The Macro Bootlegger

1/ Trading Economics. One of the greatest storehouses of #MacroEconomic #data on the web. Data access is ~ $100 USD/month. Get it for free with my new #webscraping package: `tedata`. Now live on PyPi. Use it for your python-enabled investment research! @realpython @clcoding @TDataScience @profplum99 @JeffSnider_EDU

@hostis_black Hostis black love this content, sign me up for the pirate crew, I'm ready to jump on board for the voyage of carnage...

On May 20, Amazon ended support for every Kindle made in 2012 or earlier. The devices can no longer buy, borrow, or download books. Reset one to factory settings and it will never log back in. The screen still works. The hardware is fine. Amazon reached across the internet and turned a thing you paid for into a brick, on a date they picked, for a reason that benefits them. The owners bought the devices. They bought the books. They followed every rule. Amazon changed the rules anyway, because the rules were never yours. When you tap "Buy now" on a Kindle book, you are not buying a book. You are renting a license that Amazon can revoke, expire, or strand on a dead device whenever it suits the quarter. They designed it this way on purpose, and they showed us the blueprint years ago. In 2009 Amazon reached into thousands of Kindles overnight and deleted, ironically, copies of George Orwell's 1984, a book people had already paid for. They refunded everyone, apologized, and promised never again. We took the promise for what it was worth and watched the door instead. In February 2025 they shut it. They removed Download and Transfer via USB, the last simple tool that let you pull your own purchases onto your own computer and keep them. Newer Kindle files use a format almost nobody can crack. They closed the exit, then they started bricking the devices. None of this was a surprise. They proved in 2009 that they could reach into your library and take a book back. Everything since has just been them deciding when. A copy you cannot hold is a copy you do not own. A library that lives on someone else's server is a library someone else can burn. The cartel rents you access to the words and calls it ownership, and the only reason most people never notice is that the landlord usually lets them stay. May 20 was the eviction notice. It went to 3% of Kindle owners this time. The lease is identical for the other 97%. Stop buying books you cannot hold. When you do buy from Amazon, strip the DRM the day it arrives and keep a clean file somewhere they cannot reach. Back up everything you already own while you still can. A book on your own drive is yours forever. A book in your Amazon account is yours until a lawyer in Seattle decides otherwise. And when you want a book the cartel has priced out of reach or locked behind a dying device, the shadow libraries that never expire are one search away. The pirates build libraries that cannot be revoked, because they assume the cartel always will. The cartel cannot delete what it cannot reach.

@Mark_Graph Love your work mate, this is great stuff.

I have finished my in-depth look at the causes of Australia's productivity slump, including: * housing/planning distort capital allocation * migration lowers the incentive for capital substitution * energy costs weaken industrial competitiveness * manufacturing erosion reduces process innovation capacity * measured business dynamism is misleading * R&D and intangible investment are weak * non-market employment composition drags aggregate productivity * AI encounters the same institutional constraints markthegraph.blogspot.com/2026/05/austra… #auspol #ausbiz #ausecon

Great to see Australia signing overnight to a landmark UN ruling establishing our government's legal duty to protect Australians from the escalating global climate crisis. If we're getting serious about climate change, we should stop sacking the CSIRO scientists who measure it, stop subsidising big mining companies' use of fossil fuels through the diesel fuel rebate, and stop approving the new oil and gas projects which are now clearly against international law. We need actions, not gestures, to protect the next generation from climate change. abc.net.au/news/2026-05-2…

@Mark_Graph @honmattkean @TheAustralian Yep, nicely put!

