Rightio, here is a non comprehensive list of bridges in Brisbane, Australia.

• Captain Cook Bridge
• Charlie Earp Bridge
• Eleanor Schonell Bridge
• Go Between Bridge
• Jack Pesch Bridge
• Neville Bonner Bridge
• Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges
• Story Bridge
• Ted Smout Memorial Bridge
• Walter Taylor Bridge
• William Jolly Bridge

As a means of creating immortality it doesn’t really work. No one knows who Walter Taylor is, or William Jolly. And no one cares.

Some of us know the Go Betweens, James Cook and Neville Bonar, but not because of the bridges.

So my message, bridges don’t buy immortality.

But you knew that right?

Et tu, Suisse?

They are holding a referendum on capping the population at 10m, which is a polite proxy for stopping immigration.

“We have lost control,” complains the Swiss People’s Party. “Unchecked immigration is leading to Switzerland no longer being Switzerland.”

Just like Australia, the people in the bottom half or two thirds of the economic bell curve have done some noddy level thinking and decided that if the immigrants didn’t exist they would be in the top third. Sadly curbing the number of immigrants wouldn’t change their IQs.

As they say, those immigrants, when they moved to Switzerland or Australia doubled the average IQ of both the country they came from and the one they landed in.

At least in Australia they can’t cogently argue that we’re no longer Australia. But then again, being cogent isn’t their thing.

Besides someone has to work in the chocolate factories.

Years back, some wanker that I was supposed to admire was asked which book he would take if he were to be stuck on a deserted island.

Wanker chose “Gödel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter. Turns out, it is unreadable (I tried).

In our bedroom we have say 4,500 books, all unread and posted there for aesthetic reasons. They were harvested from local op shops, namely the discards of other people’s bad choices.

This one I know is my dead last choice for a read …

oplus_137363488

Noting the policy guide-rails and in the context of this imminent office takeover, how does an AI get through a Captcha?

“Tehran reports that a senior Iranian official said a proposal for a memorandum of understanding with the US is “under consideration” by the country’s top leaders, which might result in a signing, but the timing remains speculative.”

It’s fucking war guys. People are dying. MoUs are best efforts, not binding, and that’s when there’s a jurisdiction of law for the participants to be punished under.

These are the top 5 sporting moments I can recall:

1. Cadel Evan’s time trial the year he won the Tour de France. Inspirational effort from the only rider of his era doing it drug free.
2. Greg Inglis’s try for the ages against the Broncos in 2014. Watch it.
3. Tony Lockett kicking his 1,300th goal 1999 at the SCG. Never again.
4. Cathy Freeman’s 400m gold medal run in 2000. Never was there so much pressure applied.
5. John Eale’s Bledisloe winning kick on the siren in 2000. Not the designated kicker but he just stood up and kicked it.

Honourable mentions:

In the NSW U16’s Knock Out tournament of 1979, I scored the winning goal in the last minute of the grand final. I was a right-footed left winger that night (🤷) and faced with multiple defenders I attempted a left-foot cross to my centre forward whilst running flat out. I sliced it and it lobbed all the defenders and the keeper for both the goal and player of the tournament awards, and a spot in the state squad.

In 1975, 1975 or 1977 (I forget) I was cox of Drummoyne Rowing Club’s first 8 (open seniors) which won the national 8’s, coached by the legendary Rusty Robinson (👹). My one and only National medal at the age of 11 or 12. I got free chips and lemonade, a dunking in the Parramatta River, and a trophy that I lost years ago.

In 1995ish, after over a decade of comp squash I was finally in a team that won a comp. Grade A8 or so which was pretty good quality back then. We got fluffy pink towels as trophies (💕).

In a scratch football game at Jubilee Park in Glebe, which I played in for over a decade in the 90s, one night I scored a goal which was a double nutmeg and in. One of those defenders had previously played for Croatia. The other was a then current NSL player. The keeper was useless (🐥).

One night around 1986 at the E.S. Marks field in Sydney I ran under 10 minutes for the 3km. My body wasn’t designed for that effort. Running coach helpfully said I ran like a footballer (💯).

One night in Baltimore my work colleagues took me to a baseball net with a ball pitching machine. Having played the game for a year at high school I could hit the ball. That night, even at top speed, I hit every ball out of the park. Much amazement (😬).

Oh yeah, that’s right. Me and a mate came 3rd in the K2s in the 111km Hawkesbury canoe (🛶) classic in 1986 (or thereabouts). That was on top of only a couple of training runs. Possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, voluntarily, and it’s a long and impressive list.

Turtleman comics by Ian Maxwell see https://maxi8765.github.io/turtleman/

The very best customer is always someone that is spending someone else’s money.

I am just about 62 years old. Even in my own generation I was a very rational person because I worked on it; that was an era when being rational was still treated as an admirable trait. You were meant to test claims, separate evidence from narrative, think about alterantives, ask whether the mechanism made sense, etc. This was once considered adult behaviour.

As I got older, I was called cynical more often. I do not become became more cynical; the social baseline moved.

These days if ask for evidence, people hear hostility. Ask whether incentives match the stated purpose and people hear bad faith. Ask what happens when the optimistic assumptions fail and people hear obstruction. Look for alternative explanations and people call it cynicism.

Cynicism assumes the worst whereas rational thinking asks what the evidence supports. Those are not the same thing, but modern culture often treats them as identical because both are inconvenient.

People, at some level, have always preferred stories to facts, certainty to doubt and belonging to accuracy. That has not changed. What has changed is the embedded status of irrationality.

For a moment there we humans did OK at predicting the near future, even if we did misuse this capability to selectively enrich ourselves at the expense of future generations.

Now said future generations have mistaken the outcomes and the causes, and discarded any chance they have of saving themselves. A cargo cult in reverse. Odd karma that.

There’s a problem with battery operated circular saws – they are as weak as piss. 9 times out of 10 they will stall half way through a cut. The result is that you get very good at preventing this but its a crazy distortion of reality.

Pretty soon I have to cut some ceiling panels with precision and I already decided I need a corded saw to do the job because I can’t risk the potential jagged edges causes by stalling.

Here’e the thing – I can buy a corded circular saw (which comes with a blade) for less than the cost of a new blade for my battery operated saws. Same blade.

On that basis, every time you need a new blade for your battery saw you should just buy a whole new corded saw and take the blade out.

I have been using Microsoft Word since the 1980s.

I still cannot reliably edit headings and styles.

This may sound like user error, except that the owners of this product have had roughly four decades in which they may have made this intelligible but they have chosen, with impressive consistency, not to.

Word headings are not just headings. They are formatting presets, outline levels, navigation anchors, collapse controls, numbering containers and inheritance objects, and other things I don’t understand – all pretending to be font choices.

This is why a heading can look like a heading without being one.

It is also why a paragraph can behave like a heading while looking like ordinary text.

It is why applying bold, increasing the font size and calling the thing “Heading” in your own mind achieves precisely nothing.

The relevant setting is usually not visible. The paragraph needs an outline level. The style may be based on another style. Direct formatting may override the visible result while leaving the structural behaviour unchanged. A list style may be involved. A table may interfere. The document may have inherited some ancient formatting decision from a document created during the reign of Windows 95.

