Meta, the social media empire formerly known as Facebook, rolled out a new product – it’s only a mobile app at this stage – called Threads. Thirty million-odd people signed up to it in the first day, including our very own PM Anthony Albanese. So what is Threads? Starting with the name, it was clearly chosen as a not-so-subtle dig at Twitter; Twitter threads, aka several tweets in a row, are a huge part of how users interact with it.

Fertility rates in the developed world are currently at around 1.6 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 (assuming no migration). There are many causes, but work by the United Nations suggests that the decline is primarily due to “the increasing control that individuals – particularly women – are able to exercise over their reproductive lives”.

Ah, Vienna. According to The Economist, the small central European city – it has an urban population of around 2 million – is, for the second straight year, the world’s most liveable city. Understandably, that warrants investigation: what is Vienna doing so well, and can we replicate it elsewhere? Enter the NYT, which last month described Vienna as a “renters' utopia”:

In the long run, productivity is the key driver of real wages growth. Alas, Australia’s productivity over the last decade (i.e., 2010-2020) grew at its lowest rate for 60 years. But it could be worse: “Turkey has had no total factor productivity growth or technological upgrading for over 15 years.

An internal Google document leaked at the start of this month claimed that “We have no moat and neither does OpenAI”. The document was, of course, referring to the fact that in the arms race of AI, there are no barriers to slow down potential competitors. The technology itself is not new, and every day people are coming up with new ways to do “with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B”.