Nath

In Australia at least, those cards are everywhere in populated areas. Supermarkets and department stores pretty-much all stock them. I'd say that over 90% of Australians live within 3km of a store that sells Steam cards and takes cash. Most of us even closer than that.

I hear you - if I no longer paid my tax now, it wouldn't make a difference to the ATO financially. However, if all middle-income taxpayers in my demographic who pay between around $30,000 and $80,000 in tax were to stop paying the ATO, they would feel that.

I forget the tax brackets decades later, but $90x2-3 days a week was getting taxed enough that I was losing about two hours per shift on tax. I remember thinking of it in hours at work. The first two hours paid Mr. tax man, the remaining six were for me. I remember that I was making $7 per hour. My annual tax came out at less than $2k, before deductions etc. If all the kids in the same boat as me didn't have to pay tax, I doubt it'd make much difference to the ATO.

Your point is sound because I usually use a credit card for this, but most of my Steam purchases come from buying gift cards. However, I could easily buy those gift cards with cash.

Your comment implies this is not possible/common.

It rankled with me when I was 15-17 that I had to pay income tax as a kid making ~$70-$90 per day. My paltry income would be doing nothing for Mr tax man, but that money would be much better given to me on payday. I think I would have signed up to vote and get a say in how it was spent. But there are also a lot of 16 year old morons who would act in predictable ways if forced to vote.

Maybe introduce it as optional until you are 18? And then it goes compulsory.

I do. It's still a comment in a community and if we delete it here, it's gone for everyone I think.

I don't call myself a monarchist. But I am in favour of someone holding the power to send us to an election if we get a non-functional government. Whoever that is needs to be totally independent of our day-to-day politics and essentially un-bribable.

Right now, that's the king in England. I'm not against disconnecting from that - but like I said, I don't know where else you'll find someone who is outside daily politics in Australia and can't be bribed to act against our interests. If you have a name, I'm all ears (so is the king! 😆).

If you are proposing we just do away with that, then I'd love to know how you'd deal with an Australian Trump administration. Because 3-4 years of that doesn't sound fun.

While Australia is in that supply chain, "stopping it" wouldn't do anything. For a start, the manufacturer/seller of the parts is Lockheed Martin. The government can sanction a country and tell LM they can't send their parts from Australia to Israel.

But all that will happen from this is LM will send the parts to their USA operations and from there, they'll magically be reassigned to Israel. Or worse: They move production of those parts to another nation and Australians lose their jobs. Either way, the parts will still get to Israel. The government holds no actual cards in this equation.

It might be time for another referendum on this topic. However, given the chaos that has come out of the USA in the hands of a rogue government, I'd be hesitant to completely remove the role the monarchy plays in our government. We need that check on power and I don't know what you'd replace it with.

So this entire article is a beat-up in response to a single tweet:

https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1947027209845383279

There is no laptop. There is no potential laptop coming soon.

I was indifferent, it's true. People who sell porn have had issues with the likes of PayPal and credit card payments for decades. I wasn't surprised by the move, nor did I blame Valve.

Am I bothered that it was instigated by this mob? Not particularly. If it weren't them, it would have been some other mob. They were only pointing at something the payment companies are already pre-disposed to disassociate from.

Taking credit for it is a bit of overreach. They pointed at Valve and said "Look! they have porn on their platform!" They didn't actually do anything.

The argument that short-term suites are not really suited to long-term living is fair. Do these suites have proper kitchens with ovens? Laundry nooks? Or are we going to have a shared laundromat on the ground costing $20 to do your weekly washing?

The rest is pure Nimbyism. If the government actually adapts these dwellings for safe and stable housing, it can only be a win.