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The Art of Looking Busy While Doing Absolutely Nothing

There’s a particular kind of workplace fatigue that doesn’t come from doing too much work. It comes from watching someone else do none, and then having to explain to yourself why you’re still annoyed about it. Someone posted about this recently online and it hit a nerve, judging by the response. The scenario will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office for more than about six months. A …

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Four Hundred Thousand Dollars and the Noise Around It

There’s a particular kind of media week where the volume of the coverage is inversely proportional to how much the average person is actually affected. This was one of those weeks. Labor’s proposal to increase tax on the top one per cent. Specifically, about $400,000 more over a lifetime for those earners. The coverage has been wall to wall. The op-eds have been breathless. You’d think they’d …

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Grok Is Three Years Old and Somehow That's Supposed to Mean Something

Elon Musk posted something this week about xAI being “only 3 years old,” apparently as a defence of Grok’s current standing in the AI market. The implication being: give it time, it’s just getting started. This is a strange argument to make in a field where three years is basically a geological epoch. The models people are actually using, Claude, GPT, Gemini, have each had major releases in …

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The Robot Math Problem Nobody Can Agree On

Someone posted a genuinely interesting question online recently. The gist: if minimum wage in parts of the US is still $7.25 an hour, how is any of this robot and AI infrastructure supposed to be cost-effective? How do you justify a billion-dollar data centre to replace people you’re already paying almost nothing? The thread that followed was one of those rare internet discussions where the argument actually …

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Grifters, Tickets, and the Eternal Optimism of the Conned

Fifteen thousand tickets. That’s the number being thrown around in connection with the cancelled Candace Owens tour, and I’ll be honest, it took me a moment to process that. I don’t know if it’s accurate. The figure apparently comes from a Turning Point Australia spokesperson who has every incentive to inflate it, and the Guardian doesn’t seem to have verified it independently. Could be …

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The Supermarket Question Nobody Has a Clean Answer To

Someone posted online recently asking where people do their grocery shopping. Simple enough question. The thread ran long and the range of answers was genuinely interesting, not because anyone said anything revolutionary, but because it illustrated just how much cognitive load the average household is quietly carrying around something as mundane as buying butter beans. The short answer from most people: Aldi for the …

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The Cult of the Irish Spring: What a Reddit Thread About Shower Scum Taught Me About Trust

There’s a particular kind of Reddit thread that I find oddly comforting. Not the big political ones, not the outrage loops. The ones where someone posts a photo of their grotty shower and forty strangers immediately mobilise to help. No agenda. Just people who have, at some point, also stared at a discoloured shower floor and felt personally defeated by it. This week I fell into exactly one of those threads.

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Fifteen Dollars for a Can: The Slow Death of the Social Drink

Fifteen dollars. For a can. At Rod Laver Arena. The person who posted about it bought it anyway, which is the correct and honest thing to admit. We all do it. You’re already there, you’re thirsty, the thing is in front of you, and the social friction of saying no feels worse in the moment than the financial sting. Venues know this. It is, in fact, the entire business model.

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The 'Think of the Children' Playbook Is Getting Old

There’s a piece going around arguing that governments are breaking the internet in the name of child safety, and that forcing ISPs to ship routers with default family DNS filters would be a far cleaner solution. It’s a reasonable technical argument. The problem is it’s solving for the stated goal, and a lot of people are skeptical that the stated goal is the actual goal. That scepticism is fair. …

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The FBI Director Has an Apparel Site and It Was Serving Malware

There’s a headline that crossed my feed last week that I’ve been sitting with. The FBI Director, Kash Patel, runs a merchandise site called BasedApparel.com. The site was caught serving a ClickFix malware attack to visitors, the kind where a fake Cloudflare prompt tricks you into running a malicious command in Terminal. Someone compromised a legitimate but poorly secured site and turned it into a …

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