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.
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.
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.
Does anyone know, or can anyone guess, the business case for predictive text? On phone apps, it is often incredibly difficult to turn off. Why is that, do you think? (The examples I have recent experience with are Facebook and Outlook mobile apps.)...
I don’t know. Usually mass layoffs have carry over to the rest of the economy. All the businesses serving those government employees are probably also going to downsize somewhat. Some may even go out of business who knows.
But if these are in addition to the 26k, then the 26k wouldn’t be the peak?
Most likely not everybody who is unemployed is getting a benefit so the number unemployed should be higher than those seeking jobseeker benefits.
The article says in March 134k people are unemployed and 187k people are on the Jobseeker benefit.
Note that “unemployed” isn’t everyone who doesn’t have a job, you have to be looking for work to be considered. So for example, you generally don’t count a stay-at-home Dad whose partner works to support the family.
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.
March quarter data from Stats NZ showed an increase in the unemployment rate, from 4 percent in December to 4.3 percent. It said 134,000 people were now unemployed.
If 134k is 4.3% then 4% is about 125k people. So 9k people lost their jobs since December and another 26k to go?
Is this the difference in roles or the total redundancies (a certain percentage of people made redundant will go into a new role, some of which would not have had someone in it before)?
Maybe they expect a peak of about 150k people unemployed?
Sounds like they expect it to peak at about 4.8% if my maths is right? Historically, that’s still pretty low.
He said the number of people on the JobSeeker benefit had been trending higher since the start of 2023. In March there were 187,986 people receiving this benefit, up from 131,721 in March 2019 and 168,498 last year.
I get lost with the new benefits. Are the 187k people on Jobseeker not all considered “unemployed”? Is this a case of some people with part time work (underemployed) being counted in one but not the other?
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....
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.
Winamp is going open source, and it feels like the early 2000s again (www.xda-developers.com)
As NZ unemployment rises, Kiwis are making their way across the Tasman (www.abc.net.au)
Bad in NZ or hyperbole ?
“CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM,” DOJ says after rare arrest (arstechnica.com)
Revealed: Govt set to scrap grants to help first-home buyers onto property ladder | Newshub (www.youtube.com)
Pull up the ladder after you.
Why is predictive text so hard to disable?
Does anyone know, or can anyone guess, the business case for predictive text? On phone apps, it is often incredibly difficult to turn off. Why is that, do you think? (The examples I have recent experience with are Facebook and Outlook mobile apps.)...
branding makes Strange Bedfellows (discuss.tchncs.de)
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?
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....
Down time last night 17/5/24-18/5/24
Hi everyone,...
Winston Peters accused of 'entirely defamatory' remarks about ex-Australian minister (www.rnz.co.nz)
Lol. Q3 here sets out what he (edit: allegedly) said (anything said in the House is protected by Parliamentary privilege)...