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Chinese Demography

Versus robots. 🤖 The flood of low cost Chinese labour will ebb, according to Goodhart and Pradhan in "The Great Demographic Reversal", leading to: higher inflation. manufacturing elsewhere becoming more competitive. ( un-paywalled from Nikkei Shimbun ) Apparently good news for those in developed nations who have long clamoured for fair prices and fair wages, and who blame globalisation for undercutting them. But when? And for how long?
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Recent posts

Gentrifictation vs Homelessness

 Does urban renewal displace marginalised people? 
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Adelaide House Prices Map

Visualise house sales and prices over time in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia using official data. Try the  Interactive Map ! More details on  GitHub .  Background: I rewrote an earlier project in order to try out 'vibe coding'.  Conclusion: Inline AI assistance in Colab and VS Code flattens the learning curve. Syntax is no longer a barrier. Coding is actually fun for non-autists now. 
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Half-Life 2 in Asia

Back in 2015 there were few video games with authentic Asian environments, so I made a few experimental maps in Half-Life 2 . It was also common wisdom that games had to be complete and flawless on launch. Probabilistic monetisation such as loot boxes were a no-no. Triple-A games justified their price tags by being known quantities. Now, in 2026 there are a deluge of high-quality games from Asia, featuring characters, motifs, and visuals from Asia, which are also turning the common wisdom on its head by being serialised, free-to-play, and with a strong 'gacha' component.
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Let Slip the Stocks of War

War is widely seen as indefensibly evil. Edwin Starr's question, " What is it good for ?" is clearly rhetorical. However, some like yours truly have a macabre fascination with the notion that it can enrich. The link between war and wealth was probably around before Nathan Rothschild reputedly used advance knowledge of Wellington's victory to enhance his fortune. God ordered the Israelites to plunder their enemies with fluctuating specificity . A family story has my great-grandfather reaping huge profits from selling surplus American military landing craft (that he just happened to have lying around the yard.) America's last wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are cast as cynical ploys to create customers out of victims. Keep Calm and Invest. Data tells its own story. In particular, we can cross reference periods where the U.S. was at war, against the S&P500 and its precursor index from 1940 to 2014. I would think that the massive government spending in mo...
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