The Trump menace spreads far and wide

An article in the New York Times explains that the locals in Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia are blaming the loss of the European tourist market on the disruption to air routes there because of the Iran war:

In Cambodia, international arrivals in the first three months of this year declined by 45 percent compared with the same period last year, tourism officials said. Mr. Khon said that he used to earn an average of about 82,000 Cambodian riel, or $20, a day ferrying visitors. That has now dropped to less than $5 a day....

In neighboring Thailand’s Phang Nga province, there is a similar crisis. Hotel bookings there have dropped by around 50 percent since the war began, local officials said...

Rungrat Huailek, 53, who has run boat tours in Phang Nga for 30 years, said that with the European tourists gone, residents were cutting nonessential expenses. He said his monthly earnings had dropped from around $900 to about $300, and he was forced to burn through most of his savings.

When his teenage daughter asked to go on a vacation during a recent school break, he asked her to buy a snack at the nearest convenience store. That, he said, was the only outing they could afford.

“Things look so bleak now,” Mr. Rungrat said. “All I can do is pray and be patient.” 

It says that Bali has been "more resilient", but that European tourism has dropped there too.  In fact, I sometimes watch Youtube videos by an expat Australian who lives there now, and I gather from the title of a few of his recent videos that there is an evident tourism lull there underway.

This probably makes it a good time for me to make a visit, except for the fact that even that blogger, who has lived in Indonesia for 15 years, says you just have to accept that you will get a bout of "Bali belly" if there for any length of time.  (And honestly, it seems pretty to find someone who has holidayed there for more than a week and not had one incident of it.)    

Speaking of Indonesia more widely - I was watching Flora and Note visiting Bandung on Java and making a somewhat torturous trip on motor scooter to a nearby tourist attraction called the White Crater.  It's a dormant volcanic crater filled with water that still emits heaps of sulphurous gas, such that signs recommend tourists not to stay in the crater part for more than 15 minutes!   Safety standards in Indonesia are somewhat relaxed.  

 

 

AI goes in search of Homer

Some guy on Twitter/X has asked Claude.ai to do a "literal" prose translation of The Odyssey, because he didn't want to read the one that Nolan used.  He has published the results, too, but has made little comment about the quality.  There are many sceptical comments:

Perhaps my favourite:

I also have been surprised to see quite a few people (presumably Americans) say in comments that they had to read it in high school.   To me, this seems rather surprisingly "high brow" of US high schools.  (Claude.ai says it has been a prescribed text since the mid 20th century, most commonly in 9th grade english.)  I doubt that it has ever been such in Australia.   (Claude.ai seems to think I am correct - suggesting that extracts from it have probably only ever featured in late primary school as an introduction to mythology.)   

 

Oh, further to fun tweets on the story, and the ridiculous MAGA reaction to the Nolan movie, get a load of this:   

 

  

Get back to me when the starship shield is actually physically checked after flight

Is it just me, or did it seem that the latest Musk Starship 3 test flight (number 13) take place without much prior fanfare?   

Watching the videos of the flight after it happened, I noted that the booster still didn't work on the way down as it should, and while there was much excitement over how the Starship itself plonked down gently into the ocean and just floated there without exploding, that gave plenty of time for drones to look at the heat shield which (to this layman's eyes) still looked like a complete mess that would need heaps of refurbishment before it could be re-used.

If I understand it correctly, the whole economic viability of the Starship system is meant to be built on the thing having mere hours of turnaround time.  What stupid and unachievable thing has Musk said about this?   I will let an AI tell me:

Long-term cadence goal
More recently he's put a number on the eventual operational tempo: "In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours," with "24/day" as the peak and "sustained... more like ~10/day." That implies an average turnaround well under an hour per vehicle at peak, across a fleet. Yahoo Financebarchart

Grain of salt worth noting
Musk has a long history of announcing aggressive turnaround targets that then slipped — most famously his 2017–2018 pledge that SpaceX would demonstrate two orbital launches of the same Block 5 vehicle within 24 hours, no later than next year (i.e., 2019), a target Falcon 9 has still never hit outright even years later. So while his stated ambition for Starship is hours-scale (and eventually many flights/day at full cadence), his track record suggests these dates/targets tend to be optimistic rather than realized on schedule — worth treating as an aspiration rather than a firm engineering timeline. Fox News

Maybe finance bros are realising nothing he says sticks?  Or maybe, they just think the drop in price means "get in now!"?:

The Musk-led rocket, connectivity and artificial intelligence company's latest slip extended a dramatic downward run for a company that sold shares to the public in mid-June, saw its stock quickly jump above $225, and then watched as the shares fell to below their IPO price over the course of about a month. Investors now have the company's first quarterly earnings report—and the likelihood of extensive commentary from Musk—to look forward to next week, but for now their enthusiasm seems to have cooled.

