Australian Policy Jihad

Australian Policy Jihad

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Latest — May 4, 2025

ChatGPT + Grok 3 just outperformed 18 years of GP visits

I asked ChatGPT + Grok 3 about what to do to deal with my chronic asthma. The advice they gave me, the data sources they surfaced and their ability to answer questions just outperformed 18 years of GP visits on this issue. I link a copy of my ChatGPT transcript at the end.

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Whatever (1994) by Michel Houellebecq is disgusting and incredible

Book Review: Whatever (1994) by Michel Houellebecq (The title in French: Extension du domaine de la lutte, literally "extension of the domain of struggle") Disgusting This book is disgusting in every possible way. I literally couldn't read this book and eat at the same time because

Electricity Market Modelling

ON wrote me recently and pointed out that he had written a nice set of articles on electricity market modelling, specifically through the use of linear programming solvers. I wrote some comments on these back to him in an email and have reproduced them here.

Retirement Income adequacy

An excerpt from an email I recently wrote to my mom and dad providing my opinion on how they should structure their assets for their retirement

The Administrative State and Computability

I would like to record some thoughts in light of the recent news regarding Robo-debt and government surcharging. The key issue is that there is a clash between two different forces in administrative law: * The legal system (legislation, regulation, court rulings etc.) appears to routinely create obligations on organisations (we&

Legal positivism is dead - Even the government can't tell you what the law is

Governments in Australia are plague with an interesting problem - they are incapable of determining what the law is at a given point in time. This makes it impossible difficult for them to comply with the law. Some news stories on the matter. Australians illegally charged billions of dollars in

Phenylephrine - A conspiracy theory I believe

My conspiracy theory belief is that phenylephrine doesn't work as a nasal decongestant

Update - The smelters want handouts

TLDR: * Current estimate of the cost of firmed renewables are likely to be too low, given that we don't see entities trading firmed renewables at those prices * For industrial users, the relevant cost of energy, is the firm energy (i.e. the cost of a flat swap contract)

Quick thoughts on decarbonisation

Quick thoughts on transmission lines and nuclear power

A thought on Twitter changing its block function

My take on why Twitter (X) is changing its block functionality