Part one here.

You would think there'd be somewhere open for breakfast in Chinatown on a Saturday morning. You'd be wrong. What are noodles for, if not for breakfast?

I wanted to pick up a hat from Paddy's Markets, just behind my hotel, before setting out. Apart from fruit and veg stalls, they're not open till ten o'clock, so I and my bare old bonce brave the ultraviolet unprotected.

At the north end of Chinatown is Sydney Trades Hall, nowhere near as grand as the Melbourne one. The ground floor used to be the Trades Hall Inn, but no longer. I love political activism that you can do from a pub. In here I used to sip beer and nod earnestly in the cause of stopping the introduction of the GST (Australia's VAT), and the Iraq War (or at least Australia's involvement therein).

On the heels of these stunning triumphs for the mildly-organised left, I remember somebody asking Ian Rintoul what he thought the next urgent issue would be, and he said it was refugee rights. I found this hard to credit. Who on earth could object to taking in a few refugees every now and then? In my defense, it was a slightly more innocent time.

Further up (latitudinally) and down (geologically, as the land descends to meet the harbour) Sussex Street, things get grimly prosperous.

It's all grand gaudy f-off facades, designed to destroy the streetscape, plus the grimy parking garages of posh hotels disgorging their contents with a clanking of grates and barriers. It's as ugly as sin. From my own much more modest hotel, you at least step out onto a living street. Nobody walks down here. It's death by wealth.

Nothing to see but the occasional ghost of a more productive past. I wonder what these buildings were for. I used to work down in this part of town thirty years ago and probably walked past them hundreds of times, but I can't remember.

I get to Circular Quay to meet my family with enough time to purchase/regret a breakfast snack at McDonalds. By the water, the buskers have yet to set up, but there are huge plastic tigers which I just realise I've been seeing all over town. Oh, right; it's Chinese New Year. I don't think I look at the things you're supposed to look at. Quite pleased about that.

The family thing works out as family things do. It's nice. I'm not used to seeing all these people without my dad in the background, either benignly amused or becoming tetchy about things not progressing according to schedule. From here on, it looks like I'm standing in the background by myself. I miss him.

Formalities done, we've enough time before lunch to wander round the Rocks Markets, which seems to be suffering from Covid. Not a lot of international tourists, and pretty slim pickings from a reduced number of stalls. Can't find a hat.

There's a stall selling coins. I expect to find a selection of pennies, ha-pennies, and shillings — Mum says she still has a huge jar of them at home — but holy cow! Vespasian! Trajan!

If I had a few hundred bucks I had no use for (ha!), I would be tempted. But then my inner Indiana Jones kicks in: These belong in a museum! Ideally, in a huge glass pickle jar.

My family is chemically gaseous. That is to say they expand to occupy the available space. We've a booking for lunch, but now it's down to my brother's teenage girls and their mobile phone skills to corral everybody. I notice with some envy that a couple of nephews have been lounging in the Mercantile Hotel for a while.

We have lunch at the German restaurant which nearly twenty years earlier hosted my wedding reception. A bit of icing on top of the grief cake just for me. Still, sausages and sauerkraut and a couple of glasses of quite agreeable rosé later, I'm feeling bulletproof.

Half the party head for market stalls promising gelato and chocolate, and the other half head for the Orient Hotel. I'm with the latter, sipping beer at a picnic table on the street, getting sunburnt. Wish I had a hat.

They're all going to miss their express train back down to the Shire. Not everybody makes the rendezvous point back at the quay at the appointed time. My sister volunteers to find/join her two errant sons at whatever pub they happen to be holed up in — no rush; still plenty of time. My father would be beside himself at this stage. Greatly amused, I give the assembled remnants of my family a cheery wave, and I'm free to enjoy a whole afternoon and evening in the big city, Mary Tyler-Moore style.

I just need a hat to fling in the air.

I make a beeline for the Paragon Hotel, the former public bar of which is now the McDonalds where I had my self-inflicted breakfast. A quarter of a century ago I went in there on a Sunday afternoon and was surprised to hear Bix Beiderbecke playing as muzak. There was a jazz band setting up in the back corner, so I stayed.

They were blistering. Hard-edged 1920s/30s Chicago-style jazz. Absolutely magical. I was mesmerised by the clarinet player, a strikingly tall, thin, grey, birdlike fellow who didn't seem to register that he had an audience at all, and just fidgeted away in his own little world. He's surely long dead now, like the pub. So it goes. The half of the back bar where they played is now for gambling zombies, and the tiny slice of pub remaining between that and McDonalds is pretty dismal. I sit outside and watch the Sydney Bin Chooks going about their business, all thin and birdlike with long black protuberances.