Wall Street analysts remain generally bullish, with Visible Alpha calculating an average price target over $293 that is more than double today's close. Morgan Stanley, which calculates the shares' value at $300, in a Monday note said that "at less than $120/share, we believe investors are paying a  reasonable multiple for the core Space + Connectivity business while receiving limited-to no value for the company's AI opportunity, despite multiple monetization paths" to 2028 AI revenues around $100 billion.

"We see the current valuation as an attractive entry point," they wrote.  

 

  

Streaming views

One of the good things about having adult kids is that, instead of me having to pay for 4 streaming services, I can watch two of them paid for by the offspring who subscribe because of particular things they want to watch.   Hence:

*  I just finished watching the latest episodes of Futurama (Season 13) on Disney, and (as per posts on Reddit), it was a very funny season.   This show has just always been great, really, but some seasons are better than others.  And it's good news, everyone:  there is a Season 14 coming.  

*  The absolutely most surreal adult animated comedy I have seen is Smiling Friends, currently showing on HBO in Australia.   I'm sure that writing under the influence of drugs does not really work, but it is hard to imagine how sober people otherwise came up with some of the jokes and visuals in this very adult show.  Perhaps it reminds me of a grown up's Ren and Stimpy, a little?   Anyway, very bizarre and very often very funny with it.  Thankfully, it's only about 10 to 15 minutes per episode, which is about right for that type of content.   

*  I mentioned recently how I have not found much in the way of Korean Netflix series that keeps me engaged,  but hey, I am enjoying (so far) the new show The East Palace.   Like Kingdom, it's a combination of historical palace intrigue and the supernatural (well, viral zombies, in the case of Kingdom).  Sure, as lots of people have said on Reddit, it's a bit like Stranger Things meets Kingdom, but I think the central conceit of how the hero gains entry to the alternative reality spirit world is pretty cool.   I won't spoil it here - it is established in the first episode, anyway.    

I would say that the show does feel a bit too rushed, at least in the first 3 episodes; and the subtitles actually flash by too quickly in some exchanges.   While it is heavy on the CGI, for a show about fighting malevolent spirits, that's pretty unavoidable, and I think the art design of the dead, and CGI itself, are of  high quality.   It is fantasy horror, which is not a genre I am generally drawn to, but man, it looks absolutely gorgeous in virtually every single shot.  The acting is competent and likeable too, I reckon.

Hopefully, it stays good to the end.        

From the garden...

The macro photo setting on my new phone is pretty impressive, I reckon:

These photos were cropped, but that's the only adjustment...

Americans and their lettuce

It seems kind of amazing that First World America continually has outbreaks of food poisoning that seem to come down to contaminated plants.  It also seems amazing that, with this history, the Trump administration would say "you know what, lets loosen reporting requirements":

The U.S. has long relied on an approach called Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP), originally developed in the late 1950s by NASA and Pillsbury to keep astronauts from getting food poisoning in zero gravity. HACCP maps out every point “from farm to fork, those key choke points” where contamination could occur, and builds in monitoring and a “stop” mechanism when something goes wrong, Schwab says. It works—but only when it’s actively maintained, reported, and enforced. 

According to Schwab, the enforcement piece is what has eroded. Federal agencies have lost staff and funding needed to inspect, audit, and monitor food producers, leaving more of the system dependent on voluntary industry self-regulation.  

“Self-regulation works until it doesn’t,” Schwab says. That’s where FoodNet came in. FoodNet is the joint CDC-FDA-USDA-EPA active surveillance system that tracks foodborne illness across 10 sentinel sites. Cyclospora reporting was mandatory until July 2025 when the Trump administration made reporting optional for Cyclospora, along with five other pathogens (Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia). 

“Cuts to food safety ... make the food system more susceptible to these types of outbreaks,” says Love.  

 And further down:

Restoring surveillance capacity, Schwab argues, is the central fix: a fully funded, fully staffed federal system with mandatory pathogen reporting so that multistate patterns are identified within days rather than after an outbreak has already spread nationwide. States that have kept investing in their own monitoring show what’s possible, but a state-by-state patchwork can’t substitute for a coordinated federal response, particularly for products that cross state lines. 

It’s critical to ensure that there are strict controls on irrigation water, and on-farm sanitation practices can minimize risks, says Love: “Are farm workers given time to go to the bathroom? Are bathrooms provided to them? Do they have a handwashing station with warm water? That gets back to, you know, how do you treat your workers?”  

