Links
Part of the point of blogging as a writer, or so I’m told, is as way to keep links and ideas organised as a kind of thought catalogue. Here’s a blog I didn’t write about this idea of the Memex and why blogging is important for writers.
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46
But so part of that is categorisation, which I have struggled to do with this blog. Things are all over the place and I haven’t yet done two things: fix up the nuts and bots of the blog to be more organised; and properly develop a system of tags/categories. Those two tasks are interrelated and, I’ll be honest, I have struggled to get the categories working on this platform.
So anyway, I’m talking links and today I’m going to dump some links in here as kind of a staging environment for Twitter and my work. Cos I would like to share more links and things on Twitter and be involved – this is an ongoing goal but something I haven’t improved a whole lot on. Also as a way to get my thoughts out there in the morning. Though I must add that given how I usually operate (getting out of bed just before I start work) it will necessitate a bit of a time shift, but oh well I’ll work it out.
https://www.cnet.com/science/climate/features/a-world-without-koalas/
Sad story about how koalas are now on the endangered species list and that they rule and shouldn’t be left alone. The final quote from Rebecca Johnson, Chief Scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History – which is kind of a funny American-centric source – is touching.
“It’s a really satisfying and exciting thing to see a koala in the wild,” she said. ‘To take that away would be pretty sad.”
Reminds me of seeing koalas in the trees near mum and dad’s place. Near the tennis courts, the small bit of bushland between homes and roads, huddled up comfortably in the gum trees.
DuckDuckGo, which is meant to be a non-tracking search company, has in-built exemptions for Microsoft trackers (LinkedIn and Bing) as part of its standalone iOS and Android browsers all because of a search syndication deal with Microsoft. It’s pretty clownish behaviour, to be honest, but hey that’s money for you.
https://www.innovationaus.com/aws-with-626m-in-federal-contracts-pays-negligible-tax-report/
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been raking in government contracts but pays fuck-all tax because why would it pay much tax? After all, AWS is only the most profitable part of one of the world’s most profitable companies.
The European Central Bank (ECB) is warning that crypto-assets could post a risk to financial stability. The high amounts of leverage, loaning assets to farm yields, and overall growth of the assets combined with their high level of volatility is, uh, not great, the ECB warns. It naturally wants to see regulatory gaps closed, and quick.
Reminds me a bit of yesterday’s episode of the David McWilliams podcast.
https://play.acast.com/s/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast/explaining-the-bond-equity-market-sell-off
In it he discusses how equities and bonds markets typically relate to one another, basically : when people expect high economic growth, cash goes into equities; when people expect growth to stall, cash flows into bonds.
But at the moment, both bond and equities markets are selling off which doesn’t bode well, apparently, for the global economy. Yikes.