around the traps

• The Future is More Stuff: Our economy has become a treadmill of consumption. Work more to buy more stuff, which wears out or becomes obsolete quicker than ever before, necessitating more work to buy more stuff.
• The most important intelligence sharing network in the west is being ruined by America - here's how | The Independent: Using a commercial messaging system rather than a government-encrypted communications system is dumb enough. Doing so using personal telephones is unforgivable. Doing both in Moscow, as it would appear Witkoff did, is downright incompetent. [...] The truth is that Five Eyes under Donald Trump’s first presidency was already severely strained by what some members of the group saw as dangerous incompetence in handling secrets by the Oval Office.
• Australian election policy tracker | The Conversation - quite well done.
• Life in the tower: Who controls Seattle's drawbridges? | The Seattle Times
• Saying 'Thank You', 'Please' to ChatGPT? It's costing OpenAI 'millions of dollars', says Sam Altman | Mint: A recent comment by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that user politeness contributes to “tens of millions of dollars” in electricity costs, due to the computational effort involved in generating those extra conversational responses. Everything done with AI requires a lot of power and water. Doesn't matter if it was "important" or not.
• Can Australia still afford the pub, our coffee addiction or Friday night takeaway? - ABC News: The core problem (detailed in the article) is that costs have gone up much more than wages; so the middle class is shrinking - which is a euphemistic way of saying many people are now simply poor.
• Apparently Magpies and Crows Are Using "Anti-Bird Spikes" to Make Their Nests | Audubon: Even if the use of the spikes is simply urban adaptation at play, neither Hiemstra nor McGowan are convinced it's good for the corvids.
• Sydney residents shaken awake by early morning earthquake in NSW Hunter Valley | New South Wales | The Guardian. That was a very weird way to wake up.