In The Conversation

Couldn't have put it better myself:

While reform on this front could be effective, the tendency of smaller retailers to align their pricing strategies with dominant supermarket chains – known as “price leadership dynamics” – may undermine any downward pressure on retail prices.

In essence, any slight reshuffling will recalibrate the balance of power between suppliers, wholesalers and retailers. But consumers may see little direct benefit.

One solution that might work, however, is a publicly owned grocery chain, tasked explicitly with stimulating genuine competition. For the sake of argument let’s call it a “community provisioning enterprise”.

This could be designed as a conglomerate of wholesale centres, distribution networks and retail outlets. By leveraging state-of-the-art logistics and retail technologies, it could achieve significant efficiency gains.

Potentially, that could see gross profit margins driven down into the 4–7% range, compared with margins of 55% or more on individual items enjoyed by major retailers.

The main priority of such an enterprise would be to move commodities efficiently from producers to consumers. It would have a competitive edge because of operational efficiency, minimal marketing spend, streamlined supplier contracts and capped executive salaries.

Really interesting.

From their inception in the early 1990s, Australian food banks were supposed to be a temporary solution to food poverty.

They have since morphed from “emergency to industry” – lauded for reducing food insecurity and helping to solve the food waste problem by diverting tonnes of produce from landfill.

It’s the ultimate win-win that big food corporations and retailers love: feed the needy and save the planet at the same time. This logic has been enshrined in Canada’s National Food Waste Reduction Strategy and in European laws that require supermarkets to donate surplus produce to charities. 

First, by inking this deal, Coles frames itself as future-forward and logistically driven. Groceries and grocery-store labour become more data, just like the hedge funds, healthcare, or immigrants that other Palantir clients coordinate.

Supermarkets have been under fire over the past year for increasing profit margins through a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, and accused of underpaying workers.

The Palantir deal continues this extractive trajectory. Rather than paying workers more or passing savings onto customers, Coles has chosen to invest millions in technology that will “address workforce-related spend” as part of a larger effort to cut costs by a billion dollars over the next four years. Food (and the labour needed to grow, pack and ship it) is transformed from a human need to an optimisation problem. 

Second, dependence. As my own research found, Palantir clients tend to enjoy the all-encompassing data and new features but also become dependent on them. Data mounts up; new servers are needed; licensing fees are high but must be paid.

Much like Apple or Amazon, Palantir’s services excel at creating “vendor lock-in”, a perfect walled garden which clients find hard to leave. This pattern suggests that, over the next three years, Coles will increasingly depend on Silicon Valley technology to understand and manage its own business. A company that sells a quarter of Australia’s groceries may become operationally reliant on a US tech titan.

Even if you don’t want to walk, wheel or ride, you should care because less driving helps everyone, including other drivers, who benefit from reduced traffic.

As a result of this over-investment in car road-building, Australia has the smallest number of walking trips of 15 comparable countries across Western Europe and North America.

Cycling rates are equally dismal.

Globally, the United Nations recommends nations spend 20% of their transport budgets on walking and cycling infrastructure.

Countries like France, Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and the largest cities in China invest between 10% and 20%.

These places were not always known for walking and cycling – it took sustained redirecting of investment from roads to walking and cycling.

Meanwhile, many Australians are dependent on cars because they have no other choice in terms of transport options. 

Headlines about Screen Australia’s latest annual Drama Report have highlighted one particular figure: a 29% drop in total industry expenditure compared to the year before.

But a closer look suggests this isn’t the most concerning finding. The report also reveals a significant chunk (42%) of the A$803 million spent on producing Australian TV drama in 2023–24 was funded by taxpayers.

What’s more – watching half of the Australian TV drama hours broadcast in 2024 required a streaming subscription. Watching all of them required seven different subscriptions.

With Australians’ funding of this commercial, for-profit sector on the rise, we can’t help but ask: what do Australian viewers get in return?

From the authors of "People Who Don't Understand Magic Trick More Likely To Be Impressed By It".

People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.

This link shows up across different groups, settings and even countries. For instance, our analysis of data from market research company Ipsos spanning 27 countries reveals that people in nations with lower average AI literacy are more receptive towards AI adoption than those in nations with higher literacy.

Similarly, our survey of US undergraduate students finds that those with less understanding of AI are more likely to indicate using it for tasks like academic assignments. 

Whether it’s Labor working to get transmission lines and offshore wind up and running or the Coalition working to create a nuclear industry from scratch, it will take a strong government with the capacity to articulate a plan, and the legal, financial and human resources to make it a reality.

All of these requirements were met when we constructed the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a decades-long federal government initiative undertaken in cooperation with Victoria and NSW.

Are they still in place? Not yet. Government capacity to act has been eroded over decades of neoliberalism. Particularly at the national level, public service expertise has been hollowed out and replaced by reliance on private consulting firms.

To rebuild the federal government’s capacity to act will require recreating the public service as a career which attracts the best and brightest graduates – many of whom currently end up in the financial sector. 

As global temperatures increase, Earth’s water cycle is changing. Over the past 50 years, this has led to an expansion of Earth’s tropical and subtropical zones. Tropical areas are moist and lush, but dry at the northern and southern edges.

These dry edges are pushing towards the poles. Regions that used to enjoy a gentler Mediterranean climate, as shown in the map below, are turning into dry subtropical zones.

They include highly populated regions, such as Southern California. Similarly, parts of Australia including Perth and much of southeast Australia has dried in recent decades, in a pattern consistent with tropical expansion.

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In a recent study, I interviewed 12 teachers, primarily in rural towns in the Northeast, about how they deal with problems that arise in the classroom every day. They discussed how they came up with responses based on best practices they had learned in school from resources such as books and videos. They also spoke of techniques they learned in professional development workshops.

Of the nine who worked in public schools or publicly funded child care centers, however, all but one of the teachers were influenced by pressure to follow a curriculum to fidelity. This pressure came from administrators in the form of threats of punishments and even job loss, as well as from colleagues who questioned when they taught a curriculum differently. 

[…]

The term “fidelity” comes from the sciences and refers to the precise execution of a protocol in an experiment to ensure results are reliable. However, a classroom is not a lab, and students are not experiments.

As a result, teachers and teacher educators have long decried fidelity and the impact it has on them and their students.

One participant in my study, a fourth grade public school teacher, described an oppressive environment at her school: “They were really driving the curriculum down our throats. We need to meet this at this date. And everyone should be at this lesson at this date.”

This counteracted what she was taught in college – every student is different, and every classroom is different. Not all teachers will be on the same lesson on the same day.

We mapped the extent to which researchers and advocates have been subject to intimidation tactics by tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed food (UPF) companies and their associates. The tactics described include being descredited in public, legal threats, complaints, nefarious use of Freedom of Information legislation, surveillance, cyberattacks, bribery and even physical violence.

[…]

The scale of intimidation we have found is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Many will be too scared to publicly reveal that they have been intimidated because of their work.

We found widespread intimidation across the three sectors, perpetrated by corporations themselves and their third parties. In the most serious forms of intimidation, the perpetrators remained unknown.