Linkage

Melissa Fisher believed her jobseeker payments would be cut off if she didn’t complete a resilience training course.

So the South Australian-based artist, who has a disability and has been on income support for several years, signed up. She found herself being asked to rate her friends and family, whether God played an important role in her life and if she felt grateful she had enough to eat.

At one point in the four-day course, she was shown pictures of Brad Pitt in a chicken suit to illustrate how people can go from “nothing to something”.

“I found all of it so condescending,” Fisher says of the resilience training run by WISE employment in South Australia.

“They said that who we have in our life is important and surrounding ourselves with successful people will make us successful. If we surround ourselves with unsuccessful people we will be unsuccessful.”

Fisher says she believed the course was part of her mutual obligations which jobseekers are required to undertake otherwise their payments can be suspended. Fisher says she was never told she could choose not to do the course – and other jobseekers across Australia say they also thought the same.

The reported cancellation of Hasan’s show has similarly caused outrage, with left-wing commentators saying that Hasan was both a unique on screen talent and a critical voice on the left and on the topic of Gaza in the sphere of corporate media.

“[MSNBC], make this make sense,” wrote human rights lawyer Noura Erakat. “[Mehdir Hasan]’s program has felt like an oasis on air and more needed than ever. His program with Mark Regev was a whole class on journalistic method. He should be amplified, not shut down.”

“It is bad optics for MSNBC to cancel [Mehdi Hasan]’s show right at a time when he is vocal for human rights in Gaza with the war ongoing,” wrote Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California). “MSNBC owes the public an explanation for this decision. Why would they choose to do this now?”

Victoria should commit to build 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, end the first home owners grant and lobby the federal government to examine tax concessions for investment properties, the state inquiry into the rental and housing affordability crisis has recommended in its final report.

The report stopped short of making any recommendations on rental price regulation, which is a contentious issue between the Greens, who have been campaigning for rent caps, and the government, which has resisted calls.

The 34 recommendations included a call for the government to commit to building 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, with 40,000 of them completed by 2028.

Given that for most Australians their largest asset is their home – or, for some, a portfolio of investment properties – and it is often tied to long‑term financial plans, measures that are even vaguely thought to threaten property values are treated with ‘extreme caution by our politicians’.

It is also difficult to overstate the importance of continually rising house prices to the Australian economy. In 2022, Australia’s ‘big four’ banks – ANZ, CBA, NAB and Westpac — held around $1.87 trillion in home loans. No other country’s banks are as heavily dependent on residential property with housing in Australia having been referred to as ‘the cash cow of the banking sector’.

Also of interest to the Committee throughout this Inquiry was the way in which property is discussed in the media. Outlets such The Age, for example, flipped daily between stories lamenting housing unaffordability and those celebrating strong growth in property prices. Auctions are reported as if they are exciting sporting contests with results celebrated when they ‘soar’ past reserve prices. Similarly, when the Housing Statement was announced in September, the Australian Financial Review warned that the policies risked dampening house prices, valuing rapid growth in house prices over increased affordability. Housing is a human right, and that fact lies at the heart of Inquiries such as this. All Victorians should be able to access safe, secure, quality and affordable housing. The housing choices that people can make are inevitably shaped by their own circumstances, the  broader nature of the housing system, and our social and economic priorities. One question that this Inquiry has faced is whether we want a home ownership society or a landlord society.9 Victoria, along with the rest of the country, is trending towards the latter. As rates of renting increase, so must security of tenure, liveable rental homes and greater consumer protections. But the goal of home ownership should never be out of reach for Victorians.

The intersection of AI hype with that elision of complexity seems to have produced a kind of AI booster fanboy, and they're making personal brands out of convincing people to use AI to automate programming. This is an incredibly bad idea. The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code. They're positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it's only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it's not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they'll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it. No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it. No one can explain what they expect it to do. Every choice made in writing software is a choice not to do things in a different way. And there will be no one who can explain why they made this choice, and not those others. In part because it wasn't even a decision that was made. It was a probability that was realized.

But it's worse than AI being merely inadequate for software development. Developing that mental model requires learning about the system. We do that by exploring it. We have to interact with it. We manipulate and change the system, then observe how it responds. We do that by performing the easy, simple programing tasks. Delegating that learning work to machines is the tech equivalent of eating our seed corn. That holds true beyond the scope of any team, or project, or even company. Building those mental models is itself a skill that has to be learned. We do that by doing it, there's not another way. As people, and as a profession, we need the early career jobs so that we can learn how to do the later career ones. Giving those learning opportunities to computers instead of people is profoundly myopic.

When we replaced our traditional pattern of development with the Suburban Experiment, there were some unforeseen consequences. Why did we do it, and how can we fix it?

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

A parliamentary inquiry has laid the foundations for government to reinvent unemployment services, finding the system has become obsessed with "kicking people off welfare", instead of helping them.

The government-dominated committee, established in the weeks after the government's 2022 federal election win, has called for a shift away from intense compliance measures and the return of some privatised job services to government.

Its chair, Julian Hill, said the ground-up review was the first of its kind since employment services were privatised 25 years ago.

Mr Hill wrote that in that time, the sector had degraded into a system that was not helping people find work and was neglecting employers.

"It's harsh but true to say Australia no longer has an effective coherent national employment services system," Mr Hill wrote.

Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work. 

He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Greg Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians and others.

[…]

The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order. 

Recent coverage of insurance markets has highlighted the industry’s involvement in the so-called “climate risk doom loop”: looming climate risks and worse disasters are raising the price of insurance for real estate and infrastructure assets, exacerbating their owners’ vulnerability to future disasters and feeding into higher insurance prices in the future―or the withdrawal of insurance coverage altogether.

Rising insurance prices and the credible threat of insurer divestment from higher-risk areas will constrain investment in both homes and businesses across vulnerable communities. Yet more people are moving into higher-risk areas, and some politicians fear backlash if they let insurance companies deny these communities coverage. In response, state leaders in California and Florida have sought to prevent divestment by directing their insurance commissioners to adjust pricing regulations, invite competition in insurance markets, or derisk insurers by imposing disaster-risk fees on all insurance purchasers regardless of risk.

Private investors, meanwhile, believe the insurance industry should follow price signals: if firms can identify the climate risks an assets could face, and investors price those risks into building and maintaining costs, then market actors will invest prudently.

I argue that insurance is a woefully inadequate financial tool for coping with the impacts of climate change. Improving insurance markets does little to address the fact that the core drivers of the “climate risk doom loop” rest in the design of capital markets, which are structured to direct investment away from vulnerable communities when they most need it.