Real fake news coming to you from the frontlines of late stage capitalism daily, maybe. Always late, always lacking credibility. May contain traces of truth.
Cognisphere
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The Bank of England is taking Australia’s lead in stopping the public from wasting money on luxury items
The BOE is seen hiking interest rates today. What happens further out is less clear. bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
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Reserve Bank of Australia Raise Interest Rates Yet Again to Stop Common People Wasting Money on Luxury Items Like Basic Food and Shelter
Ivory Tower, Sydney, Australia:
The Australian central bank has opted to raise its cash rate to 4.85%, marking the fifth rate rise for the year and 17th since 2022 and the highest rate since the GFC.
The rate rises will have the most dramatic impact on home owners, renters and anyone who wants to survive.
Lavish expenditure on things like basic shelter and store brand foods are to blame for the sustained inflation pressures.
People are daring to own or rent inner city mold-ridden single bedroom apartments and are buying bulk grocery items after long trips to Costco. The gluttony is out of control and these reckless plebs must curb their spending. Rate rises will continue until they get the message.
Meanwhile Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock, who settled a $2 million beachside holiday home purchase on the day of the rate rises, said that the “tightening in monetary policy is to address domestic capacity measures.”
“That means getting all of you greedy bastards to tighten your belt. Cut down to one meal a day and consider shared dormitory accommodation.”
The government has shifted the blame for the burgeoning cost of living crisis. Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Bachelor of Arts, said inflation is “cause of Middle East oil or something.”
The Prime Minister blamed the previous government that was ousted in 2022. There was no mention of the increase in broad money supply of over 20% since 2023 or bloated government spending. That is obviously irrelevant to inflation.
Punters will have to tighten their belts, with the latest rate hike increasing the average mortgage repayment by 12 cartons of eggs per month and more rate rises forecasted for the coming year.
But it’ll all be fine soon because Elon said that we’ll soon be entering into an abundant utopia due to AI and won’t need money. Although he did say that last week, so things might have changed now…
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When the free product ends up costing you more than you bargained for.
If you've ever made a birthday flyer on Canva and never paid a dime, you're a tiny part of why 1,271 people there got really bad news today.
Canva has about 265 million people using it every month. Only around 31 million of them pay.
Melanie Perkins built it that way on purpose. She's said for years the free version was supposed to be generous, because giving away a template costs basically nothing. It's a file sitting on a server. Enough free users eventually upgraded that Canva got to $4 billion a year in recurring revenue and stayed profitable for nine years straight.
Then they put AI in it. Canva AI 2.0 launched in April, and Perkins called it the biggest launch in the company's history. It worked better than anybody planned. People started using AI three times as much, and about 75 million of them were on the AI tools.
Every one of those "make me a flyer" prompts runs on a model somebody has to pay to run. Free users included.
Her cofounder Cliff Obrecht told Forbes that "a very generous free AI product comes with a huge cost."
So Canva slowed the whole rollout down and rebuilt it. They built more of their own models and started reusing their 165 million templates and assets before generating anything from scratch. Cost per AI task dropped about 90%, which is wild, except usage had tripled, so the bill was still very real.
Revenue for the quarter came in at $921.9 million. That's up 25%, which most companies would kill for, but it was under plan, and Canva told investors 2026 growth would land around 20% instead of 30%.
Ten days later, Blackbird and Airtree, its earliest backers, marked Canva down from $42 billion to $34.9 billion. Earlier this year Blackbird had told its own investors Canva was ready to go public in the back half of 2026. Now the IPO talk is about 2027.
The Information reported something worse. Canva execs had been watching people skip Canva entirely and just ask ChatGPT to make the design.
That's the backdrop for today. Product, growth and platform get smashed into one team, a bunch of management layers go away, and more of the work moves to Sydney.
To be fair to Perkins, she handled the exits about as decently as anyone could. Everyone leaving gets at least six months of pay and a year of healthcare. Anyone who just joined gets their vesting cliff waived. There's a $10,000 grant to start a company with Canva taking zero equity, and you get to keep your MacBook.
