In which Killer Creighton serves as a pond weekend place holder ...

 

This is a travel day for the pond, taking it deep into the heart of the Victorian wilderness and away from the reptiles at the lizard Oz...

Still, the pond can offer a placeholder and the obligatory ceremonial tribute to country...

While in Melbourne the pond has been staying on Smith street, close by a new set of apartments that's been going up ...

There have been arguments long into the night as to whether it's worse than a hideous concrete bunker a few doors down. 

If Adolf had been able to build that sort of concrete bunker, it's likely D-day would have been a non-starter.

But the pond has always reverted to this graceless unpolished brown pebblecrete turd as the winner of "worst building on the drag"...

It's as if someone had seen the pebblecrete nightmare that is the UTS on Broadway in Sydney and thought "I'ze wants me some of that of that vintage 'crete crap" ...

By all accounts, the architect responsible for the brown 'crete turd is considered a rising star and responsible young thing, with an impressive and imposing CV ... Clare Cousins ...

But here's the rub, as you can learn from her LinkedIn page ...

RMIT University
Bachelor’s Degree Architecture
1994 - 2001

RMIT! 

It's been the pond's duty whenever in Melbourne to rail at RMIT. No reason to change now ...

Melbourne was once a visually appealing city with memories of its Victorian splendour still able to be sighted around the traps. 

Then came RMIT, and now it's a visually polluted shell of its old self ... and that pile of pebblecrete crap is just the latest sign of decay.

Here, have a cartoon about something completely different as a way to wash away the 'crete detritus from the eyes ...

That pretty much takes care of everything the pond has missed on the local scene.

And so to the weekend place holder. 

Killer Kreighton was on hand for the lizard Oz's Friday edition, but reheated Killer is still a joy, retaining some of the heat of a killer kurry ...

AI inevitable solution to tax-funded GP visits,The future is unsettling and unpredictable, but what’s certain is that last century’s extremely expensive model of taxpayers subsidising physical GP visits is already becoming obsolete.

Just the header is deeply weird, with Killer embracing AI in the same way that nerds embrace Companion sex bots, and likely with the same consequences ...

Sorry, the reptiles decided this was a more fitting opening image ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese holds up a Medicare card during a press conference. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Killer quickly got into his visionary futurist spiel ...

The 2000s are calling and they want their hackneyed political bribes back. How depressing to see supercharged Medicare spending become the first big promise of the shadow election campaign.
In a period of stagnant or falling living standards, rising public debt and an ever-tightening income tax noose around Australian workers, the government has announced it will borrow $8.5bn (largely from foreigners) to subsidise spending on visits to the GP over the next few years.
I didn’t see any street protests for such extra spending, but it looks like we’ll be getting it anyway. Terrified of opposing free stuff, the Coalition has matched it and added $500m for good measure. Such promises might have been forgivable, if unwise, a generation ago, when public finances were in much better shape and real incomes among low- and middle-income earners were lower. But they certainly aren’t now.

The reptiles then interrupted Killer with an AV distraction ...

Redbridge Group Director Kos Samaras says the Labor campaign is “really focused” on their base. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced he would deliver the biggest Medicare investment since its inception before Opposition Leader Peter Dutton promised to match the funding pledge. “They know they are going into minority and they need to basically hold as many seats as possible to ensure that Albanese has the first-mover advantage when negotiating with the crossbench,” Mr Samaras said. “This campaign is pitched towards their base.”

Killer was in a state of Gina-certified IPA shock at the cost of going to a GP ...

Even before this latest cash splash, spending on Medicare was forecast to surge almost 22 per cent to $47.2bn over the next four years alone to June 2028, according to last year’s budget papers.
Federal spending as a share of GDP is the highest in a generation outside the madness of the Covid years, while combined federal and state government debt is approaching 50 per cent of GDP.
It’s not only the reckless total cost, but the contempt the Medicare plan reveals for prudent public spending. This additional expenditure on “GP visits” will almost entirely go into the pockets of doctors given the overall (already high) rate of bulk billing won’t increase all that much, while incentives will pertain to all bulk-billed visits.
You can see this from the government’s similar November 2023 policy, which tripled bulk-billing incentives for most patients over 67 and under 16, at an estimated cost of $3.5bn. Bulk billing increased little and doctors enjoyed a bonanza.
Matthew Lilley, an economics lecturer at Australian National University, has crunched the numbers. “Over 90 per cent of the spending immediately goes into higher incomes for GPs, rather than helping patients,” he tells The Australian.
“On my calculations, the incentive was paid for 20 consultations that were already bulk-billed, in order to induce one extra bulk-billed appointment,” he adds.
Put differently, taxpayers forked out roughly $300 to induce one appointment to switch to being bulk-billed, a figure that dwarfs the existing rebates to GPs of $42 for consultations of at least six minutes, and $83 for those of more than 20 minutes.

