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In my commissioned research activities, which are separate from the basic academic research that occupies most of my time, I come across interesting situations which bear on the way monetary systems operate and the type of constraints faced by different levels of government. In Australia, we have three levels of government: Federal (currency issuer), State…

Angertainment channel, Sky News Australia, has urged the Coalition to ignore the results of the last election and instead listen to the stations viewers, all 6 of them, and ditch the plan to heads towards net zero. ”The Coalition needs... Read More ›

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 27, 2025 by Tony Wikrent   Trump not violating any law ‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’ Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’ Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com] A […]

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory […]

Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price.

Their real clients, the entities they really care about, are the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that people making decisions tend to own stock options or have bonuses tied to stock performance of the companies they run.

This means that for a large, established tech company the product or service it offers does not matter all that much anymore. It needs to be just barely good enough to keep people using it. The easiest way to do this is some form of a monopoly.

Monopoly is the business model of Silicon Valley, and they are not even shy about that.

Billionaires come for your molars, the feds backtrack on the Epstein files, and more from The Lever this week.

… as long as they are healthy, well fed and well educated Much of the panic about falling birth rates can be dispelled once we realise that (barring catastrophe) there will almost certainly be more people alive in 2100 than there were in 2000. But what about the distant future? Dean Spears, co-author of After […]

In politics, things just happen. I always hope those caught in the moment make the right choices, so that good might follow. That’s the optimism I hold now. As my three colleagues and I were unexpectedly stripped of the whip last week for voting against government plans to cut Personal Independence Payments, we have to […]

I recently organized a homelessness study tour of Edmonton and Calgary for the Toronto Alliance to End Homelessness. Here’s a ‘top 10 overview of the study tour:https://nickfalvo.ca/homelessness-and-supportive-housing-in-alberta/

Hospital bills are wiped clean, writers win against chatbots, a bill beats the heat, and foreign aid is saved.

Jo Martin's Fugitive Doctor returns in 2026 for the epic Doctor Who multimedia saga Circuit Breaker, including audio dramas, books, and more.