Fewer babies and migration that “fell off a cliff” during Covid-19 have contributed to slower population growth in New Zealand, the first Census results released today reveal....
The Reserve Bank says that from 1 July, banks will only be able to lend about 20 percent of their new lending to owner-occupier borrowers with a debt-to-income ratio of more than six. That means, if your household earns a combined $100,000, your loan will be limited to $600,000....
TL;DR the reserve bank is going to loosen restrictions on equity and instead have restrictions on income, with an expected impact that investors can’t just buy more houses using equity when the house values go up.
Yes it seems like a good move on behalf of the RBNZ. Interest rates are likely to head down from here on out, and that means people can borrow more on the same income. Adding a cap before it starts to happen is a good plan.
Houses cost as much as they do because of supply and demand. If we could increase supply (e.g. state housing), then land values would be much lower and then you could buy a house for a lot less. You could afford a house more easily, but investors wouldn’t be able to make much on capital gains because houses would only go up with inflation.
This leads to a world where rentals need to cover their costs instead of relying on capital gains. But those costs are a lot lower due to lower house prices. And you need less rentals because more people are buying.
Plus if you have ample supply, then competition between rentals keeps rents down to just above costs.
I think that boosting the housing supply is the best answer without going full socialism. If you wanted to go further, nonprofits or the government could run rentals and charge just enough to cover their costs.
I agree about too many rentals. Every man and his dog were buying them up when they were cheap. I have worked with various people buying rentals because everyone else was, now they have properties that can’t get enough rent to cover their costs because they paid too much for the house and didn’t have a business plan before buying - they just bought the house then worked out later what they would be able to rent it for and what the costs would be.
building costs are sky high
They are, but if nothing else changed, house prices could be a lot lower if there was ample supply, because most of the cost is imagined value. I believe there is plenty of opportunity for prices to reduce while still being profitable to build houses. Developers currently pay say $700k-$1m to buy an old house and section to build three medium density new houses on. If they were paying $350k-$500k, the houses could be $100k-$200k cheaper and they’d still make the same profit.
Hopefully the recent changes to allow us to import more building products easier from comparable countries should help the actual building costs as well.
Increased supply of houses would solve a bunch of issues, but there is a big hurdle to getting that supply.
Definitely. Especially when the government is gutting Kāinga Ora instead of doubling their funding.
So it turned out another server on the same rack as our one was experiencing a DDoS attack, which affected us as well. Lemmy seems to have been pretty stable for me the last couple of days, so I’ve started reenabling things. Apologies about the downtime we have had recently, hopefully this is better from here on out.
There are lots of peertube instances. The issue is that YouTube uses ads to pay content creators, and so everyone puts their content on YouTube in the hope of becoming the next big thing.
Yep, definitely. That’s the allure. From what I can tell, it’s likely there are tens of thousands of people making over $1m a year. However, there are hundreds of millions of people uploading videos.
Most people won’t make much at all, but if you don’t have the people at the top making millions then no one has any incentive, so those people are critical.
I think it’s just not aligned, they didn’t get the scale perfect. That pointy bit over the ocean and the bit hanging down from it are actually pretty close to right, just need to be moved over and twisted a bit.
Lemmy has algorithms, it’s just that they aren’t designed to maximise profit.
If you have the sort type set to Hot, posts are ranked based on score (upvotes minus down votes) with a decay based on post time. Active is the same but based on the last comment time.
If you are on the website, there is a ? next to the sort option that will take you to a page explaining how the different options work.
But long story short, most sorting options are affected by down votes.
Haha I searched this up, general consensus seems to be if you sip it from a spoon you’re eating it, if you do it straight from the bowl you’re drinking it. I guess it’s the same for milk?
As another poster alluded to, digital goods aren’t really considered property in the traditional sense. Digital property is protected under copyright (and other IP laws). The owner could sell the game, but then they wouldn’t own it anymore (e.g. when one game studio buys another, they are buying the games as well). Instead, they grant a licence to use the game, which is how Steam works as well.