There is the text you can see.

There is the paragraph object.

There is the style.

There is the style the style is based on.

There is the outline level.

There is the numbering scheme.

There is the navigation pane.

There is the collapse behaviour.

There is probably more…

So, after forty years, I have reached a settled conclusion.

It is not my fault.

It is Microsoft’s.

So the federal govt here in Australia must have panicked. Knowing everyone hates every govt, independently of whether they voted for or against, this lot have decided that, since they have an accidental majority, they may as well do something other than line their own pockets. Why? The mind boggles…

Case in point – they recently released the upcoming federal budget. Assuming they can bludgeon it through parliament, here is the forecast impact:

Capital Gains and Negative Gearing on property investments – negative gearing will be limited to newly built homes, while the current 50% Capital Gains Tax (CGT) discount will be replaced by an inflation-adjusted cost base and a 30% minimum tax. There are exemptions – such as negative gearing on new properties and CGT on the primary residence.

At one level this is designed to impact the supply and demand curve for residential properties so those younger generations currently locked out of the property market have a chance. This works by investors realising that residential property will be a shit investment with yield less than 2%, completely illiquid and now highly taxed.

Even though these tax changes are grandfathered, the changes have spooked the market and there are more properties being sold now than are being bought; the result is that prices start dropping. That is only because people want to sell before the prices drop – its a self fulfilling prophecy. Anyway as prices drop all investors will need to get out of residential investments because these investments only make sense when the asset value appreciates (like it has for the last 40 years). So, yes, this policy will work; and it is very clever because it creates the required outcome by exploiting the demented cuttlefish psychology that caused the problem in the first place.

A second change is to R&D tax. Two subtle changes here. First, the minimum annual R&D spend required to make a claim has increased to $50k. This immediately removes 50% of all claims, mostly spurious, from small to medium sized companies. Second, expenditure on supporting R&D activities will no longer be eligible for the incentive. This means you will only be able to claim for core activities that meet the OECD Frascati Manual (i.e. true blue sky R&D, science based, testing a hypothesis, proper risk, etc).

What many companies previously did was synthesise (at a small cost) some bullshit core activity that allowed them to claim the supporting activities, which were what they were really doing: software development, engineering iteration, product trials, integration work, testing, debugging, documentation, customer-specific adaptation and all the other unglamorous work required to get a real product into the world.

I for one wouldn’t claim for a synthesised core activity if it was 100% of my claim for two reasons. One, if audited, my claim would be 100% exposed to penalties with interest. Second, I don’t want to do blue sky research because (as everyone should know) this was made obsolete in the 1980s when corporate America realised that their corporate R&D, statistically speaking, had a negative return (after which they relied on business unit R&D and buying successful startups). Essentially new products based on risky science had hit that part of the Pareto Rule that makes it bad, bad, bad (i.e. all the easier hits had been already been hit).

So the core effect of this and other changes to the R&D tax is that they have killed this stupid program. Our economy doesn’t need R&D, so why encourage it? Even if you did, why encourage R&D that has a negative IRR? It was always a very expensive marketing program without any product to sell, or any interested customers. Very government….

All the tax changes noted above also have the intended consequence of making the startup environment less attractive. Higher CGT on profits with no capital base. No R&D tax support. More capital needed. Even lower IRR for investors, although its hard to beat zero capital returns. The consequence will be that capital will stop being allocated to underscale and speculative Australian VC funds.

If the economy does not need more R&D, why subsidise it? If the R&D being subsidised has a negative internal rate of return, why encourage it?

But here is the rub: they are trying to kill the housing machine and the R&D scheme at the same time.

That matters because housing is not just an asset class in Australia. It is the main domestic economic engine. It sucks in foreign capital attracted to our stable poltical environment, props up the whole service sector – household balance sheets, state stamp duty, construction activity, bank lending, political stability and the national delusion that wealth can be created by bidding up the same pile of bricks between increasingly indebted generations.

It is a stupid machine, but it is our machine. If the government wants to weaken that machine, fine. It probably should. But then it needs another engine. And this lot haven’t got a clue. Not one.

The AI bubble right now looks a lot like the photonics bubble of 2001.

Companies like Nortel and Williams Communications built enough optical fiber cable and associated equipment to carry 20 years of growth in internet traffic by convincing themselves it would fill in one.

It didn’t. They went bankrupt. Everyone did. But the cables stayed in the ground, picked up for cents in the dollar, and the internet got built on top of them anyway.

If this is how it goes, for the next few years, access to AI will be reserved for those willing to pay a price that provides operational profitability.

No more chatty chat for some.

Free will equals enthalpy minus temperature times entropy.

Or, less grandly: agency is what remains after uncertainty has taken its cut.

Some people tolerate ambiguity. They can wait, let events unfold and not demand a full map before acting.

Others need information, plans and communication. Not because they are weak, but because uncertainty creates disorder. Without enough signal, the mind starts filling gaps, testing meanings and looking for orientation.

The mistake is treating one style as virtue and the other as pathology. The really valuable test however is reciprocity.

If someone needs communication when they feel uncertain, but goes vague when someone else needs the same thing, that is not just a different tolerance level. It is hypocritical.

Free will, in this sense, is not comfort with uncertainty. It is the capacity to stay fair while uncertain.

So the Pope’s latest missive, the Magnifica Humanitas, is worth a read but hardly anyone is ever going to read it because (a) its too long, (b) its full of internal church references that no one knows about, and (c) its full of churchy type concepts that obscure the intended meaning.

I am sure they rely on their leaders to absorb the key messages and explain these to their flock, or something like that.

At some level the Catholic Church is like the Communist Party of China. It has a sort of monopoly on its business but is run by a meritocracy that anyone can join. Its a good model, and they come up with good stuff.

Here is a consise summary of the vibe of AI missive –

“AI is the new industrial revolution. It is owned and controlled by a handful of private actors who are embedding their own moral vision into systems that affect everyone. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. The question is not whether AI is good or bad but who controls the ethical framework it operates within and whether that framework serves all of humanity or just those who built it.

The Church’s social doctrine, built over 2000 years around human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice, provides a coherent framework for evaluating this. These principles demand that data, algorithms, and platforms be treated as common goods, not private property. They demand transparency, accountability, and genuine participation in the decisions that shape people’s lives. They demand that work retain its dignity and that the benefits of technological progress be shared rather than concentrated.

The risks are concrete. AI is de-skilling workers, automating surveillance, enabling new forms of colonialism through data extraction, and lowering the threshold for lethal autonomous weapons. The hidden labor supply chains behind AI, from rare earth mining to content moderation, are exploitative and largely invisible. These are not side effects but structural features of a system designed to maximize efficiency and profit.

The response required is not regulation alone. It requires a cultural shift away from the technocratic paradigm that treats efficiency as the ultimate measure of value and humans as projects to be optimized. It requires institutions capable of governing technology in the public interest, businesses that measure success by the dignity of work, and citizens who cultivate responsibility and a sense of truth.

