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5:30 pm, November 19th, 2025 - 12 comments
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Daily review is also your post.
This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Don’t forget to be kind to each other …
Another development in the story of how one three headed hydra has agreed on all the wrong things.
And the world is noticing.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/579370/new-zealand-receives-dirty-ashtray-award-for-poor-progress-in-tobacco-control
Nicotine addiction is at the levels of 20 years ago
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/577918/teen-vaping-impacts-on-smoking-rates-researchers-say
An increase in nicotine addiction of 3.1% in the past 5 years.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360891735/smokefree-2025-goal-missed-smoking-rates-stall
The article does not mention other vaping statistics.
But the trend is that vaping rates will hit 20% of all adults over 15.
A year ago.
AI
The theory that vapes were primarily useful as a smoking cessation tool has been blown out of the water. A seriously bad call from the government of the day.
Great posts on smoking/vaping SPC…its another shambles, like the charter schools, ferries, ECE, Kainga Ora, reducing tax for the wealthy etc etc etc
Careful now RNZ. The NAct1 CoC isn't just Right, and that just isn't right – thanks Atlas.
ACT: The foreign influences that have shaped David Seymour's political agenda
@carolecadwalla Yes, it's a bubble. And yes, it's going to burst.
[…]
I’ve had vivid flashbacks this week to the last tech bubble. I had a front row seat to the dot com boom as a cub reporter at the Daily Telegraph and have vivid memories of both its peak and crash. In the UK, the peak of the peak was the day the travel start-up, Lastminute.com went public, and the entire country was swept up in the hype, as was my own newsroom. As the paper pumped out stories about how oversubscribed the share offer was, how revolutionary the technology, how high the valuation, I watched several journalists spend their lunch hour desperately trying to buy shares.
Weeks later, the share price tanked as the entire dot com boom collapsed. The media hadn’t just fallen for the bubble. It was the bubble. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about this week, the difference between then and now, and how back at the turn of the millennium, there was no other source of news and information.
Now there’s information everywhere. And in a week in which Sam Altman shat the bed and Epstein’s secrets have started to leak out, these old airlocked systems cannot hold. You’re going to see that OpenAI diagram everywhere in the coming weeks and months. And if a slide begins, it could happen fast. And the Epstein bubble? That’s already burst. Why do you think Trump is threatening to sue the BBC? It’s a classic attention bait-and-switch. Don’t look over there…look here!
Trump is on the run. The problem is that, years on from the Arab Spring, we’re all a little wiser about the idea that information will set us free. The opposite of lack of news and information is not truth or justice or even transparency, it’s chaos.
Information flows through platforms owned and controlled and manipulated for their ends by these same men. And shocks to the system are exactly what the disaster surveillance capitalists want.
https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-great-ai-bubble
trouble at mill..
@Acyn
AOC: Trump has been saying the economy is booming, but it’s really only seven tech companies. They’re driving this growth in just one sector: AI. So the entire economic growth can be tracked down to seven companies and their AI expansion. Forty percent of economic growth is attributed to these companies alone, and 80% of stock gains this year came from AI companies.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1990901861155492004
https://x.com/carolecadwalla/status/1990496746019893488
Thiel, a keen chess player, who prides himself on his ability to think twelve steps ahead seems to believe there’s a bloodbath coming. If it is a bloodbath – and that’s what the experts I quoted in my piece yesterday are also saying – then it is a bloodbath that Peter Thiel, an early investor in OpenAI, helped create. And which, he now, will in some way or another be looking both to profit from and control.
This October, Nvidia became the world’s first $5 trillion company. But it was also the world’s first $4 trillion company, a landmark it reached just a few months earlier in July this year. And that’s just two years after it hit what was then considered a huge milestone: $1 trillion.
This isn’t so much “growth” as cancer. There’s nothing healthy about a share price that looks like a late-stage diagnosis. Nvidia is at the centre of a game of musical chairs that is holding up most of the US stock market. And the experts that I quote in my piece say is that at some point the music has to stop.
The fact that it’s Nvidia and Thiel is what makes this such a toxic combo. Peter Thiel is the ur-broligarch. He cultivates a quasi Bond villain persona with an actual James Bond villain’s lair in New Zealand that he bought in case things get bumpy, which if the global economy was to collapse, would be one description for it. Thiel’s surveillance company Palantir, a military contractor to the US and Israeli governments among many others, is not just an intrusive and creepy data harvester, it’s a human rights black hole.
On an earnings call earlier this year, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a man who struggles to keep his more Messianic tendencies in check, boasted about killing people “when necessary”. That this company operates both inside Gaza surveilling and profiling people for execution and inside the UK NHS handling our most sensitive private data is one of the more sociopathic data points of the modern age.
https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/peter-thiel-gets-out-of-dodge
The AI bubble is still growing – it is networking.
Strategic partnerships.
AI as a resource. AI pipelines. AI retail platforms.
Cloud data resource. Advanced chips for AI. Quantum computing power.
Saudi Arabia diversifying from oil with a T investment account.
Claude – claudine collete language learning models, anthropic ology/sophy
https://sherwood.news/markets/microsoft-nvidia-investing-in-anthropic-anthropic-30-billion-azure-ai-compute-capacity/
Good to see that bid by that bunch of numpties to turn Kelston Boys into a Charter School has collapsed.
"A positive update" indeed.
Coming for the properties now they have sorted the curriculum and lunches.
Good that NZ saw what the potential is here with the abomination that are Charter schools back for another go at the taxpayer trough.