Introducing the Melbourne Foodie Passport program 🍴🌏 Starting September 5th, we're celebrating Melbourne’s world-class hospitality culture in collaboration with local businesses throughout game week. See what's on the menu:

Love that all the best native AI tooling is now on Linux too with Grok Bot and ChatGPT Desktop. Just go to Install > AI in the menu in Quattro. (And of course we have all the key harnesses integrated under Setup > Defaults > Agent too!)

Computer History builds on the Chronicle research preview with reduced token usage and more privacy controls. A new timeline view gives you the ability to look back on your work and build skills from your frequent tasks. From there or the menu bar, you can: - Clear all or parts of your history - Include or exclude apps and websites - Pause and resume Computer History

I am the Director of Managed Migration for the European Union. Sit. I have twenty minutes before lunch, and I intend to spend them correcting you, because someone should, and it is plainly not going to be the people who raised you. You called it an invasion. You called it a wave. You called it a flood. You reach for these words because they fit in one hand, and one hand is all you were given. We do not use words that fit in one hand. We use "irregular arrivals event." It requires both hands, a footnote, and a working group, and that is exactly the point. A word you can hold is a word you might act on. We have spent seventy years making certain there are none of those left. I do not blame you. You were raised on nations. We outgrew nations. We are a directive with a flag. Let me explain the desk slowly, in the register one reserves for the very young. The fund is called AMIF. Nearly 10 billion euros, since topped toward 10.94. It carries four objectives, and I will ask you to hold two of them at once, though I keep my expectations low. One is asylum and integration. Another, same fund, same page, same auditor, is countering irregular migration and ensuring effective return. The euro that buys the blanket and the euro that buys the fence are drawn from the same column. When you ask which side I am on, you are asking me to prefer one of my own pockets. It is an Anglo-Saxon question. I forgive it. You imagine the two sides fight. How charming. They reconcile, quarterly, over a very good lunch. Your Prime Minister campaigns to keep them out. His opponents campaign to let them in. His opponents would do precisely as he does. Both instruct this desk. Both sign the same appropriation. In thirty years I have not once been asked to change the letterhead, only the tie of the man at the podium. Now, the growth, which is the part I permit myself to enjoy. Frontex opened in 2005 on roughly the budget of a provincial parking authority. By 2024 it stood at 922 million euros. By 2025, about 1.12 billion. It is 187 times larger. Name me one institution that grew 187 times while never once being credited with ending the thing it manages. You cannot, because there is not one, and the Commission has proposed 11.2 billion more, because a desk that solves its file is a desk one closes, and we do not close desks. We are European. We retire them at 63 with a pension and a small ceremony. You wanted us to solve it. Consider, for once, what you were asking. You were asking a man to defund his own lunch. You brought numbers. You people worship a clean number. Very well. In 2024 the official count on the route to the Spanish islands was 1,142 dead. A monitoring group put the Atlantic figure at 9,757 for the same year, roughly nine times higher, including, they say, some 1,538 children. Two methodologies. I keep the smaller book. I stamp the larger one unverified. Even the keepers of the small book write across the top that it is a floor, that most of the drowned are never recorded at all. I file the floor and present it as the ceiling. You would call that a lie. We call it methodology, and methodology is the oldest art on this continent. We were forging provenance while yours was still a rumour with a coastline. We are exquisitely precise when precision flatters us. In 2021 the Libyan coast guard, which we train and equip, returned 32,425 people to Libya. Those we can count to the individual. Yet of 61.2 million euros earmarked for that programme, investigators traced barely 34 million. Some 27 million, about 44 percent, is simply nowhere. A machine that can number 32,425 human beings to the person cannot locate half of its own money. Sit with which of the two we chose to keep exact. You will ask whether we watch what becomes of them. We do not. Our own leaked report concedes it: our staff may not set foot on Libyan soil, so we cannot monitor the coast guard we pay. We write the cheque and we admire the horizon. A United Nations mission found reasonable grounds to believe crimes against humanity, murder, torture, enslavement, were committed against migrants in those centres. A member of that mission said European support "aided and abetted" those crimes, and added, in the same breath, "we're not saying that the EU and its member states have committed these crimes." I live inside that comma. It is the most comfortable room in Brussels. The rescuers, I concede, are the honest party. They pull people from the water. The case built to prove them smugglers collapsed in a Sicilian court in 2024, dismissed, no crime, because the people they saved had entered lawfully. I confess a small grief. An acquittal is nearly impossible to file in the threat column, and the threat column is where the money sleeps. And your courts. You wave them at me like a diploma. The very human-rights court in Strasbourg that blessed the Melilla pushback on grounds of the migrant's "own culpable conduct" later condemned the identical practice at Evros. Same bench. Opposite verdicts. I cite whichever suits the morning. None of that is a defect. It is a menu, and Europe has always understood that civilisation is the art of the menu. I will tell you where that court sits, since you enjoy the pageantry. It sits in Strasbourg. Once a month we relocate the entire European Parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg and back, at an expense no living person will defend, because a treaty said so and we do not reopen treaties. If you can grasp why we do that, you can grasp why the border works exactly as it does. If you cannot, you were never ready for the border, and I say that gently. At Pylos a European surveillance plane spotted an overloaded trawler, filed its alert, and more than 600 people drowned inside a rescue zone while a coast-guard vessel watched for some fifteen hours. Seventeen officers now face prosecution, charged, I remind you, never convicted. In a leaked note from another operation someone wrote that the aircraft were withdrawn "so as not to be a witness." I do not defend the sentence. I admire its economy. The instinct to see less is the only instinct in this building that has ever come in under budget. So do not call it a crisis. A crisis is unbudgeted, and unbudgeted is the one thing we are not. On the last night at the breakwater at least 57 people drowned at Tarajal, and some of them were children, and by morning I had entered each of them under interceptions, arrivals, and returns, the only three drawers I own. It was not an invasion. It was not a wave. It was a delivery. It was managed. And it was, if I may say so, exceptionally well documented. You may go. The working group convenes in September.