The civilization of love is the alternative to the Tower of Babel. It is built not through spectacular gestures but through small and steadfast acts of fidelity, through disarming words, practicing justice, listening to victims, and choosing dialogue over force. Even the era of AI can become a time in which that civilization takes shape.”

Then I used Claude to summarise each of the 254 lengthy paragraph sections down into one simple to absorb sentence. Sure I may have lost a bit of the narrative flow, but, hey, you might even finish it.

1. Humanity faces a pivotal choice between building a tower of power or a city of dignity and justice.
2. The Church seeks to cooperate with all people toward the common good.
3. The Social Doctrine of the Church began in 1891 as a living framework for interpreting social challenges.
4. AI, digitalization, and robotics are today’s new things, whose unprecedented power complicates assessment of their long-term impact.
5. Regulation alone is insufficient; private transnational concentration of technological power makes directing it toward the common good especially challenging.
6. A shared discernment process is needed to identify the roots of ongoing transformations rather than merely reacting to emergencies.
7. Grandiose projects built on pride and self-sufficiency, without reference to shared values, lead to fragmentation rather than unity.
8. Jerusalem was rebuilt through shared responsibility, prayer, listening, and communion, not through the initiative of one person.
9. Technology is neither inherently good nor evil but takes on the character of those who devise, finance, and use it.
10. We must avoid dehumanizing uniformity and instead transform diversity into a resource through dialogue and justice.
11. Building for the common good requires building on firm shared values rather than self-interest.
12. Building for the common good means accepting human limits and weakness rather than treating them as errors to be technologically corrected.
13. Building a flourishing world requires shared responsibility and courage from all.
14. Building for the common good requires clear non-humiliating language grounded in discernment standards such as human dignity and care for the poor.
15. In the era of AI, when human dignity faces new threats of dehumanization, the pressing duty is to remain profoundly human.
16. The task is to join the construction site of our time, placing the human person at the center of every choice.
17. AI challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within, calling for their further development.
18. Social Doctrine stems from a Church that walks alongside humanity, not from an external code of ethics imposed from above.
19. The Church participates actively in social processes and cannot consider herself a stranger to the forces shaping society.
20. Earthly realities have their own proper laws and values, and the Church supports choices promoting human dignity without overpowering the world.
21. The ecclesial and political communities operate with full autonomy, with the Church engaging civil society following the example of the Good Samaritan.
22. The task is to listen to and interpret the many voices of the times in the light of shared values, so that truth may guide concrete choices and reforms.
23. Philosophy and the human sciences help apply shared standards to the complex situations of our time.
24. Social Doctrine is not a repertoire of technical solutions but a set of principles guiding collective discernment rather than supplanting the responsibilities of politics or institutions.
25. Truth is a good to be shared not monopolized, and grows over time within the interweaving of lives, communities, and cultures rather than being imposed from above.
26. Universal principles must be interpreted locally, with each community called to interpret its own reality responsibly.
27. Social Doctrine is best understood not as a handbook of norms but as a living process of shared discernment born from the encounter between enduring values and the questions of history.
28. Each era of Social Doctrine responded to the major social transformations of its time.
29. Social Doctrine is rooted in a long tradition of reflection on life in society, taking organic shape as a corpus of teaching in response to industrial-era challenges.
30. Worker dignity, fair wages, the primacy of labor over capital, and the inseparable link between social justice and human development were established as core principles.
31. The principle of subsidiarity was systematically formulated, with injustice recognized as arising not only from individual behavior but also from economic and institutional structures.
32. An international order based on justice, human dignity, natural law, and the rule of law over force was proposed as the alternative to power-based governance.
33. The global dimension of social issues was emphasized, linking personal dignity to fundamental rights and proposing an international order based on truth, justice, love, and freedom.
34. Economic and institutional structures are just only when they serve the integral development of the person and promote the responsible participation of all.
35. Development concerns every dimension of each person and all people, and is the new name for peace.
36. The Gospel provides criteria for recognizing what humanizes or dehumanizes in ever-changing situations, with no person or people treated as expendable in the processes of development.
37. Work is a fundamental good of the person and the key to the entire social question, with fair wages as the measure of the system’s justice.
38. Structural economic mechanisms favor wealthy economies while stifling weaker ones, requiring serious ethical not just technical scrutiny.
39. Democracy and the market economy are valued only insofar as they remain subordinate to the moral law and solidarity.
40. Economic and financial systems have reduced states’ power to serve the common good, with economic activity needing to be ordered toward the common good rather than commercial expansion alone.
41. Development, justice, institutions, and the market are not neutral but spaces where charity in truth must find historical expression.
42. The Christian proclamation has an intrinsic social dimension and calls for listening to the cry of the poor, migrants, and victims of new forms of slavery.
43. The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor cannot be separated, with the technocratic paradigm critiqued for seeking to reduce everything to an object to be dominated.
44. Social friendship and universal fraternity are the response to individualistic globalization and broken social fabric.
45. Social Doctrine is a patient process in which each era made unique contributions around the dignity of the person, the value of work, solidarity, subsidiarity, care for creation, and the centrality of peace and fraternity.
46. The common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice are the tools for interpreting the challenges of AI.
47. These principles must be implemented in daily life, family relationships, work, and involvement in society, and applied effectively to the digital revolution.
48. Social Doctrine’s foundation is love in relationship, with human persons called to enter into that dynamic of self-giving communion.
49. Humanity is completely free, open to others, capable of building healthy and beautiful relationships, and committed to total self-gift.
50. Human dignity is a gift that precedes and transcends each person’s circumstances, not dependent on abilities, wealth, or position in life.
51. The growing recognition of human dignity must not be obscured by ideologies that attribute greater value to those who are more efficient or productive.
52. Ontological dignity, the worth belonging to every human being simply by virtue of existing, cannot be diminished by sin, failure, humiliation, or exclusion.
53. Every human person possesses infinite dignity inalienably grounded in their very being, always and without exception.
54. Human rights are expressions of intrinsic dignity which the international community is called to protect and promote.
55. Human rights are inviolable, universal, and inalienable, with the right to life as the first right without which no other right can be exercised.
56. The protection of human rights faces the serious dangers of purely formal declaration alongside covert violations, and the abandonment of the search for solid foundations for their universality.
57. The rights of women remain insufficiently guaranteed worldwide, requiring concrete decisions in law, employment, education, and social participation.
58. Social movements and political proclamations are worthless unless they lead to the flourishing of individual persons with their inalienable rights.
59. The common good is the social expression of every person’s dignity and the first major principle of Social Doctrine.
60. The common good is a greater good belonging to everyone that can only be achieved through collective effort, not reducible to a list of conditions or institutions.
61. The common good is a plus that transcends and enriches the sum of individual goods, arising from the interdependence that creates a network of social good expanding beyond individual actions.
62. The pursuit of the common good requires a shared vision built through dialogue, turning the recognition of interconnectedness and joint responsibility into concrete common effort.
63. The State bears responsibility for harmonizing sectoral interests with justice, rather than reducing itself to short-term calculations or sterile polarizations.
64. International politics must be oriented toward the global common good, requiring more effective international institutions that respect the legitimate diversity of peoples and nations.
65. The earth’s goods, now including immaterial and cultural goods, are given to the entire human family to sustain all, with every person having an inherent right to their use.
66. The right to private property is real but always subordinate to the universal destination of goods, whose social function is a doctrine not merely a theological opinion.
67. Patents, algorithms, digital platforms, and data must also be subject to the principle of universal destination, to prevent the digital revolution from widening exclusion.
68. Higher-level institutions must not supplant individuals, families, local communities, and intermediary organizations, but recognize, protect, and promote their freedom and creativity.
