Notices by Kate Bowles (kate@aus.social)

The world is terrible and yet 165 people are watching a kākāpō asleep in her nest on “a small, predator free island in southern New Zealand.”

You can too.

https://www.youtube.com/live/BfGL7A2YgUY?si=pKlRecaDDCEx9k47

I appreciated this advice to allies and other non Indigenous people ahead of Monday, shared by the Indigenous Party of Australia mailing list (original author Marnie Davis of Women Up North Housing):

“Acknowledge the weight of this time – Invasion Day can be deeply triggering and painful.
Listen more than you speak – avoid debates, justifications or minimising experiences.
Offer flexibility to allow space
Check in respectfully
Do not expect education – this is not a time to ask Aboriginal people to explain or teach.
Challenge harmful conversations when they arise and take responsibility for calling them out.
Share this email and supports like 13YARN and encourage rest and connection.”

RE: https://aus.social/@slevelt/115875023508938300

I love this story. You might hear that moving is difficult or confusing but it’s a learn-by-doing thing, with helpful low-tech user guides from @FediTips.

Like @slevelt I first arrived on mastodon.social in 2016 when everything was small. I was a Twitter user and this didn’t take for me first time. It took a few goes, helped by @lauraritchie calling me back now and then. In 2018 I opened a second account on aus.social to try out a local instance.

In a moment of unexpected friction between this server and another, I opened a just-in-case alt, but I also learned I was really committed to this one because of the fantastic @AusSocialMods and @aussocialadmin. None of this has been technically complex and I wouldn’t know Linux from a bathmat.

Welcome #forkiverse. You might be here on a whim but welcome anyway. You do you.

Reflecting on a close encounter with a stubborn significant snake while bushwalking yesterday. It was on a boardwalk through quite thick scrub so we couldn’t go around it, and we managed to end up separated by it so we couldn’t just turn back together. So we waited, talking each other into calm and eventually it moved on.

It’s an inkling of the way surfers feel, intruding in the world of others.

The maker culture on here is far from isolationist. What you do builds hope for others.

I watch people making, repairing, drawing, sewing, crafting knives and pots and short films and solutions and community and compost heaps and seed collections, and when my day begins all those actions and ideas stay with me.

Your labour of bothering to photograph it, alt text it, send updates about it, share frustrations and success, it’s just fantastic. You have no idea who’s watching and thinking: hey, maybe I could sew on a button after all.

@aral @joynewacc Thanks to you both. Done.

Shout out of appreciation for all the work @aral and @joynewacc are doing to provide supportive care to the Palestinians of Gaza showing up here in terrifying times. Thank you both, and to everyone here who has been raising Gaza in our thoughts all along.

https://gaza-verified.org/

@spacelizard @weirdestate @treleanor I feel @sundogplanets needs to know.

I’m reading this essay from @CyberneticForests over and over.

“There is no person behind the language produced by a chatbot. It’s a dilution of billions of people, like adding water to sugar until the sweetness dissolves. Writing, and lots of art and other things humans do, can give you a bit of a taste of the someone behind it. With AI, that sugar is rinsed out of the mug.”

https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-literacy/

Thinking about this, and the future of global #underwork.

https://gizmodo.com/the-end-of-work-as-we-know-it-2000635294

The End of Work as We Know It

Beginning a thought about the prospect of mass global #underwork.

The definitions and thresholds of employment used by governments are way more granular than just “in work” or “has job”. So underworking is likely to be far more prevalent than the data derived from self-reported survey responses. And the vision of labour market transformation thanks to sparkly new futurey jobs is very light on detail about new job stability or income sufficiency.

https://www.abs.gov.au/methodologies/labour-force-australia-methodology/jun-2025

And as a painful coda to Scott Farquahar’s #npc shenanigans shared earlier by @emmadavidson, here’s the other half (apparently the less warm one) firing 150 workers by video.

Sparkly new futurey jobs? No sign.

https://mastodon.social/@campuscodi/114949668927182961

#underwork

And the threshold of being countable as employed in Australia is one hour paid work a week, and can be not even that. So the unemployment rate references this number, not any common sense understanding of sufficient work to live on. It includes all the teenage workers 15 and up.

Within this are nested the underemployed who report themselves in a monthly survey of around 50000 Australians as employed and either having had expected working hours reduced, or preferring to work more than their normal working hours.

So this is how we get an official underemployment rate of 5.9% in Australia.

#underwork

Why think about this as #underwork not underemployment? Because underworking is a human condition with human impact, like overworking. Underwork is a social situation.

And unless the sparkly new futurey jobs show up, AI driven underworking will expand the demographic of an established and generationally impactful underworking class: working under the level of wealth creation, working insecurely, with fewer protections, weaker access to fair work provisions, solidarity or safe protest.

These are long term political choices.

US labour market data makes the news, in a predictable way, by confounding the Tantrum in Chief. The thing to notice though is that the science of estimation always makes people testy because labour market vitals feed into consumer confidence and political futures. Meanwhile behind the data, every point is a person, a family, a community. #underwork

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/hiring-expected-slowed-july/story?id=124238397

Why this matters: if you hear that 150 workers have been ejected from their seats, but you just heard that employment levels are both high and stable, you might think: that’s ok, there will be another job.

But when you factor in underemployment, which includes people already losing sufficient work and people who didn’t have sufficient work to begin with, things look tougher.

Political choices that favour business and growth are long-term social choices about how we live, who gets to flourish, who gets by, who gets trapped in #underwork.

This from @scottsantens on UBI is detailed and clear. Work related poverty is expanding; capitalism is failing humans as well as the planet. Capitalism as a system cannot deliver us from its own intended impacts. So, something new is needed, and urgently.

#underwork

https://hachyderm.io/@scottsantens/114953933943565622

The US takes a granular view of “not working” in the survey period, including the subcategories of “discouraged worker” and “marginally attached to the labor force”. Among workers, “involuntary part-time workers” are what Australia would call the underemployed. This is the social experience that is rapidly becoming lifetime or even generational #underwork.

The language of labor underutilization used in US reporting moralises the problem of work, making it a problem that affects government and business rather than a social harm that affects people and communities.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm

Curious about how US monthly labour market data is estimated? As in Australia, sample surveys.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/04/092204.asp

Meanwhile, salaries and sign-on bonuses in the AI sector give us a glimpse of the sunlit uplands where talent is rewarded with immediate and dizzying wealth. Work redefined as elite level competitive sport aligned to willingness to show up all hours is life changing for very few whose life goal is to, I don’t know, buy islands.

But these aspirational shenanigans are not disconnected from the social crisis of #underwork, far from it.

https://www.afr.com/technology/sign-on-bonuses-of-150m-ai-talent-war-heats-up-20250701-p5mbr1