I’ve been mulling over something that’s been nagging at me for a while now, and a recent online discussion really crystallised it: Australia’s economy has essentially become a hedge fund for residential real estate, propped up by a protected banking oligopoly. Four of the top five companies on the ASX 200 are banks – CBA, Westpac, NAB, and ANZ – with BHP being the lone miner in that exclusive club. When you step back and look at it, that’s genuinely bonkers.

Bloody hell, what a mess Intel has become. Reading about their CEO basically throwing in the towel and admitting they’re “too late” to catch up with AI competition while laying off thousands of workers has got me properly wound up this morning. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash, except this particular wreck has been decades in the making.

The whole thing reads like a textbook case of what happens when you prioritise quarterly profits over long-term vision. Someone in the discussion thread hit the nail on the head – all those billions spent on stock buybacks could have been invested in R&D to keep them competitive. Instead, they chose to juice their share price while TSMC, NVIDIA, and AMD ate their lunch.

The recent discussions about tax reform in Australia have got me thinking about how we keep circling the same drain without making real progress. Reading through various proposals and community reactions, it’s fascinating to see how deeply entrenched our resistance to meaningful change has become.

Remember the carbon tax? That brief moment when we actually led the world in climate action, only to have it torn down by political opportunism and vested interests. Now here we are, a decade later, still debating the same fundamental issues about tax reform, land use, and economic fairness.