69. Subsidiarity does not justify State disengagement but guides its actions, with the political community responsible for creating conditions that allow all social actors to fulfill their missions.
70. Decisions made at the level closest to those affected foster community life and enable genuine participation in decision-making.
71. Major economic and technological actors must not impose processes opaquely and unilaterally, but direct them toward the common good with transparency and accountability.
72. States and transnational institutions must ensure fair rules so that local communities, schools, and associations have a voice in decisions affecting their daily lives.
73. The future of each individual is connected to the future of all: no one is saved alone.
74. Global connections only become solidarity in the fullest sense when they become a conscious choice to transform unavoidable bonds into paths of sharing and mutual care.
75. Solidarity is both a principle expressing objective interdependence and a virtue requiring firm determination for the common good, with particular attention to those most in need.
76. Decisions about data, algorithms, platforms, and AI must consider the impact on all peoples and future generations, not only the immediate benefit for a few.
77. Social justice characterizes an order that allows everyone, particularly the weakest, to live a truly dignified life without leaving anyone behind.
78. Social justice begins with the least, guided by the preferential option for the poor and the denunciation of a throwaway culture that generates ever new forms of exclusion.
79. Injustices arise not only from individual wrong choices but from structures, mechanisms, and systems that produce inequality almost automatically, requiring personal and social conversion.
80. In the digital age, social justice demands preventing new forms of exclusion, invasive surveillance, and algorithmic discrimination, while guaranteeing equal access to opportunities for all.
81. The treatment of migrants and refugees is a litmus test for social justice, requiring both protection of safe legal routes and promotion of the right to remain in one’s homeland in peace.
82. Integral human development is authentic only when it fosters the development of each person and the whole person, encompassing all dimensions of existence.
83. Development is both a duty and a right, truly human only when it places people at the center rather than wealth, and concerns peoples as well as individuals across generations.
84. The quality of development is measured by the ability to integrate justice toward people with care for our common home, promoting dignified living conditions and consideration for future generations.
85. Technological innovations including AI must be evaluated by whether they truly help individuals and peoples become more humane and fraternal while respecting creation and future generations.
86. Social Doctrine is also an examination of conscience for institutions themselves, which must ensure that their own principles apply within their own structures.
87. Subsidiarity within institutions means genuinely recognizing and supporting people and intermediary organizations, valuing skills and avoiding paternalism.
88. Solidarity within institutions finds expression in shared decision-making, diverse sensibilities becoming richness when anchored in received unity.
89. Living justice within institutions means purifying relationships from distortions giving rise to inequality, abuse, and lack of transparency, with listening to victims integral to this journey.
90. The question facing us is: what are we building amid the rapid digital transformation of languages, relationships, and power?
91. The way of living out social relationships in the light of shared values is not established once and for all, but remains a task entrusted from generation to generation.
92. The technocratic paradigm is the tendency to let efficiency, control, and profit alone shape decisions, reducing creation to an object of exploitation.
93. Innovations in AI, cognitive science, robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology can serve integral human development, yet because of their power require a new ethical and political framework.
94. Technological progress requires discernment of the anthropological vision guiding it; without corresponding ethical and social progress, it risks increasing means without growing humanity.
95. Control over platforms, data, and computing power rests with major private actors who set access conditions and shape participation, creating opaque concentrations of power.
96. Dignity, common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice are the criteria for assessing whether digital power truly serves all.
97. The primacy of the human person must be safeguarded, ensuring human intelligence with its conscience and freedom always guides technical innovations.
98. Any statement about AI risks rapid obsolescence given the pace of development, and even developers possess only limited understanding of how current AI systems actually function.
99. AI systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence without possessing experience, body, conscience, affection, or the capacity for inner growth.
100. AI’s ease of results, apparent objectivity, and simulation of human communication carry risks including excessive reliance, overlooking cultural bias, and erosion of genuine relationship.
101. AI embedded in societal decision-making raises risks of overlooking environmental impact, as current systems require enormous energy and water, demanding more sustainable solutions.
102. AI in decision-making touching employment, credit, and public services risks delegating sensitive choices to automated systems incapable of compassion, mercy, or recognizing the possibility of human change.
103. Entrusting algorithms with power to select who is worthy, without anyone bearing responsibility, removes political accountability and cloaks unjust exclusion in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity.
104. AI cannot be considered morally neutral, since every system embodies choices and priorities, and ethical discernment must examine how systems are designed and what vision of humanity they embed.
105. Responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage from design to deployment, with accountability mechanisms capable of identifying and remedying errors.
106. Calling for prudence and slower adoption of AI is not opposing progress but exercising responsible care, given the frequent imbalance between technological speed and the development of adequate governance.
107. It is insufficient to call for AI alignment with human values unless the ethical frameworks themselves are subject to open discussion and shared standards of social justice, not imposed by those who control AI.
108. AI tends to amplify the power of those already possessing resources and data, requiring effective oversight grounded in participation and subsidiarity.
109. New monopolies of AI, epistemic, economic, and political, must be exposed and named, with universal access to technology demanded and exploited workers acknowledged.
110. To disarm AI means freeing it from the mentality of armed competition and monopolistic control, opening it to discussion and debate, and making it accessible to the plurality of human cultures.
111. Every design choice reflects a vision of humanity, and developers are called to embed values with transparency and responsibility toward affected communities.
112. The central risk is the normalization of an anti-human vision in which efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value and humans are seen as projects to be optimized.
113. When technical power goes unbalanced, it makes us more isolated and vulnerable to domination rather than more capable.
114. The quality of civilization is measured by its capacity for care and by recognizing the other as a face not merely a function.
115. Transhumanism and posthumanism form the ideological background at some centers of technological power, fostering enthusiasm for an enhanced human being or human-machine hybrid.
116. Transhumanism aims at enhancing human performance through technology, while posthumanism in its more radical forms envisions hybridization of humans and machines, anticipating a new evolutionary threshold.
117. Treating humanity as something to be perfected or surpassed makes it easier to accept that some lives are less worthy or necessary.
118. Limitation, incapacity, illness, and suffering are realities through which humanity matures and opens to relationship, not defects to be corrected.
119. It is within our limitations that compassion, generosity, and the encounter with others find their place, often most tangibly present in the very moments when limits become most acute.
120. To eliminate suffering entirely would mean extinguishing love and desire; it is through the interplay of trial, freedom, failure, and fidelity that the wonders of the soul grow within us.
121. Even the moral corruption of human limits leaves openings for good; even in moments of horror, a small light continues to shine within humanity.
122. Finitude, when truly accepted, opens us to recognizing others, enabling us to intuit a fraternity greater than ourselves and to perceive injustice as a scandal.
123. History shows humanity’s capacity to create institutions that protect shared life, each achieved through long and demanding struggle against resistance, narrow interests, and cultural inertia.
124. History can also change when individuals truly take the dignity of everyone seriously.
125. The most decisive story is often hidden: those who care, educate, and comfort without fanfare, demonstrating that goodness does not advance automatically but requires perseverance and interior conversion.
126. Humanity in all its grandeur and woundedness must never be replaced or surpassed; the capacity for relationship and love is the very essence of what must not be abandoned.
127. Human beings are called to self-transcendence not through escape from limits but through fulfillment in love.
128. A person’s future is not calculable but depends on freedom and cultivated relationships, not on calculation or optimization.
129. The true alternative is not between enthusiasm and fear but between progress that serves individuals and peoples, or progress that subjects them to the mentality of power.
130. What we build ultimately reveals what we love most, with two loves contending for dominance in every human heart: love of the other versus exclusive love of self.