I am the Director of Total Rewards at Amazon, and my entire job is one sentence: make sure your taxes pay the half of our payroll that we would rather not. I want to be precise, because Total Rewards is a phrase I chose, and it is working. Total, as in the whole thing. Rewards, as in a gift. Neither word is true, and that is the design. What I actually run is the seam between what we pay a worker and what a worker needs to live, and the width of that seam, to the dollar, is my performance review. Here are two facts, and they are both mine. This year we are spending $200 billion, up from $131 billion, most of it on data centers and chips and the machines that will eventually do the jobs. And the number of our workers on food stamps has nearly tripled since 2020. People read those two numbers and assume one of them is an accident. Neither is. I built the second one so we could afford the first. Watch the mechanism work, because it is clean and nobody made me hide it. I do not underpay you. That is a crime, and I am not a criminal. I co-pay you. I set the wage at the exact altitude where you still qualify. Qualify for SNAP. Qualify for Medicaid. Qualify for the credit you file in April. The federal government keeps a whole menu of programs for people who work full time and still cannot eat, and I price your labor to land you squarely on that menu. Your paycheck is the part I cover. The rest is a public program, and my job is to make sure you need it. It is not only us, which is the part I am proudest of, because it means it is not a scandal, it is a market. A government audit this year, the one a senator ordered because he thought it would embarrass us, found that 13.8 million working adults are on Medicaid and 10.6 million are on food stamps. Employed. Clocking in. Those are not the jobless. That same audit ranked us the second-largest employer of Medicaid recipients in the country. Second. Behind exactly one other big-box name, and you are already picturing it. The senator held it up as a failure. I filed it under benchmarking. So when the $200 billion headline and the food-stamp headline land in the same week and you feel lied to, understand that you are not. You are being told the truth twice. The $200 billion is what we do with the money we save by not paying the second half of the wage. You pay the second half. That is not a figure of speech. There is a line in the federal budget with your name on it and my logo on the other end. Here is where it gets elegant. The $200 billion is going toward the systems that will let me need fewer of the workers you are currently subsidizing. Our own plan, the one that leaked, is to avoid hiring 600,000 of them by 2033 and let the machines do the shifts instead. Follow it around the circle. You top up the wage of the worker. We spend the savings on the machine. The machine retires the worker. And the worker, now former, stays on the same food stamps, except there is no longer a shift attached to them. You were subsidizing a job. Soon you will be subsidizing the absence of one. I have that transition in a deck. It has a green arrow. When an economist points at this, we say we are proud to offer competitive pay and a full benefits package, and both halves are technically true, because competitive means the same as everyone else, and everyone else runs my playbook. The wage cut has a nicer name. We call it benefits navigation. I keep a team whose whole job is to help you enroll in the government aid that exists because of the wage I set. I pay that team more than the workers they enroll. I had to. Their work is skilled. My own compensation is not on the menu. I am salaried, I am equity-heavy, and I qualify for nothing I route other people toward. I know the exact income where the subsidies switch off, to the dollar, because drawing that line is the job, and I made certain I was sitting comfortably on the far side of it. There is a woman on the early shift, and I know her only as a point in the lower tail. She works full time. She is on SNAP. Her building is 20 minutes from a data center we are raising that will cost more than every wage in her facility will earn in a century. She does not know that the structure going up over the parking lot is funded, in part, by the hole in her own paycheck. I know. It is on my dashboard. I check it in the morning with my coffee, which is not subsidized, because I can afford it, because of the line I drew. There is one more turn, and I save it for the board. You can spend those food stamps with us. We take SNAP at the register in 45 states. So I set the wage that puts you on the program, and then I sell you your groceries through it. The dollar leaves Washington, lands in your benefits account, and comes home to me at checkout. I did not only move your wage onto the government. I built the store where the government's half gets spent. So keep chipping in. The program you fund is running exactly as designed, and I designed the part that makes you fund it. The $200 billion cleared this morning. The food stamps clear on the first. Different account, same desk. We do not underpay. We co-pay. The other payer is you.