Ending the Age of Billionaires

Jul 02

Ending the Age of Billionaires

Posted by: George Grundy

According to surveys, many people find it hard to differentiate between the period humans have been around and the age when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Despite homo sapiens being extant for just 300,000 years, we sometimes find it hard to compute just how vast the gap is that separates us from the Cretaceous extinction. Dinosaurs died out a yawning 65.7 million years before the earliest human, but we’re just not intuitively equipped when numbers get so large. This cognitive disability…

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Jun 25

Running Out of Options

Posted by: George Grundy

100,000 dead, forty million unemployed, a cratering economy, tear gas and looting in the street. America divided. Please, Mr President, “it’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore”. A good rule of thumb with Donald Trump has always been that if you think this is the bottom, just wait. There’s still plenty of time before the election for Trump to plumb new depths, spread more mayhem and steer America closer to collapse. The president may judge that this summer’s…

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Jun 02

Why America

Posted by: George Grundy

When the Spanish flu struck India in mid-1918 it found a nation ripe for devastation. Ruled by the haughty British and with a vast underclass of ‘lower caste’ Hindus living in squalor, Spanish flu wreaked havoc, killing around 13-million people, most of whom died in a period of just four months. Globally, Spanish flu mortality was not equally distributed – when the pandemic struck Japan the island nation closed down shipping and transport by sea, and as a consequence Japanese…

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Apr 06

A Clear View

Posted by: George Grundy

As the Morrison government continues to avoid scrutiny relating to its curious allocation of sports grants, Peter Dutton has ramped up his years-long effort to increase the ability of the federal government to eavesdrop on Australians. Dutton’s ‘International Production Orders Bill’ has made headlines as the proposed law would allow overseas police to monitor Australians phones, but further from view another rubicon has been crossed in the fraught digital relationship between citizen and state. Despite initial denials, a recent Buzzfeed…

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Mar 16

Unisuper

Posted by: George Grundy

As this summer’s devastating fires have finally brought climate change to the centre of Australian public discourse, universities have found themselves at the forefront of the response. Australian universities already employ climate change professors and researchers, and offer bachelors, masters and PhD courses studying a wide variety of climate change impacts. From a research perspective, climate change has been in the mainstream for some time, but when the government ignores the evidence science becomes political, and universities have found themselves…

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