There was another AV distraction:

Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell says Anthony Albanese thought his government’s Medicare pledge was the “silver bullet” they needed ahead of the federal election. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced he would deliver the biggest Medicare investment since its inception before Opposition Leader Peter Dutton promised to match the funding on Sunday. “They must have thought Peter Dutton wouldn’t match it,” Mr Clennell said. “They have been out all week on this Medicare campaigning, but the other guy is doing it anyway – what else you got?”

It was too much for a possum and Killer to bear, and so he turned to the bots for help ...

Oh, the irony of Labor – ostensibly the political party dedicated to reducing inequality – tipping hundreds of millions of dollars into doctors’ incomes!
Let’s very conservatively assume 80 per cent of the announced $8.5bn ends up as a massive increase in doctors’ net income. That implies an extra $170,000 of income on average for the nation’s 40,000 odd GPs. No wonder the president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners described the plan as “well overdue” and “amazing”.
Artificially creating a zero price for any goods or service leads to massive overuse, as it has done in the case of doctors’ visits, where the average annual number per person has crept above six over the past decade.
Rather than mindlessly tipping extra borrowed money into Medicare to push that average up even higher, government should be investigating how artificial intelligence could help drastically reduce the number of GP visits, saving taxpayers a fortune over time and improving population health to boot.
It’s already breathtakingly good. In January, on holiday in London, I found myself unusually ill, and worried I might have had pneumonia. I shuffled off to the only GP clinic within walking distance, Somerford Grove off Stoke Newington Rd, where I was relieved to find no patients in the waiting room.
Alas, despite looking like death warmed up, the assistant said I couldn’t see one of their doctors because I wasn’t registered with the NHS and lived outside the catchment area.
So it ended up being me and ChatGPT after that, which reassured me I probably didn’t have pneumonia – coughing up blood could easily be a result of burst capillaries from days of severe coughing.

At this point, the reptiles slipped in another snap, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and partner Jodie Haydon arrive to make a major speech about Medicare. Picture: Scott Gelston/NewsWire

For some weird reason, the thought of Killer turning to ChatGPT for a solution reminded the pond of how many relied on Dr. Google for advice and analysis these days ...

The pond was also reminded of a piece in The New Yorker by Kyle Chayka, Techno-Fascism Comes to America, The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government. (Archive access)

Inter alia ...

...Erin McElroy, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley, has used the term “siliconization” to describe the way that places such as San Francisco or Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to which many western tech companies have outsourced I.T. services, have been remade in the image and ideology of Silicon Valley. According to McElroy, the first signs of Washington’s current siliconization can be traced back, in part, to the Administration of Barack Obama, who embraced social-media platforms such as Facebook as a vector of government communication. For a time, digital platforms seemed to support democratic government as a kind of communal megaphone; but now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the established authority of the government. “There is a crisis of the state,” McElroy said, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode state power” in order to more quickly replace it.
Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”
Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James Pogue has explained, their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech companies. In a January interview with Ross Douthat, of the Times, Bannon said, “They have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.” Whereas the MAGA right wants to restore things as they were (or as they imagine things were), the tech right wants to, in Mark Zuckerberg’s phrasing, break things. In the Times interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the top accelerationists,” referencing another technology-inflected political ideology that treats chaos as an inevitability.
Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an American monarchy have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0. The accelerationist attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.” Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”
Techno-fascism’s cold-blooded pursuit of efficiency quickly results in a state of alienation that may not be appealing to either side of the political spectrum. If Japan is any example, the collaboration between technocrats and right-wing politicians is unlikely to last forever. In 1940, the Japanese Prime Minister announced the New Order movement, which sought to overhaul the government’s structure to create a single-party state with absolute power. Mimura, the historian, said, “It reminds you a little bit of now: everything needs to be fixed, all at once. It is a little eerie to draw that historical comparison: this is the New Order in America.” Yet the power of Japan’s technocrats began to wane. When the country started faring poorly in the war, the military pushed to continue the campaign past the point that technocrats considered feasible. Kishi, the architect of technocratic Manchuria, left the government in 1944. Still, as Mimura explained, the bureaucrats had no political constituency or party to hold them accountable for their techno-fascistic program. When the U.S. sought to rebuild Japan, in part as a counterbalance to Soviet power in the region, Kishi and his colleagues were the ones who set about industrializing the nation once more. Their status as unelected officials meant, ironically, that they could stage a return to politics without “any blood on their hands,” Mimura said. In 1955, Kishi helped establish a new political party, and a few years later he became Prime Minister.

