On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

#BREAKING One of the Liberal Party’s most high-profile former candidates has made a shock defection to One Nation as the party eyes a historic breakthrough in New South Wales. news24.com.au/politics/austr…

Practically all of South America was ruled by the left in 2022. After Flávio Bolsonaro’s forecasted win, nearly the entire continent will now be ruled by conservatives. All that is needed is democratic elections in Venezuela

For a hilarious but slightly unsettling experience, go to america.gov and type in "play minecraft"

Wet weather be damned: Kylie Minogue has taken to the stage at the MCG looking as if she were on the Copacabana beach in Rio, for a tight, packed, colourful 20-minute set. Follow all the action live: theage.com.au/sport/afl/afl-…

Members of the Australian media wanting more censorship. Gross.

The biggest AI companies may be using safety to lock everyone else out of the future (Save this). @DavidSacks believes that warnings about catastrophic AI risks will build public support for a powerful federal regulator. That regulator may never explicitly ban open source AI. Instead, it could require every advanced model to remain continuously monitored, centrally controlled and capable of being withdrawn. Closed models such as Claude could satisfy those requirements because they operate on company controlled servers. Open weight models would struggle to comply because anyone can download, copy and modify their underlying weights. Once those weights are publicly released, the developer cannot recall every copy, monitor every user or guarantee that its original safeguards remain intact. Anthropic identifies this irreversibility as a legitimate security concern. Applying identical rules to open and closed models could therefore produce very unequal consequences. Anthropic and OpenAI could afford expensive testing, licensing and monitoring requirements, while startups and independent developers might be unable to comply. The eventual result could be a government protected oligopoly dominated by a few closed model companies. There is evidence supporting part of Sacks’ concern. Anthropic advocates mandatory pre-release testing for every sufficiently powerful model, whether it is open or closed, with evaluations focused on cyber, biological and alignment risks. However, Anthropic explicitly denies supporting a blanket ban on open weight models. The company describes open models without dangerous capabilities as a public good and argues that regulation should depend on demonstrated capabilities rather than whether a model is open or closed. Sacks’ strongest argument is therefore about regulatory consequences because safety organizations could receive stronger protections, politicians could acquire greater authority and dominant AI companies could gain an expensive compliance moat. And open source competitors could gradually be eliminated without the government ever formally announcing a ban.

Three hurricanes are spinning in the Pacific at the same time for the first time in 11 years. Lowell is the monster of the group, a Category 4 south of Hawaii after briefly reaching Category 5. The islands are under an emergency declaration for dangerous surf and heavy rain. Karina and Marie are weaker and farther from land. A strong El Niño is helping fuel the unusually active Pacific. Mother Nature got pissed Writer: Sol

Party strategists are struck by the level of anger towards Labor among non-Labor voters, which they say is higher than normal among opponents of the incumbent. Shock at Peter Dutton’s election loss is viewed as a critical reason for the rush to Hanson. theage.com.au/politics/feder…