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Saw a post on r/auscorp this morning that put me right off my second coffee. Someone in Sydney resigned, gave a week’s notice like a decent human being, even offered to work the whole thing out. Their employer’s response was to withhold both weeks of pay, including leave entitlements already earned, and tell them they were “sick of entitled people.” For wanting to be paid for hours worked. The …

Saw a thread on r/AusFinance last night that stopped me scrolling: someone complaining about $43 steaks and $5 sushi rolls, asking how anyone affords eating out anymore. Six hundred and sixty-odd comments in a day. Normally that kind of post is just people venting about smashed avo, but this one turned into something more interesting, because the top reply wasn’t “cook at home, mate.” It was: a …

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning reading a thread on r/singularity instead of doing anything useful, which is on brand for me lately. The post was from someone who’d worked at Anthropic, now out, doing interviews about how AI is going to end jobs as we know them and usher in something called Universal High Income. Not basic income, mind you. High income. The idea being that once AI does all the labour, the …

There was a story doing the rounds this week about a small clinical trial where some people with Type 1 diabetes were able to come off insulin entirely. Early days, small sample size, the usual caveats. But the headline alone was enough to light up the comments, and what I found in there was more interesting than the trial itself. A lot of people with Type 1, or parents of kids with it, showed up to basically say: …

Saw a stat this week that stuck with me: a Cambridge study found 51% of surveyed British novelists think AI will eventually replace their fiction-writing work entirely, and 39% say it’s already hurt their income. Someone on r/artificial replied to the headline with “only half?” and got a surprising number of upvotes. That reaction told me more than the survey did. I’ve got a soft spot for …

Someone on r/australia posted a headline yesterday that made me laugh out loud at my desk: “RBA Reassures Australians They’ll Stop Raising Interest Rates as Soon as Economy Collapses.” It’s satire, obviously, but it’s the kind of satire that lands because it’s barely exaggerating anything. A couple of hours later the top post on the same subreddit was a photo of a $7 Aldi air-fried …

There’s a good argument happening over on r/AussieFrugal about the new card surcharge ban, and it’s the kind of argument I like: two reasonable positions, both partly right, neither one fully landing a knockout. For anyone who missed it, surcharges on debit and credit cards got banned this week. No more little sign at the counter saying “1.5% surcharge applies to card payments” or the extra …

Someone on r/CleaningTips posted a fairly innocent question yesterday about drying clothes indoors over a UK winter, and why everything smells faintly off when it comes off the rack. Three hundred comments later it had turned into something close to a dehumidifier fan club. I read the whole thread with the quiet recognition of a man who has hung a wet towel over a clothes horse in a closed spare room and come back …

Spent a bit of time this morning down a Reddit hole, the good kind, and it’s stuck with me all day. A bloke posted in r/Melbourne. He lost his wife to ovarian cancer two months ago. Going through old photos he found one of her from 1998, taken on a day trip somewhere in the eastern half of the state. Neither of them had ever written down where it was, and now there’s no one left who remembers. He wanted …

There’s a post doing the rounds on r/privacy about Flock Safety, the US company whose number-plate reading cameras have been getting ripped down in city after city amid lawsuits and public pressure, only for the same councils to turn around and sign contracts with Axon or Motorola or Rekor instead. Same technology. Same database. Same cop who can pull up everywhere your car has been in the last six months. …