At the Matrix Woman In Red Fountain in Martin Place, there are white limos reversing off the street and up to the fountain. A bunch of burly blokes in white suits get out and prepare for photographs with the cars. There's also a young woman, in a big white dress. Not sure why she's there. She's holding a bunch of flowers. I expect a bit of skin and a posy is a nice counterpoint to the manliness of the cars and the blokes. Very tasteful.

  At my old beloved Edinburgh Castle on Pitt Street, I employ the soon-to-be-fashionable medium of the pub lavatory selfie to immortalise the harrowing (for even the most firm-footed drunk) stairs leading down to the gents. Once upon a time I opened the door at the top of these stairs, saw a crumpled body at the bottom, concerned people gathered around, and heard approaching sirens. Even I, dim as I am, almost immediately clocked to what had just transpired. Thought I'd best go back to my beer and give it a minute.

I take some more self-consciously zany selfies (are there any other kind?) on my way back up to Haymarket, as I'm now feeling the Mary Tyler-Moore vibe.

It doesn't even occur to me that I should plug myself into a podcast, lest one or two of my remaining brain cells get accustomed to slacking off, which I can ill afford. There's enough to see and hear to keep my synapses crackling.

There's a vast, interconnected floating world of clean, gleaming shopping malls running the length of the inner city that I don't enter. In the nineties I became concerned about the state of dereliction that the city appeared to be falling into. As I only ever went into pubs, bookshops, record shops and newsagents, I didn't really notice the metastisizing private-public space below, above, and beside the public space. I was conscious of it insofar as it all linked into the underground railway station concourses, but at some point I realised that it was possible to walk the roughly eight kilometres from Central Station to near Circular Quay without ever seeing daylight, or a homeless person. Now I suppose there are several routes.

So many homeless people, obviously long term. The mattresses, tents, etc. are new to me. Fortunately there are so many derelict shop doorways and alcoves now that the beautiful people live in their floating world. One could get really settled in as a homeless person in Sydney, were it not for the roaming packs of Nazis in the wee small hours. Damn. There goes that Mary Tyler-Moore feeling.

Finally get back to Paddy's Markets, thinking I'll pick up a hat and maybe some cheap clothes. It could always be relied upon for a Bob Marley t-shirt, or something similarly subversive.

  Woah! Okay, well. I'd never say never, but not for everyday, and certainly not for visiting my mother tomorrow morning. Apart from the range of mild fetish gear, which is new, Paddy's Markets is a shadow of its former self, but then it always was.

I did however find a hat. It hurt to put it on. Definitely sunburned. Went upstairs (through the mall) to the Market City Tavern, which I should hate because it's so artificial and built for — rather than just retrofitted for — gambling, but I do love the balcony and its glorious view of nothing in particular. I shall have to carry on up George Street to Broadway to get some cheap clothes, because unlike all the teenage boys I work with in my supermarket, I cannot bear to wear the same shirt two days running.

On the way out I take the time to pose for another pub lavatory selfie.

These are the hottest new thing, honestly. I'll be selling NFTs shortly.

If that's not a natural cliffhanger, I don't know what is. Will he get the shirt, or turn up for morning tea at Mum's a bit whiffy? How bad is the sunburn, and what will the morning shower feel like? (Spoiler alert: it really hurt.) And will the latex Wonder Woman costume fit comfortably?

Continued in part three.

This month, I have been mostly reading:

• Inside psychogenic death, the phenomenon of "thinking" yourself to death — Frank Bures at Salon: Most people who enter this neurological tailspin will emerge from it before they hit bottom. They take in new information. They adapt to the new situation. But the few who don't may find themselves at stage five: Psychogenic death. The light goes out of their eyes. They say their goodbyes. They may perk up briefly as if they finally have a goal they can imagine, a solution to their problem: That new goal is death. And within a day or so, they're gone.
• Highly Paid Union Workers Give UPS a Surprise Win in Delivery Wars — Thomas Black at Bloomberg (via Bill Mitchell, who explains why there should be no surprise): The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, nonunionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further. The lack of workers is taking a toll on its reliability, too. FedEx’s recent on-time performance for express and ground packages has sunk to 85%, while UPS has met deadlines on 95% of those packages, according to data collected by ShipMatrix Inc. […] The difference in performance predates the worker shortage. Even while paying union workers almost twice what FedEx Ground drivers make, UPS earns a return on invested capital that’s more than double its rival’s. In the last full year, UPS and FedEx each had sales of about $84 billion; UPS banked $7.7 billion of operating income, while FedEx earned $5.9 billion.
• Renting Sucks — Caitlin Johnstone: This is where my kids have spent most of their lives. Their heights are drawn on the door jamb in the kitchen. Losing this house is like losing a loved one. I’m also a bit nervous about where we’ll wind up; we can’t afford to buy a house and rent in Melbourne has skyrocketed over the last few years. Mosty, though, I’m just annoyed at this stupid, backwards system which forces people to pay landlords for shelter from the elements if they’re not fortunate enough to be able to afford a home of their own. Rent is largely an extortionate double-dipping scam where renters pay landlords for the privilege of keeping vandals and vermin from destroying their investment property which they’ll generally make a handsome profit off of when they sell, and this practice is held in place by a system which depends on the permanent existence of an underclass who can’t afford to own land.
• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
  
