Dreadnought Bottrill

saw this polar bear picture and couldn't resist

official boob post

You've been lied to your entire life - VEGETABLES. DON'T. EXIST! (no, seriously, they don't)

Watch the full episode on Dropout

I've literally always said this

this dialogue tree is only accessible if you have the medicine skill to diagnose his agoraphobia this is so funny like whats with the third option. just outta nowhere. you see a psych they diagnose you you bring up possible practical solutions and theyre like you know what from the brief conversation weve had i find you mad annoying so im now going to beat you up severely. actually you know what #averagepsychiatrist

yeah i let her hit., with a b aseball bat. on a completely unrelate dnote i have this terribl e headache

why does no one remember how homophobic the 00s were? this totally checks for 2003

I’M DECEASED

Japanese embroidery artist, Narumi Takada. Step on fresh snow (2021) Footprints painstakingly executed in straight stitch, satin stitch, and backstitch; snow created with punch needle and cut loops.

Every protein bar is called something like "double chocolate indulgence caramel cookie dough delight crunch" and tastes like clay and sawdust

why am I catching strays all of a sudden 💀

video series

I feel genuine sympathy for this dude. He killed his whimsy for love.

free him

BALANCE IS RESTORED !!

I checked the guy's Reddit account. He shaved it off because it was too high-maintenance and he was super busy after the birth of his daughter. Feel like the original Tumblr post is kind of implying that his wife pushed him to do it, which I'm happy to report isn't the case!

That is extra sad actually because that's exactly the sort of mustache a pilot SHOULD have

Found my 53yo very-much-not-online father in the kitchen today meticulously arranging cutlery on the countertop and i was like 'what are you doing' and he looked up at me with the world's most shit-eating grin and said "Your mother told me this is how you rick-roll the Youth" and i looked over and it was fucking. Loss.jpg.

i must stress that he's never seen the original comic. My mother simply showed him the shorthand symbol and he memorized it. As far as he is aware this is just a fucking hieroglyph that deals instant psychic damage to everyone under the age of 30

So HECS debt is going to be less expensive. Here's how that works.

Basically, student debt until now was indexed to inflation so it doesn't decrease in value. Inflation is where money becomes less valuable over time. $10 could pay for more things 20 years ago, so $10 is less valuable today than it was before - which is why banks charge interest on loans. By the time you repay it, the initial amount is worth less than when you took it out, so interest means you offset that by paying more in the long term.

HECS debt doesn't charge interest - but instead adjusts with inflation every year.

However, the Labor government has decided to stop that. The Consumer Price Index or CPI (measure of inflation) went up 7.1% last year therefore automatically everyone's student debt was going to go up 7.1% until Labor undid that, thus saving people $3 billion.

Going forward, the indexation will be based off either CPI or the Wage Price Index, whichever is smaller.

This means student debt no longer maintains the same value in line with inflation and depreciates over time.

So this isn't debt forgiveness, but also does mean even if you don't repay it the debt technically becomes smaller over time because that debt becomes less valuable.

This isn't a radically large change, but ongoing means education is less expensive in the long term. It's not a one off cash splash. This is a structural reform to decrease the cost of studying.

So I think this is positive. There isn't a downside to this idea - the only critique is that it could go further, like wiping away debt. It does make incremental reform easier in the future because this means in 10+ years someone can't go "but back in MY day we had to pay X amount for uni!" Because what they paid gradually has decreased in cost whether they paid it back or not. It's harder to be selfish in comparison if student debt becomes less of a burden, which this does progressively over time.

However, this is not cost of living relief. You automatically pay HECS debt back once you reach a certain annual income. So if you have $25,000 in student debt, but your income isn't enough to hit that repayment threshold then this change doesn't alter anything about your day to day living. As far as I'm aware they're not changing the payment threshold.

These changes are about how much it'll cost you to pay it back over the next few decades.

So it can't really be labelled as cost of living relief because it's not altering what your repayment obligations are. It's good, but I don't like Labor trying to spin in it to expand their list of cost of living measures.

Labor's alteration of the Stage 3 tax cuts to give a tax cut to every taxpayer (instead of just the wealthy, like the Liberals and Nationals legislated) IS able to be labelled cost of living relief. So you will be better off 1 July thanks to Labor reforms, whereas if we were under a Coalition government we'd be poorer both now and in the future.

yeah this checks out

tags via @thyrell