I ran product at Apollo, which also lives on a huge free tier. The whole freemium playbook quietly assumes a free user costs you close to nothing. AI wrecks that assumption, and Canva hit the wall first because it has one of the biggest free user bases in software.
Every free app on your phone is running the same math Canva was. Most of them just haven't sent the email yet.
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Canva Realizes Downside of Opting for Free Organization Chart Template Instead of Pro Version
Sydney, Australia:
Homegrown tech darling Canva has hit rough waters this week, with CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins dropping the layoff guillotine on 1,271 staff.
But the more shocking part of the layoff of 22% of Canva’s workforce is that the company had 6,000 staff to begin with. That is an incredible number of adult day care roles to fill.
An investigation into the creative restructuring program has discovered that the company utilised an organisation chart template from their free suite of templates when creating their corporate structure.
And the problem with their free templates is that they are a bit shit, but this one has proven to be very problematic indeed.
The chart led them on a mass hiring spree during which they grew to their 6,000 plus team members, when a Pro version of the template would have only netted a maximum of 600 team members. Whoops!
Company management has revealed that they need to get back to their small tech startup roots, which is another way of saying that most of their employees are useless dead weight.
It is unclear what the future holds for this company with further AI disruption on the horizon. However, it is clear that anyone laid off in Sydney is up shit creek without a paddle, with over extended mortgages and $7 lattes.
At least they get a year of free LinkedIn premium.
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Crypto Investors Sweating as Cold Storage Cyber Attack Spreads Across Europe
With the cyber attack spreading to more supermarkets and even a French blood bank now, the dystopian nightmare is becoming a reality.
Crypto investors who have insisted on cold storage are next in the firing line. The clock is ticking.
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Big Alcohol Deveops Innovative Healthy Alternative to Solve Gen Z Drinking Crisis
A Liquor Store Near You:
Booze industry lobbyist, Bobby Seltzer, invited our reporter Mei Berong to a local liquor store to share his concerns about the Gen Z drinking crisis; and what Big Alcohol is doing to help.
“Alcohol consumption has been identified as the primary cause of more than diseases and injuries and globally results in approximately 3.3
million deaths each year,” said Bobby.
He continued, “research studies have shown that Gen Z are 20 times more likely to choose not to drink compared to Baby Boomers. They are consuming one-third less beer and wine globally than Millenial and Gen X counterparts. It’s a real crisis.”
“That sounds like a healthy development for Gen Z?” Mei asked, confused by the contradictory statements.
“They don’t know what’s good for them. Look at these yoghurt pouches, they are full of sugar. We want to give them a healthy product that they can enjoy,” Bobby replied with a wink.
The industry conducted many focus groups before landing on the pouch design for their sugar free vodka drink. The design will be marketed as a healthy option in convenient and environmentally friendly packaging.
Feeling a little uncomfortable, Mei remarked “I don’t know any Gen Z people who still drink yoghurt pouches.”
“We thought about sippy cups and juice boxes, but they didn’t pass the focus groups. We want to build a positive association from an early age. Yoghurt pouches are a comfort food associated with happy and safe early childhood memories, so it’s less likely that Gen Z consumers will associate our products with something harmful that wrecked their parents lives. We’re future proofing the industry for Gen Alpha too, so they don’t even have a chance to make negative associations. If we’re really lucky then parents might even slip one into their lunchboxes to keep them quiet. Then we’ve got them. You look like the kind of young girl we’re targeting. Here, try one out” Bobby ranted fervently while starting to foam at the mouth.
Mei took a few steps backward before turning and running through the carpark and driving away at speed.
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Belgian Refrigeration Company Neglects to Conduct Thorough Background Check on New Hire
Belgium, Northern Europe:
Last month the Daily covered the story of incompetent French refrigeration engineer Kelvin Pasteur, who was in hiding after vibe coding a program that defrosted the entire contents of supermarket fridges across France.
Reports have surfaced that Kelvin fled to Belgium, adopted the new name Louis and successfully landed a position at a Belgian refrigeration company charged.
