So apparently NYC hospitals have been sharing patient health data with Palantir, and they’ve only just decided to stop. And the reaction from most people online was essentially: they were doing WHAT?

Yeah. That tracks.

For those who don’t know much about Palantir, they’re a US data analytics company with some genuinely unsettling associations — they’ve done work for ICE, assisted with surveillance operations, and their CEO is about as MAGA as it gets. To be fair, someone in the online discussion I was reading pointed out they also do legitimately useful things like tracking missing children and tracing food contamination outbreaks. But that’s the uncomfortable reality of dealing with companies like this — the good and the bad come bundled together, and you don’t always get to pick which parts you’re funding or feeding.

Right, I’ll be honest — I don’t usually get swept up in athletics. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, I just tend to follow it the way most Australians do: vaguely, every four years, when the Olympics rolls around and suddenly everyone’s an expert. But this week, something genuinely extraordinary happened, and I’ve been down a rabbit hole of YouTube clips and Wikipedia tabs ever since.

Gout Gout — an 18-year-old kid — just ran the 200 metres in under 20 seconds. Not just under 20 seconds, but 19.84 seconds, smashing both the Australian national record and the U20 world record. Let that sink in for a moment. Peter Norman’s national record had stood since 1968. Fifty-six years. That’s older than me. And Gout didn’t just nudge it — he obliterated it.

Every year it’s the same story. The temperature starts dropping, you dig out last year’s electric blanket, and discover the controller has given up the ghost or the thing just doesn’t heat evenly anymore. So you think, “no worries, I’ll grab one from Kmart.” And then you get there and the shelves are bare. Not a heated throw in sight. Just an empty shelf with a little price tag mocking you.