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Created
Wed, 16/02/2022 - 21:23

If you told someone a year ago unemployment was about to dive below 5%, to just above 4%, they wouldn’t have believed you.

If that person was an expert, and you said it would happen despite a Delta outbreak and lockdowns in our two biggest states, they might have said you had little idea of how the economy worked.

At the beginning of last year, The Conversation asked 21 of Australia’s leading economists what would happen in 2021 and 2022. At the time, the published unemployment rate was 6.6%.

None of them thought it would slip below 5% in 2021 or 2022.

Asked when the unemployment rate might eventually even touch 5%, none nominated 2021. Only two nominated 2022. The rest picked dates years into the future. Three picked “not for the foreseeable future”.

Created
Mon, 14/02/2022 - 18:39

We've been doing live streams of our songwriting sessions at our studio from our Twitch channel. We just turn on the camera and try out ideas and see where they take us each week.

We took a clip from one of those sessions that we liked recently and posted it on our YouTube channel.

We gave this song idea a random name called "Slippery Friction" and decided to build on it.

Here is the progress so far...

1. Slippery Friction Clav Sound (Live Stream Clip)

It was Tom playing a part on the keys using the clav sound, Cliff played bass and Rob just started doing a beat.

Created
Sun, 13/02/2022 - 02:02

When I think back to my college friends and me, what a beautiful bubble we lived in! Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a fancy college—it was state school, and we were all from out of state. And we certainly weren’t rich kids: my friend J came from a Lower East Side single parent family, […]

The post Education is its own privilege appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

Created
Fri, 11/02/2022 - 04:45
Hi all. Shaun Shelly (a frequent contributor to this blog) and I are co-hosting a series of four “salons” webcast (if that’s the word) by a splendid organization called Interintellect. These salons are Zoom-based meetings of people from various disciplines: IT, mental health, consciousness, culture, art and literature, drug use, philosophy, neuroscience, and science more […] (Read the rest.)
Created
Wed, 09/02/2022 - 21:16

Sometimes the best things you can do are invisible.

Such as fighting cholera by ensuring drinking water wasn’t contaminated by sewage, as happened in London in the 1840s.

Or setting up an emissions trading scheme, which drove emissions down, despite former prime minister Tony Abbott attacking it as a “so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one”.

Air free from contamination is as invisible as uncontaminated water, but the case for air isn’t yet as widely accepted as it is for water.

Created
Tue, 08/02/2022 - 22:33

Later this year, Terraqueous Distributors will be re-releasing their whole range of previous unofficial Doctor Who annuals, starting with the 1972 annual.

Terraqueous Distributors said:

"When we announced that we would give access to the 1988 annual alternate contributors edition cover to everyone who donated to the Lullaby Trust, we were asked if we would do the same for the past annuals, when we re-release them. We originally said no.