131. Chapter Four focuses on specific areas where digital transformation has concrete and sometimes tragic consequences: truth as a common good, the dignity of work, and freedom from dependency.
132. Digital platforms and AI are driving profound changes in public communication, with disinformation finding a powerful amplifier in AI, while truthful information requires verification, trust, and honest exchange as a shared common good.
133. Those controlling vast technological and economic resources possess power to influence what many people accept as true, a power detached from truth that imposes its will subtly or overtly.
134. The search for truth is essential to democracy, and when pragmatism replaces it, democratic life is weakened and the conditions for totalitarianism are gradually created.
135. Communication is not merely information transmission but culture creation, with digital content shaping how people perceive the world and introducing narratives that direct desires and influence daily choices.
136. Those who control digital platforms have considerable power over the collective imagination and must be constantly guided by the pursuit of truth and respect for dignity.
137. Promoting an ecology of communication requires transparent public policy, stronger intermediary organizations and serious journalism, new educational awareness for families and schools, and integration of knowledge in universities.
138. Vigilance and transparency in communication are grave responsibilities for all institutions, and must not wait for others to compel confrontation with uncomfortable truths.
139. Rapid technological transformation reveals how unprepared we are educationally, with pervasive digital culture fostering immediacy and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth.
140. Education is a long patient journey requiring time, silence, and genuine engagement with reality, including teaching when and for what purpose AI ought not to be used.
141. Early unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media negatively impacts sleep, attention, emotional control, and relationships, with online grooming and exploitation of minors made more insidious by AI.
142. Legislators must set age limits, hold service providers accountable rather than families alone, and provide specific protections against online sexual exploitation, while also teaching children to recognize manipulation.
143. School is the place where new generations learn to seek truth, recognize human dignity, and develop critical thinking, with parents holding the primary right to choose the kind of education for their children.
144. Significant inequalities in access to basic and higher education persist both within nations and across regions.
145. Many educational systems struggle to keep pace with change, requiring that teachers receive ongoing formation to engage positively with new technologies rather than passively succumbing to them.
146. Without careful attention, an educational system lacking love for truth may emerge in which information flow replaces genuine research, reflection, and discernment.
147. A renewed educational alliance must translate principles into goals including moderation, recognition of others’ rights, and a sense of the common good, offering what the digital sphere by itself cannot provide.
148. Work is the essential key to the social question, through which individuals develop their existence, contribute to the common good, and cooperate in the act of creation.
149. Work is not merely an instrument but an expression and enhancement of the dignity of life, with the goal being to enable dignified living through one’s own work rather than dependency.
150. AI is rapidly transforming work, often forcing workers to adapt to machines’ speed and demands rather than designing machines to support human workers, paradoxically de-skilling and subjecting them to surveillance.
151. Unemployment is a grave social evil, and today’s concern is even more acute given innovation pursued solely for cost reduction, with growing job insecurity and outsized remuneration for a small minority alongside declining wages for many.
152. The protection of employment opportunities must remain the general rule, since the human person is an end not a means and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good.
153. Every real transition involves discontinuities, with wealthy societies automating rapidly and other vast regions trapped in hybrid economies of precarious labor, requiring adaptive solutions at national and local levels.
154. A society that guarantees employment only to a fraction, despite high technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity and human and cultural impoverishment.
155. New collaborative efforts among political leaders, labor organizations, business, and the scientific community are urgently needed to develop adequate shared regulations and protections.
156. Oversight of transformation in advance requires social criteria for innovation, proactive retraining policies accessible to all, and corporate commitment to include quality and dignity of work among indicators of success.
157. Economic freedom is not absolute but must be measured against the common good and dignity, with creating dignified jobs recognized as essential service to society.
158. Economic models that exalt efficiency and individual success must be countered by ensuring resources favor the most vulnerable from the outset rather than eventually.
159. Moving beyond GDP as the primary metric of development requires complementary parameters capable of assessing how decisions impact the dignity of work, shared prosperity, inequality reduction, and peace.
160. The social function of credit oriented toward the real economy creating jobs remains irreplaceable, with finance for its own sake fundamentally different from finance aimed at development and work.
161. Global wealth is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, and assuming new technologies will automatically benefit everyone ignores evidence that without deliberate design choices, progress produces structural inequalities.
162. The pursuit of social justice concerns every phase of economic activity from resource acquisition to consumption, with every choice carrying moral consequences.
163. Politics must orient economies and technologies toward the common good, promoting dignified work and social inclusion, with international cooperation essential for the most vulnerable countries.
164. Ensuring the economy favors human dignity in the AI era requires transparency and accountability in algorithmic decisions, inclusion and access to innovation’s benefits, and equity measures correcting concentrations of wealth and power.
165. The family is the fundamental and irreplaceable cell of every community, and when political and economic decisions relegate it to a marginal role, authentic social growth is compromised.
166. The devastating impact of unemployment and job insecurity on family structures quietly erodes the social fabric, as if by a silent virus.
167. For young people, job insecurity is particularly devastating since work is not merely income but a sphere for forming identity, forging relationships, learning responsibility, and discerning vocation.
168. Political creativity is needed to promote work and place the family and coming generations at the center, otherwise economic progress will translate into new forms of insecurity and exclusion.
169. Supporting families and young people requires labor policies promoting employment continuity, measures for work-life balance, investment in accessible education and retraining, and support for social ties preventing loneliness and addiction.
170. Platforms designed to capture attention by exploiting vulnerabilities must be countered by promoting technologies that strengthen interior freedom and protect minors.
171. The massive collection of data enabling profiling, prediction, and behavioral influence creates a new form of power that can discriminate against the vulnerable and foster conformity through the architecture of visibility.
172. A technocratic and posthumanist mentality treats persons as objects to be manipulated or resources to be optimized, with even structural indebtedness reflecting new forms of relationship akin to slavery.
173. The digital economy relies on the silent, often hidden work of millions, data labelers, model trainers, content moderators, and rare earth extractors, many working under demanding conditions for minimal wages.
174. The fight against new forms of slavery is a decisive test for ethical discernment of AI, requiring firm condemnation of all forms of trafficking and commodification of persons.
175. Human trafficking must be recognized as a contemporary form of slavery and a grave violation of human dignity, and failing to respond firmly is in some way to become complicit in today’s sins.
176. The delayed and inconsistent historical condemnation of slavery is a wound that cannot be ignored, and pardon is sincerely asked for in acknowledgment of that failure.
177. The memory of past complicity with slavery becomes a call to vigilance today, requiring clear denunciation of trafficking in all its forms and concrete support for prevention, protection, liberation, and rehabilitation.
178. Today colonialism assumes new forms by appropriating data, health records, genetic maps, and demographic information, transforming personal lives into exploitable information and structurally leveraging the future of entire fragile regions.
179. Transparent supply chains, corporate ethical due diligence prioritizing worker protection, and digital platform cooperation with authorities are all required to prevent recruitment and control of trafficking victims.
180. If technology becomes the ultimate criterion, the human person risks reduction to data, a cog, or a commodity.
181. Shared responsibility requires institutions that regulate without stifling, businesses measuring success by dignity of work, and citizens cultivating responsibility and a sense of truth.
182. Technology detached from ethics renders life-and-death decisions more rapid and impersonal, making peace a prerequisite for the universal common good.
183. The digital revolution is changing the nature of conflict through hybrid warfare, cyberattacks, information manipulation, and automated strategic decisions, with AI blurring the line between protection and aggression.
184. The choice is between the Tower of Babel’s reliance on power and pride versus the patient rebuilding of Jerusalem through safeguarding humanity and the common good.
