Linkage

BOM launched its new website, which was also built by Accenture Australia, in October 2025 during an extreme weather event. It was widely criticised for its costs and poor design, including changes to its rain radar display.

Upon launch, BOM said the website cost $4.1 million to reconfigure. But it has since been revealed that the real cost was approximately $96.5 million, owing to the cost of upgrading and testing its back-end systems.

Much of the cost can be attributed to the $78 million contract signed with Accenture, which initially started as a $31 million contract and grew across nine extensions.

During a Senate estimates hearing late last year, Greens senator Barbara Pocock described the broader program as a "nightmare Harvard case study in contract failure and management of contracts", specifically citing Accenture in her criticism.

"This is a firm that is famous for 'land and expand'," she said.

[…]

In the US, President Donald Trump has taken the axe to the government workforce, with science and climate agencies taking major hits.

In Australia, the CSIRO is also facing significant cuts.

Most recently, it was announced that the organisation would lose up to 350 full-time equivalent jobs across its research units, including reports of over 100 job losses in their Environmental Research Unit.

Senator Whish-Wilson said, given this, Australian scientists would be "rightly questioning" what the government's priorities were.

"Scientists are going to be devastated if they hear that tens of millions of dollars are being spent on new web services when they're being told there's no money to pay for their salaries and for the critical science that they do," he said.

"[Science] which, by the way, feeds into Australian Climate Services and will be used on this website or updated web portal."

I wish I could say I thought these concerns were overblown:

The law orders the Director of the Kansas Department of Revenue (which oversees the granting of driver’s licenses) to identify all people granted a driver’s license (or other ID) with a gender marker that does not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth, a stipulation that applies almost exclusively to trans people.

It then orders that these licenses be invalidated, ordering the bearers to surrender their old licenses, at which time they will be provided a new license that has the wrong gender marker.

There is no part of that which isn't concerning.

Firstly, it requires the government to make a list of all people to whom this would apply to. Since the requirements are meant to only include a hated minority group, the government is essentially making a list of those which it views as its internal enemies.

Second, it required that the affected IDs be invalidated. This leaves those trans people who previously had safe IDs with no means of accurately representing themselves.

Since the primary means of identification for most Americans is their driver’s license, this would also mean taking away their legal right to drive a car, which is required for most daily tasks. Being able to drive is also a requirement for many jobs, and having a valid driver’s license is a requirement for many types of public services.

Third, the affected trans people would be forced to surrender their now invalidated IDs as a means of obtaining new ones. This serves to remove from circulation any existing IDs that do not misgender the trans people in question.

Lastly, these trans people will be provided with new IDs whose sex markers are based on what they were assigned at birth, rather than what their body (or appearance) would suggest today.

To an outside observer viewing such an ID seeing a person that appears to be one sex/gender, but whose ID marks them as the opposite is a dead giveaway that the person is trans. From there, they are marked out as different from the general population, and can then be treated differently based on whatever prejudices the reader sees fit or whatever discriminatory laws are relevant.

Tourism in Vegas is down, but gambling revenue is up. How does that work? Vegas is a microcosm of the whole economy — it caters more and more to the super-rich, while everyone else is squeezed out. We went out to talk to locals, who say this lopsided approach can't last.

On Monday, Mississippi enrolled an anti-trans bill that will ban driver's license gender marker changes for transgender people across the state. The bill, which now awaits Republican Gov. Tate Reeves' signature, requires that all Mississippi driver's licenses reflect the holder's sex assigned at birth and explicitly states that court orders recognizing a gender change "shall have no effect" on license issuance. It is the latest in a wave of extreme anti-transgender identification document bans in recent months, following Kansas's decision in February to invalidate transgender people's driver's licenses overnight with no grace period—a story we at EITM broke. Though the Mississippi bill does not retroactively invalidate existing licenses the way Kansas did, any transgender Mississippian whose license comes up for renewal will be forced to carry identification that does not match their identity, should the governor sign it.

[…] 

The bill is the latest in a growing wave of anti-transgender identification document laws. In February, Kansas went further than any state before it, invalidating transgender people's driver's licenses overnight and sending letters demanding their immediate surrender—leaving many scrambling and unable to get to work, pick up their children, and navigate daily life with suddenly invalid IDs. Though Mississippi's bill does not contain those instant revocation provisions, the effect will be the same over time: as licenses come up for renewal, transgender Mississippians will be forced to carry documents that out them. According to the Movement Advancement Project, seven states already do not allow transgender people to update the gender marker on their driver's license. If Gov. Reeves signs SB 2322, Mississippi will become the eighth.

