Aye You Free stuff! I was particularly drawn to Labor’s contribution to men’s health, $32million or $2.30 each. In fairness to Albanese he actually had some policies while it was not absolutely clear that his principal opponent had any at all. What is most striking across all the parties was the complete lack of any

Unrealised CGT It’s only on superannuation, it’s only on balances over $3m, it only affects about 80,000 tax payers. Less than half a per cent of the population. It’s a nothingburger. The general reaction suggests to me that this argument is winning. Most people are not concerning themselves because they are not really in any

We don’t need money What do you do if your last CEO got thrown in jail by the Americans and you need a bit of top cover? What you do is, you take money you don’t really need from people that have influence. Not surprising then that one of the most cash generative businesses in

Are Tariffs bad? At university, tariffs were “bad”. It was pretty simple stuff and simple to calculate. Comparative Advantage, everyone richer for it. Free trade, hooray. Indeed, it is mathematically “proven” they are bad. It plays out here. Australia is comparatively good at mining, agriculture and that’s it. China is comparatively good at manufacturing almost

Free Stuff For those following along closely; this Balaji riff will resonate. A lot of people are asking why the DeepSeek model was just given away and open sourced and Balaji goes to the heart of the answer. It went much further than just the model. Earlier this month they had what they called ‘open

Bits Our contention last year was that in the era of AI digital intelligence would not want to use government currency. This latest software deployment isn’t proof of that but it is a step along the way. To begin with, it uses something called an MCP Server (some good explanations here). My less detailed version

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Perhaps sanity did prevail. As I had hoped last week, the initial holdings in the American Strategic Bitcoin Reserve will indeed be made up of assets already held by the US Government. The majority of those were seized as part of the Silk Road case in 2013.  Government BTC deposited into the

A rough week Some blowback from the ByBit hack. $1.4 billion in Ethereum stolen by North Korea. Overall the response from the impacted exchange has been impressive; fully restoring their 100% reserves within 72 hours. Even so, it left the market rather spooked. The audit report (which is in no way an audit report) on

Fort Knox That is Senator Mike Lee of Utah. The question becomes “is the gold really there?”. The Elon Musk DOGE team seems pretty keen to find out as well. Is it strange though that nobody has ever actually counted the gold? Companies all over the world are required to have audits every year because

$100k is hard The sustainable break beyond $100k was always going to take time. It’s such an important psychological level that once it does fall, it should be far easier to progress. That we are feeling disappointed in the mid-90s (or perhaps bored) is rather encouraging when you look at overall performance versus other asset