Alastair Fraser

Curious 🇨🇦. Lecturer (Assist. Prof) in economics at USyd.
"No person is an Island, entire of itself; everyone is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main"

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

Fortunately Canada has a large Ukrainian population, so there's hope for us in resisting invasions

[Justin Massie @justinmassie1]

“military planners are modelling a U.S. invasion from the south, expecting American forces to overcome Canada’s strategic positions on land and at sea within a week and possibly as quickly as two days.

Canada does not have the number of military personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack, they said. So, the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.

The aim of such tactics would be to impose mass casualties on U.S. occupying forces, the official said.

This rupture in the joint defence agreement would likely see France or Britain, nuclear-weapon states, being called on to provide support and defence for Canada against the U.S.”

https://t.co/4pXpa8aPvV

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

@SteveKivinen Not just you

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

In the 2025 survey of USyd staff, only 33% of academics said they had confidence in the University Executive

Our executive should position us as an Australian institution contributing to Australia and the world

Not as export business like mining

That's not role of a university

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

Australian universities face significant challenges. I think these are exemplified by a phrase common among university administrators

"Education represents Australia’s 4th largest export"

I absolutely hate this

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

4) Freedom of speech is not something fundamentally important to be contributed by universities; business i.e. international students come first

My experience (and I've read the policies) is that Aussie universities value freedom of speech notably less than North American uni's

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

There, I fixed the headline

"You call that a knife? Victoria's ban on machetes begins as knife definitions create confusion" https://t.co/ItytLh8ZrQ via @ABCaustralia

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

Over the last three years, housebuilding in London has collapsed. Molior recorded just 2,158 private starts in the first half of 2025, around 5% of London’s (low) targets, and still falling.

What is going on? I have posed this question to numerous specialists, most of whom cannot comment publicly for professional reasons. This thread is a summary of what I have gleaned.

[Dr. Robert Rohde @RARohde]

Western Europe summer high temperatures have increased ~2.6 °C (4.7 °F) during just the last 50 years.

That's in a world with only 1.4 °C of global warming.

[John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch]

NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline?

Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.

What should we make of this?

[Chris Blattman @cblatts]

I was skeptical of the $200/mo price tag for ChatGPT DeepResearch, but man is it paying off. The ability to get a cogent, well-referenced, literature review or annotated bibliography in 7 minutes is incredible.

Short thread on how I've used it. Advice/feedback welcome.

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

That things simply 'work better' in Australia than Canada was one of the things I soon noticed after moving here. Canada would do well to look to Australia for examples, rather than using the U.S. as the almost only benchmark for policies and good government.

[Joseph Noel Walker @JosephNWalker]

Australia has relatively high state capacity.

That is, our administrative state is unusually effective.

This deserves study, but I was surprised to find that very little had been directly written on the topic.

So the economist Peter Bowers and I produced a literature review.🧵

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

@etjernst @Macquarie_Uni Congrats Emilia!!! Great news for both you and Macquarie.

[I4R @I4Replication]

After being alerted about possible misconduct, the I4R are reproducing published papers that use data from a specific NGO (GDRI). This thread releases the first 2 reports and provides more information about the work and responses/statements from authors journals and journals. 🧵

[Martin Bauer @martinmbauer]

The most energetic neutrino ever observed just smashed into the Mediterranean and left a signal that was picked up by the K3Mnet neutrino telescope 2400m under the sea

At the moment we don't really know where this neutrino came from, nor should it really be there.

🧵1/10

[Auschwitz Memorial @AuschwitzMuseum]

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

[Alastair Fraser @AlastairFraser]

My new favourite example of how crazy the University of Sydney bureaucracy is, is the requirement that midterms be "60 minutes in duration (with no reading time)" while final exams are "120 min in duration (plus 10 minutes’ reading time"