Linkage

Businesses are using the recent ban on credit card surcharges as “cover” to pass along much larger price increases to customers, experts say, as cafes and restaurants struggle to cope with climbing costs and rising interest rates.

Credit card surcharges, typically worth about 1.5% of the transaction, were banned from 1 October, as part of a Reserve Bank-led reform aimed at improving transparency for customers and, ultimately, lowering bank fees.

Small Flat White, an online coffee price tracker, has reported that 17% of cafes have increased their prices since the start of the surcharge ban.

Of those who raised coffee prices, the average increase was 50c, or more than 10%, according to the survey of more than 1,500 cafes.

That is multiples of the typical 1.5% card surcharge fee.

[…]

Wes Lambert, chief executive of the Australian Restaurant & Cafe Association, said business costs were rising rapidly while coffee prices in Australia were among the lowest in the world.

Lambert said businesses changed their prices for many reasons, and that the surcharge ban could have been the impetus for company owners to build up the courage to pass on costs to customers.

“Maybe this is the catalyst that has caused cafes and restaurateurs around the country to wake up.”

Lambert said restaurants were blaming the need for price rises on higher produce costs, steep rents and recent adjustments to junior pay rates and awards.

Many business owners are also affected by the four interest rate rises in 2026, which have driven up repayments on variable-rate loans and equipment financing.

“It should be no surprise that in a high inflation, high interest rate environment that businesses are going to raise their prices,” he said.

Driverless taxi company Waymo claims to be a tool for safe streets — but at least two of the cities where Waymo operates have not experienced declines in traffic-related injuries and deaths.

In San Francisco, where Waymo began operating in June 2024, traffic injuries actually increased by 2.6 percent from 2,896 in 2023 to 2,907 in 2025, according to data tracked by the city. And crash deaths also rose, albeit by one, from 26 in 2023 to 27 in 2025, a statistically insignificant increase, but nonetheless in the wrong direction for a company that has argued it will make cities safer.

[…]

In San Francisco, total vehicle miles traveled have gone up, and Waymo could be part of the problem, the city’s latest congestion management report claims. 

[…]

The more likely outcome, experts say, is that Waymo and other self-driving taxi services, would divert New Yorkers from using public transit, which remains the safest transportation option. Public transportation is 95 percent safer than vehicles, and it requires no new technology. Those who want to see safer streets should force Waymo to address the amount of miles it will add to a city’s overall VMT, another expert said at the Roosevelt House conference.

“We shouldn’t be asking only like, ‘Hey, are robotaxis safer than humans on a per-mile-driven basis?’ because there’s a real risk that AVs induce people to take a lot more car trips or to replace transit,” said David Zipper, a reporter for Bloomberg whose work questions the assumption of AV safety. “We could end up with a lot more driving. And even if every individual, self-driven mile is safer, if you have that much more driving, you have more crashes overall.”

This is England. Heartbreaking.

This week NHS England released their new guidance and every news outlet announced in bold letters, with the BBC putting it on their front page, that transgender women are to be barred from female hospital wards. Trans guys are banned from male wards, too, but they are invisibilised in the narrative, trans women are the ‘danger’, and so we’re the focus.

I have Multiple Sclerosis and so I need to use hospitals from time to time. I haven’t stayed in hospital in the last 10 years, but the time is coming. Now the guidance suggests staff will endeavour to put me in a side room, but who are we kidding the NHS isn’t the Tardis and isn’t replete with rooms they aren’t using for people who need them, and so I will be placed on a men’s ward. Every examination, every time I need to get up to use the toilet, every urgent response to my needs, will all be in a room full of men.

And of course, being placed on that ward reveals our transgender status to everyone. This woman, who most people think of as just another girl in the street, is going to have her gender history revealed to all who see her while in her most vulnerable state.

I can feel it already. The part of me so desperate to be realised in this world tugs at me, scared that we’ll go back, that we’ll put ourselves in the horrifying situation where we’re thought of as a man once more. I felt it when we fell off the Rocinante, our manual wheelchair, splayed out in the road surrounded by good, concerned people who saw this woman in need and stopped to help, asking urgently whether I needed an ambulance. I felt that pull to minimise the symptoms, to tell them I was ok, unsure of how much my appraisal of the seriousness of my injuries was being shaped by my fear of what would happen if I went to hospital.

Bookmarking because I am not a political optimist.

HRT Mom is a website dedicated to science-based, and lab tested methodology for homebrewing HRT. While there is much speculation as to how to best make HRT for injections at home, HRT Mom sticks just to the facts and avoids making assertions based on popular opinion or what feels most convenient.

I have spent over a thousand hours pouring over lab manuals, compounding manuals, USP guidelines, research papers, consulting with professional scientists, working in my home lab, injecting what I create, and writing reports on all the information I learn. All of this work is solely to bring you this guide. I’ve additionally invested thousands of dollars into equipment and experimentation to help work out the kinks in my lab. Up until recently brewing HRT at home has been a task of approximation. People share and publish guides and info on how compound HRT but they never fully understand what it is that they’re writing about. This website changes that. All information that is shared here is based on empirically validated research and its resulting logic. Any claim that cannot be backed up is flagged as an opinion of the author.

"Affordable" housing deja vu:

It was spruiked as a scheme to allow low and middle-income earners to purchase their first home in Canberra, but almost five years after signing on, some participants are yet to move in.

Instead, some buyers say they have been left stranded as they grapple with incomplete works while locked in contractual disputes with the builder.

[…]

Last month, Ms Lawther brought an independent assessor to her practical completion inspection, resulting in them both being told to leave the property due to unauthorised access.

In a subsequent email, the builder advised independent inspectors would not be allowed on site prior to handover because the homes had already been inspected and passed by the certifier.

