking fees, even in a major city, are a small fraction of what they are in Australia for instance. I could park at Chicago for a week for what it could cost for a few hours at SYD or MEL. Australian airports no doubt also charge the airlines more than their US counterparts too (landing fees etc.), which indirectly affects ticket prices etc.
So in terms of user experience, private airports seem nicer, but in terms of equity of accessibility to travel itself, publicly owned is the way to go. Prices go through the roof when airports are privatised, if Australia is anything to go by. Travel should not be only for the wealthy.
They don't get lost... they just take a reaaaallly long time to process and be credited to the account. No doubt they are sitting on the money in the meantime earning interest, of course. Seriously though why does it take over 2 weeks for a standard ACH transfer to show up?
I suspect that's simply because they don't support Australian interbank transfer/payments systems like BSB/account transfers and Bpay etc. Since they aren't Australian there's no reason they'd have this set up, which leaves only outgoing wire transfers which are expensive for them as a business.
What I do is use GDAX to transfer the coins to be sold to an Australian crypto exchange. This is completely free using GDAX (they even eat the BTC transaction fee for you, which is kinda amazing given how high those fees have been recently). Australian exchanges will obviously then allow you to sell the coin(s) and do a normal Australian bank withdrawal. Money appears next business day in my account. Done it several times and it works well.
Australian here. I tend to use debit cards most of the time rather than credit. The CC is just there for emergencies. I used to work as cashier and EFTPOS accounted for the bulk of all our transactions.
Like with a CC I'm not liable for any unauthorised transactions, and I usually don't have that much in the linked transaction account anyway (the bulk is locked away in a savings account that is not accessible via the card).
I don't think I've ever seen an unembossed credit card (i.e. with the raised numbers). Is this just an American thing or are there other places that have unembossed cards?
Sounds to me like the problem is having an internet connection in class rather than laptops themselves, since the findings focus on time wasted on social media, shopping, other non-academic uses. I used a laptop in class in the late 90s/early 2000s for taking notes on, instead of on paper, but it wasn't really a distraction because there was no internet connection (Wifi wasn't ubiquitous in classrooms back then). It was just the way I took notes.
As someone who moved to the US (from Australia) hearing these sirens is one of the (many) surreal things about living here. Australia relies on radio, TV and SMS/phone alerts - no sirens.
The sirens here in the US sound like something out of an old cold war movie. Duck and cover! They test them at noon every Wednesday in the area I live in...
I have to admit, just when I thought facts about US healthcare couldn't surprise me anymore, I learn that astronauts - one of the toughest and highest profile government jobs you could have - don't have guaranteed healthcare later in life? That seems insane, especially given there's really not that many astronauts out there to begin with.
I'm from a country with public universal health care, with a private option (i.e. you can pay for private health insurance on top of the public system if you think it's worth it - it covers extras like dental, cosmetic surgery, etc.) But private insurance isn't tied to employment. You just buy it from a company like you would car insurance or home insurance. Having said that, the public system is good quality (you'll probably be treated by the same doctors either way), so there's no need to worry if you can't afford it. It's not a perfect system but it's gotta be better than what's happening in the US.
That's one of those cultural things and is true in most countries. I grew up in such a country and find buildings in North America and some European countries ridiculously stuffy and overheated in winter. It just depends on what you grew up with I guess.
I live in the US now but keep my indoor temperature at 18/19 C at most (65-66 ish F), and yeah, wear a jumper. I sometimes crank it to 20 C / 68 F if I have guests coming around hehe.
I'm from Australia and live in the US, and 90% of people here think I'm English. I just think they can't tell the difference (to be fair, there's not a huge difference between urban Australian and RP/London English).
Yep - this makes complete sense. The two TVs we do have are used purely as displays for Chromecast and games. We don't actually watch 'TV' on them. I also have various computer monitors, some of which are big enough that you could comfortably use them as 'TVs'.
Increasingly I think distinguishing TVs from monitors by whether or not they have a tuner will become meaningless, as more and more people are just using them to watch content from one HDMI/DisplayPort source or another, which may be a timeshifted 'TV' show, or a movie, or a game, or YouTube, or...
I feel like if they are desperate enough to fly you out to NZ for a job interview and show you around for a week, that it would defeat the purpose to get to the salary negotiation part of it and skimp on the dollars there. Cost of living in NZ is quite reasonable. So yeah, if you're constantly thinking of your pay in terms of "what would this buy me if I converted it back to my home currency and spent it at home", then it may seem like a bad deal. But you wouldn't do this purely to bring money home - you'd be spending it locally and enjoying the lifestyle.