This article has the usual flaws. eg. LLMs do not "hallucinate and elaborate on misinformation"; the behaviour misleadingly classed as such is the system working as designed to probabilistically produce plausible-sounding sentences.

Osmanovic Thunström says the idea to invent Izgubljenovic and bixonimania came out of studies on how large language models work. When she teaches her students how AI systems formulate their ‘knowledge’, she shows them how the Common Crawl database, a giant trawl of the Internet’s contents, informs their outputs. She also shows students how prompt injection — giving an AI chatbot a prompt that shunts it outside of its safety guard rails — can manipulate the output.

Because she works in the medical field, she decided to create a condition related to health and hit on the name bixonimania because it “sounded ridiculous”, she says. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania — that’s a psychiatric term.”

If that wasn’t sufficient to raise suspicions, Osmanovic Thunström planted many clues in the preprints to alert readers that the work was fake. Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California. One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise”. Both papers say they were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”.

Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.

Genocide against trans people takes on patterns that set it apart from the mass murder genocides that people commonly associate with the crime, such as the Holocaust. Currently, the genocide against trans people follows a pattern – denial of identity (pattern #9 in the Lemkin Institute’s Ten Patterns of Genocide) – that makes it more familiar to the colonial genocides against indigenous populations, including the residential/boarding school systems in North America and Australia, where indigenous children were “allowed” to go on living if they gave up their identities, including their languages. Denial of identity involves two main steps: preventing people from openly expressing an identity and destroying institutions that reproduce the identity. Given that the denial of identity is the consequence of a well-defined hostility, even hatred, for the identity, the pattern is often characterized by incitement against the group. Alongside suppression and incitement, perpetrators of this pattern of genocide will simultaneously criminalize the identity, so that expressions of it or institutions that reproduce it become characterized as threatening and corrosive to the body politic and warranting state violence and coercion. People who assert or support the denied identity then become criminal elements that must be eliminated. In the case of the boarding schools, children who used their mother tongue or otherwise showed signs of their independent identity were severely punished.

[…]

What the anti-trans movement fails to understand is that trans people are not created through gender-affirming care. Their identities are real regardless of whether they have undergone any form of medical or even social transition. Gender-affirming care bans and policies forcing trans people to remain closeted condemn trans people to lives of suffering, but do not make them cis. 

This is a really good succinct explainer for the people in you life who have no precise, coherent definition of "intelligence" beyond I know it when I see it (which is, you, me, and everybody else), and/or a belief that computers are fundamentally magical (which appears to be most people in the world).

Artificial intelligence is routinely framed as unstoppable – a technology the world must adapt to, not question. But as companies invest hundreds of billions and the hype accelerates, scrutiny has fallen away. Cory Doctorow on who controls the story around AI and why past tech “revolutions” offer a warning.

Supporters of capitalism like to claim that the supermarket is a wonderful capitalist invention. In fact, the supermarket has been a central figure in pro-capitalist propaganda since the Cold War. For decades, popular culture has linked socialism of any variety with images of grey, joyless stores and empty shelves.

This image is so persistent that we even saw people sharing pictures of supermarket shelves emptied by pandemic panic-buying as if it was a taste of socialism at work. The idea that these photos came from supermarkets operating under in a capitalist economy doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds.

Such propaganda has fostered a common-sense notion that publicly owned supermarkets must inevitably lead to a lack of choice or to food shortages. However, the experience of capitalist supermarkets themselves disproves the idea that bureaucratic planning and centralized control always gives rise to such problems.

Supermarkets don’t spontaneously adapt to the signals of a vibrant free market: they are highly planned economic structures. Decisions are made months or years in advance to secure reliable supply chains, meet seasonal demand, and keep shelves filled.

Moreover, far from being a diverse industry, supermarkets tend toward consolidation. In Australia, just two supermarket chains account for over 65 percent of market share, in a pattern that is repeated all over the world. The business model of supermarkets relies on scale. They could fairly be described as natural monopolies — or in Australia at least, duopolies.

