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Comment Re: Pay attention to the bigger picture (Score 1) 42

It is interesting to draw a line from the Luddites of the industrial revolution to the present shift with AI. Then it was machines that replaced manual labour. Now we have systems that can imitate human reasoning and threaten to absorb much of the work done by white collar roles. Generalised robotics is also close to taking over many blue collar tasks. The real question is whether society will adapt fast enough. Human capital is still valuable, but the form it takes is changing. The pace of that change is uncertain. Will we become a new kind of Luddite movement in response, or will we find a way to reshape our roles around these new tools?

Comment Re: Won't cost them much (Score 2) 53

Honestly the level of local tax dodging strategies in use are off the charts and only worsening Australia's net trade deficit. Apple: earned billions in Australia in 2023/24 and paid zero income tax here, per the latest ATO transparency data and analysis of the report. Microsoft: same story as Apple in 2023/24, billions in Australian income and zero income tax. Netflix: about A$1.2b in Australian revenue in 2023/24 and paid zero company tax. The âoebig fiveâ US tech firms (Microsoft, Google, Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon) together paid only about A$650m of tax on their Australian operations in 2022/23, despite multi-billion local revenues. Having local media quotas is the bare minimum. Updating the tax rules to exclude strategies like exorbitant charging for IP for trademark and marketing materials from company owned subsidiaries in low tax jurisdictions. It certainly doesn't go far enough.

Comment Not that bad, not the whole story. (Score 2) 71

You have to remember this wasn't just a website, it was several decades of technical debt sitting on end of life onprem databases, middleware and legacy code that needed rewriting. This is also a migration to cloud enabled modern stack with a heap of backend and front end Integrations. Did Accenture charge a bomb for the BOM website?! Yes they did. Australia has a problem where government departments outsource all the decisions to consultancies and doesn't do much in-house any more in the name of "small government". In the process the tax payer pays through the nose.

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