I agree with you on the weather - I actually quite like COLD weather, but the constant wind in Wellington is irritating and makes even mild days feel colder than they are on paper. Having said that, NZ has plenty of beautiful countryside and scenery, and Wellington itself is quite a fun town. Three hour flight from warm beaches and bigger cities in Australia too (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane).
I'm Australian but have worked and lived in Wellington a bit, and in the USA. New Zealand internet on the whole is pretty good. Within Wellington you should be able to get a fibre connection at 100 Mbps no problems, at a cost similar to in the US.
Ping times to sites in Europe and America are obviously high, but not much you can do about that (pesky speed of light!) Most big sites have CDNs in NZ or Australia though, so it's not really a problem unless you enjoy playing online games that don't have local servers...
I love my Garmin LMT too, but holy hell are the maps expensive if you want a map not from the region you bought it in. I'm regularly in three different countries so no matter where I bought it, I'd be screwed. Fricken almost 200 bucks for a map of Australia + NZ? That's barely less than the unit itself was!
No, they're going to rely on the fact that the majority of people will abide by the guideline, even though a few won't. It's risk reduction, nothing more. You already have people who don't turn their phone to flight mode in contravention of the rules, but they don't go around checking everyone's phone for that either.
In many aspects of life, Australia is a mid-point between the US and Europe... it's kinda a hybrid of them. Speed of life and attitude towards customer service is one of them, language is another (an accent closer to the UK than the US, but uses plenty of US words rather than the UK equivalents, e.g. truck vs lorry, eggplant vs. aubergine, etc.)
It also varies drastically by where you are in the country. Some states are known to have a slower pace of life than others (true in both Australia and the US).
I kind of agree with you, but I think a lot of people don't really care about huge innovations in the smartphone space anymore. The smartphone market is mature, stable and relatively saturated now. Every man and his dog owns one. In the first few years of iOS and Android devices, obviously huge innovations and gains were being made every year. But the phones on the market are all damn good. I struggle to think of anything that would be a massive life-changing improvement these days. So I'm fine with just seeing incremental improvements each year. It's a bit like cars - this year's Toyota is not radically different to last year's, but no-one really expects otherwise.
I think if someone is going to have to come up with an entirely new product category before we see huge innovations again. Apple tried with the Watch, and it's been modestly successful, but let's face it, a lot of people just don't wear watches.
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What on earth are you talking about. Australia isn't Europe. The overall tax burden in Australia is roughly the same as the US (and I actually pay a little MORE tax in the US, on the same income, than I did in Australia, though the difference isn't massive).
I didn't literal mean 'the average' (or median) home is a million bucks. As you said, the actual average is less than that. I said that a typical, average home (as in, an unexceptional looking home that's not huge, not fancy, etc.) was pushing million bucks, and you could pick up similar homes in the US for a couple of hundred thousand. I was using the word 'average' in the colloquial, rather than mathematical/statistical sense.
Or to put it another way, I was saying that homes that would cost a couple of hundred grand in the US would be approaching a million in Australia if you tried to buy something equivalent. I know because I've bought in both countries.
My home market is Canberra and there has been no bubble burst there so far (indeed, prices have continued to modestly increase in the last quarter, even as Sydney and Melbourne have fallen). $626k in Canberra would buy you a fairly ratty old dogbox in dire need of renovation (or, a pretty nice apartment). For a stand-alone house with a yard in decent condition (comparable to a typical American house you could get for $200k in much of the country), it would indeed be close to a million bucks. My Canberra place is a small 3 bed, 1 bath place built in the 1960s, on 690 square metres, nothing exceptional at all, and is valued at approx $930k AUD, to give an example. Whereas my US place in a similar sized city is easily twice the size, with a bigger yard, and only a touch more than half the price, after currency conversion.
This is true ... but it's also true of the US itself. I've applied for (and been granted) professional work visas for both Canada and the US over the last decade and the process was similar in both, in that you had to prove there was no local person who had the necessary knowledge or background to do the work. You also have to prove you wouldn't be being paid substantially differently than the local for the same work.
The US is no different in this regard (at least for the L1 type visas typical for professional work). It's always a pain hiring a foreigner in any country because the company takes on the burden of sponsoring them, processing all the immigration paperwork etc.
Yep absolutely. I moved to the US from Australia a few years ago and holy hell, housing is cheap here compared to much of the world.