[…]

Earlier in the process, buyers said they were shocked to discover their homes had not been built from brick, despite it being the only external material on the inclusions list.

Instead, the Suburban Land Agency endorsed the use of foam cladding, but admitted the builder had failed to properly communicate the change with the buyers. 

Well, this is good news for the current account balance:

Independent satellite monitoring has detected massive plumes of methane emerging from one of Australia's largest oil and gas complexes.

The persistent clouds above Chevron's Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on Barrow Island off Western Australia's Pilbara coast were picked up by five consecutive passes of the Tanager-1 satellite since November last year.

The most recent, in late August, recorded an average emission rate of about 7.8 tonnes of methane an hour.

That is the equivalent of burning more than 110,000 kilograms of coal within a span of 60 minutes, calculated using an online tool by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The repeated detections, the latest far exceeding a "super emitter" event under US EPA guidelines, prompted a United Nations (UN) warning to Chevron.

According to the UN, methane is responsible for about 25 per cent of global warming and is a greenhouse gas 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide

I have lost count of how many times I’ve left work over the past five years only to realize one push notification later that I had more rights in the morning than I did in the afternoon. The week after Trump’s passport executive order, I kept forgetting to breathe. While social media swirled with speculation about what this was meant to distract the public away from, visions of a grim future unspooled in my head. When it feels like your world is ending and the most people can be bothered to say about it is that something actually important must be happening somewhere else, the clear message is that what is happening to you is a second-tier issue—that you don’t really count.

The distraction discourse also doesn’t account for what happens when politicians supposedly on the “good” side embrace bigotry themselves. Is the response to, say, the recent decision by South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews to release an anti-trans ad to dismiss it as a distraction—or to ignore it entirely? This wasn’t just a rhetorical shift. This was an otherwise progressive politician being dragged into the realm of authoritarian prejudice—the kind of choice that has potentially life-altering consequences for those of us who live here under the bus. Shouldn’t that matter?

Beautifully clear statement of principle by Erin:

Equality organizations exist to promote equality positions, and candidates that receive endorsements gain the prestige (and sometimes the resources) that are going out to these organizations meant to protect LGBTQ+ rights. As a result, supporters of these organizations now have to contend with the fact that some of their support is going towards helping elect candidates that call trans girls “boys” and actively vote for anti-trans policies. That may be a hard pill to swallow for the millions of trans Americans who are concerned about recession of their rights.

An alternate path does exist: putting significant pressure on Democrats who have embraced anti-trans positions not to do so, and withholding or withdrawing endorsements when they do. If equality organizations are not willing to do this, they risk having their goals co-opted and becoming merely another branch of the Democratic Party, rather than independent organizations willing to advocate for the rights of transgender people and to award their endorsements and grades only to those who meet the mark. It is the path many reproductive rights organizations have taken in refusing to endorse anti-abortion Democrats.

The Democratic Party and Democratic officials are under heavy pressure from paid consultants to adopt more anti-transgender positions and policies. Should Democrats embrace those policies and win, the wins will be presented as evidence that abandoning transgender people is what it takes to win elections, and the contagion will spread through the party. And right now there is nothing to stop it. A Democrat can take an anti-trans vote or make an anti-trans statement before an endorsement and receive it anyway, or after an endorsement and keep it. The blessing of the organizations built to defend LGBTQ+ people has become something a candidate can simply take for granted. What remains unknown is how far one would have to go to lose it. Meanwhile, transgender people will keep being cut out of the calculus in favor of candidates who throw them under the bus, with the endorsements of their own movement in hand.

When federal energy minister Chris Bowen announced last November that all electricity companies in NSW, South Australia and South-East Queensland would – from July 1 – be forced by law to offer three free hours of electricity between 11am and 2pm through his Solar Sharer scheme, it seemed a top idea.

It would encourage people to use power between these hours, soaking up that solar power and so cutting demand later in the day when prices are higher. This would also enable households without solar, especially tenants and apartment dwellers, to share in the benefits of the energy transition to renewables.

The electricity market is dominated by the big three retailers: AGL, Energy Australia and Origin. They all own big power stations, too, so they are also generators. Because of this they are often referred to as “gentailers”.

I reviewed multiple pricing schedules on the government’s Energy Made Easy website and it’s now clear that Solar Sharer pricing has the highest cost for a household of all pricing schedules on offer.

The electricity retailers have increased the price of electricity outside the free three hours of Solar Sharer, plus they’ve increased the daily supply charge above the supply charge in their other pricing offers. 

Brilliant:

This seems like a reasonable explanation. "Aesthetics and judgement"... coming from "experience and intuition". Okay, interesting.

But where does taste come from? Every now and then there's a famous Rick Rubin or (sigh) Steve Jobs type character, who is a non-practitioner who undoubtedly does move mountains around their sense of taste, and so I think lots of people are hoping they can rely on maybe being such an exceptional figure themselves.

But it's important to realize that in the case of Rick Rubin or Steve Jobs, these are people who had strong taste who were also in positions of power and themselves were curating practitioners who themselves had exceptional taste. Which means that in order to produce something interesting and exceptional, they were curating practitioners who operated away from the averages who did the actual work.

But if your practitioner is an LLM, then you're not a Steve Jobs or a Rick Rubin. Your practitioner is the averages.

So you'd better have exceptional taste yourself, and here's the thing: ultimately, taste in terms of practice has to come from doing the practice yourself, and trying and failing and thinking something will be interesting and then you find you actually don't like it, or you try something and you end up having a wonderful accident or make up for some sort of thing that you're not good at, and that becomes your style, and your style defines the taste and preferences that you shape around it.

So... I'm afraid that to develop taste, you're going to need to spend a lot of time not using generative AI to develop it. Which a lot of people are finding themselves having a hard time motivating themselves to do.