Luxury Escapes

It’s not overstating things to describe Jim Chalmers as the most rotten Treasurer of our lifetimes. And this Government as the most duplicitous and inept. But while many commentators have pointed out that the Prime Minister repeatedly promised that the Government wouldn’t change the tax rates on capital gains or remove negative gearing, that lie was a sideshow. Election fraud would be tolerable if the result was positive for society. See my full article on Substack - link in comments

Here’s a quick cheat sheet on the Winners and Losers from Jim Chalmers abhorrence. LOSERS - Anyone aged under 40 wanting to buy an investment property - Anyone aged under 40 wanting to buy shares or any other asset that might allow them to build real wealth - Anyone wanting to work for a startup (you’ll need to move to New Zealand, or frankly anywhere else) - Anyone aged under 40 who will be paying the interest on $1.25 trillion of accumulated and rapidly growing debt - Anyone paying income tax which is not being adjusted for rampant inflation - Business owners who battle for years on a meagre wage and will then be paying 47% tax on capital in one hit (rather than averaged out like normal wage earners) WINNERS - Boomers who own existing investment properties and can keep negative gearing to their heart’s content - Foreign owned tech companies who use transfer pricing to pay zero tax in Australia - Oil and gas companies (many foreign owned) who pay virtually no tax to extract our resources - The CFMEU who will continue to steal billions of taxpayer dollars for rail projects no one asked for, no one wants and no one will ever use - Criminal cartels selling Illegal tobacco - Millionaire superannuation holders who will continue to pay only 15% CGT - Foreign investors buying Australian assets who will continue to pay 0% CGT - Wealthy boomers who will continue to get refunds into their super for imputed dividend payments - Thousands of crooked suppliers who have turned the NDIS into their own $50b cash machine - Business valuers who somehow need to value every single Australian entity next July - Anyone wanting to be a highly paid public servant - Accountants who will be paid a lot more to deal with massively increased tax code complexity Let me know of anyone I’ve missed

My interpretation of the Australian tax change: If you start a successful business and sell it for $20 million, you pay 47% in tax - $9.4 million. But if you win $20 million in the lottery, it’s tax free. So the message is: Don’t build. Don’t innovate. Don’t invest. Gamble instead.

Huge congratulations to the The Stained Glass Museum for arranging the York Study Trip 2026 - an excellent line up of experts and locations.

yall say please and thank you to claude.. right?? i asked a bunch of my SWE mates and found that NO-ONE is pleasant to claude aha! so to combat this, here are some niceclaude projects that i think yall should integrate into your workflows if you wanna be a 10x nicengineer https://lnkd.in/gAtvN8_X -> appends thank you to every prompt you make. https://lnkd.in/gZk22h6e -> gives you a wand that lets you rain compliments to claude. https://lnkd.in/gxtfMa9z -> provides a snippet for your claude.md files that injects pleases and thank yous into every prompt. im working on my own little contribution to the niceclaude ecosystem, will release soon watch this space!

I used to live behind the lens It was a hobby. Somehow my work was featured in magazines, even Vogue funnily Then AI happened. Not all at once. Just quietly, over time, I stopped picking up the camera. The urge to create faded in the background. When everything can be generated, iterated, perfected in seconds, you start to question what it even means to make something. Today, a friend said something that stayed with me: “Your taste didn’t go anywhere.” And I think that’s what I forgot. Tools change. Speed changes. Everything gets easier. But the way you see, what you choose to notice, what you choose to say, that’s still yours. In a world where everyone can create, taste is the only thing that’s hard to replicate. So I’m picking up the camera again. Have you ever felt like you lost a part of your creative self?