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John Quiggin
@johnquiggin@aus.social
mastodon 4.7.2I'm an Australian economist, and blogger, writing from a democratic socialist perspective. Also on Substack, Bluesky etc
2736 Followers
209 Following
50 Posts
Joined February 03, 2023
Pronouns:
They/He
Protests against data centers are doing the shareholders and creditors of AI a big favour, slowing down the hyperscaling race, and protecting them from a future full of stranded assets.
Nate Silver discovers the educated poor
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/nate-silver-discovers-the-educated
Trump promised a self-coup and hardly anyone noticed. Michael Koziol in the Nine papers, gets it right, whereas NY Times and Guardian (article by US prof) missed the point completely, treated this as an attempt to sow distrust in results. #uspol
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/north-america/trump-lays-the-groundwork-for-emergency-declaration-ahead-of-midterms-20260717-p60g7g.html
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Past cohabitation with propertarian/libertarians, “classical liberals” etc who have mostly gone Nazi
Treating property rights as human rights rather than social constructions
Discomfort with “every billionaire is a policy failure”
A general lesson from the fall of Jacinta Allan. Once a potential leadership challenge is public enough to be a serious possibiiity, it's sure to happen. And, once it happens, incumbent is bound to lose, maybe after the first vote, or the second, or (in the best case) at the next election. #auspol
it was once expected that a finding of corruption in a govt department would entail resignation of the minister in charge. Now it's big news that a minister in the ACT government has done the right thing. By contrast, Jacinta Allan, hanging on like grim death #auspol
Grauniad keeps describing Keir Starmer as “a decent man”. AFAICT, decent = “Oxford law grad who looks good into a suit”. Lied his way into Labour leadersip, ruthlessly purged enemies, allied with McSweeney & Mandelson, crawled to Trump,tried & failed to block Burnham Have I missed something? #ukpol
I've been making this point for years to anyone who will listen, and now we have the statistical evidence. A key implication is that bosses who use the workplace to massage their egos are costing shareholders money, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html
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Anyone with minimal competence in this domain wouldn't have needed help. But few of us have minimal competence across the board.
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Not a job for an agent in any case, but the process made it obvious to me why agentic software goes off the rails. If an agent is left to run autonomously, ambiguity in the instructions and errors in the software are going to propagate until disaster strikses.
TIL, again, that it's easy to make mistakes and important to correct them. I misread a source as saying that the UK has no equivalent to our Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. In fact, the Cabinet Office fills that role. Apologies for the error.
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Two main paths downwrds
- Grandparents had unionised jobs working for GM or similar in the 1960s.Current generation non-union trade workers. Roughly similar real income, but much more precarity and lower social status
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And the bigges argument of all- the important people at the event want to display their importance to you
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Schools probably the biggest activity of the NSW Church and thoroughly corrupted. Fisher effectively Chairman of Board with McInerney as CEO. The fact that he is an Archbishop shouldn't protect him. If it does, case against any state support for Catholic schools gravely weakened.
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By contrast, if you go back 56 years from 1970 to 1914, hardly anyone then was better off than their grandchildren. And tech innovations massively more significant than Facebook and streaming TV.
How privatised companies got so rich - we paid.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/26/always-remember-how-macquarie-built-its-millionaires-on-outrageous-tolls-and-charges
Really annoyed with the #Lowy Institute. For the second time, they’ve asked Australians whether we should seek a nuclear-powered submarine, then reported the answer as “support for #AUKUS”. I wrote and complained last time and they said they would fix it, but they haven’t. https://poll.lowyinstitute.org
Quite striking that even Starmer's UK is seeking to reduce dependence on US military technology. Not what Trump and Hegseth were hoping far when they told Europeans to pay their own way. https://mezha.net/eng/bukvy/1e0351dd_uk_develops_affordable_long/
Another logic fail on AI, this time from NYTimes. Meta leasing compute capacity to Anthropic is evidence that Anthropic is eating Meta’s lunch (who knew?). Evidence of AI industry hunger for computing power would be AI companies buying/leasing compute from non-AI firms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/technology/meta-anthropic-ai-computing-power.html
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- Moderate downward mobility, say from 75th to 25th percentile. Grandparents college educated professionals, parents some-college white collar, current generation no-college retail. Real income about 30 per cent lower in third generatioion.