A very typical, average suburban home is pushing $1 million in most Australian cities. Here, outside a few bubble zones (e.g. Bay Area), you can pick up similar houses for a couple of hundred thousand. I've lived in Asia (Singapore, Japan) and Europe (England, France) as well, and the US is cheaper than all of them.
Mind you, there is a downside ... and that is property taxes. I pay a pretty hefty property tax bill in the US on my place that would not be an ongoing expense back in Australia, so I supposed I have to factor that in. Still it would take many decades of property taxes to add up to the difference in initial cost.
Only in the US though. Elsewhere 'liberal' still means what it always has. This makes discussing politics in different countries difficult at times.
Every time I (Australian) mention the Liberal Party online, I have to add a "note to Americans: this is a centre-right, conservative party, not what you guys call 'liberal'". Pain in the ass.
As an Australian that moved to the US a few years ago and does a lot of flying for work, I'm on the fence when it comes to airport privatisation proposals. One of the interesting differences between the US and Australia is that, despite the fact that the US is generally more in favour of private sector delivery of services (think healthcare etc.), it has overwhelmingly kept its airports publically owned. Most major airports in the US are publically owned, whereas I think every major Australian airport was privatised many years ago.
On the one hand Australian airports are wayyyy nicer than US airports. More modern and up to date, cleaner, more spacious, better and more facilities etc. Nicer places to be in by a long shot. US airports, especially some of the major ones (Newark and O'Hare spring to mind) are very overcrowded at peak times, straining at the seams and generally just more unpleasant places to be in (e.g. what's with those disgusting old seats and claustrophobically low ceilings in Concourses E/F at ORD?)
But why are they so much nicer? Because they charge a lot more and thus have a lot more money to pump into improvements. US airport parking fees, even in a major city, are a small fraction of what they are in Australia for instance. I could park at Chicago for a week for what it could cost for a few hours at SYD or MEL. Australian airports no doubt also charge the airlines more than their US counterparts too (landing fees etc.), which indirectly affects ticket prices etc.
So in terms of user experience, private airports seem nicer, but in terms of equity of accessibility to travel itself, publicly owned is the way to go. Prices go through the roof when airports are privatised, if Australia is anything to go by. Travel should not be only for the wealthy.
They don't get lost ... they just take a reaaaallly long time to process and be credited to the account. No doubt they are sitting on the money in the meantime earning interest, of course. Seriously though why does it take over 2 weeks for a standard ACH transfer to show up?
I suspect that's simply because they don't support Australian interbank transfer/payments systems like BSB/account transfers and Bpay etc. Since they aren't Australian there's no reason they'd have this set up, which leaves only outgoing wire transfers which are expensive for them as a business.
What I do is use GDAX to transfer the coins to be sold to an Australian crypto exchange. This is completely free using GDAX (they even eat the BTC transaction fee for you, which is kinda amazing given how high those fees have been recently). Australian exchanges will obviously then allow you to sell the coin(s) and do a normal Australian bank withdrawal. Money appears next business day in my account. Done it several times and it works well.
Opt out if you're in Australia: https://www.directoryselect.co...
Someone else already posted the US opt-out.
Australian here. I tend to use debit cards most of the time rather than credit. The CC is just there for emergencies. I used to work as cashier and EFTPOS accounted for the bulk of all our transactions.
Like with a CC I'm not liable for any unauthorised transactions, and I usually don't have that much in the linked transaction account anyway (the bulk is locked away in a savings account that is not accessible via the card).
I don't think I've ever seen an unembossed credit card (i.e. with the raised numbers). Is this just an American thing or are there other places that have unembossed cards?
Sounds to me like the problem is having an internet connection in class rather than laptops themselves, since the findings focus on time wasted on social media, shopping, other non-academic uses. I used a laptop in class in the late 90s/early 2000s for taking notes on, instead of on paper, but it wasn't really a distraction because there was no internet connection (Wifi wasn't ubiquitous in classrooms back then). It was just the way I took notes.
As someone who moved to the US (from Australia) hearing these sirens is one of the (many) surreal things about living here. Australia relies on radio, TV and SMS/phone alerts - no sirens.
The sirens here in the US sound like something out of an old cold war movie. Duck and cover! They test them at noon every Wednesday in the area I live in...
No, you don't, but a 4 year old isn't going to know that. There's an emergency call button on the lockscreen (screenshot below):
https://www.igeeksblog.com/wp-...
