Great to see plans withdrawn for a data centre next to Helena River near the Perth foothills following community opposition. Assessed as a warehouse, I suspect this would have been approved by the state assessment panel. www.watoday.com.au/national/wes...

folx, I’ve been working on AI "ethics" for almost a decade now & hate to tell you there’s no such thing as "ethical AI" the only "ethical principle" that works is regulating the shit out of the industry & to take back control of our autonomy, fundamental rights, freedoms & right to exist w/out AI

Our society has a massive blind spot when it comes to how dangerous these giant trucks and SUVs are to everyone outside of them.

“Health researchers at the University of Auckland have suggested a tax on utes in response to high emissions and more deadly accidents. They said traffic accidents involving utes were seven times more likely to be fatal, burdening the healthcare system.” www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Westcycle has developed a tracker to show how many pop-up cycleways, paved bike lanes and e-buses for regional communities we lose for every dollar spent on the Aus gov’s regressive and polluting fuel excise cut/subsidy westcycle.org.au/fuel-crisis-...

Undergrad: "We're going to build a subway network!" Grad student: "We can build light rail!" Early career planner: "BRT is a cost saving service as good as rail!" Grizzled planner: "What if we somewhat improved the existing bus service"

This is going to leave the US so deeply unskilled. This is exactly how technofascists like to see it. As @olivia.science & I wrote: “the AI industry has lobbied government agencies to mandate the use of its products, claiming that without them, students will be unprepared for the job market.”

“…if every datacentre proposed in the NSW planning portal was built, they would require about 4.4 gigawatts of power – equivalent to the electricity needs of 10m households – and consume up to 25% of the city’s drinking water by 2035.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Announced this morning: Free public transport in #Melbourne and across Victoria for the month of April. It'll clearly benefit those who can use or switch to the PT network. Not so much the people who don't have a usable service they can use.

This is not the US. It's Australia. In 2026. #NickHanna

i’m tired of every paper (even critical ones) on societal impact of AI starting by both-siding the “benefits” and risks/harms of AI in academia, i would like us to arrive at a collective reckoning that we don’t need to play both sides. it's totally legit to clearly state just the harms. period

tech stuff that is very bad that isn't generative AI - Betting markets - Camera glasses (Meta) - Fascist doorbell cameras - Driverless cars clogging up cities - EVs are still getting bigger -> makes them deadlier, more polluting (through more power consumption) - Streaming death spiral

“The addition of AI-driven biometric identification is the latest entry in the company’s history of profiting off of public safety worries and disregard for individual privacy”

A content warning for very, very significant police violence on this video: Israeli President Herzog is visiting Australia, and police in New South Wales are violently bashing prone protesters. The media is framing it in completely neutral terms. Watch the video, then look at the headlines.

Amazing sob story: "ChatGPT deleted all the work I hadn't done" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“A bill so terrible that Attorney-General Michelle Rowland – sounding like Chat GPT attempting to avoid a direct answer – couldn’t say how it would be applied in practice to people opposing a genocide. And she’ll be one of the ones making the decisions”. thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

“Car bloat”—increasingly oversized automobiles—worsens road safety, affordability and the environment. Here are some of the stories I wrote in 2025 examining the trend and proposing solutions. 🧵 In @vox.com, I likened car bloat to secondhand smoke (which helped bring down the US tobacco industry).

NSW suffering an eruption of the HDAs - that is, spot rezonings for high density housing Independent of any planning strategy. It’s looks like a game of ‘pin the development on the donkey’ - uncoordinated, haphazard, opaque in process, speculative, too open to corruption… Such a risk to all of us

Back when I-35 first sliced through Austin, Texas, in the 1950s, no visual archive was kept of the people whom the highway displaced. Now, as TxDOT annexes properties along I-35 to expand the interstate, documentary photographer Liz Moskowitz records some of the people and businesses being upended.

Must read article by @emfarrelly.bsky.social on the outrageous, undemocratic recent changes to NSW Planning Act. Premier Minns in pocket of the worst urgera & profiteers, environmental vandals & developers. This analysis ignored by MSM, sucked in by press release architectureau.com/articles/pro...

