Linkage

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.

The other bit of background worth understanding here is that Meta has been desperately seeking a path to regulatory capture for quite some time now. It’s been practically begging for Congress to pass child safety legislation that only the largest companies (like itself) could comply with. Indeed, Meta has done this before. It went against the rest of the internet industry in embracing FOSTA, again to try to create a regulatory moat. So this shouldn’t be surprising.

Meta’s failed forays into the “metaverse” and AI have shown that it’s been pretty consistently losing the innovation race, and the government granting it a regulatory moat that smaller competitors can’t cross would be a godsend.

And it’s even better when it can be done in a way that looks like Meta “losing” a lawsuit.

So that’s what Meta gets here. They “settle” the lawsuit so the AGs and Meta haters can all claim that they’ve “protected the children.” Meta pays out over a decade — enough that it’s taking a $10 billion legal charge in Q3, which stings for a bit but will mostly be forgotten by next year. Meta can easily eat the cost. And then Meta agrees to implement a bunch of kid safety features, most of which we have no idea whether they actually protect any kids. Notably, a legislature could not have mandated most of these features without running straight into the First Amendment — but coming out of a settlement, they carry the imprimatur of law anyway (more on that in a moment), and the structure of the agreement makes it so that Meta has to actively encourage Google and TikTok to take identical steps, thereby setting in concrete what steps any platform will have to take to be considered following “best practices” and therefore acceptable to most of the country’s Attorneys General.

[…]

You can argue that these feature changes sound like they should help kids. Limiting access to two hours a day (unless parents grant more, which many will), lights out at midnight, disappearing like counts — these all sound like they’ll help some kids. But if it turns out that locking kids out of these systems actually pushes the most vulnerable ones to darker places with no trust & safety team at all, you won’t hear about that from Meta or the AGs.

We just spent three years teaching the entire industry that if you do research on child safety, you’ll have it held against you. Do we really think that all of this is going to actually enable anyone to figure out what works to help actual kids?

Meta bought itself a moat. The AGs bought themselves headlines that will be useful next election season. And every teenager in the country was just automatically enrolled in an untested experiment. There’s a five year independent auditor requirement to confirm that Meta follows the rules. But not to see if the rules work.

An investigation by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) has found an "alarming lack of transparency" from major government contractors operating inside the privatised employment services system.

It has also raised concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest arising from for-profit companies in the system making large donations to Australia's major political parties.

[…]

It shows how for-profit "employment services providers" can use aggressive tax minimisation, large dividend payouts, offshore-related party payments, tax havens, and opaque financial reporting to extract profits from the system, without breaking any laws.

And it questions if the system is meeting the public's expectations.

"It's no secret that Australia's system of privatised employment services has failed," the report argues.

"The Howard-era system fills the pockets of private equity and millionaires, while leaving jobseekers without work."

The ULEZ restrictions are actually not all that strict, especially from the perspective of us here at an electric vehicle publication – most diesel and petrol (gasoline)-powered cars made within the last 10 and 20 years respectively qualify, despite that they still create significant tailpipe pollution.

Also, there are exemptions available for delivery vehicles, buses and so on.

Nevertheless, despite these exemptions, a recent report released by the city of London shows how well the ULEZ has worked at lowering pollution in London and making everyone healthier.

The report points out that two of the most dangerous aspects of vehicle emissions – nitrogen oxides, which are responsible for smog formation, and PM2.5, which are tiny particles that irritate the lungs – have dropped by almost a third compared to if ULEZ hadn’t been implemented, in only the few years that the policy has been in place.

Specifically, NO2 is 27% lower and PM2.5 is 31% lower in outer London. Nitrogen oxides (which includes both NO and NO2) as a whole are down 14%.

Some areas have seen even more significant declines, like Central London, the most densely populated area. It has seen a drop in NO2 levels of 54%.

All in all, 99% of air quality monitors around London have showed a reduction in pollution, so the new rules have benefitted everyone.

Cory and Jon both on top form:

Splendid overview of RBA counter-productivity from my friend and colleague Martha:

In November 2024, The Reserve Bank Act was ammended. The changes now required the RBA’s monetary policy board to determine the monetary policy of the bank to stabilise prices in Australia, to maintain full employment in Australia and stabilise Australia’s financial system.  The Reserve Bank’s role was to prevent banks from destabilising the financial system to prevent credit crashes. The Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy-Reserve Bank was an agreement between the Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the Reserve Bank Board on the 10th July 2025. The agreement provided full operational autonomy to the RBA’s Monetary Policy Board, underlining the RBA’s goals of price and inflation control.

Somehow the ‘economic prosperity and welfare of all Australians’, got swapped out for keeping the banking sector stable. Now whilst the concepts might be related, stabilisation of Australia’s financial system is no guarantee of either economic prosperity or welfare for all the people of Australia. The RBA has also completely reinterpreted the term ‘full employment.’

Specifically the RBA’s statement of monetary policy explains ‘to achieve its statutory objectives, the Bank sets monetary policy to keep inflation in the economy to 2%-3%, and employment at the desired level that is consistent with maintaining low and stable inflation. In other words, there always has to be a level of ‘natural’ unemployment to avoid inflation.  Dr Kelly notes that even when inflation is within the RBA’s desired target range of 2-3%, the RBA does nothing to stop unemployment rising by lowering interest rates.