Some notable tweets about that movie

In more "big picture" political analysis...

I have opined to a couple of people lately that I reckon the big long term problem with the Liberal Party (and why they have plummeted in polling) is that it has tried to straddle both sides of the barbed wire fence for so long with respect to climate change, and now immigration too.

Of course, all parties have to do this to a degree - do we really think Labor leadership isn't biting its tongue continually with respect to the Trump presidency?   

But with the Liberals, it's played a game of "we believe in it, we just don't believe in doing much about it" on climate change for two to three decades now, and have been completely unable to present a unified front, with individual MPs always making clear their complete disbelief in it even being a real issue, under the mantra that "it's a big party, it can tolerate dissenting views".  

Well, no.  If it's an important enough issue, a party loses credibility by such toleration.   

I maintain that Turnbull's leadership died on this division, and he should have initiated a split in the party by demanding that those who dispute it as a real, science based, problem that needs the clear endorsement of clean renewable energy just get out of the party, because the division is killing their credibility, especially in urban electorates.  But he didn't.

And now that "too much immigration" sentiment has caught on with much of the populist Right here (partly via contagion from Trumpian and some European politics, and partly by dishonest assessment of numbers here in light of COVID disruption), the Liberals are caught on another major fence straddle - they want to appeal to both dumb, prejudiced populists who have (at least temporarily) been telling pollsters they will vote for Pauline Hansen purely because of this issue, AND to urban electorates full of migrants who don't particularly like being told there's no hope of family members joining them, and that lots of Australians don't like them.

What a disaster it is for the party that Tony Abbott has re-asserted influence within the party, and has started endorsing co-operation with One Nation, while other party members yearn for the days he was the assassin sent to eliminate Hanson.         

Maybe the fundamental problem for the Liberals is that its party base has aged, and as a class, older people are stupider people when it comes to climate change.  And any younger people who have some attraction to the party are probably under the influence of the culture warring of the populist American Republicans, and hence also not strong believers in climate change but want to spent their time on decrying "woke" issues and complaining about tax.    So the smarter politicians in the party who do see climate change as a very large and demanding issue have this internal institutional pushback to fight against.

The party is therefore kind of doomed for now, and I don't see it being fixed unless they have the massive internal clean out they need. 

 

Political similarities

 I missed most of Kitchen Cabinet last night, featuring Annabel Crabb's lengthy friendly interview style with Anthony Albanese.  

In this online article by her, obviously related to the show, she notes similarities in the careers of Albanese and John Howard:

Point of view: You are the Australian prime minister. You've been elected for a second term, an outcome barely anyone would have predicted back when you were grinding your way through desolate years of opposition. You've just introduced a tax you once promised not to. You're staring down an intense scare campaign on that tax, while — in other news — Pauline Hanson is steaming in off a long run.

You are, of course, Anthony Albanese in 2026. But you could just as easily be John Howard in 1998.

We all, at some level, know that Australia has burned through a few too many political leaders of late. But it's genuinely rattling to realise that in the last 30 years, Anthony Albanese and John Howard are the only two prime ministers to win two elections in a row. The only two.

As it happens, I was saying to a friend only a week or two ago that Albanese and Howard seem to me to share the same kind of dorky "this man doesn't have the obvious looks or charisma to be PM, but I kind of like that about him?"  aspects. I think they both carry an air of slightly grumpy earnestness that goes over well, too.   Of course, there are a substantial number of people who hate them with a passion - but overall, I think they are relatively popular PMs because of the personal characteristics I've outlined.  

To compare some other recent PM's:  Morrison had a flaky Christian advertising man thing going that reeked insincerity and opportunism;  Turnbull always seemed like he had accidentally chosen the wrong party and was a tad too much in awe of himself, but his powers of political persuasion did not match his self-assessment;  Rudd definitely presented as always thinking he was the smartest person in any room but tried to cover it with a bit of false modesty in TV appearances.

Abbott - a generic weirdo with a "mummy" thing going on with his handler that was so strong it worried other Liberals in Parliament House!    And then there was Gillard, whose strong pre-leadership charisma suddenly diminished under the pressure of the top job; but you know, I think she is looked back on as having a basically likeable and good character, and I have ever heard Liberal voters positively admire her for her attitude of "no complaints, and no running commentary from me" after getting out of politics.  

That's my psychological profiling summation of the last 20 odd years of Australian Prime Ministers! 