If Steam let you transfer your account to someone else (e.g. bequeath or sell it), then they would need this in the licence (which they could do in theory). Other than the logistics of that (especially how to handle people selling accounts - and the scammers that inevitably come with that), the AAA publishers are unlikely to agree to those terms. Ultimately the Steam licence is likely a compromise between Steam’s vision and all the AAA publishers that wouldn’t publish on Steam if they didn’t get the licence they wanted. A bit like how Netflix doesn’t really care if you use a VPN, they just have to enforce it so studios will let them use their content.
From 30 May, New Zealand’s four major banks - ANZ, ASB, BNZ and Westpac - must offer the secure payment service - although some already have it in place....
The NZ Privacy Act 2020 looks broadly similar in intent to the GDPR, so I imagine there’d be the same disinclination to collect information which can’t be proven necessary to perform the requested service or satisfy regulatory requirements.
It is similar. Not sure about GDPR but in NZ, you can only use data for what it’s collected for but you just ask for consent at the point of collection, and state your intent as using the information to assess suitability for insurance (or whatever), then you have met the requirements.
I have several NZ insurance policies and they had no interest in transaction history. Same with my mortgage. I sent bank statements, but only as proof of address
I think the idea is in future you could get cheaper life or health insurance if you agree to let the insurance company scan your records to check how much fast food you eat or whatever. It’s not feasible today as you’d have to have staff processing it which negates the cost saving, but in a future world maybe it could be a thing.
For mortgages, they definitely check your bank statements after the new rules against loan sharks came in (a couple of years ago), but if you are borrowing from a bank you’re with then they aready have that info.
I’ve been neck deep in Lemmy stuff recently and realised we don’t have a post that explains the different frontend options that are available on Lemmy.nz....
Tesseract started as a fork of Proton, which is why they look so similar. But then I believe they turned their attention to Sublinks, which is another federated service much like Lemmy.
The cool thing about Sublinks is they maintain Lemmy API compatibility, so any Lemmy apps can be used with Sublinks. For the same reason, Tesseract can also be used with Lemmy.
Sublinks is very early days still, but chose Java as a back end language to try to have more people able to help.
Census 2023 data: What the first results reveal (www.rnz.co.nz)
Fewer babies and migration that “fell off a cliff” during Covid-19 have contributed to slower population growth in New Zealand, the first Census results released today reveal....
Investors may see biggest impact of Reserve Bank's lending limits (www.rnz.co.nz)
The Reserve Bank says that from 1 July, banks will only be able to lend about 20 percent of their new lending to owner-occupier borrowers with a debt-to-income ratio of more than six. That means, if your household earns a combined $100,000, your loan will be limited to $600,000....
Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 28/5/2024
Last weeks thread here...
YouTube has now begun skipping videos altogether for users with ad blockers (www.androidpolice.com)
Lemmy.nz Community Census (survey.lemmy.nz)
Hi all!...
What 16th century Ottomans thought Europe looked like on top of an actual map of Europe
The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack (bsky.app)
Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.
Meet my new puppy: Ass! (lemmy.world)
Seems a little strange (lemmy.world)
Edit: Forgot to censor name
Scientists discovered human can also breathe ________
You can't take it with you, but you can't leave it for someone else either: Valve says you aren't allowed to bequeath a Steam account in a will (www.pcgamer.com)
Mammals (beehaw.org)
Alarming 500% Surge: Colorectal Cancer Rates Skyrocket Among U.S. Youths (scitechdaily.com)
Open banking: How to opt in - and out - of the new payment system (www.rnz.co.nz)
From 30 May, New Zealand’s four major banks - ANZ, ASB, BNZ and Westpac - must offer the secure payment service - although some already have it in place....
Alternate frontends
I’ve been neck deep in Lemmy stuff recently and realised we don’t have a post that explains the different frontend options that are available on Lemmy.nz....