Linkage

The report, released tonight, recommends scrapping rules that force developers to include a minimum number of car park spaces when building housing.

The "Wasted Space" report found that upwards of 40 per cent of car parks were left empty each night in apartments in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

"State and local governments typically require new housing to include off-street parking — often much more than residents want, needlessly driving up the price of housing," the report said.

The report found these parking minimums increased construction costs by $70,000 for a two-bedroom Sydney apartment.

Bless Amy Goodman.

As consolidation, layoffs, and deference to power continue to hollow out the corporate media, Jon is joined by Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!” and subject of the new documentary "STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE!" Together, they examine which stories get told and why, discuss the bargain the media makes in trading truth for access, and explore the power ordinary people still possess to organize and fight back — even as attacks on our democracy intensify.

Very interesting take.

In parallel with the rise of the technopoly over the past couple of decades the US’s global dominance has been declining. The 2007 crash effectively legalising financial fraud – you only get jail time if you defraud the rich – lead to both a decline in the rule of law in the US and an excessively financialised economy. When stock markets and the like are overrepresented they suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive.

If you have two economies of equal size and productivity, one has a massive financial sector and billionaires while the other does not, the financialised economy will have less left over to invest in research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Over time, it will inevitably fall behind the country with a smaller financial sector because it’s the other things that drive the economy and productivity, not stock market growth.

The US has coasted on the fact that it’s economy is so big that it could afford all the finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood. At least for a while.

[…]

Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries. Why make software for hotels when you can control the hotel industry? Why make software for taxis when you can replace the entire industry with software? Instead of trying to entice customers to upgrade their software by making new versions more valuable to them, push them to a subscription service where you control what they get, when they get it, and what value they’re allowed to unlock from their own businesses. Why sell Word when you can sell an Office 365 Cloud Subscription?

The endpoint of this is to replace every industry that remains with generative models. Cut back on actual development of Photoshop, for example, lower development costs and programmer overhead even as you replace the industries that are your customers with automatic image and video generators.

But writing out a detailed analysis of the how, what, why, and where of the software industry’s grasp for control doesn’t really make that much sense when we don’t know how any of it’s going to pan out.

The software industry is built on the foundation provided by an unchallenged US global hegemony. Without it, without the economic force provided by the US dollar, the US having access to all of our data around the globe and their control over payment systems and networking would be less tenable. Today’s software industry would not exist. Without the weight of the US political empire behind it – if Airbnb or Uber had been local startups – much fewer countries in the world would have loosened their regulations and consumer protections to accommodate them to the point where they prospered as they did.

Even as the software industry achieves its ne plus ultra – the unprecedented achievement of controlling all language, media, and office work in the west by turning “AI” into the universal intermediary – the foundation they built on is crumbling.

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

[…]

Combined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.

There’s little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box is arriving this week, and generative UI is arriving this summer. Both are free. The mini-app-building feature and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.

The lack of self-awareness in naming a site that excludes anyone who isn't a bigoted joyless monomaniac "Giggle" cannot be emphasised enough.

Last week, the Federal Court upheld a 2024 decision that it was discriminatory to exclude a transgender user from a women-only app.

The court had been considering an appeal from Giggle for Girls app founder Sall Grover over the 2024 finding that she discriminated against Roxanne Tickle by blocking her from using the app and refusing to reinstate her.

Grover and Giggle argued the decision to exclude Tickle was exempt from being classed as discrimination because the app aimed to achieve "substantial equality" and create a safe space for women.

On Friday, the Federal Court upheld its decision that the exemption did not apply, meaning similar arguments made in defence of single-sex spaces would likely also fail.

On Saturday, Opposition leader Angus Taylor said in a statement on social media that the finding confirmed "the Australian law does not properly protect single sex spaces for women and girls".

He vowed on social media to amend the Sex Discrimination Act if the Coalition won government, "to ensure that women and girls (and men and boys) have protections based on biological sex".

"We are not removing a single protection from anyone," he said.

"But we are recognising something that should never have been in doubt: biological sex is real, it matters, and women and girls deserve spaces where it is respected."

Taylor said a move to "define biological sex in the Act" as "the sex you are born" would be a first-term priority.

"This is not radical. It is common sense," Taylor said.

