Of course, the actual doctors spend most of the article talking about diet, tobacco and alcohol consumption, and exercise, which are far more determinative of your cancer risk than either of these real but comparatively minor factors: www.smh.com.au/healthcare/h...

PSA for Melbourne cyclists, if you're going up or down Mount Donna Buang from the Warburton side, there's dozens of blown out tyres and their associated bits of steel belt strewn over the road near the big car park a couple of km from the summit. I got a puncture on the way down.

Yes, but also Baumol.

Jeebus. One way or the other this test will end without a player scoring a 50.

The serious answer is likely “he gives good quotes and is plausibly an expert in something”, which is all a journalist on a deadline usually needs.

Eternally this

This entire opinion piece by Chip le Grand does not mention ISIS a single time. Not once. Instead it repeatedly suggests that the cause of the Bondi attack was Labor's failure to crack down harder on Gaza protests and related antisemitism. www.smh.com.au/national/lab...

not that the present economic picture is rosy, but i do think that popular culture — and specifically nostalgia bait television — is a big part of the reason that our public memory of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s seems to miss the real economic pain that marked each of those decades.

Inevitable, bad, and why requiring porn sites to collect personal information about their users is a bad idea. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Good. Now do inner Melbourne. These trees are a menace in all respects. (Including for hay fever.) There must be better shade tree options!

Lots of discussion about gun laws today, understandably. One basic point I'd like to make is that you wouldn't want people running around hunting rabbits with deer rifles, which might be an unintended consequence of a blanket one-gun-per-adult policy.

The relentless march of ever-falling battery prices continues. 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

WTAF?

This thing is a gimmick: It runs a few times a day on a 3km route.

Examples of these trucks were at the recent Melbourne EV show. We can electrify heavy transport if we want to, though the trucking industry, particularly owner drivers, will probably have to be dragged kicking and screaming.

While there is nuance in the details, ultimately, this appears to be a "computer says no" system, designed on the basis that human assessors are too susceptible to sympathetic applications.

EXCLUSIVE: Funding and support plans for national disability insurance scheme participants will be generated by a computer program and staff will have no discretion to amend them, under a major overhaul of the NDIS to be rolled out next year, @australia.theguardian.com can reveal.

Brought to you by the letters I, B, and M.

With grant success rates this low it is essentially impossible for young researchers to make their way - and if it’s this bad for DECRAs, imagine what it’s like for people in the post-DECRA valley of death.

Betteridge's Law strikes again. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This is…not great. There might be a (kinda) national gas market but the ability to move gas around the nation is constrained by available pipeline capacity, and there is also limits to the ability to store gas to meet peak demand in winter - which is where the risk of shortages comes from.

Whenever anyone mentions merit ever, ever again, I’ll just point to the opening paragraphs of this essay and the fact that the writer has been repeatedly hired by the best-funded and most prestigious outlets on the planet:

What possible justification is there for CSIRO to be shrinking, FFS?

This discourse annoys me quite a bit. It would be more productive to think a little harder about why SUV marketing - and actual SUVs - hit a chord with so many buyers who are prepared to pay more for what are, in many ways, inferior vehicles for their owners well as for society.

Spotted near work. The driver (who uses it for work) was very eager to talk about it and loves it - says he wouldn’t go back to a petrol version. While I do not love full-size American pickups on our roads, it’s interesting that given the opportunity to try it, ute drivers don’t mind an EV.

This kid is going to be in Formula One sooner or later.

This is a good lesson for Australia. If you can't do anything in a 3 year term, you can't do it in 4, or apparently 5. The problem is not the term length, the problem is the culture and incompetence of the politics of the people who rise to the top in our parties.

The UK is the perfect example of too many profoundly stupid, lazy people in politics. They have 5 year terms, and the political class complain that they need 6 to do anything. They have 4 years remaining before an election and they're already shitting the bed about leadership

Wonder if this will make Sky News and the Oz...

Unfortunately a lot of serious* news media behaving as though this is exactly the case

Gordon Lightfoot didn’t have a problem using indigenous names for places, way back in the 1970s. What a beautiful song about a tragic event. open.spotify.com/track/536L9C...

Hopefully they cause faster runners to operationally slow up so you can catch them…

A historic turning point for clean heating in Europe: For the first time, in the first half of 2025 sales of heat pumps in Germany have surpassed those of gas boilers. This is a big milestone, demonstrating that the transition away from fossil fuels in our buildings is not just a future ambition.

RIP John Laws

Raising a glass of Valvoline tonight. You know what I mean (if you’re an Aussie of a certain age…)

Does anyone happen to recall a case from a few years ago where a person of Chinese origin (can’t recall if they had Australian citizenship) was killed execution-style in their home (think it was in Sydney) for no obvious reason? Or am I misremembering things ? #auspol

Judging by the history of GOP and Tory sex scandals there’s a lot of conservatives here for it too… (Australian conservatism sadly a bit third-rate on this criterion as well…)

Color anyone that’s ever watched “The Wire” as unsurprised.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Did you know that the federal government is offering rebates for solar and battery systems?

To be specific: Russia has the world’s nuclear arsenal, on public estimates China is growing but isn’t going to catch the USA or Russia’s any time soon, and neither have conducted nuclear weapon tests since the test ban treaty or shown any inclination to.

1. It's fascinating to see, as you can from the responses to the post below, how many daft things people believe, to justify their continued meat eating. So let's examine a few of the common myths in the following thread. 🧵

Activism is easy until you have to get something done. More people should let that roll around their thought orbits.

Why do private school fees rise so fast? It's the ultimate first-world problem, but it's a topic that a) generates an unbelievable level of angst in Australian upper-middle class circles, and b) the reasons why it's inevitable are not widely understood. greengaps.substack.com/p/why-your-s...

There are some quibbles here (to wit, solar economics looks a lot worse in polar regions that get not much sun for months on end that coincide with peak energy demand) but the basic point is sound - space solar power is a pipedream without radically lower launch costs.

This was great, and quite relevant to Australia. My takeaway - the assumption that there is endless profitable demand for Australia's LNG over the medium term - may well be completely false.

The difference between David Pocock and the rest of the Cwth Parliament is that as a professional athlete he was required to appreciate interest conflicts and integrity risks (especially re. gambling). In Australia the federal level is unique in not doing this: States and Councils must handle risk

This kind of thing gives me the absolute screaming shits. It’s the same as Qantas and the bloody chairman’s Lounge at a smaller scale: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Earnest post, but: a thing I like here is it’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism. We have to sustain each other. Making joy isn’t denial, it’s how we will survive

This is the best news I've heard all week. Remarkable.