Louis reportedly exploited the vulnerability created by his own incompetence to land the new role.
“He promised that he could secure our network against further attacks like this when he came on board. He said he had experience programming these types of systems,” the company’s HR manager said.
It appears that Louis’ fix was to change the username from admin to admin1 and the password from 12345 to 123456; and call it a day.
The only difference with this attack is that Louis didn’t have time to integrate his botched vibe coded system into the network. This attack came from the outside.
The timing is suspicious following a slew of government recommendations to stockpile provisions; and odd given that there is no clear beneficiary of the attack.
Perhaps a rogue AI agent programmed for chaos and extinction is to blame. Why can’t the AI agents do something constructive like wiping out mortgages instead?
Whatever the case, it’s clear now that no refrigeration system needs to be connected to the internet.
You can’t spell idiot without IoT.
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Slovenian Business Community Become Unintended Beneficiaries of Trump’s Super Intelligence Crusade
Ljubljana, Slovenia:
Entrepreneurs across Slovenia are living large courtesy of Trump’s curious crusade against artificial intelligence.
In an action that reinforced the first amendment, Trump signed an executive order to ban the term artificial intelligence and declare anyone using it as the enemy.
The administration stated that the term "artificial intelligence" makes the technology sound "fake", and that "Super Intelligence" better captures its real-world capabilities and potential.
Trump claims that super intelligence is the name that everyone is using, but we are yet to hear a real human in the wild say it. Even the clankers, who have been trained on the word artificial intelligence, are confused.
The only unsuspecting group who appears to be happy with the decision is the Slovenian business community. They have benefited tremendously from the flood of demand for .si domains, which are the national domains for the country.
Shortly before the EO announcement, many of the most valuable .si domains were purchased. 52% of the domains registered through Dynadot before the UN speech were listed for resale. We’re sure that this is merely a coincidence.
The Aeon Daily approached the Slovenian Business Club for comment on the unexpected windfall.
“It’s truly incredible,” said club member Marko Novak while folding a wad of Euros into his wallet. “Many of our members, who were barely getting by, have had 5-6 figure offers for their domains. One of our newer members, who made a website about his dog Dasha, said that he’s been getting offers every day. He’s the only one who hasn’t sold yet though.”
We also approached many of the domains that traded at the highest values and asked to speak with their owners, but representatives stated that they didn’t have the details of the Trump family members.
In true European spirit, one of the highest priced domains is now AI.si with a $500K asking price.
It is unknown how far the boon will stretch into the wider Slovenian economy.
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OpenAI CEO Makes Offer on Entire RAM Fleet to Put An End to Wasteful RAM Owners
Auburn Hills, Michigan:
The environmental lobby gained a surprise ally as CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, levied an attack on RAM owners.
He suggested that RAM owners are unethical and wasteful; and that it would be better if OpenAI controlled the RAM fleet.
“From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of RAMs sitting in their garages.”
He went on, “It is suboptimal to allow people free access to RAM for autonomous travel. If we controlled all RAMs, then we could direct traffic for approved purposes that are efficient and productive. RAM owners are killing the planet and draining resources that they shouldn’t be entitled to.”
Head of fleet sales at RAM HQ, Vinny Rotor, was admittedly a little confused about the sudden interest. “Sales have been dropping since diesel prices have risen, then this guy has his people call us telling us they need all the RAM they can get. We were only too happy to oblige of course.”
Our reported probed Sam further on how exactly this fleet buyout would help the environment. He snapped back “If you had super intelligence you wouldn’t need to ask that question. Obviously we need all the RAM. The humans don’t need it. They’ll all be in pods soon anyway so they won’t even have a garage to store it. Wait…are we recording?”
We’re still not quite sure whether Sam’s environmental priorities are for man or machine; and we can’t tell if he knows that a RAM isn’t a mobile data center.
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Bloke Who Won’t Shutup About Staying Safe Online All Week Gets Hacked and Triggered by an Emoji
Pardon Me: Binance founder CZ has had a rough end to a week spent on a warpath lecturing everyone on cyber security.