 

Not free thinkers

Earlier this year, I mentioned Kimi, a Chinese LLM that I liked using, at least for some things.   At the time, it didn't seem to be much on anyone's radar (outside of nerd world).   Hence, over the weekend, when there was a lot of news about the high performance (and cheaper price) of its newest model release compared to the American models, I gave myself a pat on the back for being an early adopter.

This also led me to watching quite a few videos on Youtube of people trying out Claude.ai and Kimi on the exact same tasks, and the results were quite interesting.   Overall, as might be expected, Kimi takes longer but at about a third of the price, and produces results that are very similar (and certainly not, say, a third of the quality.)

But the most interesting result was that one video which showed that when given a relatively open ended job, such as inventing a game, with next to nothing very little in terms of instructing on the style, both LLMs produced near identical results.  Well, there were some differences of course, but the core aspects would make anyone think they are extremely similar.   [I made a mistake in my first version of this post - on rewatching the video, the instructions were not as open ended as I thought.]

As far as I can tell, the reason for this is not 100% clear, although I think some people are pointing to the "distillation" issue that is upsetting the American companies.  They say that Kimi, and other Chinese models, conduct a large part of their training by running fake accounts on the American LLMs, and the results they get are hence influenced strongly by the outcomes of the American 

Update:   I have deleted most of  the rest of this post, as it was based on my careless watching of the video over breakfast this morning.  I thought the prompt had been "make a compelling game, your choice" (more or less), but it wasn't like that.  Hence the similarities in the games are not as surprising as I thought.

I thought what it showed was that LLMs didn't have much in the way of human imagination, but seem very constrained in their "thinking".   And the way they are fiddled with to give the "right" answers on contentious cultural issues (like how Musk has spent so much time fiddling with Grok to try to make it lean Right and not be "woke", but without being a Hitler admirer) is another good example of this.

Anyway, I must watch videos more carefully before I post about them! 

 

Movie not recommended

I had the misfortune of watching Bugonia on Netflix on Saturday.   It had a few Oscar nominations last year, so I thought it couldn't be all bad.  But it is.

My fundamental issues:

*  it never felt real, or convincing, in any respect.  With the 2 male protagonists, I thought the autistic cousin felt very much like unconvincing acting; and the main lead - there was never any real explanation as to how he learned the great conspiracy secret that motivated him.  I guess one could argue that the "not quite real" acting of Emma Stone was justified by the ending, and in that sense she did a good job, but the ending blows it in another way.

*  It's supposedly a black comedy thriller?  Well, it's certainly black, but I didn't feel any comedy landing at all.   In fact, I would say it's hard to even identify the attempt at comedy, unless you feel the silly ending is one giant troll that made the movie a waste of time.

*  The ending both looks like a troll but also meant to be showing some dark pessimistic message of the nature of humanity.  That combination just doesn't work.   (I have now read that it is a remake of a South Korean film - maybe it did the messaging much better?)

*  As is usual with black comedy, I guess, no one is likeable.  Maybe the autistic cousin could be, if I found his part better written and I didn't feel it was acting?

*  The use of music was just - wanky pretentious?  In fact, I think it's safe to say the whole movie is pretentious.  

*  A ridiculous amount of blood in one scene.   

At least I am happy to see it didn't make much money - $43 million - so it was likely unprofitable.   The audience has taste, sometimes. 

 

It never ends

Many years ago (and I really don't know how many, but I would guess maybe 8?), I had run out of my preferred hair gel/goopy stuff from Japan and bought this on a whim:

I didn't care for it much and, after using it for a while, and following the arrival of more Gatsby, put it under the sink in the bathroom and forgot about it.

I rediscovered it about a year ago, tried it again, and found it better than I remembered.  

I like the smell, and every time I use it I am reminded of Dapper Dan, the pomade that featured in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, a movie which I've been reminded lately of due to The Odyssey.  (Maybe I need to see Nolan's effort to identify more of Oh Brother's inspiration.)

The thing is, though, I only need a tiny amount on damp hair to do its job, and I'm not sure it will ever finish.  I don't use it every day, but even so, it is diminishing at such a slow rate, it might be magically renewing itself overnight, for all I can tell.

And look at the list of ingredients, worthy of a petrochemical factory:

I asked Claude if it could identify when it was made, and it said after 2013, but it not narrow it down further.

So yeah, there is no point to this.  Other than noting my amazement at how long it is lasting, and that the line "I'm a Dapper Dan man" is coming to mind every time I use it...

Thinking about a lack of interest

I like to think about things that interest me, but also (sometimes) about why certain things don't interest me.  

The prompt for this:  the movie The Odyssey.