(Thanks for the name check, Martha.)

Governor Michelle Bullock has admitted that the RBA is basing its actions on the expectations of inflation, rather than direct observation of inflation. The RBA relies on the NAIRU (the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). The NAIRU cannot be directly observed or measured, it can only be inferred. My colleague, economist Katy Swain, hilariously calls the NAIRU, the RBA’s ‘invisible friend.’

Australia's growing reliance on temporary migrant labour has fuelled a booming labour hire industry, with contractors sitting between growers and workers, often recruiting, transporting and housing them.

While some operate legally, others prey on vulnerable migrant workers, paying them cash, well below the minimum wage.

[…]

The Modern Slavery Act, introduced in 2018, requires companies with annual revenue above $100 million to file a report each year, identifying the modern slavery risks in their operations and supply chains and what they're doing to address them.

It was designed to encourage transparency and improve corporate behaviour.

Four Corners used data analysis tools to analyse hundreds of annual modern slavery statements from 50 food companies between 2020 and 2025.

One in four contained sections that were more than 80 per cent identical to previous reports.

[…]

Former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Allan Fels has dedicated a lot of time to the plight of migrant workers. […]

He describes the Modern Slavery Act as a symbolic and tokenistic law. "It's the sort of law you pass when you want to look as if you're concerned about something, but you don't intend anything to happen," he says.

An independent review of the Modern Slavery Act handed to the federal government in 2023 concluded Australia's framework should be strengthened.

"The report spells out what's obvious to regulators like me — that the law was never intended to be associated with any real action. It was just a law you put on the books as a sign of concern, but with no intent to take serious action," he says.

Another brilliant rant from Girl on the Net. [Standard disclaimer: She's a sex blogger, so some of the ads on her site may not be the sort you want your boss to see over your shoulder. Assuming you read blogs during working hours. And if not, why not?]

Wiki isn’t the only site concerned about censorship, though, and early implementation of age verification in the UK shows that it – like any attempt to regulate ‘porn’ – ends up catching a lot of other content too. Reddit users have already begun documenting subreddits that have been age-gated, including support forums for sexual assault survivors and help on how to quit smoking. On top of this, a tonne of LGBTQ+ content and sex education has already been caught in the net. Expect much much more of this to happen going forward.

This isn’t a question of just getting the government to write in exemptions, either. Although Wikipedia may earn an exemption through the court case (I hope it does), one of the core problems with the Online Safety Act in implementation is that the definitions are incredibly broad and the penalties are potentially extremely harsh. Websites need to assess whether they have a ‘significant number’ of UK users – what’s significant? 10% of total traffic? 10 people? 10,000 visitors per month? They also need to consider whether it’s likely to be accessed by children. What does that mean – ‘likely’? Sites which aren’t marketed to children or shared in any spaces where children are likely to be browsing… are they exempt? We don’t know. What we do know, however, is that sites which do not comply will be investigated by Ofcom, and potentially fined up to 10% of their annual revenue or £18 million – whichever is greater. The chilling effect of penalties like this, especially when combined with ‘guidance’ from the regulator that could generously be described as ‘vague’ means that any site with any content that could potentially be classed as ‘harmful to children’ would be taking a giant leap into the expensive unknown if they didn’t proactively comply. And compliance with ‘age verification’ is costly and time consuming: I personally can’t afford to do it, which is why I’ve just blanket blocked UK users from hearing the audio. Many other sites – both adult and non-adult – are coming to the same conclusion. Check out the Blocked page, from the Open Rights Group, which is tracking site closures and blocks as a result of the Act. Submit any sites you know of that are doing this too – let’s keep track of what we’re losing.

So there’s another harm: you’re not just losing access to this content unless you hand over private details, in many many cases (particularly with smaller sites and services) you’re losing access to it entirely. Even flashing your passport won’t get you to the content, because the site owner can’t afford to hire a bouncer to check your ID.

[…]

The UK government’s implementation of AV, without any exemption or concession for small sites, essentially means that those with the deepest pockets will get the most traffic. That means the large, ‘free’ porn tube sites – already an extremely dominant force in the adult industry, hoovering up a lot of the money and even shaping how we define ‘porn’ in the first place – will only become bigger and more powerful. Meanwhile those smaller sites trying to swim against the tide, offering a view of sexuality that is broader and more diverse than what you see on the front page of TubeFuck will struggle to get traction. As TechDirt put it this week:

   “This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but everyone else gets crushed.”

The system working as intended:

A National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) service provider was allowed to pocket more than $1 million by incorrectly billing for personal training services, while at least 4,000 other providers also incorrectly charged Australians with disability, the federal government says.

The provider that incorrectly billed for more than $1 million charged disabled Australians $193.99 an hour, nearly three times the government's recommended price.

The rort centres on a category of service called "other professionals", which was intended for services provided by a qualified therapist to deliver evidence-based supports.

However, unscrupulous providers submitted a range of other claims under that item, including payments for decluttering, personal training, golf lessons, float tanks and horse therapy.