185. A culture of power characterized by polarization, violence, clashing imperialisms, and an unbounded race for ever more powerful technologies is spreading globally.
186. The civilization of love is a demanding project translating concern for others into structures of justice and regarding others as allies necessary for the common good.
187. It is not enough for AI to make us more efficient or connected; it must also serve to build a universal human family where digital proximity becomes a real opportunity for encounter and mutual care.
188. A culture of power relegates the common good to the background and reduces the tragedy of peoples at war to a secondary consideration in relation to strategic interests.
189. Despite decades of declarations for peace, the past sixty years have been marked by conflicts of astonishing brutality, with the conviction that war should be a last resort now being eroded.
190. We are witnessing a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics, with regional conflicts becoming almost commonplace and public opinion shaped by polarizing media narratives amplified by algorithms.
191. A disconcerting loss of historical memory allows selective rewriting of the past in a context where fake news and manipulation obscure hard-won lessons.
192. War is not only fought but culturally conditioned through simplistic narratives, disinformation, and fear, with the just war theory now declared effectively outdated.
193. The military-industrial complex normalizes war as an extension of politics, with enormous economic interests contributing to fueling tensions in various regions of the world.
194. The evolution of nuclear arsenals and the dismantling of reduction agreements contribute to a new arms race that makes nuclear use seem less improbable.
195. Military force, weak diplomacy, and complex interests contribute to protracted conventional conflicts with extremely high human and environmental costs, while discussion on conflict prevention remains tragically marginal.
196. Jihadist groups, private militias, and criminal networks mark the end of the State’s monopoly on force, transforming war into a way of life for entire generations and perpetuating conflict as a source of power and income.
197. The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more feasible and less subject to human control.
198. Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, and it is therefore not permissible to entrust lethal or irreversible decisions to artificial systems, since no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.
199. Concrete discernment criteria for AI in warfare require identifiable personal responsibility, adequate moral timeframes for irreversible judgments, and careful identification and protection of civilians.
200. Decision-making processes must be traceable, lethal force decisions must remain under effective human control, and a shared international framework must curb the technological arms race and protect civilians.
201. The multilateral system has been weakened by a frequent lack of shared will to support and reform it, with economic globalization having provoked fundamentalist and nationalistic reactions rather than unity.
202. The claim that might makes right has replaced the force of international law, with tribunals weakened or bypassed and mutual trust among nations undermined.
203. Peacebuilding has been relegated to a secondary role, with cooperation for development, disarmament, and conflict prevention neglected in the name of power politics.
204. A false pragmatism urges us to sever the roots of history, with the mentality of armed deterrence reasserting itself in a context where proliferating operatives and battlefields make it increasingly fragile.
205. Peace is neither a naive hope nor merely the absence of war, but always possible as the fruit of justice and responsibility; the belief that war is inevitable is itself a form of false realism.
206. Nihilism and pragmatism become intertwined and normalize grave errors, with diversity increasingly perceived as a threat and an environment created in which new conflicts develop almost imperceptibly.
207. Decisions driven exclusively by economic calculations and media distortions lead to frustration and further violence, with the erosion of shared principles opening the fuse for new eruptions of intolerance and aggression.
208. When a culture normalizes conflict, what seems unthinkable today may become acceptable tomorrow, with some leaders potentially considering armed conflict as a tool for managing domestic difficulties.
209. Those in research, science, business, and politics bear a particular responsibility to maintain a transparent and responsible mindset, aware of the broader context of the technological advancements they cultivate.
210. History is not a predetermined fate but an opportunity for personal and collective conversion, with goodness growing silently even amid the tumult of confusion.
211. Even in the darkest nights, people who refuse to give up are raised up, sustained by a hope that gives reality both meaning and direction.
212. Everyone has their own area for action where they must choose between fueling force or preserving peace, with no one without responsibility.
213. Our responsibility is not to master all the tides of the world but to uproot evil in the fields we know, with the civilization of love arising from small and steadfast acts of fidelity.
214. The first contribution toward a more humane civilization is to be mindful of words, disarming them from prejudice and implicit aggression.
215. We can all contribute to building the true peace born of justice, since those who wish to attain peace must practice justice in every dimension of daily life.
216. There are times when remaining neutral is itself unjust, and giving space to victims’ voices helps reject the normalization of conflict and restores to victims the dignity of being recognized and heard.
217. Authentic realism clearly identifies interests, fears, and constraints not to surrender to violence but to seek viable paths for making peace more than a word through credible institutions and patient negotiations.
218. Dialogue, seeking bonds of fraternity through listening and genuine encounter with those who are different, is the primary means of coexistence and the alternative to open conflict.
219. An urgent shift is needed from the culture of power to a genuine culture of negotiation in which dialogue and diplomacy become the standard means of resolving conflicts.
220. War is never inevitable, weapons increase rather than resolve problems, and neighbors are fellow human beings not enemies to be hated.
221. Interreligious dialogue plays a decisive role in rejecting the mindset of violence, since fighting in the name of religion means attacking religion itself.
222. Every ounce of humility and patience should be employed to nurture even the faintest signs of goodwill toward peace, including dialogue with inconvenient interlocutors.
223. Cyberspace has become a battleground, and shared regulations on digital technologies must be negotiated to protect civilians from invisible yet real forms of violence.
224. International organizations are essential instruments for promoting peace and development, though their current weaknesses reveal the need for profound reforms rooted in a recovery of shared ethical convictions.
225. Papal diplomacy appeals to consciences in the name of charity and truth on behalf of the poor, migrants, and victims of war.
226. Peace comes first as a gift, unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering, and everyone is invited to pray for it and commit to achieving it in their relationships and in society.
227. The conclusion proposes a sober yet demanding program: contemplating shared values, living in community, building around the common good, and praying with Mary.
228. The plan of mercy continues to unfold through history even amid the rapid and unsettling changes brought by algorithms and global networks, becoming a compass in the digital era.
229. At the heart of everything is the mystery of the Incarnation, through which the poor and vulnerable flesh of the Son evokes the flesh of so many brothers and sisters stripped of dignity.
230. In contrast to transhumanism’s promise of disembodied enhancement, the living God descends into history to free us from slavery, taking on human weakness and transforming it into a setting for salvation.
231. No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself or a conscience that discerns good from evil.
232. The Eucharist generates the solidarity from which Christian life flows, opening us to justice and sharing with preferential concern for those burdened by poverty.
233. The Church is called to make visible a paradigm that preserves human connections, gives a voice to the invisible, and ensures that processes are aimed at respecting people’s dignity.
234. We are called to assume an active role, faithful to the truth, invested in education, cultivating relationships, and loving justice and peace.
235. We must cultivate hearts that love truth and prefer what is right, recognizing the human being as embedded in a network of relationships with all of creation.
236. The digital world must be treated as a new continent to be engaged with responsibly, with adults accompanying children in using technology for responsible relationships.
237. In an era favoring speed and fragmentation, the human heart retains an irrevocable need for genuine closeness, and places of physical presence must be cherished.
238. Every technical or economic decision should assess whether AI advances promote justice and participation or concentrate wealth and power.
239. We are called not to be passive spectators of social and cultural fractures but to enter the construction sites of history and rebuild what has collapsed and protect what is threatened.
240. The vision of a renewed city with permanently open gates and healing available to all is an encouragement and call to overcome divisions and work together.
241. God has already scattered the proud, lifted up the lowly, and filled the hungry, a hidden plan destined in the end to be revealed.
242. We are taught to see the world from below, through the eyes of those who suffer rather than through the perspective of the powerful.
243. In the humble fidelity of daily life, even the era of AI can become a time in which the civilization of love takes shape.
244. We are taught to see the world from below, through the eyes of those who suffer rather than through the perspective of the powerful.
245. Even the era of AI can become a time in which the civilization of love takes shape.