The modern supermarket is the result of large-scale logistics engineering and industrial food production. Neither of these things are inherently capitalist, although the inequality and exploitation that currently define the food system certainly are.

• This inquiry is about finding ways to put the people who use human services at the heart of service provision. This matters because everyone will use human services in their lifetime and change is needed to enable people to have a stronger voice in shaping the services they receive, and who provides them.
• In the study report for this inquiry, the Commission identified six services for which the introduction of greater user choice, competition and contestability would improve outcomes for the people who receive them. These services are: end-of-life care services; social housing; family and community services; services in remote Indigenous communities; patient choice over referred health services; and public dental services. This final inquiry report sets out tailored reforms for those six services. There is no one-size-fits-all competition solution.
• Users should have choice over the human services they access and who provides them, unless there are sound reasons otherwise. Choice empowers users of human services to have greater control over their lives and generates incentives for providers to be more responsive to their needs.
  • Competition and contestability are means to this end and should only be pursued when they improve the effectiveness of service provision.
• A stronger focus on users, better service planning and improved coordination across services and levels of government is needed. Governments should focus on the capabilities and attributes of service providers when designing service arrangements and selecting providers — not simply the form of an organisation.
• Each year, tens of thousands of people who are approaching the end of life are cared for and die in a place that does not fully reflect their choices or meet their needs. Reforms are needed to significantly expand community-based palliative care services and to improve the standard of end-of-life care in residential aged care facilities.
• The social housing system is broken. A single system of financial assistance that is portable across rental markets for private and social housing should be established. This would provide people with more choice over the home they live in and improve equity. Tenancy support services should also be portable across private and social housing.
• Family and community services are not effective at meeting the needs of people experiencing hardship. Practical changes to system planning, provider selection, and contract management would sharpen focus on improving outcomes for people who use these services.
• Current approaches to commissioning human services in remote Indigenous communities are not working. Governments should improve commissioning arrangements and should be more responsive to local needs. This would make services more effective and would lay the foundation for more place-based approaches in the future.
• Patients should have greater choice over which healthcare provider they go to when given a referral or diagnostic request by their general practitioner. A simple legislative change would help. More patient choice would empower patients to choose options that better match their preferences. Public information is needed to support choice and encourage self-improvement by providers.
• Public dental patients have little choice in who provides their care and most services are focused on urgent needs. Long-term reform is needed to introduce a consumer-directed care scheme. This would enhance patient choice and promote a greater focus on preventive care.

• Greater competition, contestability and informed user choice could improve outcomes in many, but not all, human services.
• The Commission has prioritised six areas where outcomes could be improved both for people who use human services, and the community as a whole. Reform could offer the greatest improvements in outcomes for people who use:
  • social housing
  • public hospitals
  • end-of-life care services
  • public dental services
  • services in remote Indigenous communities
  • government-commissioned family and community services.
• Well-designed reform, underpinned by strong government stewardship, could improve the quality of services, increase access to services, and help people have a greater say over the services they use and who provides them.
• Introducing greater competition, contestability and informed user choice can improve the effectiveness of human services.
  • Informed user choice puts users at the heart of service delivery and recognises that, in general, the service user is best placed to make decisions about the services that meet their needs and preferences.
  • Competition between service providers can drive innovation and create incentives for providers to be more responsive to the needs and preferences of users. Creating contestable arrangements amongst providers can achieve many of the benefits of effective competition.
  • For some services, and in some settings, direct government provision of services will be the best way to improve the wellbeing of individuals and families. The introduction of greater competition, contestability and choice does not preclude government provision of services.
• Access to high-quality human services, such as health and housing, underpins economic and social participation.
  • The enhanced equity and social cohesion this delivers improves community welfare.
• Government stewardship — the range of functions governments undertake that help to ensure service provision is effective at meeting its objectives — is critical.
  • Stewardship includes ensuring human services meet standards of quality, suitability and accessibility, giving people the support they need to make choices, ensuring that appropriate consumer safeguards are in place, and encouraging and adopting ongoing improvements to service provision.
• High-quality data are central to improving the effectiveness of human services.
  • User-oriented information allows people to make choices about the services they want and for providers to tailor their service offering to better meet users' needs.
  • Transparent use of data drives improvements in the performance of the system for the provision of human services and increases accountability to those who fund the services.