• Seeing the world like Wikipedia – What you should know about how the world’s largest encyclopedia works. — Zachary J. McDowell and Matthew A. Vetter in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog: As acknowledged by Katherine Maher, former CEO of Wikimedia, Wikipedia is a mirror of society’s biases, and nowhere are these biases more visible than the much-discussed gender gap. The fact is that less than 20% of Wikipedia editors identify as women. This leads to all kinds of issues related to content gaps, policy biases, community climate and harassment, which we discuss in detail in our book. Notably, these issues broke into to mainstream in the case of Donna Strickland (the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics since Marie Curie), who not only did not have a Wikipedia page until about 90 minutes after she won, but as it later emerged had a previous draft of her article rejected for not meeting notability standards. This and other issues are part of a larger systemic bias (eg. the lack of reporting on women in science), but are exacerbated and reflected by low levels of diversity within Wikipedia itself.
• Domino Theory — George Monbiot: It’s true that within a few years, as the advocates argue, the entire stinking infrastructure of petrol and diesel could be overthrown. But what is locally clean is globally filthy. The mining of the materials required for this massive deployment of batteries and electronics is already destroying communities, ripping down forests, polluting rivers, trashing fragile deserts and, in some cases, forcing people into near-slavery. Our “clean, green” transport revolution is being built with the help of blood cobalt, blood lithium and blood copper. Though the emissions of both carbon dioxide and local pollutants will undoubtedly fall, we are still left with a stupid, dysfunctional transport system that clogs the streets with one-tonne metal boxes in which single people travel. New roads will still carve up rainforests and other threatened places, catalysing new waves of destruction. A genuinely green transport system would involve system change of a different kind. It would start by reducing the need to travel – as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is doing with her 15-minute city policy, which seeks to ensure that people’s needs can be met within a 15-minute walk from homes.
• ‘We Remember a United States That Fought the Nazis’: A German Scholar of Fascism Weighs in on Christian Nationalism in the U.S. — Andrew L. Seidel in Religion Dispatches: When I ask, “Do you think that analogies to 1930s Germany are overblown?” She pauses thoughtfully then answers, “I don’t think they’re overblown.” She brought the receipts to our interview. Brockschmidt lists several signals, structures and characteristics of American Christian Nationalism that overlap in worrying ways with fascism. The “myth of a golden past,” is a big one. “[Calling for a return to] how the country used to be when in fact it’s a version that never was. It’s used to divide the country into us and them.” I found this particularly interesting because it goes to the heart of Christian Nationalism—attempting to return America to a Christian nation that never existed. As I’ve written elsewhere, America can never be a Christian nation because the moment it becomes a Christian nation it will cease to be America. Alongside this myth is the tendency to paint outgroups as “not real Americans.” A third marker is the veneration of “law and order, which really just means being tough on a certain portion of the population, not on crime.” Brockschmidt also mentions other “dog whistles used to stoke fear, resentment, and anger against outgroups [in order] to strengthen the feeling of togetherness of [the] ingroup.” Another marker of incipient fascism is “anti-intellectualism,” which can be seen in the “crusade in universities against wokeness and against critical race theory,” and, more broadly, against science, vaccines, and the pandemic itself.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Lab Leaks — Alex de Waal in the London Review of Books: In 1977 a strain of influenza reappeared after a twenty-year absence, an event with a probability in the natural world approaching zero. It wasn’t particularly virulent and was superseded by another strain the next year, but its appearance was a mystery. The most likely explanation is that it escaped from a Chinese or Russian laboratory during a vaccine trial. Other escapees include smallpox (in Birmingham in 1978), Sars outbreaks after the Sars epidemic (twice), and foot and mouth disease in the UK. Human error is usually to blame. […] The Covid-19 pandemic may well have been a ‘normal accident’; it’s equally possible that ‘Disease X’, the WHO’s codename for the next pandemic, will be another. If so, it will be the by-product of our total war on microbes, our determination, since the acceptance of germ theory 150 years ago, to collect, classify, experiment with and sometimes exterminate them. As with the Manhattan Project, demand for ever more powerful munitions justifies risk-taking of a kind that the scientists involved don’t fully comprehend.
• Georgia student's 'gay is ok' artwork removed from classroom, compared to Nazi flag, parents say — Brooke Migdon at the Hill: According to parents, school officials at Oglethorpe Avenue Elementary in Athens, Ga. promptly removed a student’s art piece, which featured a rainbow and the words “Gay is OK” written beneath an umbrella, following a complaint from another parent. When a teacher questioned the decision, an administrator compared hanging the drawing to hanging the flag of Nazi Germany in the classroom, according to a group of parents who witnessed the interaction, NBC-affiliate WXIA-TV 11 reported this week.
• Butterfly sanctuary closes as QAnon believers, thinking it’s home to sex trafficking ring, plot caravan there — Mike Rothschild at the Daily Dot: The email from the Center makes it clear that the grounds themselves are in direct danger from conference attendees who intend to form a “rolling car protest,” described as a ’Trump Train’-style “caravan to the border” that will likely make a stop at the National Butterfly Center. The Center’s location just minutes away from the Rio Grande has made it a hotbed of conspiracy theories and rumors, which claim it’s a hub of drug smuggling and human trafficking. Many of these rumors are pushed by Brian Kolfage, the leader of an eight-figure fundraising effort to privately build Trump’s border wall Kolfage, who has called the Center’s employees “butterfly freaks” running a “sham” sanctuary devoted to profiting off human misery, has pushed the theories hard, including sharing doctored photos of rafts at a dock outside the Butterfly Center. He’s also spammed Wright with violent threats over Twitter, eventually resulting in his account being suspended. Kolfage himself is not speaking at the event, presumably because he’s currently under indictment for wire fraud and tax evasion due to allegedly stealing from the We Build The Wall nonprofit he founded.
• Phil Are Go!:
  

