You can utilize AI without a data center

This is a symptom of using the over-broad, deliberately vague marketing term “AI”.

If you can create (train) it without huge-scale violation of consent, without huge scale copyright infringement, without huge scale badly-treated human labour for labelling and refining, without huge-scale electricity and water consumption?

Then it isn't the “AI” being discussed in the article and therefore irrelevant to the point.

Also worth noting: (some of) those outside Australia seem largely to be responsible for the rise in One Nation popularity, by automated bot farms spreading racist lies on social media.

They are polling uncomfortably high, which puts them way too close to power. Worth taking seriously in order to effectively combat them.

Stop penalising teens for wanting to socialise.

Stop demanding we identify ourselves to unaccountable private actors, merely to socialise.

Instead: Penalise the platform corporations that make an environment friendly to predators, abusers, scammers, and extractionists.

Keep penalising those corporations, until they learn to stop. Or go out of business because their business model is incompatible with our wellbeing.

For one thing, I want our society to welcome children, not dehumanise them as “semen demon”.

We don’t have enough people now that want to help. Go to any nursing home and see that we need to import the help.

Don't want to help? At the pay rates and job conditions on offer, that's right.

An obvious solution is to raise the offered pay (by whatever means; the government can certainly afford to subsidise this) and improve the job conditions (by regulation enforcing proper treatment of workers).

There are plenty of people already here willing to work, if the work is properly remunerated and stable and dignified. If the job is worth doing – as we both agree it is – then let's show that, by making it feasible for plenty of people to have a dignified life doing that work.

Because we all need help as we get older.

Yes, we do. Why do we need more births for that?

There are still plenty of people being born, and growing up and entering the work force as adults. We (i.e. society, i.e. whoever holds the purse strings) can offer better pay and better job conditions for those workers, so that it's a more appealing career for the people who will already be looking for jobs.

Better help for the people who will be born anyway. Not pushing for more births.

Any other actions I can take?

As with so many problems imposed by powerful groups, the effective actions we can take in response must also be group action.

Join Australian groups resisting the build of LLM data centres. Join groups pressuring Australian politicians to implement privacy laws (all LLM tech depends heavily on violating our privacy). Join groups in your professional field resisting LLMs in our workplaces. And so on.

Individual action is only a small effect, and tends to send no message (because you're effectively opting out of something, and to the extent you're successful, you're thereby not considered in any decision about you). Take positive action by joining groups that actively and loudly resist changes hostile to us.

GDP merely measures the sum of economic transactions (“activity”) during a period.

It is blind to the distinction between socially beneficial activity (preventing illness, educating children) versus socially harmful activity (selling tobacco, mining cryptocurrency); all of that counts as positive GDP.

It is blind to anything (e.g. doing your own housework, raising your own children, growing your own food, reducing your consumption of stuff generally) which can't be measured in financial transactions.

GDP is always a useless measure if we're interested in what's good for a society.

But it's pretty good for measuring how wealthy stock market gamblers are feeling. So, for as long as our political leaders represent those interests and not ours, GDP persists.

Like any other monetarily sovereign state, Australia never need incur debt for government spending, and should not balance its budget.

All Australian dollars are created by the Australian government, deciding (by passing law) that new money shall exist. Poof, now it exists, as a number in the central bank; from there it flows into the economy, until taxation destroys it again.

So younger people are quite right to be unconcerned by a deficit in the Australian budget. All of that is money that exists, and if there were no deficit then none of the rest of us would have any money: it would all have been returned to nonexistence by taxation.

Our government can fund any and all services they choose to, simply by passing law that says the money is available (thereby creating the money). We don't want them to “balance” the budget, we want well-funded public services and (independent from government services) we want higher taxation on the wealthy, to reduce their spending power.

That they do not do this; that they pursue the phantom of a “balanced budget” for a monetarily sovereign state that creates its own money whenever it wants? Is a choice made by our government, every day, based on a flawed ideology that ignores the facts of the very system they govern.

Sorry for posting a paywalled article

Here is a Wayback Machine URL for the same post: https://web.archive.org/web/20250912020115/https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-death-fascism-america-united-states-donald-trump-australia-don-farrell/ in case you want to update the post to use that URL.

as long as no one can kick me out

In the 21st century, I can't imagine anyone gets this guarantee without a stupid amount of wealth. And even then, high wealth levels (and its maintenance) requires far more people than it seems you're comfortable with.

No matter where you live, even if you own the property outright, pressure to “develop” can unexpectedly come knocking.

and it’s far away from people

I feel this, keenly. I truly hope you find what you need.