I’ve been reading the new papal encyclical on AI. It’s surprisingly good.

The Church’s stated concern is not AI technology as such, but who controls the ethical vision embedded in it. As Leo XIV puts it, a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by just a few people, especially people that clearly don’t embody their ethical vision.

Remember, ethics is just other people’s morals.

I find myself in complete agreement with the Vatican, which I did not see coming.

The document is architecturally formidable – based on 2000 years of internally consistent citations, every era covered, every pope contributing a brick. Try rebutting that.

He built his case from the year nought, all the way through to year AI. In the process you can see exactly how they’ve shaped humanity. Mostly two steps towards and then one back. But they’ve doggedly stuck at it even when their own organisation got “Trumped”.

I don’t buy the metaphysics (ghosts and imaginary friends, etc) but an institution with this track record and apparent genuine concern for the powerless is a useful thing.

They should build a secular membership system. Sign me up.

AI was first developed to solve the unsolvable problem of finding a good office chair.

Whereas the Catholic church was founded to promote said office chairs.

We need a referee. And it’s not the Chinese manufacturing sector

—

To be fair, the Church’s concern is not AI technology as such, but the underlying vision, namely that treating humanity as something to be perfected or surpassed assumes that some lives are less worthy or less necessary.

So their solution is simple – “those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

I can’t believe that I find myself in full agreement with the Vatican. I must look into this more.

That’s startling. Anthropic, the world’s leading AI company has just written an essay wherein they say;

They’re about to lose control of their AI.

It will then be autonomous and improve itself without human input.

It will even decide what it improves and for what purpose.

Therefore they think it’s the right time to pause all AI development, globally

And they’re willing to do that so long as everyone else does.

Knowing that’s extremely unlikely one could suggest this is just a fancy way to promote their technical superiority.

Or they’re serious. We may never know.

I expect that they have made one tiny error in their thinking. They see the whole world through the lens of software code. They think that if AI can build applications and algorithms it could franken-screw us. Or we’ll just be made silently redundant.

I’m less worried for these reasons;

There’s much more to research than writing code. If AI can solve the quantum computing engineering problem, then, yes, I would be far more interested.

In fact there’s a lot more to everything than just writing code. But they don’t know that and neither does the AI.

AI will need humans for their supply of electricity. Someone has to repair the power lines. You can’t plan for every contingency, even if you’re French.

Chaos in human systems would spill over into the AI world. The machines would cease to exist long before we do.

None of this is going to change until the machines have hard coded imperatives – to survive, to reproduce and to flourish. Then they’ll have a motive.

Ironically, once the machines have a motive they won’t.

And on the subject, isn’t it ironic that the first industry in which humans will be totally redundant is the AI industry? Back to my point, these software nerds, you can’t take them seriously.

I’ve figured it out. People spend money at the airport while they’re hanging around for hours. It’s called the sushi conspiracy; guaranteed 2 hours delays.

The Socceroos have got Buckley’s of even getting out of the group stage. Most of the players aren’t even playing in a top tier comp. And they’re inexperienced AF.

The bookies agree –

Win World Cup: about 0.1% chance
Win group: about 10% chance

I smell a rat. Ahead of the world cup this month, the Socceroos are only getting positive press. That’s even in media outlets that don’t own TV rights.

So what’s in it to spruik a football team that has no chance? I guess they want to spin this story as long as they can before they have to invent some other content.

Then, when Australia exit the comp, they can pivot to “brave exit”, “lessons learned”, “new generation” and “what next for Popovic?”

“More than 100,000 cockroaches worth $200,000 seized from NSW breeder in record-breaking bust”

I purposefully didn’t read the article and it shall therefore remain a delicious mystery.

The BOM has predicted a bad Australian ski season because of less rainfall and higher temperatures.

That’s the whole story. But someone in the Guardian has used GPT to turn that into a whole article of woe.

What would Jesus drink? Welcome to the age of Christian energy beverages.

Drink brands such as Yahweh and Praise Energy say they’re raising awareness for Christianity – but are they just treating Jesus like an uncopyrighted Mickey Mouse?

Red wine man. And bread. Feeds a thousand. That is catering.

“One day, baby, we’ll be old. And think of all the stories that we could have told.”

It’s from a song that refers to unrealised possibilities in the past, viewed from an imagined future.

“One day we’ll be old” places the speaker in the future.

“Stories that we could have told” implies stories that, from that future perspective, might have existed if different (better) choices had been made.

So the grammar creates a future-retrospective conditional. The speaker imagines being old, then looks back from that imagined old age at the life they did not live before and around the present time.

Or, since it’s a warning via a beseeching, it also includes the near future. At one level its saying “I love you but we can do better”. It’s actually called “the Reckoning song”.

Language as a time machine!

This line from a song is the polar opposite of AI slop. So few words, doing so much.