At Sydney’s mighty arms convention, weapons are sold as ‘solutions’. No one mentions the people they will target

100% this! I'm going to start calling those two-wheeled electric vehicles with throttles that don't require pedalling "e-motos" too. Hopefully we can shift the narrative => e-bikes are NOT a problem in Toronto's bike lanes, e-motos are the problem. #BikeTO #bikesky

Inside Labor’s plan to tax EVs www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy... via @thesaturdaypaper.com.au

A broken university system is letting Australia down https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/a-broken-university-system-is-letting-australia-down/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-broken-university-system-is-letting-australia-down #auspol

RIP Kitkat, Mayor of 16th Street: “The mayor of this space was taken by technology that none of us asked for and…none of us consented to” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Today, I’m taking part in a half day work stoppage with fellow Curtin University NTEU comrades. We are taking part in protected industrial action to secure better workloads, pay and conditions for all Curtin Staff in our Enterprise Bargaining Agreement ✊ @nteunion.bsky.social

It’s Bike Month here in Western Australia, so it’s the perfect time for our public transport agency to release this ad campaign pointing out how embarrassing and disempowering it is to ride a bike

Slower speeds save lives: "...there were 2,638 people injured, including deaths, on low-speed roads in the most recent 18 months, compared with 3,520 injuries between April 2022 and September 2023, a reduction of 25%."

They know the climate chaos coming, they know their decision will make it worse, and kill any hope of mitigation, but they did it anyway - for their own benefit. Not a principle among them.

Welcome to the enshittification of cars. This is the worst thing to happen to cars since SUVs.

No, Jim, their primary purpose is to PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. Kinda important during dual climate change and biodiversity extinction crises, which are an existential threat to humanity…and your precious economy. www.theguardian.com/business/202... Just another neoliberal Labor politician.

We need to talk about oversized trucks and the aesthetic of fascism.

“Expanding freeway networks undermines efforts to reduce emissions and encourage cleaner transport. It points to a deep-seated flaw in Australia’s urban planning systems which must be solved.” theconversation.com/australia-wh...

1.3 billion tonnes of GHG emissions and critical risks to Perth’s water security and the Northern Jarrah forests. There’s a few more days to make a submission on Alcoa’s plan to expand mining in Perth hills. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

CCWA will hold a “requiem for our reefs” at @wamuseum.bsky.social's Woodside Open Day to highlight the “devastating impact of Woodside’s emissions on WA’s coral reef system" & call for public support to stop WoodCIDE from "drilling for new gas under the pristine Scott Reef in the Browse Basin”

​Five years ago today, I wrote my first of 50+ stories about car safety. My motivation was simple: I couldn't understand why e-scooters were capped at 12 mph, but hulking SUVs could go 10x faster. The passage below still feels true. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

The UK government, which is going all-in on AI, is asking people to delete emails in order to save water, claiming it will lighten the load on data centres.

Pls stop what you are doing and read this entire report on Israel's murder of journalist Anas al-Sharif and five colleagues in Gaza City. "He characterized Israel’s threats as 'Silence or Death,' and he vowed not to be silent." It ends with his final message. www.dropsitenews.com/p/anas-al-sh...

The best way to cap off a week is by walking around with a bunch of geography teachers talking urban infill, the housing crisis, gentrification, laneways and vegetable worshipping churches.

Join the dots. My cartoon in today's @theageaustralia.bsky.social and @sydmorningherald.bsky.social (both newly arrived to Bluesky)

A new study of vehicular crashes in the UK shows that—after accounting for driver characteristics, road conditions, & more—adult pedestrians & cyclists had a 14% higher fatality rate when hit by an SUV rather than a regular car. Children had a shocking 77% higher fatality rate when hit by SUVs.

The Maintainers have released their “Maintainers Study Guide: A Guide to Ground Your Practice in Principles of Maintenance, Repair + Care” — a resource that “reflects nearly a decade of work” across The Maintainers’ conferences, fellowships, research networks, etc themaintainers.org/study-guide/

Who gets to define "false and distorted narratives"? How can we be sure these sweeping powers won't be misused to silence criticism of the Israeli government over its actions or defame dissenters? What definition of anti-Semitism will be applied? Will we get similar protections against Islamophobia?

Tesla's Supervised Robotaxi launch was a pathetic flop. Tesla's Supervised Robotaxi launched yesterday to much acclaim from the Tesla Cult. Since nobody who was at the event has properly summarized the first day, we thought we would do it. Below are our findings. 🧵

Thrilled to be partnering with the great folks over at @crikey.com.au to get some of @roycerk2.bsky.social's excellent reporting, like this deep dive on the fight to get Monash to break up with Woodside, out to more Australian readers! www.crikey.com.au/2025/06/19/m...