Let’s make sure the labelling debacle is the last time a health harming industry is allowed to set the conditions of their own regulation.

New alcohol labels should have been introduced today, but lobbyists derailed them - Alcohol Action Ireland


“Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know”

The Feed Is Fake - Vulture


Budget for a broken social contract

Greg Jericho on last night’s budget, and the kicking it gives to people with disabilities:

And so now we have a government saying those with disabilities need to be kicked off the NDIS because gas companies need their profits…

Most people know someone on the NDIS, and few would think they are rorting it. The problem, of course, is that the NDIS is a Productivity Commission idea, which believes the private sector delivers better efficiency than the public sector.

It never does. It always leads to profiteering and worse service and yet when you are beholden to neo-liberalism, what need have you for reality?…

Because people know with such things what happens is the shonks rort the system and get away with it, while those with disabilities need to endure the cuts because ‘spending is out of control’.



Hard to walk back the impact of this paper though…

Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags



More on the Job Ready Graduates Program, a failed, deeply inequitable policy that needs immediate reform:

“The [2025] modelling… shows the number of students with debts over $50,000 has increased by 70%, and humanities students are set to pay off their debts into their 40s.”

One in four humanities students in Australia to take more than 25 years to pay off student loans, Treasury finds - The Guardian


When considering what’s the purpose of Anzac Day, we should pay as much attention to what people do as to what they say:

“…a number of crowd members booed loudly and repeatedly during an Acknowledgment of Country by Uncle Ray Minniecon…

“We have experienced this type of racism for over 200 years,” he told media after the service. “One of the questions that we have in our minds is: What crime did we commit to attract this kind of racism?””

Loud boos mar Anzac Day dawn services in Martin Place and Melbourne - SMH


I thought you’re not supposed to go to war with your own client states (he says nervously)

Could Trump withdraw US support for UK sovereignty of Falklands? - The Guardian


“…we have a choice about who we want to be as a society. For me, that choice is clear. I want to live in a country where people seeking safety are not treated as risks to be managed, but as people to be protected. Because safety should not come with conditions. And belonging should not depend on how we are described.”

Angus Taylor’s comments remind refugees like me that our belonging is conditional - Thouraya Lahmadi


World held hostage by reliance on fossil fuels, Christiana Figueres warns – and climate health impacts are ‘mother of all injustices’ - The Guardian

In March, research published in the international science journal Nature found that ocean levels had been underestimated due to inaccurate modelling. In some areas of the global south, including south-east Asia and the Indo-Pacific, they may be 100cm to 150cm higher than previously thought.






Well this is grim:

However, the terms demanded extensive sharing of national health intelligence, including epidemiological surveillance data and pathogen samples, while offering no binding guarantees that Zimbabwe would receive equitable access to medical technologies developed from them.

US’s new scramble for Africa is biomedical imperialism



Will she read novels? I hope so, because a novel is one of the last technologies that still trains attention as an ethical act. It makes you inhabit another mind without extracting a summary.

Interesting piece that gazes across the epistemic abyss


The Atlantic, so take it with a mountain of rock salt, but interesting to ponder:

The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films

I’m looking forward to degrees in vertical microdrama.


New preprint: We got 400 postgrad students to use AI in an assessment and critically reflect on it, rather than banning it. Here’s what happened.

Might be useful as you head into the new teaching year, especially the design principles.