In 2013, I had the chance to attend a TEDx organizers workshop at TEDActive in Palm Springs. One of the breakout sessions was on hosting. I probably would not have gone to it based on the topic alone, but Rives was leading it, and that was enough for me. I had heard his name come […]
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 25, 2026 by Tony Wikrent Dingbat imperialism and its malcontents Hoodwinks and Hijinks: Trump ‘Nabs’ Greenland at Davos Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 01-23-2025] …In this case, Trump did major damage to alliances and economic ties, causing Europe and Canada—by way of Mark Carney and Macron—to announce reorientations […]
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There is a video clip somewhere of Dennis Altman on the ABC’s Monday Conference program, a forerunner to the late (and unlamented) Q&A ...
The British journalist and activist Ash Sarkar is one of the most engaging members of the group of leftwing radicals who make up Novara Media. Established in 2011, in the long wake of the GFC, and at the dawn of Prime Minister David Cameron’s savage reign of austerity, Novara now has over a million subscribers, not least because of Sarkar’s ambassadorship in the otherwise solidly centrist world of mainstream UK political commentary ...
In November 2022, any residual feeling that Silicon Valley represented a clear-cut boon for humanity vanished like a fart in the wind. In an act of breathtaking arrogance, OpenAI released GPT-3.5, a free preview of its chatbot ChatGPT. Confronted with a technology that could synthesise humanlike text in response to prompts from actual humans, journalists and commentators rushed into print to weigh its likely implications, often using the chatbot itself to generate the first few paragraphs of their articles (which is a bit like a caveman ostentatiously sporting a bronze medallion towards the end of the Stone Age) ...
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