Eyes weld open … Insiders trading … bionic peepers ‘powering down’

Well Well Weld It will return to you, years from now, with a shock of recognition, and you’ll be scarcely able to believe you’d forgotten it. Just as Tony Abbott’s stewardship came to be represented by the image of him tearing into a raw onion with its skin on like a dog being offered an ice cream, this may come to represent Scott Morrison’s. I’m speaking of course of the footage where Morrison, visiting Specialised Welding & Engineering in the Northern Territory, decided to get a closer look at his work, leaned in and lifted his protective mask as the white-hot sparks spat in his direction.

That vacant grin, the hand that you can see in the wider shot desperately and helplessly trying to indicate the correct way to wear the mask — it’s truly hypnotic. We can only imagine the conversations the guy making the gesture had with his family that night, talking about our prime minister like he’s a none-too-bright new apprentice who probably won’t last.

It’s a beautiful day to stay Insiders The state of the Australian media is sobering anytime you stop to think about it, and Sunday gave us a real dose of that. The political editor of one of the country’s best-read daily papers arguing that dark money in Australian politics isn’t that big a deal. Asked about the tens of millions of undisclosed donations that have flowed to the major parties, Herald Sun political editor James Campbell, with a dismissive sigh, asked, “Well, what are they getting for their money?” He seemed completely unswayed by the obvious response: “We don’t know.”

Crikey and the Herald Sun have had our differences on what we consider news for a while, but this decided lack of curiosity about something you would expect any journalist to be appalled by still catches the breath.

Things combine to be bad in ways you hadn’t predicted (part 9500) From time to time we at Crikey like to reflect on the ways decidedly distinct modern trends can combine in surprising and dreadful ways, like the ham-and-pineapple pizzas of historical trends.

So you’ve been blackmailed by your smartphone-operated coffee machine, you’ve attempted to hold police accountable only to find they’re using over-zealous copyright takedowns to get your footage taken off the internet, and the forests your employer planted to ameliorate climate change burnt down… because of climate change.

And now, we’re getting recipients of medical miracles suddenly abandoned because the company who created them made the technology obsolete. In an incredible piece in tech magazine IEEE Spectrum, several people who rely on bionic eye implants manufactured by Second Sight Medical Products report their high-tech visual aids “powering down”, after the company — verging on bankruptcy — abandoned the technology:

“[Second Sight patient] Ross Doerr … received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. “She said, ‘Well, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,'” he remembers. “She said, ‘By the way, you’re not getting your upgrades.'”