The Tax Practitioners Board can expect renewed interest in its continuing investigations into PwC Australia when the senate’s inquiry into consultants meets again for the first of a two-day hearing.
“Everything is becoming more expensive, only we should become cheaper.” NachDenkSeiten(Micael T, via machine translation)
US BIAS: NEWS YOU CAN (AND PROBABLY SHOULD) USE: How to Submit an Open Records Request (ORR) or Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA)
Germany Has Reached Its ‘Limit’ on Migration, Admits Left-Wing President.
So has everyone else. This method of redistribution of the world’s riches, like all communist grand schemes just makes everyone poorer.
Son, You're Old Enough to Know the Truth, There is No Such Thing as the "Invisible Hand of the Market". "The fingers! They're unregulated!"
Musk says X will charge everyone to use the platform.
Musk replied: “The single-most important reason we’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”
Musk said adding a subscription would make it much more difficult for bots to create accounts, because each bot would need to register a new credit card.
He added that the company plans to come out with “a lower tier pricing,” than what it currently charges for its X Premium subscribers, which is around $8 monthly.
The power of data: Forget Twitter, the party’s moved to WhatsApp
As Australians lose interest in sharing their opinions on social platforms, they are instead jumping into group chats. AFR Magazine’s hotly anticipated Power issue is out on Friday, September 29.
After Pat Cummins was appointed Test captain, then-prime minister Scott Morrison added him to a WhatsApp chat group. Coach Justin Langer was the third member of the group, which was labelled – presumably by the PM – “Legends”.
The episode, which came to light in a cricket documentary released this year, highlighted how group chats have reshaped the way Australians connect. People are increasingly sending messages and emojis on Meta’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage to closed groups of friends and peers or, in the former PM’s case, sports stars. And they’re spending less time on social media.
WhatsApp groups are private meeting places where the country’s powerful gather to swap information, or blow off steam. Illustration by Sam Bennett
Data from Similarweb, a US digital data and analytics firm, shows there are more than 5.4 million Australians with Android devices who use WhatsApp every month. (The firm doesn’t collect data for iPhones. But considering Apple has about 45 per cent market share, that number can be roughly doubled.) The dataset shows that WhatsApp users check the app an average of 13 times every day. They spend almost half an hour on average each day in their group chats.
Australians are spending even more time in the immersive image-heavy world of Instagram and TikTok. The data shows they spend an average of 56 minutes a day scrolling through photos on Instagram, and more than one hour and 21 minutes on TikTok.
At the same time, Australians have soured on apps that used to be all about broadcasting your opinions to everyone. X, formerly Twitter, has 1.4 million “monthly active users” – a quarter of the user base of WhatsApp in Australia. Barely half of that number go on X every day. In January, Reuters reported that less than 10 per cent of Twitter users account for more than 90 per cent of tweets. Elon Musk’s social media app is an increasingly roomy echo chamber.
Musk’s unpopularity opened the door for Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads, which Meta launched in July. However, after initially attracting as many as 311,000 daily users, the number had dropped to 52,000 by the end of August. The “broadcast yourself” era of Twitter is running out of steam.
WhatsApp groups are private meeting places where the country’s powerful gather to swap information, or blow off steam. Pressure has been building in the UK throughout this year for Boris Johnson to hand over his WhatsApp archive to parliament because the former prime minister in effect organised the country’s COVID-19 response in group chats with cabinet secretaries, staffers and bureaucrats.
When venture capitalists and start-up founders needed to co-ordinate how to save their cash from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse this year, they turned to WhatsApp. So-called WhatsApp “war rooms” were set up by VCs to make sure verifiable information was getting through. Tellingly, the bank run was the first in history to be blamed on false and misleading information being spread on . . . Twitter.