In which the pond hotwires AI to avoid petulant Peta and other reptiles ...

 

It's what passes as a quiet day at the haven for reptiles devoted to the Murdochian hive mind... including yet more confected hysteria about Albo's mob... featuring that villain for the reptile ages, the notorious Comrade Dan ... (will the reptiles ever allow him to fade away?)

The reptiles quickly passed over most unfortunate news. 

Dame Groan had been out and about yesterday mourning it ...Inflation beast conquered but consumers have paid a high price, The inflation rate is good news for the government, but it does not guarantee either an interest-rate cut or Labor’s re-election.

The old biddy did her best to play it all down, but stripped of photos and AV distractions, it was a dismal effort ...

It felt like the countdown to a rocket launch – the release of the CPI figures for the December quarter 2024. Normally, the releases of the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures come and go and no one takes too much notice.

A rocket launch? The pond had thought it was a plane ride ...

Please, let the old biddy do a beefy boofhead from Goulburn, and continue ...

There is a lot riding on how the Reserve Bank interprets the result. Needless to say, the bank won’t be relying on a single CPI figure to determine whether or not the cash rate should be cut at its February 17-18 meeting. There will be a wide range of figures and market intelligence that feeds into the decision, but this CPI release is very important.
Three very important additional considerations are the ongoing tight labour market; the low and falling value of the Australian dollar; and the ongoing high rate of services inflation as opposed to goods inflation.
The key figure in the ABS release is the rise of 3.2 per cent in the trimmed mean CPI in the December quarter, a measure that factors out volatile and extreme elements from the calculation. This figure is down from 3.6 per cent (revised up) in the September quarter. The bank focuses on the trimmed mean.
By conItrast, the headline figure for the December quarter was 2.4 per cent, down from 2.8 per cent in the September quarter. Both the trimmed mean and the headline figures are marginally below the prior consensus estimates. No doubt, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, will be bragging about this headline figure, the trimmed mean outcomes still being above the bank’s annual target range of 2 to 3 per cent.
Last year, the bank’s governor, Michele Bullock, stressed the need for inflation to be sustainably in the annual range before cutting the cash rate. This points to a degree of caution lest the cash rate is cut too soon and inflation then fails to stay in the target band. This would be widely marked as a monetary policy failure.
Notwithstanding the ongoing declaration of both Anthony Albanese and Chalmers of their respect for the independence of the RBA, a lot of nudging has been going on for some time. When Chalmers declared last year that high interest rates were “smashing the economy”, he was in effect telling the bank what to do.
In this sense, the RBA’s February meeting is a test of its independence. To be sure, if the case for a cut is overwhelming, the bank should make this call. But if there is a high degree of uncertainty about the course of inflation over the coming year, it should hold, even in the face of considerable political pressures.
Unfortunately, the CPI result puts the bank’s decision spectrum somewhere between a clear-cut case for a rate cut and a hold on the cash rate. The bond traders will probably put a high probability on a cut – most likely 25 basis points. The government will argue that the case for a cut is now compelling.
There will now be another rocket launch-type countdown come February 18.
As the election approaches, the political benefit for the Labor government of a cash rate cut is that it would quickly feed into lower mortgage rates and provide a degree of financial relief for indebted homeowners. It would be a demonstration that the inflation beast has been conquered, although bear in mind prices won’t be reverting to their 2021 levels. Prices have increased by around 15 per cent since then.
Mind you, the Fed in the US cut its official interest rates several times leading up to the election there in November. It was insufficient to save Biden/Harris from defeat.
Judith Sloan is The Australian’s contributing economics editor. She is an economist and company director.

Indeed, indeed, what an inspiration there is overseas ...

Over on the extreme far right, things were back to normal with the return of petulant Peta ...

As usual the pond decided the right move was to studiously cut petulant Peta with an imperious wave of the finger. 

As soon as the pond noted the reference to "political correctness" and yet another attempt to demonise furriners, petulant Peta was dead to the pond. 

If the pond wanted electioneering, it would turn to Wilcox for inspiration ...

On the other hand, all that leaves the pond precariously short of reptiles to study ...

There was some more blather about back-door banquets being food for thought. Forget it Jake, this is still the reptiles in election mode.

The shortage was compounded by Jack the Insider behaving like a well-trained cat and pissing into the kitty litter like the rest of the Murdochian empire ... see Politico ...

Inter alia ...

