dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Adjusting asset returns for risk. Common wisdom in Australia is that an investment property beats shares because:

A lightning storm knocked out my Raspberry Pi. I would not have rebuilt it were it not for AI.

Boomer picking is the new stock picking. Australia has two demographic trends: declining access to housing and jobs for the young, and rocketing aged care costs for the aging. For the elderly who prefer to age at home, care and maintenance costs continue to climb despite subsidies. Many are forced to sell the house and move to an aged care facility, which is only marginally cheaper.  For their young, wages are stagnating, work is hard to enter and when obtained, precarious. Furthermore, housing costs are many multiples of average income. Could a solution be for younger folk to forego traditional employment and become live-in carers for their elderly, on condition that all their living expenses are paid and they inherit a modest multi-million dollar, property? Let's model it! Variable Sydney/Melbourne metro benchmark Property Value (V) $2,000,000 Remaining Life Expectancy (T) 5 years Average Young Adult Salary (S_gross) $85,000/year ($66,000 net after tax & HE...

My browser-based flight simulator now has clouds. Soarer Home Page (GitHub) Soarer Project Page (GitHub) 2016: I code in Notepad, host on a small Adelaide ISP's free web space, and duct-tape together esoteric (to me) mathematical concepts into code. 2026: An AI code assistant, integrated into my IDE churns out code and helps debug it. Playing flight sims as a kid didn't make me want to fly IRL. It made me want to make a better flight sim. Clouds are the final major feature. I'm just going to enjoy flying from now on.  (But it sure makes me feel small.)

Versus robots. 🤖 The flood of low cost Chinese labour will ebb, according to Goodhart and Pradhan in "The Great Demographic Reversal", leading to: higher inflation. manufacturing elsewhere becoming more competitive. ( un-paywalled from Nikkei Shimbun ) Apparently good news for those in developed nations who have long clamoured for fair prices and fair wages, and who blame globalisation for undercutting them. But when? And for how long?

 Does urban renewal displace marginalised people? 

Visualise house sales and prices over time in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia using official data. Try the  Interactive Map ! More details on  GitHub .  Background: I rewrote an earlier project in order to try out 'vibe coding'.  Conclusion: Inline AI assistance in Colab and VS Code flattens the learning curve. Syntax is no longer a barrier. Coding is actually fun for non-autists now. 

Back in 2015 there were few video games with authentic Asian environments, so I made a few experimental maps in Half-Life 2 . It was also common wisdom that games had to be complete and flawless on launch. Probabilistic monetisation such as loot boxes were a no-no. Triple-A games justified their price tags by being known quantities. Now, in 2026 there are a deluge of high-quality games from Asia, featuring characters, motifs, and visuals from Asia, which are also turning the common wisdom on its head by being serialised, free-to-play, and with a strong 'gacha' component.

War is widely seen as indefensibly evil. Edwin Starr's question, " What is it good for ?" is clearly rhetorical. However, some like yours truly have a macabre fascination with the notion that it can enrich. The link between war and wealth was probably around before Nathan Rothschild reputedly used advance knowledge of Wellington's victory to enhance his fortune. God ordered the Israelites to plunder their enemies with fluctuating specificity . A family story has my great-grandfather reaping huge profits from selling surplus American military landing craft (that he just happened to have lying around the yard.) America's last wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are cast as cynical ploys to create customers out of victims. Keep Calm and Invest. Data tells its own story. In particular, we can cross reference periods where the U.S. was at war, against the S&P500 and its precursor index from 1940 to 2014. I would think that the massive government spending in mo...

I've been wrong. Many times. Often for the 'right' reasons. 

Is ending a financially draining relationship worth the hit to assets? Some tools to price staying vs going. via GIPHY

Is having children to care for you in old age a good strategy? The social contract, particularly in Confucian societies, is that adults are expected to care for their elderly, reciprocating the care received as children. But how well is this expectation played out in fact?

Why you should want to work. The fable of the 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' is often used to prime the work-shy for shame and deprivation.

It's not the size, it's the growth. As the world ages, it's worth wondering if retiree benefits will increasingly drive inflation through supporting elderly buying power and enabling them to exit the labour supply. Let's plot pension replacement rates , a measure of pension generosity, against 2023 inflation for the G20, the world's largest economies. In short, countries' circumstances and systems are too diverse for a strong relationship between pension generosity and inflation, but let's break it down further.

Will having children make marriages last? Children, it is supposed, so enrich a marriage that it is more likely to endure over time. They bring a unique stimulus, necessitate close teamwork, and foster intimate communication. While some would argue that they could seek such stimuli elsewhere, and others would say that they can do without that sort of personal development, the naysayers are not strong enough to displace a nuclear family ideal that has persisted despite change in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Invaders don't win. Defenders lose. If we're fretting about our own Golden Age falling to usurpers, let us remember that barbarians don't operate in a vacuum. The Khwarazmian (Persian) Empire was corrupt and rife with elite infighting before the Mongols arrived. 

It’s claimed that Australia’s stagnant productivity is due to a lack of business investment . That's an easy argument: if companies aren’t investing in better technology and equipment, workers can’t become more efficient .  In fact, business investment has paced the overall economy for decades . The real issue isn't lack of investment, but where that investment is going, and what's driving the rest of the economy.

 A user asked r/geography, " Why is the modern Mediterranean so poor compared to the historical one? " The simple answer (not mine, unfortunately): "The world got bigger."

Think the public service is bloated or that small business is the backbone of Australia? Look here.

Can testaments be created that outlast heirs? The Native American practice of looking forward seven generations sounds noble but is essentially vague. Still, it seeds the idea for an investment math exercise that could provide not just for seven generations, but the generations beyond. (Fund Manager Conference Call)