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7 Nov 2025

How are Gen Xers faring in today’s America?

1 Zacharia = 0.45454545 of a Scaramucci. Coincidence? I think not.

abc.net.auDownsizing from the family home may cost too much for empty nestersSome empty nesters want to move into smaller homes but say the cost of doing so keeps them in their large properties.

21 Sept

We do not live in a society www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...

21 Sept

What in the “conservative, small-minded, small government, self-centred, short-sighted idiocracy” is this? This pair stand to make an absolute bundle on the oversized home they’ve owned for decades, but they won’t sell because some of the $ would go to govt services instead of an overseas holiday.

My monthly budget is in deficit, so I’ve decided to stop buying food. Soon I’ll be rolling in cash!

What kind of space weapons will be on Artemis IV?

There was a brief window of a few thousand years when artists were able to make tangible art and trade it for money. Now that the entire history of human creative endeavour has been fed into the maw of AI, that time is over.

From now on, human art can only exist as it did in pre-literate times – as stories, songs and images that exist in artists heads and are shared by spoken word and performance, never being written down or recorded in any way except in the memories of other people.

The “terminators“ of the future won’t be killing machines, they’ll be humanoid robots designed to blend into the audience and record oral stories and performances and take them back to the AI overlord.

theguardian.comHealth officials in turmoil over 11th-hour backflip on aged care algorithm override powers, emails revealMinisters given emergency briefing about changes to algorithm decisions just three days before tool rollout

It is abject cruelty by the #Labor government to create an algorithm that under-assesses older people’s needs while not allowing human assessors to change the outcome. It is a system designed to strip money out of aged care at the expense of vulnerable people. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

12 Sept

It’s not a ‘redemption story’ unless you’ve redeemed yourself. If you’ve become a One Nation candidate, your arc is not bending towards redemption, you’ve become a worse human being on any possible metric. #auspol

theguardian.comI turned off my algorithm for 24 hours. Is this how social media used to be?Thanks to a little-known feature in Instagram, I try to travel back to 2012 – before everything on the internet was an ad

I’m not on instagram (having ditched all Meta products back when the company was still just Facebook), but seeing the photo of @caitlinecassidy.bsky.social‘s feed in this article made me desperate to see the video of the baby deer going down a waterslide www.theguardian.com/media/2026/s...

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My big five usage report card: Meta: totally divested ✅ Microsoft: subscribed to 365, but at least I’ve never knowingly used Copilot ❌ Amazon: I refuse to buy shit or subscribe to Prime, but I can’t give up the IMDB app ❌ Alphabet: who does use YouTube? (Plus I have to use Chrome to test websites) ❌

(But it is Duck Duck Go all the way for search) And finally… Apple: I’m so deeply invested in the Apple product line and ecosystem that I couldn’t escape their walled garden with a grappling hook, & I watch every Apple event, luxuriating in the warm bath of smooth and soothing corporate content ❌❌

Just reflecting on this – I think Meta is the easiest of the ‘big five’ to avoid. The others…either they have something inescapable and pervasive (how do you stop using Amazon Web Sevices?) or I can’t let it go (where do I watch DIY videos and video game trailers, if not on YouTube?)

Apple made a folding iPad mini!

2 Sept

America.

2 Sept

Universities are becoming AI machines. Academics are using it to write papers. It is teaching classes. Students are using it to complete assessments. It is marking student assessments. Autonomous agents mean we can soon remove humans from the teaching loop altogether.

15 Aug

What’s this I hear (in an ABC news story) about @fionakatauskas.bsky.social not having her contract renewed at @australia.theguardian.com? What next? Are they going to have @firstdogonthemoon.bsky.social put down?

theguardian.comAs online dating goes into ‘salvage mode’, can AI solve all its problems?Dating apps such as Bumble forced to adapt as ‘swipe fatigue’ grows

14 Aug

Dating apps are one of those industries that, like internet search, can only remain profitable if they are bad at their job. If adding AI works, they will go out of business. If adding AI doesn’t work, they will still go out of business, because everyone hates AI. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

14 Aug

Farage has suffered what can only be described as a humiliating victory.

11 Aug

Woman on secret military flight: “I’ll have the beef please” Air attendant peering into catering cart: “I’m sorry ma’am, all we have on this flight is chicken”

AI is just a “one weird trick” gambit, except instead of being an easily ignorable clickbait link at the bottom of the article you just read, it is an insanely expensive behemoth that is eating the entire world.

I would genuinely like to know: is everyone’s experience of customer service chatbots the same as mine? I have never been assisted by AI customer service. At best, the chatbot just told me things I either already knew or didn’t ask about. At worst, it gave me incorrect information.

In every interaction I have had with a customer service chatbot, a human has had to address my issue. All the chatbot did was delay any action to fix the problem I was having, while demanding more effort from me in pointless chat interactions before I was able to escalate the matter to a human.

