One of the downsides of being around a long time, coupled with the tardiness in the production of personal software that can indeed act as a second ‘fact dump’, is that I spend lots of time trying to track down the correct version of a quote and its reference value. The one below I had remembered as “There is nothing in British medicine that the GMC cannot make worse.”

Claude and Google scholar didn’t get me there but mere chance did. The quote in question was penned by Nigel Hawkes, a wonderful journalist who used to freelance at the BMJ. He died in 2021: an obit is here.

Here is the correct version in the BMJ (paywall).

And then there was the GMC (General Medical Council), a body seemingly designed to prove that as bad as things seem, they can be made worse.

Doesn’t Britain do so well with its regulators! Think:water companies, Post Office, FCA etc). My own view is that journalists, and to name one example, MD, in Private Eye, do a much better job of protecting the public from the horrors and abuse of the public by the NHS or government.

Note added 1 April 2026 (no joke!)

I now see (again by chance) that my memory was closer to the mark than I made out above. Here is the same Nigel Hawkes writing in the BMJ on the topic of validation:

“On the usually sound principle that there is nothing in UK medicine that can’t be made worse by the involvement of the General Medical Council…” (BMJ 2012;345:e7375)

Vegans (t)read carefully

One of North America’s largest beef processors is using AI to get millions of dollars’ worth of extra meat off the bone in its slaughterhouses as US beef prices hover near record highs. Cargill has developed an AI-powered computer vision system that spots “red pixels” — tiny flecks of meat left clinging to bone and fat as cattle carcasses move down its processing lines.

Early trials show that by using the system, branded CarVe, meat packers can recover an average of up to 0.5 per cent more meat from each animal. “At the scale that we’re operating, that’s big,” said Florian Schattenmann, the company’s head of research and development.

AI is particularly useful in beef processing because of the variability involved, Schattenmann said. “It’s not like assembling a car, right? Every Toyota Camry looks the same and it’s all automated. Every cow is slightly different.”

The last phrase is the surgeon’s defence, I wager. But when you chase 0.5%, with the chainsaw of modern capitalism, humanity itself becomes the carcass.

No words

Although Stevenson loathes executions, he has witnessed two. Each of the condemned wanted to be sure there was one sympathetic pair of eyes. “They bring in law enforcement officers and relatives of the victims, and when they open the curtain, the prisoner is strapped into the electric chair staring at a sea of hostile faces,” he says. “But the worst part is always before that.” On the day of the execution, the convict’s body is shaved to make it a better conduit. Men with clippers erase all the hair from the tied-down body. One of the condemned, Herbert Richardson, a Vietnam veteran with psychiatric illness who was convicted for a pipe-bomb murder, asked to hold Stevenson’s hand. “There were tears running down his face,” Stevenson says. “It was like preparing an animal for slaughter.”

FT

Quiet rituals of survival in Tehran

Responsibility dissolves in the noise. Every side deflects blame. Meanwhile, ordinary people stand in the middle, absorbing the consequences. For now, life is measured in small intervals: between explosions, between cups of tea, between messages confirming that another loved one has made it through another night.

[email protected]

Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic

“Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before. For the past 14 months, few foreign leaders have been able to acknowledge that someone without any strategy can actually be president of the United States.”

Lee Gillette writes in the LRB

“Between 1964 and 1973, first Johnson then Nixon conducted the largest bombing campaign in history in South-East Asia. In Laos, a country of fewer than three million people, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance: 270 million bombs of almost two hundred different types, including cluster bombs, via 580,000 planeloads, an average of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. A third of the bombs failed to explode. Poor rural areas, where 70 per cent of the country’s population live by subsistence farming, remain minefields to this day. Unexploded bombs are inadvertently triggered by farm work, fires used for cooking, people walking or children playing (since 1975 nearly half of the twenty thousand casualties have been children).”

We have to stop calling some jobs ‘low skilled’

Sarah O’Connor in the FT writes:

Economists have contributed to this with their habit of describing certain jobs as “high skilled” (and other jobs as “low skilled”) when what they actually mean is “jobs that require skills that the market currently values highly”.

But the truth is, nobody really has a clue. If anyone might know, it would probably be Francesca Borgonovi, head of skills analysis at the OECD Centre for Skills. But she is refreshingly honest: “I don’t know what to tell my kids to study,” she told me. “At the end of the day, I’m just as clueless as anybody else. And that could be a very good thing.”

The law is there to punish humans and protect the corporations.

February 15, 2026 – Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier writes¹:

[Aaron] Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013..

Swartz considered this hoarding of knowledge to be neither accidental nor inevitable. It was the result of legal, economic and political choices. His actions challenged those choices directly. And for that, the government treated him as a criminal.

And what’s new?

Today’s AI arms race involves a far more expansive, profit-driven form of information appropriation. The tech giants ingest vast amounts of copyrighted material: books, journalism, academic papers, art, music and personal writing. This data is scraped at industrial scale, often without consent, compensation or transparency, and then used to train large AI models.

But guess what?

…this time, the government’s response has been markedly different. There are no criminal prosecutions, no threats of decades-long prison sentences. Lawsuits proceed slowly, enforcement remains uncertain and policymakers signal caution, given AI’s perceived economic and strategic importance. Copyright infringement is reframed as an unfortunate but necessary step toward “innovation.”

The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

1. The original essay was written with J. B. Branch, and originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. ↩

‘Is university still worth it?’ is the wrong question

John Burn-Murdoch with another fine article in the FT.

“Britain’s university graduates are having a rough time of it. In 1999, the average graduate salary was 80 per cent more than their non-graduate counterpart; in the latest data this was down to just 45 per cent, and that’s before factoring in student loans. Adding insult to injury, the government has worsened the terms of the loans to ensure repayments don’t wither in line with salaries.

A common response is to blame simple economic inevitability. Today 41 per cent of Britain’s workers have a degree, up from 20 per cent in 1999, and if you increase the supply of something (graduates), you reduce its price (earnings). A more nuanced version argues that rather than imparting new skills, university education mainly serves to signal who the most skilled people already are, so expanding participation dilutes the average skill level of graduates, along with their average earnings. Either way, so the argument goes, earnings erosion was inevitable, the government should have anticipated it and graduates shouldn’t have been sold an economic fiction….

But there’s one problem: none of the above has happened in most other developed countries. In the US, college graduates today earn 92 per cent more than non graduates, up from 80 per cent in 1996, even as the share of people with a degree has climbed from 27 per cent to 40 per cent. Graduate earnings premiums have also held up or increased in the face of expanded enrolment everywhere from Canada to France, Spain and the Netherlands.”

One giant mess that will wreck the lives of many. All predicable. Cheap money, bums on seats, and a country that finds it hard to distinguish between being a spiv and a businessman/woman.

Britain’s worst political scandal of this century.

In February 2025 Peter Mandelson was asked by the Financial Times about his relationship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The soon-to-be British ambassador to America offered a forthright response. “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”

The Economist