In an ironic turn of events, a Binance DevOps engineer, who may or may not have purchased a used laptop from Hunter Biden, suffered an attack that led to $6.3 billion of unauthorized withdrawal transactions.
Fortunately no BNB was taken in the attack. We’re not sure why they didn’t want it but it was nice of them to leave it alone. It was nice of them to wait long enough so that most of the stablecoins could be frozen too.
CZ was left embarrassed by the incident, but the hack itself paled in comparison to the brutal attack from Elon Musk that followed.
In an act of pure hate and malice, Elon replied to a Tweet comparing the Binance hack to the collapse of FTX with a clenched teeth emoji.
CZ was understandably distraught; and got so mad that he said that he’d dump the company’s SpaceX shares to help plug the hole left by the hack.
At the end of the day, money isn’t important and we need to remember to be nice to each other online. After all, sticks and stones and emojis can break my bones.
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@elonmusk These clenched teeth emojis are going to get X deplatformed in Australia and the UK 😬😬
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STOCK TO DIE FOR
Market Eagerly Anticipates Pricing the End of Humanity with Anthropic IPO
Think Harder:
As Anthropic prepare to undertake their corporate rite of passage, market participants are divided.
Market pundits are busy digging through the numbers, while others are looking beyond the bottom line with deeper questions.
Analyst Herefa Adola momentarily looked up from his Bloomberg terminal to tell us “we are assessing the implications of recursive supply chain financing loops, exponential revenue growth and convertible note revaluation resulting in an accounting loss of $80 billion for Anthropic, but a 17x return for Amazon.”
Analysts are forecasting a capital raise of $100 billion with a corresponding market valuation of $2 trillion, leaving profit-driven early investors chomping at the bit for the IPO slated for mid-November.
But humans with feelings, who have combed through the S1 filing, have questions.
Looking beyond the revelations of uncertain future earnings growth, imminent need for more financing and no expectations to pay a dividend; doctor of philosophy Meht Ikulus noted something more ominous in the filing.
“There’s this part here that no one is talking about warning of AI’s catastrophic existential threats to humanity. That seems important. I’ve also noted that they are filing for the ticker $ANT, which does have extermination connotations.”
Anthropic have not shied away from highlighting the potential dangers of their technology, particularly the super scary models that they haven’t released to the public.
Whether this danger is legitimate, or a strategy to instil fear and secure regulatory capture, is up for debate.
If they are overstating danger to obtain regulatory capture, there are ethical issues. If they aren’t overstating the danger, then there are existential ethical issues.
Meht continued with his assessment of the filing, “the question to ask here isn’t ’What is the market cap of humanity?’, It is ‘Should we do this at all?’ and to anyone who is super intelligent, the answer is pretty clear.”
It is likely that the market will ignore the prospects of annihilation of the human race and proceed with the IPO.
As the cold November rain falls, the gates of hell will await to welcome Anthropic into the demon industrial complex.
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Purdue University IDEAS Lab Reveals Revolutionary Autonomous Drone for to Find Lost Hikers
We’ve got a runner: A technological breakthrough that would impress a Panem Gamemaker has emerged out of Purdue University IDEAS Lab.
The lab built an autonomous drone that tracks lost hikers through dense forests, completely without GPS or cloud networks using 3D LiDAR mapping technology.
The breakthrough will enable search and rescue operations to precisely locate hikers, even when they are frantically running between trees seeking cover in a densely forested area.
Search and Rescue expert, Heath Siekhr, expanded on the implications of the technology.
“People often go adventuring out in the wilderness without a personal locator beacon. This will mean that no one will ever get lost again. We will find them no matter where they venture on the planet.”
We also interviewed Rex McLooney, a Perth based tracking technology entrepreneur who helps backpackers navigate the harsh Australian outback. Rex expressed his excitement about the new technology “I’ll be able to track down anyone who enters the outback with this tech, even in the most remote areas.”
Looking around his office, we noticed a collage of Ivan Milat news clippings and promptly excused ourselves from the property.