Sigh. Yes, we've heard it all before. It's reality that's being excessively radical, therefore we must legislate against reality.

The deal would have been Palantir’s largest yet in British policing, after others worth £330m and £240m with NHS England and the Ministry of Defence.

The row has been inflamed by the fact that Khan has previously made clear that Londoners only wanted to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.

[…]

The row has cast fresh light on Palantir’s record of winning public contracts in the UK. Scotland Yard previously appointed Palantir on a much smaller contract to use AI to monitor staff behaviour in an bid to root out corrupt officers. This contract was awarded directly, without advertisement or open competition, because its value was just below the £500,000 threshold required for City Hall’s approval.

Khan said on Thursday: “In general terms, what you’re allowing is these private companies to almost have a loss leader, so they give you a good deal or something for nothing for a short bit of time [and] you can become reliant upon them.”

In 2023 the government’s chief commercial officer raised concerns with Palantir about the practice of offering public services for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold.

Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at the tech equity campaign Foxglove, said: “Palantir is notorious for its ‘land and expand’ approach, in which it wins small contracts or even offers free services at first, then uses those to build a much wider role in our public services.”.

He said Khan had “seen through this practice, and put a stop to it – while rightly highlighting Londoners’ concerns over Palantir’s ethical record”.

[…]

Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat member of the Commons science and technology select committee said he was “delighted” by City Hall’s decision.

“To get another contract without competition would have been a disgrace,” Wrigley said. “Palantir have failed to deliver to their promises on too many projects. Buying projects through free trials to then write the contract spec should be banned from government procurement.”

Khan’s move will be a blow to the Labour government’s efforts to use AI to improve policing. In January, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, called for police to “ramp up use of AI” and to adopt the technology “at pace and scale”.

Harrowing, but unsurprising reading:

Systemic weaknesses in New South Wales’ childcare sector have allowed predators to work in the industry and abuse children, a scathing inquiry has found.

In its final report, published on Wednesday, a NSW upper house inquiry into the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector found “the proliferation of for-profit services and a lax regulatory approach” had led to “predators” being allowed to work in childcare and abuse children.

The report said operators backed by private equity have “no place” in the sector, and that the state’s regulator for early education had “failed to respond appropriately” to services with “extensive histories of non-compliance, breaches, safety incidents and persistently poor ratings”.

Woolworths and Coles are big companies that plan to stay around for a long time. Could not one or both of them commit to a policy of truthful advertising and stand by it long enough to establish a reputation that customers could trust?

This hasn’t happened – with supermarkets, or telecoms, or banks or anywhere else, at least in the absence of comprehensive public shaming driven by government action. But why not?

One explanation, apparent from the evidence in the Coles case, is that no one wants to be the first to move. Given the short-term pressure that decision-makers are under, it’s easy to imagine that any proposal of this kind will be put in the too-hard basket and left there.

Another possibility is that distrust is so widespread that no single company can break the pattern. The era of neoliberalism has certainly strengthened this distrust. There was a time when used car dealers were famously untrustworthy but financial institutions were pillars of probity. Today, when buying a second-hand car, the biggest risk is not that the speedo will be wound back but that you will be sold a loan with deceptively high interest. In this context, you just assume everyone is lying.

Last week, the German-owned supermarket chain took another step into the Australian mainstream, trialling a grocery delivery service with DoorDash in Canberra ahead of a potential expansion around the country.

Aldi has long resisted offering deliveries, given the service would make a basket of groceries more expensive, undercutting its price advantage over Coles and Woolworths.

[…]

Aldi tried a similar service with a third-party delivery provider in the UK, but it didn’t last. The chain is also hesitant to build its own delivery system because that would add significant costs to the business, which would either result in higher grocery prices or less profits for its German owners.

Prof Gary Mortimer, a retail expert at the Queensland University of Technology, says Aldi has had to respond to the delivery trend.

“Online food and groceries now represent anywhere between 10 to 12% of supermarket revenue,” Mortimer says.

“As Aldi enters into that space, even using a third-party provider like DoorDash, Coles and Woolworths will be looking at how they go about defending that market share.”

Retail expert Bronwyn Thompson says Aldi considers the competitive advantage of a delivery service to be worth the additional expense.

“If they’re trying to be more of a ‘whole shop’ destination, this is part of that,” Thompson says.