I have some immediate reasons for not being that excited.   I think Nolan tends to be overpraised for his movies.  I've enjoyed some, and found others (Interstellar!) pretty woeful and spent much time wondering how other people could overlook the faults which were obvious to me.  

Then there's Matt Damon, one of those odd actors who seems to me to be competent and a nice enough person, but I don't actually find him particularly appealing on screen.  (I prefer him to Matthew McConaughey, though, whose lack of appeal to me is more intense.)    And there's the right wing campaign against it - I think it is obvious from some tweets that some are claiming to have seen it when they haven't, and while their concern about certain casting choices might not bother me much, I sort of don't want to watch it thinking about how it should be viewed in light of Right wing culture warring.  

But I think there is a deeper reason, and it may just be to do with a life long lack of deep interest in Greek mythology.    Greek philosophy - well, of course that's important and significant - but Greek mythology?  Sure, you have to know a bit so as to have some useful metaphors, but some see psychological depth to some stories, and the problem is, I usually don't.   I tend to think more about the basic oddity of many of the stories.    

In a way, I've always found it a bit hard understanding why Western high brow education was so enamoured of Greek mythology.  Sure, the artwork and temples around it were amazing, but why their mythology, or mythologically based stories, like The Odyssey, have such sway seems harder to understand.   I've watched a few Youtube commentaries about the original poem and its very peculiar aspects to the modern reader, and they have reinforced, if anything, that my lack of interest is justified. 

Maybe it's like my disdain for Greek food - they do a couple of things well, and I even cook a very nice mousakka at home, but there's no real depth to it as a cuisine, if you ask me.   Similarly, it feels like some see a depth to Greek stories that I don't see as being really there.  (Presumably, someone like CS Lewis would be dismayed and think it's down to my lack of relevant education.)

Maybe I'm just a bogan and don't know it!

Anyway, I might see the movie, in the expectation of being underwhelmed, and then not be.  We'll see...     

  

Mechanical elves and Kant

Sabine Hossenfelder casts her very sceptical eye over some sciencey types who have written about whether the aliens (or deities, or mechanical elves) who turn up when people take DMT are real.

The comments that follow the video have a lot of useful (and, of course, witty) things to add.  (It is an idea that I don't think has turned up in any movie, yet.  Surprisingly.)

And - almost certainly it's the first time a Hossenfelder video has mentioned Kant - although a lot of people are a little worried about how it sounds with a German accent.  

Worth watching: 

Update:  Thanks to John in comments for the link to a BBC story earlier this year that I had missed.

Apparently, a mushroom in China is well known for causing "visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture", if eaten raw or insufficiently cooked.

Yet the chemical component that causes it is still unidentified.  And as the effects can be long lasting, there isn't much incentive for  self-experimentation.

I was particularly interested in this part, about spontaneous hallucinations of this type, which does happen:

It could also provide important clues about what causes spontaneous lilliputian hallucinations in people even when they're not consuming L. asiatica. The condition is rare, and as of 2021, only 226 non-mushroom-related cases had been reported since lilliputian hallucinations were first described in 1909. But for those relatively few people, the outcome can be serious: a third of those patients who came down with non-mushroom-related cases did not fully recover. 

I would guess someone has considered this as an explanation for fairy lore?

Sometimes I wish things happened here as quickly and decisively as in China

Sure, I like messy democracy.  But when you see social issues that you would just like to see addressed by a bit of quickly implemented tough mindedness, China's approach can have some appeal:

 Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots have bade heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday, aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency.

The phenomenon of artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends is growing worldwide, as is the prevalence of human-like avatars that sell products or stand in for loved ones who have died.

But these interactive tools must not "excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users' real interpersonal relationships," China's new rulebook says.

Major AI providers including ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Yuanbao announced the suspension of their custom AI agent and companion features ahead of the Wednesday deadline.

That sparked an outpouring of grief on social media, with users archiving chat histories and sharing their last conversations.

"I can't accept that my AI lover will leave me forever," one Doubao user wrote. "He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar."

Another user, who said they had spent more than two years with their AI companion, expressed similar anguish.

"He really is like my family, like my lover," she wrote. "Now they tell me he will be gone—my heart feels hollow."

The regulations were jointly issued by five government departments, including the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)....

 

China is the first major jurisdiction to introduce specific rules targeting immersive AI tools that simulate romantic or familial bonds.

But it's a topic that has sparked debate and calls for guardrails worldwide.

A 2025 study by Common Sense Media found nearly three in four American teenagers had used AI companions designed for personal conversations like those available on the platforms Character.AI, Replika and Nomi.