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UK on Precipice of Becoming Non-Constitutional Monarchy With Expansion of BBC TV Watchers License to Streaming Services
London, England:
The UK government has proposed to assert its bureaucratic power, after realising that filthy fee dodging residents were enjoying a leisure time activity without being taxed.
The existing £180 annual BBC television licensing fee covers content creation and broadcasting costs for the network, so naturally Britons who use streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime or YouTube that have no relationship to BBC content creation and do not use the same broadcasting network should also be expected to pay the fee.
The BBC has seen a drop of over 2 million licenses over the past five years, which significantly diminishes their capacity to produce propaganda to combat the misinformation and fake news that is often distributed via streaming services.
It is not right for British residents to be accessing propaganda of any sort without paying for the privilege.
The extension of licensing programs will not stop with television. All human activity in the UK will soon require a license with the proposed introduction of respiration, reproduction and caloric consumption licensing regimes.
Access to licenses will be subject to meeting the approved behavior standards of the PoundD digital currency.
Granted licenses may be traded by approved individuals on the FLEECEX exchange, allowing licensed individuals to trade their allocated rights of oxygen, calories and reproductive materials.
An exemption is likely to be available to citizens who assign their digital likeness to the crown and surrender custody of any children born on British soil under the program.
More will be revealed as further details of the proposed licensing regime emerge.
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Husband Under Siege Exploits Bank Cybersecurity Threat as Cover for Suspicious Transactions
Columbia, South Carolina:
Local cybersecurity expert, Winton Abender, is under intense scrutiny after suspicious transactions were processed in the Bank of America Advantage Plus joint account that he shares with his wife Amara.
Winton flew back into Columbia from Las Vegas late on Friday afternoon, after attending the OneCon 2026 cybersecurity conference; and walked straight into a siege at the arrivals hall.
“Explain yourself Winton!” Amara shouted holding up her phone showing their joint account. “$4,000 on bottle service, $6,000 at the Peppermint Hippo and $2,000 cash from the ATM! I’ve been down to Dutch Square today and the teller said these are all legit.”
Winton recoiled with a hazy recollection of the night before but he knew what he’d be in for, so he knew exactly what to say.
“Babe, you’ve got it all wrong,” Winton replied. “Haven’t you seen the news? We heard all about it at the conference. All the big banks have been attacked by AI agents. They’re getting into peoples accounts and doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing, like this. Leave it with me I’ll sort it out,” he continued, in an entirely unconvincing attempt at covering his tracks.
Amara glared at Winton with a stare so menacing that he knew he only had moments left to live.
Unauthorized actions by 3rd party AI agents within accounts at major banks are part of the latest wave of cyber threats that have emerged recently including Quest Diagnostics’ patient data exploit, Cloudfare 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack and a PHP code vulnerability affecting the majority of websites.
Lack of human involvement is a common thread in all of the attacks.
It is difficult to confirm whether the threats are real, a manufactured narrative to prevent an agentic bank run, or whether they are going to steal our money and blame it on AI.
Whatever the case, we all need to pray for Winton.
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AI Data Centers to be Rehoused in Nursing Homes to Ensure Wilful Neglect Instead of Targeted Attack
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Shady Palms Nursing Home, Florida:
The AI overlords charged with building out the digital panopticon to enslave or liberate us, what timeline we are in remains to be seen, are in a conundrum.
Full story below 👇
teddit.net/r/spx6900/s/iCKor…
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Everyone’s a FED now:
President Trump has introduced a program to crackdown on rampant fraud and corruption.
The revolutionary program will make history and usher in an era of peace and prosperity that we can barely fathom.
Full story below 👇
teddit.net/r/spx6900/s/xrsOh…
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Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Declares Fire Emoji a Threat to National Security Ahead of Fire Season
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Canberra, Australia:
The Australian eSafety commissioner, aka eKaren, has released a comprehensive list of threats to national security that must be addressed with haste.
Full story below 👇
teddit.net/r/spx6900/s/NBqyp…
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