Commonwealth Bank pays its tax. The ASX pays its tax. Magellan pays its tax. But for every hero there are many villains. According to Michael West Media, Transurban Holdings has averaged over $2.5 billion in revenue per year for 11 years and paid zero corporate income tax. Sydney Airport Corporation generated over $1 billion a year and also paid zero. DP World went a full decade without a single tax payment.
Honda just wrote down $15.7 billion on its EV strategy. Cancelled three models months before launch. Flagged its first annual loss in nearly 70 years as a listed company. The Honda 0 Saloon, 0 SUV and Acura RSX are dead. The Ohio EV hub that was supposed to build them sits waiting for a purpose.
It is a staggering number. But it is not surprising.
Honda bet heavily on the US market for its electric future. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act killed federal EV tax credits, replacing them with interest deductions for US-made cars. The business case for Honda’s planned EV imports evaporated overnight. CEO Toshihiro Mibe admitted “the situation changed far more rapidly than we expected.” Battery-powered cars accounted for just 2.5% of Honda’s 3.4 million global sales last year. They were never close to ready.
Do we spend more time conjuring up clever bots than just getting on with it? It can be a trap.
Think about how you read the web right now. You visit a news site, check a blog, open another tab for a tech site, scroll a subreddit. Repeat daily. Most of this routine is unnecessary, because a technology called RSS has been doing it for you since 1999.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a standard format that lets websites publish updates in a way that software can automatically collect. You subscribe to the sites you care about (news, blogs, podcasts, anything) and a single app called an RSS reader pulls all the new articles into one place. Content comes to you. You stop visiting individual sites. It is, genuinely, like email for websites.
Sarang Sheth published a thorough piece on Yanko Design this week cataloguing how Microsoft broke Windows. The TPM 2.0 lockout. Stealth OneDrive syncing. TikTok pre-pinned to a fresh install. Thirteen years of two competing settings interfaces. Updates that break the machines they’re supposed to protect. It’s a well-argued indictment.
I agree with nearly all of it. Where I part ways with Sheth is his conclusion: that Windows remains the most practical OS, that there’s no clean exit, that MacOS is “paternalistic by design,” and that the MacBook Neo is “genuinely less of a laptop and more of a netbook.”
While I have ‘graduated from the workforce’ (aka ‘retired’) I am finding the current crop of uber-powerful and enabling tools are encouraging me to do more ‘work’ at my computer, as I push my capabilities and do stuff that was scarcely imaginable 10 years ago. It is addictive. The same phenomena is hitting in high tech workplaces. According to Every.to “New research shows AI doesn’t reduce work—it makes you want to do more of it”
A Melbourne high school teacher puts up a photo of the Milky Way in class. His students say, “Where’s that?” He says, “In the sky.” They say, “No, it isn’t.”
That exchange, from a beautifully crafted ABC News piece published today, is quietly devastating. Not because the kids are ignorant. Because they’re right about their own experience. In suburban Melbourne, the Milky Way functionally doesn’t exist. More than 2.8 billion people worldwide can no longer see it from where they live. A child born today who can see 250 stars will see just 100 by their eighteenth birthday.
Check out how to make the move in 2 steps: https://claude.com/import-memory
Every developer knows the pain. You open a new Claude Code session, and it’s forgotten everything. Your coding standards, your project quirks, the debugging insight it figured out yesterday. Gone. That era is ending. Claude Code now runs dual memory systems. First, CLAUDE.md files where you write persistent instructions (coding standards, workflows, project context). Second, auto memory, where Claude saves its own notes on patterns it discovers, debugging insights and your preferences.
I mow my own lawn. Always have. It’s not complicated, but getting the timing right is surprisingly fiddly.
You need dry grass, reasonable temperature, low wind and no rain on the horizon. You also need a free block in your diary long enough to actually do the job. In Melbourne, where a day can serve up four seasons, these conditions don’t always line up.
I’d been meaning to automate this for a while. Last weekend I sat down with Claude and built it in a single session.