Buying submarines from China would be faster than waiting for America
The fastest way to get a new submarine right now is to buy one from Beijing. Nobody in Canberra will say that out loud, so I will.
Posts in: policy
London and Paris just proved clean air policy works
Environmental policy almost never gets to claim a body count in reverse. This one just did, for children’s lungs.
For five years, researchers tracked the lungs of more than 3,400 primary school children in London and Luton, a town thirty kilometres up the road with no low emission zone of its own. In 2019, the London kids had measurably worse lung function than their Luton peers, a straightforward marker of pollution stunting their growth. By 2024, that gap was gone.
The study, published in The Lancet Public Health in August 2026, is the strongest evidence yet that air pollution damage in children isn’t necessarily permanent.
Fossil fuel lobbyists outspent renewables 179 to 1 last month
Clean energy still runs on the assumption that facts speak for themselves. Last month, fossil fuel groups spent 179 times more money betting that they do not.
The spending gap
RenewEconomy pulled the numbers straight from Meta’s ad library, and they are stark. In August, five fossil fuel organisations spent roughly $553,000 on political ads in Australia. The entire renewables industry spent $3,090. That is not a rounding error in a marketing budget. It is one side fully mobilised and the other side barely in the room.
Norway's wealth tax and the entrepreneurs it chased away
Norway taxes unrealised gains. About 1% a year, calculated on full market value for listed assets and book value for private companies, assessed on whatever your net worth happens to be on New Year’s Eve. It doesn’t matter if your startup is loss-making with no cash flow, if your portfolio has since tanked, or if the company has gone bankrupt since the valuation date. The bill still arrives.
hagaetc.eth lays this out in Norway Shrugged, an Atlas Shrugged-flavoured account of watching Norway’s entrepreneurial class walk out the door.
Smart glasses don't have to be surveillance devices
Smart glasses manufacturers are about to learn the lesson Google learned with Street View: you can document the world, or you can document people. Doing both without consent has consequences.
The EU is now actively considering restrictions on smart glasses, with Germany’s data protection authority warning they could already be illegal under existing laws prohibiting hidden recording devices. France and the Netherlands have raised similar alarms. In the US, New York courts have banned them outright, DEF CON barred Meta Ray-Bans from its conference floor, and the Air Force prohibits them in uniform.
Handing your child a gun while ignoring the warning lights is now murder
Colin Gray gave his 14-year-old son an AR-15 for Christmas. That rifle killed four people at Apalachee High School. On Thursday, a Georgia court gave Colin Gray 15 years for murder. He didn’t pull the trigger. He is still going to prison. It’s only the third time a US parent has been convicted for a school shooting committed by their child - but legal experts are calling it a turning point.
Artificial Intelligence can't beat Natural Stupidity
I love a good chart. This one is devastating. I really hoped to confine the Covid Pandemic to history but the Republicans in Washington DC have unleashed all of the horrible memories in service of political theatre.
American schools choose drones over gun control
Watching this from Australia, it’s hard to overstate how strange it is: schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado are installing pepper-spray drones built to ram an active shooter at up to 97 km/h. Nobody in the story proposes making the guns harder to get.
Nine schools so far. Each gets a storage box housing a plastic drone from Austin firm Mithril Defense, branded Campus Guardian Angel. A teacher hits a panic button. A remote pilot flies the drone down the hallway toward the gunfire.
Dave Hughes asked for a fact check. He got one
Dave Hughes went on a podcast, spent 90 seconds confidently rewriting Australia’s recent economic history, then dared someone to fact-check him. Someone did. It took about 600 words to correct 90 seconds of what the fact-checker called “economic fan fiction.”
Hughes is a television and radio personality and stand-up comedian. Lately he’s drifted into political and economic commentary, most of it aimed at the Federal Labor government’s tax policy changes. He’s understood to run a substantial investment portfolio of his own, like plenty of the policy’s other critics, largely exempt from the change thanks to grandfathering.
In the clip in question, Hughes slates previous governments, (always Labor), while dropping in “I might be wrong” and “I haven’t researched it” as he goes. Caveats are not the same as caution. If you haven’t researched something, the option not to broadcast an opinion on it remains open.
Kimi K3 and the price of catching up
Moonshot AI’s new flagship undercuts Claude Opus 4.8 on price and edges past it on the industry’s leading benchmark. The catch is that it isn’t actually open yet, and won’t be runnable by anyone outside a data centre when it is.
Six labs now field a model scoring above 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Two months ago it was two. Grok 4.5, GPT-5.6, Muse Spark 1.1 and now Kimi K3 all launched within eight days of each other. The newest entrant landed this week, it’s Chinese, and it undercuts Claude on price.