This comment, with 43 likes, is striking & helps to explain some of the angst over LLMs. Good ideas can be expressed in pedestrian text. Wrong and silly, even pernicious, ideas can be expressed in sparkling prose. If your main concern is style rather than content, hating LLMs makes lots of sense.

desperate attempt to construct a metaphysics of wordcelism in the face of technological competition. birds don’t know how to fly unless they’re constructed an elegant treatise on flight.

one more ceo sleepout will turn this around. one more cost of living tax cut. just one more foodbank drive, I swear www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

It’s darkly funny how AI tech bros have negatively polarised a large section of progressives into becoming copyright maximalists

I feel much of the AI hate is from people who pride themselves on their own writing. Human nature overstates the importance of our own skills, and here it overstates the significance of the writing process itself as a condition of analytical and critical rigour.

Rishworth: "I am really sick of this debate of 'too soft' or 'too hard' mutual obligations. I want to see effective mutual obligations" You're sick of the debate? Imagine how all the people you're torturing in this system feel

Mutual obligations aren't effective at getting people jobs, there's no 'debate' about this after 40 years of failed policy. We already know they don't work, and you can't make them. You've formed two stakeholder groups who will almost without exception tell you to get rid of them entirely.

Strange piece. Prof Holden thunders about a "productivity tax" that "punishes high productivity businesses" by imposing "vastly different effective capital gains tax rates". Except it's not true. His numbers rely on the wrong denominator and money illusion.

Putting aside that this is bullshit, if you make a lot of money (presumably this guy’s definition of “success” in life) you actually should pay more tax. It’s called contributing to the society that created the conditions for your “success”.

Check out the new episode of The Economy, Stupid where I discuss the illicit tobacco market with Peter Martin and Chris Richardson. My bottom line is that organised crime is the new Big Tobacco, and fixing policies needs to be on the table to get it under control. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

what the fuck are the greens thinking with a slightly-less-pitiful tax cut + playing into the "deserving" vs "undeserving" narrative Labor is pushing. abandon this visionless individualist mindset and make the positive case for a broad tax base that supports public goods for all.

TWO great jobs in History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney! Rank from Lecturer (Assistant Prof) to Assoc Prof. Particularly interested in candidates working in the areas of early modern science, or science or medicine in Asia, or Indigenous knowledge systems... #HPS #STS #histstm #histsci

Each year since 2020, Treasury has forecast tobacco tax revenue to recover. Each year, actuals fall further. The 2026-27 Budget writes down 2025-26 by another $1.2B, and ~$8B has been written off for that year alone since it was first estimated in 2022-23. 🧵

In 18 years of closely watching federal budgets, I've never seen a budget measure with this level of social spending cuts (not even in Joe Hockey's 2014 budget). $36b in NDIS cuts over the forward estimates

The ongoing unlawful payment cancellation saga in the employment services system has it listed as "unquantifiable". They don't know how much it is going to cost them. 🧵

No one in govt is talking about before the budget, but just FYI, the level of Jobseeker is now 42% below the poverty line - worse than it was during the Howard years... live.thepoint.com.au

New blog post: Public health is supposed to involve critical and systems thinking. But if the response is "Whose side are you on?" when asking critical questions, it says a lot about a discipline's capacity to balance trade-offs and prioritise equity. edjegasothy.wordpress.com/2026/05/10/w...

🚨 New paper alert: 'Has Australia lost control of its tobacco and nicotine markets?' Short answer - yes, and largely by following two WHO endorsed policies: very high tobacco taxes and a ban on vapes and other less harmful nicotine products onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

Check out the latest from @edjegasothy.bsky.social and me about Australia's historical experience with prohibition, and what lessons we can learn about it's impact on illicit markets and organised crime. theconversation.com/prohibitive-...

Interesting piece on RBA economists' 'dirty little secret' - they want more unemployment. Aus's ability to bring inflation down, avoid recession & retain high employment is good by internl standards. Workers paid in real wage losses & higher mortgage repayments. But at least they had jobs right? 1/7

Happy valentine's day ❤️

Cohesion. My @smh cartoon.

BREAKING: Researchers propose giving homeless people houses to reduce heat exposure. Critics note this lacks the cost-effectiveness and portability of existing cooling hub infrastructure. edjegasothy.wordpress.com/2026/01/28/g...

