It's time to ditch your mind-numbing, pointless career
Is it time for us to redefine what we mean by career success? Rutger Bregman thinks so, and his new book, Moral Ambition, makes a brisk and persuasive case for ditching 'mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs' and doing something more meaningful instead. He's aiming this book squarely at the 'idealistic and ambitious' person of any age who works in consulting, law, finance and other well-paid sectors.
Bregman is no ambition slouch himself. The superstar Dutch historian has published several books and essays, including the global bestsellers (2020) and Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (2017). He went viral on YouTube in 2019 after calling out billionaires at the World Economic Forum in Davos for their tax avoidance tactics: 'It feels like I'm at a firefighters conference and no one's allowed to speak about water.'
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The Age
2 days ago
- The Age
Big Smell: Behind the world's fragrances sits a shadowy oligopoly
Damp carpet and old coffee. That is how a perfumier might have described the ' top notes ' – industry speak for the initial olfactory experience – at SIMPPAR, the annual fragrance-ingredient expo held this month in Paris. It is where vendors from Sicilian dynasties to Japanese chemical firms gather to showcase their ingredients. Some are natural. The centifolia rose, a beautifully pungent pink flower harvested at dawn, at its peak potency, makes for excellent marketing material. Less romantic but highly lucrative are the synthetic ingredients. These molecules allow their makers to isolate specific smells, spare the animals once killed for their secretions and give fragrances staying power. Sellers of such raw materials grumble openly about many things. Deepu Nair of Greenleaf Extractions, an Indian supplier, complains that unpredictable weather has ravaged his country's ginger crop. Laura Johnston of Ultra International, a Dutch pedlar of essential oils, laments that regulations aimed at ensuring ingredients' safety and traceability are ever increasing. But few wish to discuss the biggest question hanging over their industry: the fate of the four giants that dominate the business of turning raw materials into flavours and fragrances for brands. America's International Flavours and Fragrances (IFF), Germany's Symrise and Switzerland's dsm-firmenich and Givaudan control some two-thirds of that market. Their haute perfumiers develop the formulas for lines by Yves Saint Laurent, Hugo Boss and others. Their functional perfumiers create scents for Procter & Gamble's laundry detergent. Their flavourists work with Coca-Cola. Meanwhile, their chemists produce in-house synthetic ingredients. Loading To protect their formulas, the four have developed a culture of secrecy. The competition for commissions, or briefs, is fierce – or at least it is meant to be. Over the past two years trustbusters have been poking their noses into all this. In 2023 EU authorities raided the four's offices. Swiss and British antitrust cops have also been investigating. Allegations include price-fixing and divvying up customers. (Givaudan, dsm-firmenich and IFF say they are co-operating; Symrise, which Britain dropped from its probe last month, did not reply to The Economist.) These probes have also encouraged civil lawsuits. In February an American judge declined to toss out a class action against the companies brought by a group of consumers and smaller businesses over alleged anti-competitive behaviour. (The four firms have denied wrongdoing.)

Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Big Smell: Behind the world's fragrances sits a shadowy oligopoly
Damp carpet and old coffee. That is how a perfumier might have described the ' top notes ' – industry speak for the initial olfactory experience – at SIMPPAR, the annual fragrance-ingredient expo held this month in Paris. It is where vendors from Sicilian dynasties to Japanese chemical firms gather to showcase their ingredients. Some are natural. The centifolia rose, a beautifully pungent pink flower harvested at dawn, at its peak potency, makes for excellent marketing material. Less romantic but highly lucrative are the synthetic ingredients. These molecules allow their makers to isolate specific smells, spare the animals once killed for their secretions and give fragrances staying power. Sellers of such raw materials grumble openly about many things. Deepu Nair of Greenleaf Extractions, an Indian supplier, complains that unpredictable weather has ravaged his country's ginger crop. Laura Johnston of Ultra International, a Dutch pedlar of essential oils, laments that regulations aimed at ensuring ingredients' safety and traceability are ever increasing. But few wish to discuss the biggest question hanging over their industry: the fate of the four giants that dominate the business of turning raw materials into flavours and fragrances for brands. America's International Flavours and Fragrances (IFF), Germany's Symrise and Switzerland's dsm-firmenich and Givaudan control some two-thirds of that market. Their haute perfumiers develop the formulas for lines by Yves Saint Laurent, Hugo Boss and others. Their functional perfumiers create scents for Procter & Gamble's laundry detergent. Their flavourists work with Coca-Cola. Meanwhile, their chemists produce in-house synthetic ingredients. Loading To protect their formulas, the four have developed a culture of secrecy. The competition for commissions, or briefs, is fierce – or at least it is meant to be. Over the past two years trustbusters have been poking their noses into all this. In 2023 EU authorities raided the four's offices. Swiss and British antitrust cops have also been investigating. Allegations include price-fixing and divvying up customers. (Givaudan, dsm-firmenich and IFF say they are co-operating; Symrise, which Britain dropped from its probe last month, did not reply to The Economist.) These probes have also encouraged civil lawsuits. In February an American judge declined to toss out a class action against the companies brought by a group of consumers and smaller businesses over alleged anti-competitive behaviour. (The four firms have denied wrongdoing.)