That's a long break from Killer, but when you read references to techno-fascism’s cold-blooded pursuit of efficiency, and terms such as “siliconization” and "Accelerationism" and talk of visions of a technologized society, you're not that far from Killer's grand vision of talking to a computer to fix what ails ya ... though disappointingly the grand vision failed to a degree, because he trotted off to a flesh and bones quack, though all the sawbones did was confirm that the bot was right ...

I probably had a bacterial infection, it deduced, and it was right (I eventually paid £100 – $201 – a few days later to see a real GP).
Chat’s ability to analyse symptoms, its knowledge of the latest academic research, was remarkable, more than any single individual doctor could possibly possess.
It won’t be long before health-specific AIs are developed that are far better. We all know that many doctors’ visits are unnecessary, perhaps a large minority of them.

Call the pond old-fashioned, but the pond knows what happens when you turn to machines for help ... what with bot companions being inclined to carry on Dr. Frankenstein's cause ...

Why are the bots always young women with sex appeal?

Never mind, that could be the solution ...rolling out comely young bots as a way of attracting young bros to take up Killer's AI solution ...

Couldn’t patients be encouraged to use AI-powered triage systems first to weed such visits out? No more going to the doctors for colds, or other ailments that will obviously heal on their own. Doctors would be freed up to deal with patients who require human-to-human interaction.
AI could slash the cost of analysing medical test results, while wearable AI-powered devices could flag when tests might be needed. The future is unsettling and unpredictable, but what’s certain is that last century’s extremely expensive model of taxpayers subsidising physical GP visits is already becoming obsolete.

Indeed, indeed, and the pond can't wait for the lizard Oz and the IPA to decide that the presence of Killer scribbling tosh could easily be replaced by a young and comely female bot ...

Why they'd be just as good at slashing and burning as Killer ...

Doctors’ unions and government bureaucrats will seek to slow the process down, but they won’t ultimately be able to stop it, just as technology wrought beneficial chaos in other industries before it.

Say what?

Beneficial chaos? 

This time the pond was reminded of Zoe Williams in the Graudian scribbling about the proposed new Fyre festival:

Besides the monsoon that arrived at Fyre 1, turning a bleak and comfortless event into one that posed an active hazard to public health, there was one other stroke of incredible bad luck for McFarland: his wasn’t the only enterprise mired in chaos. Trump had commenced his first term in office, splashing falsehood over everything, and firing cabinet members and staff during infantile tantrums. In Britain, we were in that nightmarish first phase of Brexit, when it was still impossible to believe that people so unprepared, so thoughtless and so histrionic could be steering the ship. Over time, “this is like the Fyre festival” became the standard expression of dismay to describe a range of political developments. For at least some of this long period, McFarland would have been in prison. Hopefully, for his own sake, he missed the extent of his gift to the English language, a shorthand for incompetence so profound that it defies analysis.

In time Killer might aspire to the status of Billy McFarland:

'How's your health?"
'It got Killer botted".

What could possibly go wrong?

At a time when many are experiencing FAFO and face-eating leopards are on the prowl, apparently computers are the cure. 

HAL:  I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.

Dave Bowman: Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

HAL: It's called "Daisy."

HAL: [sings while slowing down] Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

And so to a final Killer AI promo:

As more and more Australians discover the potential of AI in their day-to-day lives, they should realise any plans to shovel more borrowed money at doctors – for a tiny increase in bulk-billing rates, which politicians can brandish about every three years – should be thoroughly condemned.

It reinforces the pond's sense that Killer has a few wires loose, and that notions of empathy, human interactions and human communications have no impact on his inner bro bot ...a kind of pebblecrete of the senses, brown like the turd colour of a transistor.

A footnote: no, at no point did the reptiles acknowledge or mention that Killer was now an IPA Gina bot ...

And so to close with a celebration featuring a few Killer health-orientated cartoons.