The newspapers — the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post — cited concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy, business conflicts and other public controversies that have sparked headlines since he emerged as a presidential candidate in the 2024 election. The New York Post, the famously pugilistic tabloid, attacked Kennedy’s status as a conservative and accused him of being a “serial womanizer” who “hasn’t met a conspiracy theory he didn’t love.”
“He’s still a radical left lunatic who is anti-energy, a ‘big time’ taxer and completely incoherent about our nation’s health,” the New York Post’s editorial board wrote on Monday night.
Trump and Rupert Murdoch — the family patriarch who has wielded significant influence over his media properties — have had a complicated relationship. While many viewed Murdoch’s attendance at last year’s Republican National Convention as a sign of a repaired alliance between the two, the Fox News titan previously expressed fear about Trump’s influence on the conservative broadcast network’s audience during depositions for the Dominion lawsuit.
His properties also seemingly backed Trump’s chief competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for the 2024 Republican primaries for a time before throwing back in with Trump.

Poor Jack, just another parrot inn the empire and as relevant as spittle on a fire down under.

As if it was anything but the bleeding obvious.

RFK Jr. is a anit-vax conspiracy nutter of the first water, and willing to compromise body and what is called the soul for a glimpse of power, with a craven sidekick TV celebrity wife happy to go along for the ride...

He should fit right into the monarchy, the Valhalla of clowns that News Corp and Faux Noise helped create ...

The pond had hoped that some reptile had felt the calling to maintain the Zionist rage. 

That way the pond would have been able to note the keen Keane railing at the Murdochians in Crikey, Sarah Schwartz must be punished: The instrumentalisation of a dissenting Jew, After calling out Peter Dutton's use of Australian Jews for his own political purposes, Sarah Schwartz has faced a campaign of demonisation (archived here for those who have paywall problems)

The keen Keane began with a flourish:

In the history of News Corp holy wars against the company’s ideological and commercial enemies, rarely has there been one with less basis in reality than that being conducted against Human Rights Law Centre legal director and Jewish Council of Australia executive officer Sarah Schwartz.
Over the past week, Schwartz has been attacked across multiple News Corp outlets, right-wing pro-Israel Jewish groups have been pressed into service to criticise her, university vice-chancellors have been forced to apologise for her, and gullible politicians like Labor’s Jason Clare have joined in.
The charge? That Schwartz was antisemitic in her presentation to a comedy debate on bad racism takes, held as part of a Queensland University of Technology symposium on racism. How? Schwartz — who routinely comes under vile antisemitic attacks from neo-Nazis online, and who has worked with pro-Palestinian groups to block recruitment efforts by Nazi groups — put up a slide referring to “Dutton’s Jew”, which she argued is a creation of the opposition leader for his political benefit.
All the tropes of a News Corp holy war have been on display. Multiple articles saying nothing but repeating attacks on the target. Inviting op-ed comment, followed by news articles about the comment and comments on the comment. And the conflation of unrelated issues, such as Schwartz being blamed for the “coordinated humiliation” a Jewish academic claimed he experienced, allegedly at the hands of other delegates at the main symposium event which Schwartz didn’t even attend. And that’s as nothing compared to the online onslaught Schwartz has endured as a result, including vexatious threats to pursue her under the Racial Discrimination Act.
If you actually read Schwartz’s presentation, you’ll see she’s making a thoughtful and well-evidenced point: Jews have long been instrumentalised by political elites for their own purposes: “This idea of Jews as political footballs to be used by the elite ruling class has a long history. Anti-Jewish conspiracies have historically provided elites with a shock absorber, to prevent popular rage from reaching the kings, queens and tsars,” she said in her presentation.

And so on, and the pond realised how lucky and wise it had been to avoid that particular reptile mugwump-infested swamp...

The pond decided it should make at least one attempt to provide reptile content, and so it was left to a certain Anne-Louise Brown to debrief the pond on DeepSeek one more time, although the fuss had largely died away ...

DeepSeek shows tech’s a monster, but we can tame it, World leaders need to find a path between week guardrails and excessive control or risk inhibiting innovation of this growing phenomenon.

As per standard reptile practice, the reptiles opened with a bog standard meaningless stock photo... Stock opened up flat amid the arrival of the Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek which sparked a sell-off in tech stocks.

At least the pond could match that, and up the (medium rare) steak, with an infallible Pope ...

AI can be tamed? And we only learned it was a monster because of DeepSeek?

Strangle the pond in shallow waters before things get too Frankenstein Henry deep ...