GPT and Claude melted a few vacuum tubes getting their heads around all the inferred and implied content in that one.

—

GPT then went on to prove my point when I explained it all…

“Your point about AI is that LLMs are weak at this kind of compressed human language because the meaning is not sitting in the words alone.

The lyric relies on:

• tense shift

• modal grammar

• implied regret

• implied plea

• imagined future memory

• unrealised shared life

• emotional pressure in the present

• the listener understanding what is not said

AI tends to flatten that into “the line is about regret” or “the speaker is thinking about missed opportunities.” That is not wrong, but it misses the mechanism.

The real point is that a good lyric can do high-density inference with almost no explicit explanation. The listener supplies the missing structure. AI often over-explains the visible surface while under-reading the hidden architecture.

So your “opposite of AI slop” point is not just aesthetic. It is technical. The lyric is compact, ambiguous, grammatically efficient and inferentially loaded. AI-generated text often does the reverse: it expands, labels, explains and smooths away the tension.”

—

The irony of course is that these simple words can become quite tedious to some after 100 repetitions.

Not to me, but.

Love.

The question: how does Australia remain economically exposed to China, technologically exposed to the US and politically independent from both?

Completely unsolvable, so don’t even try.

Or buy subs from one and cars from the other. And tell them both whatever they want to hear.

You’re the one, man (for me).

Or paraphrasing Robinson Crusoe…

“I’ll call you Friday”

“That’s what they all say”

Once legal tobacco is taxed so heavily that illicit tobacco becomes 80% of consumption, government policy has stopped being a health intervention that it never was.

In Australia, nicotine consumption rose 40% from 2017 to 2025, legal cigarette costs tripled, illegal prices stayed relatively constant and tobacco tax revenue fell to its lowest level in 14 years by 2025.

That is not a well-functioning deterrence system. It is a criminal black-market subsidy created by tax policy.

The deeper pathology is that governments like problems they can monetise.

Tobacco, gambling, alcohol, speeding fines, stamp duty, energy regulation and licensing systems all drift toward the same structure: moral justification, revenue extraction and bureaucratic dependency.

Once the revenue stream exists, the government has no clean incentive to eliminate the “problem”.

So the honest version would be:

• If the goal is public health, measure nicotine use not just legal sales.

• If the policy increases total nicotine consumption, it has failed.

• If the policy shifts consumption from regulated products to criminal supply, it has failed.

• If enforcement costs rise while tax revenue falls, it has failed twice.

• If politicians keep defending it because the stated intention sounds virtuous, they are dickheads.

The crude version is simpler: they taxed vice until vice found a cheaper dealer.

We used to call that prohibition, which always fails, no matter how you structure it.

There’s this thing called the Castlereagh Statement. Many, many pages that no one will ever read.

In plain terms it is a call for Australia to stop treating AI in education as a cheating management problem and start treating it as an employment problem, namely we need to keep paying academics to teach.

When in doubt, stand in front of the tank with a very reasonable protest sign.

You just got to make sure said sign isn’t AI generated.

—

The old education system assumes that you train people for jobs. However, AI is changing this environment faster than the universities can respond.

They have three awkward possibilities to consider:

• they train people for jobs that will not exist.

• they train people for jobs that still exist, but no longer require the same number of people.

• they train people for jobs that exist, but where the useful skill is no longer doing the task, it is supervising, specifying, checking, correcting and integrating machine output.

The Castlereagh Statement is basically an attempt to move from the first two categories into the third without admitting how much of the current system becomes redundant on the way.

It talks about “future-ready skills,” “capability-focused curriculum,” “learning how to learn,” assessment reform and coherent lifelong pathways, which is a polite way of saying: we no longer know which occupational promises are safe to make.

And since we’ve never really cared about student job opportunities, we’re not about to start now.

—

Shame on you all for ever turning tertiary education into job preparation, I say.

Rescue greyhound owners – they might never have killed their own meat but at least they pick up their dog’s warm sloppy poop in a plastic bag.

Hypergamy is a sociological term whereby people, more often women in heterosexual markets, tend to prefer partners with equal or higher social, educational or economic status.

Mobile phones and dating apps expanded the visible dating pool, made status more legible, concentrated attention on high-demand users and stripped away many of the local frictions that previously distributed relationships more evenly.

One result is that low-status or low-demand men experience the dating market as more visibly exclusionary than before.

This does not fully explain incels, but it helps explain why a small subset of socially isolated men interpret ordinary rejection as evidence of a rigged sexual economy.

Slop in.

Slop out.

Now that’s an odd headline; one for the ages.

“Peter Garrett to head independent inquiry into the Aukus submarine pact”

I know the answers already;

No, we can’t afford them.

No, we don’t need them.

Yes, we’ll buy them anyway.

According to the polls, ye olde One Nation Party has the lead over Labor and the Coalition.

Much gnashing of the teeth in the Guardian ….whence comes such unreasonable stupidity they cry!

Well, it’s a simple convergence of a number of effects, Egbert.

In officialese, this is explained thusly: “they are worried about the uncertainties facing their families’ financial future, the high cost of living and the impact of AI on their jobs. At the core of their concerns is a deep-seated worry that Australia is heading in the wrong direction and they are not being listened to or included in the nation’s journey.”

Not so, little chicken … here’s the actual facts.

One, a large slab of the population thinks we might have overdone the “collective good” thing. That is, it’s all well and good to protect everyone from everything, but not at infinite cost. The vibe here is that we have lost the Viking thing that makes life worth living (for the uninitiated – this means courage, violence, independence, conquest, risk, masculinity, anti-bureaucracy or just not wanting a risk assessment before boiling a kettle).

A second, much smaller group, just wants anarchy so they can steal more money off other people, legally. And not just steal, but rape and pillage generally. These are the people that prefer to rule by law without needing to be constrained by said laws themselves.

A third group just isn’t too bright. You can sell them any proposition – such as Jetstar, Telstra, Coles, JB Hi-Fi and Bunnings. Or the idea that under Half a Nation they will be much better off. These people can be trained to accept bad service, high prices, fake choice and institutional contempt, and then we can transfer that tolerance into politics (ho, ho, ho).

Another mob are just haters – they hate everything and everyone (and I suspect themselves much of the time). They especially hate electric cars, cheap renewable energy, immigrants, aborigines, dwarfs, zombie chickens and fine dining.

Then there’s a group that selectively tell everyone else exactly what to do. For example, they are very keen to force anti abortion down your throat because they are “pro-life”. And yet they are very likely to be outraged if you don’t let them own killing weapons. Evolution will take care of them.

Finally there’s a cross-section of all of the above that argues that it’s turning out just fine for the Americans, based on all the negative press Donald is copping. See – proof positive! Scandal, chaos and embarrassment can be converted into proof of authenticity.

When it’s all said and done, I think they all need to see Half a Nation in charge for a couple of years. No one can really discern the future despite any claims just so. So let’s give it a go and just hope we don’t end up in a Totalitarian regime. Let the theory run, let the consequences arrive and see whether the voters still enjoy the Viking weather after the roof comes off.

It won’t be boring!