The “growth” ghouls never learn. Yesterday: Westpac’s chief economist for New Zealand, Kelly Eckhold, said the move was “great news” for our exporters when “conditions are probably the best they've been in a very long time” “Any reduction in tariffs is welcome news,” McClay said Today: 😬 #nzpol

No matter what happens with the economy in the interim, NZ will likely be voting in the shadow of another election in which cities will be occupied, ballots seized & any opposition criminalized It starts with the politicians in power picking the electorate You, citizen, are not a “dropkick” #nzpol

Toitū Te Tiriti

“The United States looks more and more like the sick man of the Americas, a country of spectacular disparities in wealth, crippling political dysfunction and pervasive violence.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Gawd our press is exhausting in its endless grant of “silver linings” to this government’s failures. www.thepost.co.nz/business/360...

Worth reading Anil Seth’s essay in its entirety, but this point especially: “As Immanuel Kant argued long ago in his lectures on ethics, treating conscious-seeming things as if they lack consciousness is a psychologically unhealthy place to be.” www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...

A ruling and a sermon: Matthew 19:14: “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them! For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." John 11:35 is famously the shortest Bible verse: “Jesus wept.”

great blog maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...

Bracing and clear eyed assessment from Carney, who understands you can’t beg your way off the menu. Please pay attention, AoNZ, as we head into this next election. Luxon’s neoliberal nonsense and Winston’s appeasement will be our ruin. #nzpol www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

The question of whether LLMs are conscious is now settled. @erikhoel.blogsky.venki.dev’s approach is agnostic about which theory of consciousness is right. Empirically, LLMs are equivalent to a lookup table, which is manifestly not conscious. But a future A.I. system that learns on the fly might be.

She’s in her lane: reserve banking Winston’s in his: tosser Nothing to see here. Perhaps the media should stop feeding this troll … #nzpol

From March 2025. Just gonna leave Luxon’s “I trust Donald Trump” here to remind you how f&$@‘d we all are. #nzpol

"For Kirk and for much of society today, words are not expressions with referents, but rather, performative speech acts with specific functions — in his case, owning the libs." holy moly, what a blog www.theverge.com/policy/84960...

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

Reading this exceptional piece from 2023 that goes hard on the distinction between words and meanings. This is *exceptional*. nymag.com/intelligence...

Nature research paper: Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders go.nature.com/3MoazOr

Proud to stand with Louisa Wall, Marama Davidson, Rawiri Waititi and Green MPs as we delivered a 30k strong petition calling on the PM to bring his ministers into line. Whether it’s Seymour calling academics “deranged,” or Peters taking cheap shots at anyone who disagrees with him, it’s not ok.

… in which Smithers explains why Springfield loves Mr Burns. #nzpol #lolibertarians

A Washington resident has been hospitalized with bird flu, according to the Washington State Health Department, and they’re infected with a strain of the virus that hasn’t been seen in humans before. https://cnn.it/4oIRswI

… and this is the system that our current government is eyeing as a “solution.” yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/aca-health...

Three powerful white men refuse to apologise to a young wahine Māori who was right all along? Colour me shocked.

Putting an atom into a hall of mirrors ("cavity") can stop it from emitting light. Now remove a mirror. How long before the atom can emit? Immediately! No matter how long the hallway. Vlatko Vedral of @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social explains this bizarre case of quantum spooky action at a distance.

A good primer on the neo-Idealists/ post-physicalists. Good scientific thinkers know that the formalisms only get you so far. medium.com/@jnode/ideal...

Are the laws of classical physics missing something important about how the Universe works? This short documentary by @quantamagazine.bsky.social presents a proposal that could help us better understand why everything seems to grow more complex and orderly over time

as a reminder: bluesky (the app) has a broad set of user interactions controls. beyond blocking and block lists, we have features to control who can reply, mention, and quote-post accounts

Wait until the cost of genocide catches up with Te Pati o Empty Suits … #nzpol

Grant truly impresses me with his consistent & singular wrongness. In what universe are readers enlightened by a boomer libertarian mansplaining why taking a position against genocide is “demagoguery” while quite literally engaging in demagoguery against a particular female politician? #nzpol #stuff

The usual explanation for great music is that it's predictable but not too predictable. But there's more to it, said @frosas.bsky.social at #ALIFE2025. We prefer music when we perceive agency behind it. Improvisation trumps a prepared performance. See paper at www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy.... ⚙️🧫

Sad to report that we've lost another #kakapo, and a particularly significant one. Solstice was the last kākāpō rediscovered, found on Rakiura in 1997. She died on the weekend as a result of complications from the #disease cloacitis. There are now 237 kākāpō left. #conservation #parrots #birds

All this appeasement on Gaza is really paying off. We could probably shave a few % off that movie tariff if Luxon erased a century of social and environmental progr… (checks feed) … never mind. #nzpol

There really isn’t any moral test that Luxon can’t fail. #nzpol

Chotiner interviews Neville Chamberlain . . . #chotiner #uspol www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

It is 9/11 in the US and I can think of no better answer to the question, “25 years later, how would we know if terrorism won?” than a quick scroll through X today. Here in Aotearoa, we already knew the answer to “who matters to David Seymour?” It.Can.Happen.Here. #nzpol

Richard Rorty knew… in 1998. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

After nearly a century of effort, we still don't have a theory of quantum gravity go.nature.com/45VIwf7

Researchers have identified more than 1,000 potentially problematic open-access journals using an AI tool go.nature.com/3JGQnFT

Researchers are studying why mitochondria are moving between cells and whether the process can be harnessed to treat cancer and other diseases go.nature.com/4fYoEwG

“Let them eat cake”? #nzpol

So, they just bought the butter from the pic?

No, David Seymour is a deeply unserious person who diminishes every issue he touches. It’s like saying “Diddy is right that we have to get past this whole East Coast West Coast rivalry.” #nzpol thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-...

. . . a transfer of wealth from NZ teachers and nurses to the military industrial complex. #nzpol

Uff, the comments on this article are BRUTAL. And finally, consensus among Kiwis. None too keen to replace the current empty suit with an equally empty “effervescent tangerine” pantsuit. #nzpol www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

My wife and I have coined a term for this effect: Getting “Brownleed” #nzpol

“Kiwis travelling to the US should be concerned. Reasonableness is absent from the border scene there.” Just. Don’t. Go. www.stuff.co.nz/travel/36079...

Reclaiming the sacred: How we can begin to decolonise ourselves

There is one fundamental phenomenon that quantum physics can't explain: gravity go.nature.com/45v70f1

Behold the Very First Color Photograph (1861): Taken by Scottish Physicist & Poet James Clerk Maxwell

Lateral #PrefrontalCortex is involved in executive functions, but what roles do distinct anatomical subregions play? @clbas.bsky.social &co show that caudal VLPF specializes in visual input processing, while middle areas support context-based behavioral planning @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4ljEz9W