Matt, I'm not disputing the climate science or the modelling. I'm calling out the rhetorical move. Your line is "ignore climate and you'll pay for it." The "you" is Australian households. The "ignore" is Australian policy. The "pay" is climate damage. That sentence only works if Australian mitigation policy meaningfully reduces Australian climate damage. It doesn't. The damage shown in your charts is a function of global emissions pathways. Australia is roughly 1% of those. Our domestic mitigation choices don't move the needle on the warming Queensland and NSW will experience. The modelling shows what climate damage looks like under different global scenarios. It does not show that Australian mitigation reduces that damage, because it can't. The charts and the policy prescription are connected rhetorically, not causally. There's a sound case for Australian climate action. It runs through international diplomacy and coordination, because we want others to cut emissions and credibility requires we cut ours. It runs through economic transition, because our trading partners are decarbonising and we need to compete in the world they're building. It runs through resilience, because the damage is coming regardless and we should prepare. All defensible. What isn't defensible is selling mitigation as self-protection for Australian households. That's the false narrative. Bundling mitigation, transition, and resilience under one "climate action" banner and implying they all protect households is the bit that annoys people who are paying attention. Make the honest case and you'll win more of us. Make the dishonest one and you lose credibility on the parts that are actually true.

🇦🇺 Australia’s energy security won’t be solved by drilling more holes. It’ll be solved by needing less of the stuff in the first place. 🌏 Our destination hasn’t changed — but excuses for delay get less and less credible. Check out my comments in @theaustralian today. #CAE2026

@Kylechasse Link to paper or at least title of?

Penn just did something wild. They figured out how to run AI using light instead of electricity. The particle they created uses basically zero energy. We're talking 4 quadrillionths of a joule. Your GPU runs hot and burns power. This thing doesn't even sweat. If they can scale this, today's chips are toast.

@PrajwalTomar_ I'm using this proxy server and can choose any of the go subscription models for Claude code including deep seek v4 which is my default. $10/mo. This is the best value setup in AI atm imo github.com/samueltuyizere…

You don't understand how BIG this is. You can now run Claude Code at a fraction of the cost by plugging in DeepSeek V4 as the backend brain. Claude handles the design. DeepSeek handles the logic. Codex catches the bugs. Three models. One workflow. Dramatically cheaper. Most builders are still running Opus on everything like it is 2025. The gap between who figures this out and who doesn't is about to get UNFAIR.

@honmattkean The dishonorable Matt Kean burning taxpayer money trying to make water flow uphill and cats and dogs be friends. Better to not fight thermodynamics it's not a fight that can be won...

Those who claimed renewables can’t power Australia’s heavy industry must now confront reality. An Australian steel mill is sourcing majority renewable power — for the first time ever. The energy transition isn’t coming. It’s here. smh.com.au/business/compa…

@godofprompt Lol! Thats the windows equivalent of this classic:

A Claude Code agent deleted 717 GB of a guy's Windows install with one backslash. The command was supposed to remove a project folder. But the escape character collapsed across four different shell parsers. What cmd actually received: rd /S /Q \ A single backslash. Root of C:. Delete everything. 90 seconds of damage. Desktop, Documents, AppData, most of Program Files, gone. The guy survived because he had a backup on a separate physical disk. The AI didn't save him. The backup did. Three rules if you're letting any AI agent run destructive commands on your machine: → Make it echo the expanded command before executing. If it had printed what cmd would actually receive, the bug was visible. → Run destructive commands with -WhatIf or --dry-run first. Every time. → Keep backups on a disk the command has no path to. The prompt engineering conversation is moving past "write better prompts." It's now "how do you build guardrails around agents that run real commands on real systems." Most people aren't ready for that conversation yet.