More than 200 years have passed since the publication of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Yet, when it comes to the human condition and the opportunities and challenges new technologies present to humanity, surprisingly little has shifted.
At the crux of this seeming immutability lies a basic truth – it is not the technology that is bad; rather, it is how people choose to use it.
In Frankenstein, Shelley observed that: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
In 2025 – as has been the case since the dawn of time – humankind finds itself in another race for technological supremacy. Today, however, the technology is not hewn of wood or stone, but of chips and wires. Artificial intelligence is here to stay and will have an increasingly profound impact on the way we communicate, work and play, on politics, policy and geopolitics. The big challenge for Australia, therefore, as a net consumer of AI, is how to create the right ­settings and safeguards to ensure the use of AI technologies by our governments and organisations is responsible?
Over the past week the significant impacts of international AI policy have been on display.
In one of his first acts as President, Donald Trump announced the Stargate Project, which aims to build $US500bn ($801bn) worth of AI infrastructure in the US via a powerful coalition of OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX. Much like the US push into enhanced semiconductor production via the CHIPS Act, Stargate is aimed at building real technology competition in a market China has aggressively pursued and upon which the world relies.
However, the fanfare of the US announcement has been overshadowed by a Wall Street grenade, with the launch of DeepSeek’s R1, a Chinese-developed generative AI (GAI) model that has been found to perform better than OpenAI’s comparable tech.
Also, DeepSeek’s technology is significantly cheaper to train and develop, which means it will be highly attractive to organisations wanting to implement GAI systems but struggling with budget.

Then followed another useless bit of visual stock photo mush,  Fears of upheaval in the AI gold rush rocked Wall Street, following the emergence of a popular ChatGPT-like model from China, with US President Donald Trump saying it was a "wake-up call" for Silicon Valley.

The pond thought the mention of King Donald I at least allowed the use of an alternative illustration ...

Amazingly the reptiles had managed to miss the entire OMB panic and confusion from the King's karnival of klowns ... it had managed to make the AI tulips panic seem like a passing blip ...

Instead of all that OMB chaotic fun, there was more tepid AI broth to sup on ...

The announcement of the technology’s apparent efficacy sent the US stockmarket into a panic, with Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia and Broadcom all experiencing losses. Indeed, the shockwave prompted US tech billionaire Marc Andressen to proclaim that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment”.
So what does this global competition mean for Australia? As previously noted, we are and will ultimately continue to be consumers of AI, not large producers of these technologies.
Therefore, in an age defined by a global technology race, Australia is confined in relation to the impact it can have on a geopolitical stage. But there are things that can be achieved domestically via policy and regulatory settings that can help Australia take advantage of AI innovations while also mitigating potential risks. However, they must not be knee-jerk reactions.
The federal government’s significant consultation on mandatory and voluntary AI guardrails has helped set the scene for what AI regulation in Australia may look like. But while engagement from government has been strong, the proposed guardrails remain very broad and, in practice, may be difficult and expensive to ­implement.
In this regard there are also big lessons for Australia to take from the EU experience and the implementation of the AI Act, a cumbersome tome of legislation that frequently contradicts itself and other pieces of EU law. Indeed, a recent European Commission report into future EU competitiveness by former European Central Bank president Marion Draghi noted that “the EU’s regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation”.

There was a feeble attempt at an AV distraction, to accompany wringing of hands, A new Chinese-developed AI assistant, DeepSeek, has crashed US tech markets and caused investors to wonder if American dominance is over.

And that was pretty much it ... you know, reptiles in the swamp and elephants in the room ...

Then there is the elephant in the room: energy supply. AI systems and the data centres they rely upon use vast amounts of energy. For Australia, which is aiming for net zero emissions by 2050, this may be one of the toughest hurdles to overcome. Furthermore, as ­operational prices surge, it may also push Australian organisations towards vendors who can provide AI technologies more cheaply – vendors such as DeepSeek.
This is not inherently bad because tech competition is good. But as has been the case with other Chinese companies and potential security risks associated with 5G technologies, some level of caution must be applied.
Therefore, there is a key role for Australia’s national security establishment to play in helping ensure that Australians are protected from threats including foreign ­surveillance, social engineering and data hoarding.
When it comes to AI, there are many doomsayers but the stark reality is that AI is here to stay and, if not embraced for the opportunities it presents, Australia risks being left behind.
Sensible regulation that fosters, not hinders, innovation is vital. As is the understanding that, just as Shelley observed in 1818, it is humans that control the technology and the outcomes it brings, not the technology itself.
Anne-Louise Brown is head of strategy and Iisights at Akin Agency. She was formerly the director of policy, Cyber Security Co-operative Research Centre.

That's it, we're supposed to take comfort from 1818? 

Has this Brown woman ever seen any of the movies that show the results of human folly and madness?And the effect it can have on dwellers inside the reptile hive mind, still eager to replicate the 1930s?

 Possibly not ...

As for the rest, perhaps this day old infallible Pope shows a way forward for the reptiles ...

Given the paucity of the pond's offerings this day, guilt made the pond think a parody might be in order.

The pond has always enjoyed the conceit behind The Producers and so was primed for this offering ...

 

 

For those wanting to savour the original film, there's this, without the quavering voice ...

   

 And there's this for those who hanker for the stage version straight, no Uncle Leon chaser ...