Peter Gallagher

Tariffs, once imposed, are hard to unwind. That's why we should keep WTO on life support. When, eventually, the USA rediscovers its interest in keeping global markets open, its obligation to return to 1994 bound-tariff ceilings will give the Admin valuable leverage in Congress.

What happens when you subsidize an inferior input? wsj.com/opinion/the-re…

Grok can now do in 39 seconds what the Commonwealth currently has 20 external firms doing for 10s of millions of dollars in consulting fees. The media monitoring industry is dead.

"Et tandem EuboIcis Cumarum allabitur oris. Obvertunt pelago proras: tum dente tenaci Ancora fundabat naves, et litora curvae Praetexunt puppes..." When (finally, in Bk VI) Aeneas reaches Italy he turns the ships' prows to sea, then beaches the sterns & anchors them a-shore.

When he's bad he's very good::astralcodexten.com/p/press-any-ke…

"When Origin Energy pulled out of the Hunter Valley Hydrogen Hub in NSW, Bowen stepped in to prop it up with another $432m in taxpayer cash. The idea of this project is to supply green hydrogen to Orica’s ammonia plant in Newcastle. But look closely and you learn all this cash…

In 2009, I took my only shot at writing a novel: Cloud of Lies (Amazon). It predicts the construction of this dam — the location for an early chapter of the book that concerns one of the PLA guard, a pirated copy of "Call of Duty: 4" and a software virus.

"Eppur si muove"

Tomorrow (in AU) it will be 56 years since "one small step..." in what seemed to be the right direction.

Kimi K2 is great fun as a writer (I've been asking it to write pitches for magazine articles that I have no intention of actually writing). But sometimes it seems to think it's made by a company called OpenAI. Hmm....

How Android phones became an earthquake warning system:arstechnica.com/science/2025/0…

The passing of John Stone AO leaves Australia bereft of one of its most unflinchingly courageous public intellectuals. He died yesterday, at home, with his family by his side, aged 96. In a long public life, that included heading up the federal Treasury, three years in the…

Excited to share a milestone published in @NatureMedicine from our decade-long effort to build The Human Phenotype Project, a unique longitudinal cohort with unmatched depth of clinical and multi-omic profiling, enabling truly predictive, personalized medicine. Led together with…

"In 2023-24, the [AU] tariff regime imposed compliance costs [on business] of $1.3 bn - $4 bn, while collecting $2 billion in revenue... budgetary assistance increased by 3.9% to $16.1 billion but stayed flat as a percentage of GDP": pc.gov.au/ongoing/trade-…

The Productivity Commission in 2011 said the NDIS would be "for people with a significant and permanent disability who need lifetime care and support" 717,000 people are now on the NDIS, up from 535,000 less than three years ago ndis.gov.au/understanding/…

It was the 1,238th day of Russia's war to take Kyiv within three days, and the President of the United States was publicly dissuading the Ukrainian President from launching missile strikes on Moscow.

"The announcements are a green-light to Putin to continue what he is doing for the rest of the summer. There is no incentive for Putin to stop bombarding Ukrainian cities, killing Ukrainian civilians for small territorial gains." @PhillipsPOBrien open.substack.com/pub/phillipspo…

How to sound tough but do nothing: Impose tariffs on a country where we already impose sanctions. A 100% tariff on almost nothing will do almost nothing.