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But that’s entirely consistent with the observation that lots of Americans can not only be worse off than their parents but worse off than their grandparents.
Please help me in the campaign against preventable blindness. https://johnquiggin.substack.com/p/three-sleeps-to-go
How we paid for the millionaire factory https://substack.com/home/post/p-208634850
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But when it didn't work, I was stuck, not wanting to risk damaging an expensive component. Google and YouTube got me nowhere, but ChatGPT walked me through all the steps until I got it right. Chat mode is great here, because of step by step interaction.
We don't need massive data centres, and gas-fired power plants, to manage the use of LLMs as a replacement for Google. Hyperscaling is a destructive waste of resources,
https://act.350.org.au/petitions/protect-larrakia-country-say-no-to-new-data-centre-in-darwin
Hoping US/Trumpistan beat Belgium and go all the way to win the Cup*, ideally with some dubious penalties to help them. Then maybe FIFA will pay the price of decades of corruption.
Happy I can take a dispassionate view, since Socceroos already out
Ocean biomass sinking not recommended. A long term problem for solutions based on reforestation, I think. But for the moment, let's restore as much forest as we can https://drawdown.org/explorer/deploy-ocean-biomass-sinking
In the middle of this standard lament, a startling concession "And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before." after which the author moves on almost immediately
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
TL;DR. The hyperscalers expect massive growth, but the electricity needed to meet current demand could be supplied.by a handful of power stations
Ethereum success with proof of stake more evidence that Bitcoin is a pointless and evil waste of energy
https://coinmarketcap.com/community/articles/6a51e415f8f0eb0b8ffe9b65/
The race to the bottom in corporate taxation finally seems to be over https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/announcements/2026/07/corporate-tax-revenues-remain-elevated-while-tax-rates-stabilise-according-to-new-oecd-data.html
CNBC reporting as good news the fact that SpaceX is leasing out around 20 per cent of its compute capacity. Another 25 per cent already leased to Google. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/22/spacex-ai-colossus-data-center-reflection.html
Some basic propositions about voting, maybe of interest to readers of Nate Silver #uspol
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/nate-silver-discovers-the-educated
Only real lever govt has - drop maximalist goal of suppressing vaping as well as smoking. Even if "gateway drug" claim were true, that horse has bolted. Anecdotal stuff we've been fed "17 yo vaped once and died of lung cancer" the opposite of evidence-based policy #auspol
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/why-the-government-won-t-cut-cigarette-excise-to-combat-illicit-tobacco-20260710-p60ebf.html
Support my appeal to end preventable blindness
https://johnquiggin.substack.com/p/freds-big-run-ff9
Article lists co-operating autocracies, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, but not US. Trump presented as a bumbler failing to counterbalance dictators. In reality he loves them and want to join (even if Iran has spurned him, and China wants to be the capo di tutti capos) https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/the-rise-of-authoritarian-cooperation-a-new-illiberal-order
Has anyone connected the dots between Ashley Hinson and Susan Collins shared network of Epstein-adjacent donors? Marc Rowan central to both, Lutnick big donor to Hinson. Feeds into general narrative of Republican corruption wnich Dems need to push hard. #uspol
Double donations day for Fred's Big Run https://open.substack.com/pub/johnquiggin/p/freds-big-run-b11
Has anyone connected the dots between Ashley Hinson and Susan Collins shared network of Epstein-adjacent donors? Marc Rowan central to both, Lutnick big donor to Hinson. Feeds into general narrative of Republican corruption wnich Dems need to push hard. #uspol
Boosted by @oxy@social.bsdlab.au
"A long, long time ago, Albanese said he picked a side. He has never stopped counting those who didn’t pick his."
Albo vindictive hatchet man who cares only about the trappings of office. And we are stuck with him, unless he screws up so badly as to give us Hanson. #auspol
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2026/09/26/inside-albaneses-factional-dominance-theyve-all-been-executed-except-one
Boosted by @oxy@social.bsdlab.au
A few days ago, I got a message asking me about some articles I wrote on John Locke’s role in American slavery, which were published in Jacobin in 2015. Unfortunatley, I can’t find the message, so I’m just poting the links. Title fo the first one gives a pretty clear indication of my views
https://jacobin.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property
https://jacobin.com/2015/10/locke-classical-liberalism-treatise-nozick-constitution
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/john-locke-freedom-slavery-united-states
