Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.
- Economic growth is forecast to hit 3.5 per cent in 2022-23, an upwards revision from a year ago. It will then cool to 2.5 per cent.
- Australia’s 4 per cent unemployment rate is already the lowest it has been since 1974 and it’s forecast to fall further to 3.75 per cent. This well below the 5.5 per cent forecast last year and the worst-case predictions of 8 per cent.
- Wages growth is expected to run above 3 per cent annually for the next four years, though almost all of that growth will be cancelled by rising prices.
Winners and losers: Who gets what in the budgetby James Massola
Scott Morrison labelled an ‘autocrat and bully who has no moral compass’ by Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells
Is Sunak a fit and proper person to be in charge of the nation’s finances?
Sky broadcast a damning interview with Rishi Sunk yesterday in the links he has, via his wife and her holdings in Infosys, to Russia, in
Read the full article…
Vladimir Putin used to be popular in Slovakia. Then he invaded Ukraine
Ukrainian intelligence publishes list of 620 Russian FSB agents operating in Europe
FRAGGING? Russian soldier reportedly runs over commander with tank in protest.
A Russian soldier reportedly drove over his colonel with a tank — while two other service members were caught venting about strongman Vladimir Putin’s “bulls—” invasion of Ukraine amid reports of heavy losses.
The Russian soldier who was behind the wheel of the tank “blamed the commander of the group, Col. Yury Medvedev, for the deaths of his friends,” Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsimbalyuk said on Facebook.
“Having waited for the right moment, during battle, he ran over the commander with a tank as he stood next to him, injuring both his legs.
Take all battlefield reports with a grain of salt, of course, but this is far from the first of these stories to show up in my feed.
The FBI Guide to Internet Slang
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, the FBI released their internal 83-page guide to internet slang(most of which are initialisms and acronyms). The quality of the scanned document is very poor, but it’s (just) readable. A few of my favorite phrases gleaned from skipping around the report:
BMUS - beam me up, Scotty
EMFBI - excuse me for butting in
JC - Jesus Christ/just curious/just chilling
MOS - mom over shoulder
PS - photoshop/play station/post script
SMG - sub-machine gun
TOTES FRESH - totally precious
YOYO - you’re on your own
WYLABOCTGWTR - would you like a bowl of cream to go with that remark?
For their annual publication that they send out to their company mailing list, Pentagram recently made a far more legible and well-designed version of the FBI’s guide featuring some of their own favorites.
The booklet challenges readers to identify 14 abbreviations of varying difficulty and absurdity, with answers at the back. The acronyms are set in two custom typefaces designed by Pentagram partner Matt Willey, based on the markings that appear on the agency’s uniforms, particularly in popular media. The two fonts are fittingly named Edgar Sans and Clyde Slab in honor of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his deputy and alleged lover Clyde Tolson.
After 25 years Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are still working to democratize knowledge
NiemanLab: “…In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive, which stands alongside Wikipedia as one of the great not-for-profit knowledge-enhancing creations of modern digital technology. You may know it best for the Wayback Machine, its now quarter-century-old tool for deriving some sort of permanent record from the inherently transient medium of the web.
(It’s collected 668 billion web pages so far.) But its ambitions extend far beyond that, creating a free-to-all library of 38 million books and documents, 14 million audio recordings, 7 million videos, and more. (Malamud’s book is, of course, among them.) That work has not been without controversy, but it’s an enormous public service — not least to journalists, who rely on it for reporting every day.
(Not to mention the Wayback Machine is often the only place to find the first two decades of web-based journalism, most of which has been wiped away from its original URLs.) A little while back, the Internet Archive celebrated its 25th birthday, and I used that as an excuse to chat with Kahle about how his vision for it had changed along with the internet it tries to preserve in amber — and about why there is still so much human knowledge locked away on microfilm. Here are some bits of our conversation, lightly edited to make me sound more coherent on Zoom calls…”