As numbers on the calendar ticked over, I was mostly reading:

• Oh Great They’re Putting Guns On Robodogs Now —Caitlin Johnstone: So hey they’ve started mounting sniper rifles on robodogs, which is great news for anyone who was hoping they’d start mounting sniper rifles on robodogs. At an exhibit booth in the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exhibition, Ghost Robotics (the military-friendly competitor to the better-known Boston Dynamics) proudly showed off a weapon that is designed to attach to its quadruped bots made by a company called SWORD Defense Systems. “The SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) was specifically designed to offer precision fire from unmanned platforms such as the Ghost Robotics Vision-60 quadruped,” SWORD proclaims on its website. “Chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor allows for precision fire out to 1200m, the SPUR can similarly utilize 7.62×51 NATO cartridge for ammunition availability. Due to its highly capable sensors the SPUR can operate in a magnitude of conditions, both day and night. The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now.”
• Nurdles: The Worst Toxic Waste You’ve Probably Never Heard Of — Karen McVeigh at Mother Jones: Nurdles, the colloquial term for “pre-production plastic pellets,” are the little-known building block for all our plastic products. The tiny beads can be made of polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and other plastics. Released into the environment from plastic plants or when shipped around the world as raw material to factories, they will sink or float, depending on the density of the pellets and if they are in freshwater or saltwater. They are often mistaken for food by seabirds, fish and other wildlife. In the environment, they fragment into nanoparticles whose hazards are more complex. They are the second-largest source of micropollutants in the ocean, by weight, after tire dust. An astounding 230,000 tons of nurdles end up in oceans every year. Like crude oil, nurdles are highly persistent pollutants, and will continue to circulate in ocean currents and wash ashore for decades. They are also “toxic sponges,” which attract chemical toxins and other pollutants on to their surfaces.
• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  
• Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda — Caitlin Johnstone: The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet Politico has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include “support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.” […] I mean, how refreshing is that? How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they’re going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.
• David Graeber’s Final Challenge — Giulio Ongaro in Tribune reviews The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow: More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom—freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences—that appear to have been simply assumed among our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: ‘The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared,’ they suggest, ‘but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.’
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Soft-wars — Blair Fix: Political economist Chris Mouré has a new paper out in the Review of Capital as Power. It’s called ‘Soft-wars’, and it is a fascinating case study of the behavior of big tech. The story starts in 2011, when Microsoft led a $4.5 billion consortium purchase of Nortel and Novel. Later than year, Google responded by buying Motorola for $12.9 billion. The funny thing is that Google then proceeded to sell off what it had just bought. By 2014, almost nothing was left of Google-owned Motorola. Nothing except patents. And that, Mouré thinks, was the whole point. Mouré argues that this acquisition war was ultimately a battle over intellectual property. Google and Microsoft were competing to control the mobile market. And the way to do that was not to ‘produce’ anything. It was to command property rights.[…] Mouré’s analysis nicely illustrates a truism in economics: big corporations behave nothing like economics textbooks say they should. The textbooks say that profits should stem from productivity. But the reality is that what big companies care about most is restriction. The battle for profits is a battle over property rights — the legal right to restrict.