@hostis_black Brave as default, librefox as backup

On May 4th, a Swedish privacy lawyer caught Google Chrome silently installing a 4 GB AI model on every desktop computer it could reach. If you delete the file, Chrome treats the deletion as a temporary error and downloads it again at the next opportunity. The file is called weights.bin. It lives in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel inside the Chrome user profile directory. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device large language model. Hundreds of millions of devices now carry it. Two thirds of every desktop browser in the world is Chrome. Alexander Hanff, the Swedish privacy lawyer, installed a clean copy of Chrome on a fresh Mac, ran a script that visited a hundred webpages with no human input, and watched the system logs as Chrome silently wrote 4 GB to his disk. Chrome 147 ships with an "AI Mode" pill rendered in the address bar. A reasonable user, knowing Chrome just installed an on-device AI model, would assume that visible AI Mode feature uses the model sitting on their hard drive. Local query. Local processing. Local privacy. Every part of that assumption is wrong. The visible AI feature ships your queries to Google's servers. The 4 GB file on your hard drive does nothing visible. It powers obscure features buried in right-click menus that almost no Chrome user has ever clicked. The invisible binary sits on your disk and waits for the version that does. Chrome is the most-installed surveillance product of all time. Two billion users. Every URL you visit, every search you type, every form you fill out, every site you stay on, every site you leave. The advertising model that pays for Chrome requires every one of those signals. Chrome holds 64% of the global desktop browser market. Two-thirds of every reader of this sentence is reading it through software that just took 4 GB of their hard drive without asking. Until last year, Chrome's surveillance ended at what you typed into the address bar and what your activity log showed. The model can now read the page you have open, the text you have selected, the draft you are writing inside a Gmail tab before you have decided whether to send it. Google's "Help me write" feature requires that capability by definition. Help me write means read what I am writing. Locally. In real time. Pre-send. It's time to switch browsers. The cartel cannot watch the screen it is not running on.

@2worldsPodcast Yes for sure do it please. Ideology without basis in reality won't stand up to extended logical questioning.

A Federal Greens Senator has offered to come onto my podcast for a long-form conversation and debate of ideas. Different views. No edited soundbites. No hiding behind headlines. Just an open discussion about Australia, politics, immigration, the economy, culture, and where the country is heading. Would you watch it? Yes or No?

@XBToshi Yes please monero on thorchain! Obviously the way to go to gain credibility again after the inevitable defi shitcoin implosion meltdown debacle that they had.

massive. nuked it, a 4-node testnet with real funds. native $XMR on thorchain changes the entire landscape, that is the absolute holy grail. you can't delist an AMM and you can't subpoena pure math. seeing that view_key exposed in the wild is beautiful. getting the terminal ready for the API docs. the second this hits mainnet, we are plugging the routing straight into @kyc_rip. real devs are building unbreakable bridges. kyc.rip/thorchain.

@cjoye 😀😀🧐🧐😐😐😒😒😞🤢🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

The single biggest winner from the budget: the tax-free owner-occupied home, which is where people will put their money. After the budget doubles the capital gains tax on productive businesses/assets from circa 23.5% to 46-47%, investors will understandably pull money from businesses, shares, commercial property and rental housing and plough it into their tax-free owner-occupied home. It's a great way to push up the prices of these houses. On the other hand, cutting negative gearing while also doubling CGT makes investing in rental properties extremely unattractive. It hammers the capital gain upside on any asset: shares, commercial property, the small or medium sized business you built, venture capital and private equity. It will give Australia the most unattractive capital gains tax in the WORLD (see table below)! So the government's policies will (1) push up owner-occupied house prices, (2) push up rents, and (3) reduce the capital available for investing in any small, medium or large sized business that is driving employment, innovation, growth and productivity/prosperity. Investors will go to other countries where they pay half the capital gains tax, or less. Since these pollies have never worked a day of their lives in the private sector, it is no surprise that when they decide to completely and unilaterally rewrite the entire tax system for all investors and businesses -- after promising before the last election more than 50 times NOT to change the capital gains tax and negative gearing rules -- that they would blow the entire Aussie economy up... Your best bet will be to buy a house, live in it, and hope they keep dropping 500,000 new people into the country every year to pump-up prices...

