Links
Data collated by the tertiary education union has revealed there are 306 university executives who earn more than their state’s premier.
I love Law & Order and I heard Noam Chomsky is a fan too. I tried to find a source - according to this 2003 profile, he is:
When Chomsky and Carol are in Cambridge, they usually watch an hour of television at night—“Law & Order” or some other cop show. Carol makes sure that they go to bed right afterward, and they wake up around eight.
I dunno about this. Clapback read-a-book energy.
“Australian authors group give every federal politician five books to encourage nuance in Middle East debate” via hamonryen
Interesting open access article from Abby Smith, Seema Mihrshahi, and Becky Freeman on Exploring small retailers’ perspectives on selling tobacco after the tripling of Tasmania’s tobacco licence fee.
An interesting project that imagines New York 20 years from now, and draws on residents' expertise to imagine it
I worked with “informed optimism,” which means you are basically working with many of the same institutions, systems, and tendencies that exist today, and understanding how there could be the best possible scenario. When I interviewed people for New York 2044, I asked them if they could use the lens of informed optimism to imagine their scenarios.
News from Home - Urban Omnibus
On the ongoing delegation of military judgement to autonomous systems - to ultimately kill humans
The use of AI to create novel text, images, and video will likely exacerbate the challenge of cognitive warfare. This form of non-lethal warfare explains the social engineering of adversaries’ beliefs, with the overall intent to affect their defense priorities, military readiness, and operations. In this way, countries will attempt to harness AI to produce misinformation and disinformation, which are designed to mislead and deceive opponents, and across the competition continuum ranging from peace to war.
A new military-industrial complex: How tech bros are hyping AI’s role in war - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Some reasonable points here, and a challenge for us is to be open to the message!
Mastodon’s structure and culture of openness present opportunities to avoid many of the epistemic perils of biased and untrustworthy large corporate platforms. However, Mastodon’s risks include techno-elitism, white ignorance, and isolated, epistemically toxic communities.
Beyond Corporate Social Media Platforms: The Epistemic Promises and Perils of Alternative Social Media - @Lakephil@mastodon.social
I really enjoyed this list of The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century
“Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to its history and not its future” - Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
The Verge 2004 - a fun selection of articles reflecting on why this year was a turning point for our online existence.
With the European Peace Facility, the EU is seeking greater flexibility that will allow it to bypass the African Union and directly fund national and sub-regional military initiatives.
The blockbuster film of the last few years has achieved a synthesis of these two trends: color-rich saturated imagery, hammer on the head straightforward storytelling. I think that the actual visual pleasure offered by these new films is such a breath of fresh air that they disarm people’s critical faculties (See also: Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Banshees of Inishiren, Saltburn). What has emerged reminds me most of the USSR’s most maligned aesthetic legacy, socialist realism.
tl;dr the big variation in non-GP specialist fees in Australia is largely due to differences between individual doctors, rather than factors such as patient complexity or structural costs.
Sources of specialist physician fee variation: Evidence from Australian health insurance claims data 🔒
Guizhou has been the target of successive visions of state-led sinofuturity, which have developed the province as unevenly as its karst landscape.
3.5 million Argentinians pushed into poverty this year
Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population
Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei’s austerity measures hit hard