I have to admit, just when I thought facts about US healthcare couldn't surprise me anymore, I learn that astronauts - one of the toughest and highest profile government jobs you could have - don't have guaranteed healthcare later in life? That seems insane, especially given there's really not that many astronauts out there to begin with.
I'm from a country with public universal health care, with a private option (i.e. you can pay for private health insurance on top of the public system if you think it's worth it - it covers extras like dental, cosmetic surgery, etc.) But private insurance isn't tied to employment. You just buy it from a company like you would car insurance or home insurance. Having said that, the public system is good quality (you'll probably be treated by the same doctors either way), so there's no need to worry if you can't afford it. It's not a perfect system but it's gotta be better than what's happening in the US.
That's one of those cultural things and is true in most countries. I grew up in such a country and find buildings in North America and some European countries ridiculously stuffy and overheated in winter. It just depends on what you grew up with I guess.
I live in the US now but keep my indoor temperature at 18/19 C at most (65-66 ish F), and yeah, wear a jumper. I sometimes crank it to 20 C / 68 F if I have guests coming around hehe.
I'm from Australia and live in the US, and 90% of people here think I'm English. I just think they can't tell the difference (to be fair, there's not a huge difference between urban Australian and RP/London English).
Yep - this makes complete sense. The two TVs we do have are used purely as displays for Chromecast and games. We don't actually watch 'TV' on them. I also have various computer monitors, some of which are big enough that you could comfortably use them as 'TVs'.
Increasingly I think distinguishing TVs from monitors by whether or not they have a tuner will become meaningless, as more and more people are just using them to watch content from one HDMI/DisplayPort source or another, which may be a timeshifted 'TV' show, or a movie, or a game, or YouTube, or...
I feel like if they are desperate enough to fly you out to NZ for a job interview and show you around for a week, that it would defeat the purpose to get to the salary negotiation part of it and skimp on the dollars there. Cost of living in NZ is quite reasonable. So yeah, if you're constantly thinking of your pay in terms of "what would this buy me if I converted it back to my home currency and spent it at home", then it may seem like a bad deal. But you wouldn't do this purely to bring money home - you'd be spending it locally and enjoying the lifestyle.
I agree with you on the weather - I actually quite like COLD weather, but the constant wind in Wellington is irritating and makes even mild days feel colder than they are on paper. Having said that, NZ has plenty of beautiful countryside and scenery, and Wellington itself is quite a fun town. Three hour flight from warm beaches and bigger cities in Australia too (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane).
I'm Australian but have worked and lived in Wellington a bit, and in the USA. New Zealand internet on the whole is pretty good. Within Wellington you should be able to get a fibre connection at 100 Mbps no problems, at a cost similar to in the US.
Ping times to sites in Europe and America are obviously high, but not much you can do about that (pesky speed of light!) Most big sites have CDNs in NZ or Australia though, so it's not really a problem unless you enjoy playing online games that don't have local servers...
I love my Garmin LMT too, but holy hell are the maps expensive if you want a map not from the region you bought it in. I'm regularly in three different countries so no matter where I bought it, I'd be screwed. Fricken almost 200 bucks for a map of Australia + NZ? That's barely less than the unit itself was!
Yeah Queensland runs pretty slow ... its hot up there ya know :) This isn't a criticism, I love Qld.
No, they're going to rely on the fact that the majority of people will abide by the guideline, even though a few won't. It's risk reduction, nothing more. You already have people who don't turn their phone to flight mode in contravention of the rules, but they don't go around checking everyone's phone for that either.
In many aspects of life, Australia is a mid-point between the US and Europe ... it's kinda a hybrid of them. Speed of life and attitude towards customer service is one of them, language is another (an accent closer to the UK than the US, but uses plenty of US words rather than the UK equivalents, e.g. truck vs lorry, eggplant vs. aubergine, etc.)
It also varies drastically by where you are in the country. Some states are known to have a slower pace of life than others (true in both Australia and the US).
I kind of agree with you, but I think a lot of people don't really care about huge innovations in the smartphone space anymore. The smartphone market is mature, stable and relatively saturated now. Every man and his dog owns one. In the first few years of iOS and Android devices, obviously huge innovations and gains were being made every year. But the phones on the market are all damn good. I struggle to think of anything that would be a massive life-changing improvement these days. So I'm fine with just seeing incremental improvements each year. It's a bit like cars - this year's Toyota is not radically different to last year's, but no-one really expects otherwise.
I think if someone is going to have to come up with an entirely new product category before we see huge innovations again. Apple tried with the Watch, and it's been modestly successful, but let's face it, a lot of people just don't wear watches.