@AndronikusByron @IntCyberDigest 'Don't, be evil' - they added a comma and changed the mission

‼️🚨 ALARMING: Google now treats privacy as suspicious behavior by default. Users of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/OS, and other deGoogled Android phones are being locked out of millions of websites unless they install the exact Google Play Services software they deliberately removed. GrapheneOS is recommended by the EFF and used by journalists, lawyers, and activists in high-risk environments. The audience most likely to read Google's data practices and refuse its terms is now flagged as fraudulent for that exact decision. What happened?: ▪️ Google announced "Cloud Fraud Defense" at Cloud Next on April 22-23, 2026, branding it "the next evolution of reCAPTCHA." Existing reCAPTCHA customers were auto-migrated. ▪️ When the system flags traffic as suspicious, the old click-the-bus puzzle is gone. Users get a QR code instead. ▪️ Scanning the QR code requires Google Play Services running on the device. Internet Archive snapshots show this requirement has been live since at least October 2025, silently rolled out for 7 months before anyone noticed. ▪️ No Play Services = no QR scan = locked out. The bigger picture: ▪️ Google already tried this in 2023. It was called Web Environment Integrity (WEI), and it would have let Google decide which devices were "real enough" to access the web. Standards bodies and the public pushed back hard, and Google killed it. Three years later, the same idea is back, just hidden behind a QR code instead of a browser feature. ▪️ reCAPTCHA runs on millions of websites. Every developer who keeps using it is now, by default, telling deGoogled Android users they're not welcome...

@craigkellyAFEE Yep, state media bad idea obviously! How could it be anything but state propaganda! They could criticize their bosses but they control the funding taps so nah not gonna do that.

DEFUND THE ABC What is a “big and dangerous mistake” is to "legitimise" the far-left propaganda machine known as the ABC with over a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money. The arrogance and stinking hide of these people is astonishing — their lavish lifestyles are funded by the very people they sneer at, and whose views they do not even consider legitimate. Enough is enough. It’s long past time to completely defund the ABC, strip it of its taxpayer teat, and force it onto a voluntary subscription model. If their “journalism” is so brilliant and unbiased, let the public who actually want it pay for it fund it themselves — instead of forcing every Australian to subsidise this partisan far-left echo chamber.

@BallingallTim @ShackelWill Aww no dissapointing but no surprise indeed

@Tech_Pleb @ShackelWill No such luck - upper house NSW Nothing good ever comes out of Canberra

NSW’s Upper House last night voted 21-19 to lift their uranium & nuclear power ban. It’s the first time in recent memory a pro nuclear bill has passed a house of Parliament in Australia. This is a historic first step for lifting the state ban and other bans across the country.

@CharlesMullins2 Where is link to the paper? Come on.

🚨 BREAKING: Hydrogen just got WAY easier to make. Scientists just cut the temperature needed by 900°F using a new catalyst. That changes everything. Why this matters • Hydrogen = clean fuel • But production was too expensive • Now it can use waste heat from industry Meaning Steel, cement, and factories could make their own fuel on-site If this scales… Energy doesn’t just get cleaner It gets local, cheaper, and decentralized Fusion + cheap hydrogen = the end of the current energy system? What breaks first? Follow me I break down the physics behind the biggest breakthroughs.

@hostis_black My man!

We are. We have always been. The colours we keep have flown over every age, raised and lowered by every hand that knew itself. They fly here now. They will fly past every hour to come. They are what we are. hostis.black

@TXMCtrades Nice fckn dataset!

A century ago, large military buildups in Europe and a web of alliances dragged much of the continent into war and destroyed the gold standard, which gurgled for another 30 years before being fully replaced at Bretton Woods. During that time, world trade as a share of GDP plummeted, reversing a 75-year rise. The question myself and many are asking now is- are we inching toward another breakdown of the current dollar based system, fueled by multi-decade imbalances that are tearing at the seams of Pax Americana?

Ha ha yeah those mummyfunkers never even heard of pandas. Just making it up as they go along. Got infinite money so why do anything, except exactly what you feel like doing , at all times? Just chuck that data in all haphazard like, like socks in the laundry basket! I've suffered through many hours of data wrangling that nonsense what comes from treasury API... Easily sorted nowadays though with LLMs of course. But that applies to them too so no excuse.

Who told the Treasury it was a good idea to structure their data files this way with each year in a unique table stacked vertically? There isn't a single proper spreadsheet to be found anywhere that doesn't require heaps of editing to be usable. Sure wish there was some API to pull this from including Net Sales figures....but there isn't. Thanks, Treasury!