In my individual experience, AI chatbots have made the customer service experience worse (more time-consuming and effortful) while presumably not saving the company money (since a human needed to fix my problem anyway). Is this everyone’s experience? Or am I some weird outlier with special needs?

theguardian.comThe disturbing rise of ‘gooner’ assaults at Dollar Tree stores: ‘They find it funny to degrade women’In dark corners of the internet, men are goading each other to masturbate in public – and on female shoppers – and post the footage

20 July

What do Hegseth’s testosterone-maxxing and Dollar Tree have in common? It’s where high-T meets low-inhib. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

13 July

Reilly, Ace of Spies has sung his last song

9 July

With zero evidence, I’d be willing to bet that the “software defect” that caused the #Telstra outage, was the fault of an AI code-writing assistant and the human checking its work didn’t pick up the error. This is going to keep happening, for one inescapable reason. 1/3

9 July

if you are a human tasked with checking machine-made widgets coming past on a conveyer belt and there is only a 1 in 100,000 chance the machine made an error, it is incredibly hard to maintain the focus needed ro catch the single defect out of 99,999 perfect widgets. 2/3

9 July

Software engineers do less and less code writing and are increasingly becoming conveyer belt inspectors, checking machine-generated code for errors. In this situation, some errors will always get through, and some of those errors will be catastrophic.

theguardian.comIOC lifts suspension and paves way for Russia to compete at LA 2028 OlympicsThe International Olympic Committee has lifted a suspension on Russia that would allow athletes to compete for the nation at the 2028 Los Angeles Games

Did I hear someone talking about corrupt sporting organisations? www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/j...

Who else has ordered a pair of Facebook’s new creep spectacles?

Another Trump-backed candidate fails to perform #USAversusbelgium

My main problem with the pam the bird graffiti on the bolte is how annoyingly off-center it is. I’m glad I don’t have to drive across the bridge every day, because that shit would really piss me off #melbourne

4 July

As America turns 250, it’s clear it won’t reach its 300th birthday. As empires go, it has been remarkably short-lived.

1 July

Since data centers have gobbled up all the GPUs, can I just get Claude to run my Steam library in the cloud?

theguardian.comMore US states push to ban kratom drink deemed ‘gas-station heroin’At least eight states have banned the plant-derived product as more people use it and some claim it’s addictive

16 June

Kratom madness grips America – did you know that hospitalisations from kratom use in America have surged from around 0.000013% of the population to nearly 0.000155% of the population in just 10 years? When will this scourge end? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

16 June

Metaphor (n): evocatively describing something by saying it is actually a completely unrelated other thing. Example: ”the reflecting pool turning into a literal swamp immediately after its ‘renovation‘ is a poignant metaphor for the America of today”.

31 May

I wasn’t planning to read Careless People because I don’t feel like I need anyone to tell me how heinous Meta is. But after reading about Meta’s efforts to silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, I’ve ordered a copy out of spite.

28 May

I love the idea of Trump’s face on a $250 bill – soon Americans will be using them to buy bread, and it’ll be a great reminder of who’s to blame

22 May

There is no headline that could better sum up the absolutely dire state of the liberal party #auspol

theguardian.comAustralian director Phillip Noyce shoots feature film for Saudi Arabia celebrating ‘heroism of security men in combating drugs’Exclusive: Regime, which executed 243 people last year for drug offences, accused of investing in entertainment to whitewash its human rights record

8 May

Just another example, if it were needed, that brilliance in youth doesn’t necessarily translate to wisdom in old age. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

theguardian.comCoalition considers plan to slash net overseas immigration by nearly half its current rate, leaked document revealsExclusive: Taskforce to mull options to cut level to 150,000-200,000, which is higher than One Nation’s hard 130,000 cap and Howard-era’s 100,000 target

7 May

Coalition planning to stop Australian economy dead in its tracks www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

6 May

If 50% of the staff at your company can be replaced by AI, your company doesn’t need to exist.

6 May

Basically, if you run a SAAS company, and you are sacking most of your software engineers and replacing them with AI, then anyone armed with a good prompt can replace your company’s services for free.

theguardian.comThe Parallax View: remember when Hollywood made potent political cinema?This Warren Beatty thriller puts all the anxieties and tension of the 70s into a blender – and delivers a perfectly paranoid pulp mystery

5 May

The remake would be called “The Palantir View” www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...

24 Apr

The thing is, even with excellent PR, you can still go to prison for murder.

theguardian.comFalling fertility, debt and AI: is the US headed toward a population crisis?Americans having fewer kids plus an ageing population could be a recipe for disaster that further erodes social stability

19 Apr

There’s a simple recipe for solving this problem: maintain high and sustained levels of immigration, and provide social services to boost productivity: like affordable housing, education, universal healthcare, cheap renewable energy and extensive public transport. www.theguardian.com/business/202...