West Australian
3 days ago
- West Australian
Commonwealth Bank deploys AI bots with Aussie accents to trap scammers using ‘honeypot' strategy
Telephone scammers have a new mark to contend with – an artificial intelligence bot deployed by Commonwealth Bank to tie them up in tedious, go-nowhere calls. Phone scams accounted for the highest amount of financial losses in 2024, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre, and CommBank hopes this new tool will help protect Australian citizens. 'This is about flipping the script. Scammers are increasingly using AI to target Australians – we're turning the tables by using AI to fight back,' said James Roberts, CommBank's General Manager of Group Fraud. 'Every minute a scammer is engaging with a bot is a minute they're not targeting an Australian.' The technology used by CBA has been spun out of Macquarie University's AI research lab and was trialled in a pilot program last year. The spin out company, is headed by Professor Dali Kaafar, who is also Executive Director of Macquarie University's Cyber Security Hub. uses thousands of conversational AI bots to disrupt scammers targeting Australians via text-based conversations and voice calls, tying them up in fruitless exchanges and sharing real-time information on scam types with the bank. CommBank said it works with telecommunications companies, tech firms and government agencies to share intelligence and coordinate responses. The system uses a 'honeypot' strategy, operating a network of dedicated phone numbers designed to be discovered and targeted by scammers. Once the scammer calls or messages a honeypot number, they end up engaging with an AI bot instead. 'We've designed our bots to be difficult to detect by scammers, making them incredibly effective at gathering intelligence and disrupting scam operations. The bots are uniquely crafted with diverse identities – varying in gender, age, tone and cultural nuance – and fine-tuned with Australian slang and humour to improve realism,' Professor Kaafar said. CommBank said it had diverted hundreds of thousands of scam calls since it began a trial program with Apate in 2024, and that the technology would become increasingly important as scammers also start using AI to power their nefarious acts. 'We know no single organisation or sector can solve this alone,' Mr Roberts said. 'That's why it is so important to collaborate across sectors to disrupt scam operations at scale.' The initiative follows a similar effort in the UK that went viral late last year, when mobile phone operator Virgin Media O2 unveiled an AI chatbot named Daisy – a sweet-sounding virtual 78-year-old grandmother – to waste scammers' time. Daisy was trained on real scam calls and designed to sound convincingly human, often keeping fraudsters on the line for upwards of 40 minutes with rambling stories about knitting and her cat, Fluffy. Daisy spearheaded an advertising campaign to encourage Brits to report scam calls to a national hotline, with the promotional video views more than 1 million times on YouTube. The Commonwealth Bank has been a fast mover in the adoption of artificial intelligence for its own business improvements. Earlier this year, the bank said AI was able to answer 90 per cent of customer inquiries and it was being deployed in the business bank to help reduce loan approval times to as little as ten minutes. The bank has already deployed detect fraud, processing 20,000–30,000 fraud alerts daily, a number that could scale effortlessly to 50,000. 'The technology we have seen over the last six to nine months has the potential to be quite transformational,' Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn said at the time.