Been rather dispiriting how much ink has been spilled by the gallery on MP expenses, while the report into mutual obligations has been pretty much ignored. @amyremeikis.bsky.social is on it #ThePoint (what is The Point? It’s not news, but it SHOULD be) thepoint.com.au/opinions/251...

"Anti-poverty and human rights groups are calling on the government to abolish the Targeted Compliance Framework, following a scathing report from the Commonwealth ombud" www.themandarin.com.au/304738-targe...

Australian states want to cut tobacco taxes to fight the black market. Commonwealth says no. Meanwhile, tobacco is effectively getting cheaper.. just through criminal networks instead of policy. New blog on why the current debate is stuck: edjegasothy.wordpress.com/2025/12/10/i...

Suppose you wanted to persuade politicians that universities were just a bunch of money-hungry lobbyists, concerned more about profits than educating our young people. What would you do? The Group of 8 (lobby for "sandstone" unis) decided to join "an alliance of industry groups". #universities

Now @justiceandequity.bsky.social has added its name to the list of groups opposing this draconian and underhanded move. These are the groups @tanyaplibersekmp.bsky.social has dismissed. She refuses to address concerns about separation of powers, due process and unintended consequences.

For the first time in a decade the majority of British adults believe the generosity of the welfare system stops people from supporting themselves, according to the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). on.ft.com/3X6VYbZ

A short while ago, Dr Janani Shanthosh and I had an engaging conversation about The Foreign Gaze, which she's now beautifully captured in text and audio. It's the first in her series of interviews titled On Theory. Please read, listen, and follow the series. Here goes ontheory.com/interviews/s...

New blog post: Can we really measure how many people die from heat (or cold)? edjegasothy.wordpress.com/2025/10/10/c...

On the centenary of Thatcher's birth, there have been predictable calls for a memorial to her memory. But Britain's 2300 food banks serve that purpose already.

What I think I've learned from my kids: Don't let people yuk your yum Children are real people Listen to people when they tell you what their needs are Accommodating needs seems to more often result in better outcomes than forcing adaptation to environment

As the brilliant Michael Kinnucan points out, it's more than a bit strange that there's a debate over whether New York can afford universal childcare. New York already has universal childcare! Every single child is cared for by somebody. Small children are never left home all day by themselves.

Reducing hazards ≠ justice. Unless we tackle the inequalities that shape who suffers harms & who benefits, inequity persists. My new blog on false equity arguments and why “doing one without the other is the injustice”: 👉 edjegasothy.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/d...

I think there is a puritan streak in public health. Where these ideas that seem logical are popular even if there is no peer reviewed basis for them. The other one that frustrates me is you hear clinicians insist that only water counts towards people’s consumption of liquid

folks are really obsessed with trying to find evidence artificial sweeteners are bad. to date it's basically been a failed exercise, but that hasn't stopped spurious conclusions getting significant overage.

universal Medicare safety net - problem solved

the implication of this is there is only one method for improving low-middle incomes that is reliable, rigorous and evidence-based: redistribution. everything else is just talk.

everyone loves to quote Krugman on productivity growth being almost anything. strangely they never mention his view that productivity is a great mystery, one that is unresponsive to sweeping changes in government policy and ideology, and something that no one knows how to sustainably increase

My contribution to the welfare state debate: Pre-transfers, the Child Poverty Rate is 100% [Link below]

Two Sydney Uni staff members are being sued in Australia's Federal Court by complainants who claim that statements opposing genocide and Zionist oppression of Palestinians are racist hate speech. Please give what you can to help @nickriemer.bsky.social & @professorjkeane.bsky.social's legal defence

Just out in @aunz.theconversation.com: #AI #Abundance and money. My reflections on #BasicIncome #BasicServices and why we need more than technical solutions to the political challenges of #poverty and #inequality theconversation.com/if-ai-takes-...

The curve of this building in Darling Harbour is like an archimedes’ death ray

Commonwealth Ombudsman already smashed them and now not even govt's chosen auditing firm can say if the house of cards system of punitive mutual obligations is legal. Quite literally, they say, it is indefensible. Yet it persists. Even after Robodebt. www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politic...