Fears of another lockdown amid fuel shortages and recession risk
By Nassim Khadem

As fuel costs surge and supply fears grow, businesses and households say the economic shock from the war in the Middle East is already hitting home.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-17/fears-of-another-lockdown-amid-fuel-shortages-recession-risk/106568312

#Recession #CostofLiving #EconomicGrowth #Economy #Inflation #InterestRates #SmallBusinesses #Unemployment #Work #FederalGovernment #Budget #COVID19 #EpidemicsandPandemics #War #NassimKhadem

Breaking: Unemployment rate remains at 4.3pc
By Gareth Hutchens

Australia's unemployment rate remained at 4.3 per cent in March, the same as February, in seasonally adjusted terms.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-16/unemployment-rate-steady-march-2026-australia/106570400

#EmploymentStatistics #Unemployment #EconomicTrendsandIndicators #EconomicGrowth #Inflation #UnrestConflictandWar #GarethHutchens

Had a scheduled phone conversation with the Employment Agency. The lady said something I couldn't quite understand about my driver's licence. Turned out that she meant this:

"Since you haven't found work as a university professor or a project director in contract archaeology, you might want to apply for jobs where having a driver's licence is the main sought-after qualification."

In effect, she told me to become a delivery driver. 🙄

#unemployment #academia #archaeology

I have a job interview this afternoon, and I've been warned that the hiring manager is very excited by LLMs, so I'm playing around with Google Gemini today.

I keep hearing about how these things have gotten better, but I'm not really seeing it. I'm currently trying to get it to refactor a function I have that injects data into a HTML+markdown template, and in cleaning up my chicken scratch code it

* Keeps breaking the template
* Keeps *reformatting* the template
* Has stripped the template of comments
* Randomly changes div tags to other things
* Keeps changing my colour schemes
* Keeps breaking the markdown rendering by indenting blocks of text too far (indicating to the md renderer that it's a code block)

I at one point asked it to create new, better comments for my template, and it just stripped mine from it again. When told it to create new comments, it spit out the template right back out with slight, unrequested modifications sprinkled throughout, but still with no comments. I asked it *four times* to add comments before giving up. I don't think it "knows" what an HTML comment is.

The idea that people are getting all excited about this stuff is mind boggling.

#Unemployment #JobHunt #LLM #AI #Interview

"A paper last month by LSE professor Luis Garicano and co-authors extends the idea that jobs are bundles of tasks, to consider whether the different activities in a job are a tightly bound bundle or something more akin to an itemised list of discrete activities. In the context of software, a contractor or junior hire generally falls into the latter group: these jobs are weak bundles, with daily work consisting mainly of writing code to spec — tasks that could be given to someone else (or AI) without any disruption to the workflow or the quality of the final product. Here, AI breaks off a large chunk of the job and leaves a role with substantially diminished scope (or obviates the need for that hire or contract).

But senior developers, or coders working outside the tech industry in roles where their programming skills are combined with domain-specific expertise, tend to have jobs comprising tightly enmeshed and cross-functional tasks. Here extracting the coding part of the job from all the rest is much harder, so the bundle of tasks remains intact. Instead of becoming a competitor AI becomes an assistant, enhancing rather than eroding the job. This fits with the findings from Brynjolfsson and our own analysis that hiring for senior software roles continues to hold up better than for junior ones."

https://www.ft.com/content/b69f8599-eaf1-477a-a5a8-60a715e56a04?syn-25a6b1a6=1

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment #Unemployment #Layoffs