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes — Olivia Little & Abbie Richards at Media Matters for America: TikTok’s “For You” page (FYP) recommendation algorithm appears to be leading users down far-right rabbit holes. By analyzing and coding over 400 recommended videos after interacting solely with transphobic content, Media Matters traced how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm quickly began populating our research account’s FYP with hateful and far-right content. TikTok has long been scrutinized for its dangerous algorithm, viral misinformation, and hateful video recommendations, yet this new research demonstrates how the company’s recommendation algorithm can quickly radicalize a user’s FYP. Transphobia is deeply intertwined with other kinds of far-right extremism, and TikTok’s algorithm only reinforces this connection. Our research suggests that transphobia can be a gateway prejudice, leading to further far-right radicalization.
• Pru Goward AFR column on ‘underclass’ condemned as disturbing and abusive — Amanda Meade in the Guardian: An article by the former New South Wales Liberal minister Pru Goward which portrayed lower socio-economic Australians as dysfunctional and lazy “proles” has been condemned as disturbing, abusive and inaccurate by anti-poverty advocates. The opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review by the former NSW families minister argues there is an “underclass” of Australians who are “appalling” housekeepers and neglectful parents and “almost entirely lacking [in] discipline”. […] “Government agencies view them with alarm as huge cost centres; they are over-represented in their use of government crisis services and are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day,” Goward wrote in Wednesday’s AFR.
• Pompeo Effectively Admits To Assange Allegations — Caitlin Johnstone: After a lot of flailing and humming and hawing Pompeo does eventually make what sounds like a concrete denial with the curiously-worded phrase “I can say we never conducted planning to violate US law.” But even this wouldn’t be a denial of the claims in the Yahoo News report, because the report is mostly about the intelligence community and the Trump administration trying to find legal loopholes that would allow them to take out Assange. For example, this quote from the Yahoo News article: “A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal.” This would in no way be contradicted by Pompeo’s claim that “we never conducted planning to violate US law.” It would mean that there were discussions and plans about assassinating Assange amid conversations and debates about whether it would be legal to do so. The fact that they didn’t plan to violate US law doesn’t mean they didn’t plan to assassinate Assange if they could find a legal loophole for it.
• Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? — Judith Butler in the Guardian: Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims. […] In his well-known list of the elements of fascism, Umberto Eco writes, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” for fascism is “a collage … a beehive of contradictions”. Indeed, this perfectly describes anti-gender ideology today. It is a reactionary incitement, an incendiary bundle of contradictory and incoherent claims and accusations. They feast off the very instability they promise to contain, and their own discourse only delivers more chaos. Through a spate of inconsistent and hyperbolic claims, they concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship. […] This form of fascism manifests instability even as it seeks to ward off the “destabilization” of the social order brought about by progressive politics. The opposition to “gender” often merges with anti-migrant furor and fear, which is why it is often, in Christian contexts, merged with Islamophobia. Migrants, too, are figured as “infiltrating”, engaging in “criminal” acts even as they exercise their rights of passage under international law. In the imaginary of the anti-gender ideology advocates, “gender” is like an unwanted migrant, an incoming stain, but also, at the same time, a colonizer or totalitarian who must be thrown off. It mixes right and left discourses at will.
• Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action — Todd Miller, Nick Buxton, and Mark Akkerman, the Transnational Institute (TNI): Seven of the biggest emitters of GHGs – the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia – collectively spent at least twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (more than $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018. Canada spent 15 times more ($1.5 billion compared to around $100 million); Australia 13 times more ($2.7 billion compared to $200 million); the US almost 11 times more ($19.6 billion compared to $1.8 billion); and the UK nearly two times more ($2.7 billion compared to $1.4 billion).