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

It [Finland] has more heavy metal bands per capita than any other nation. In the far north, for the few days around the winter solstice, the sun does not rise.

Finland has been ranked the happiest country on Earth by the UN for the last eight years in a row. A world leader in childcare

?Causality (Link)

The Trump team went to Europe in a state of malign ignorance, exemplified by Trump saying during his Davos harangue that “without us, you’d all be speaking German.”

Most Swiss speak … German. Paul Krugman.

I guess the name says it all. US medicine.

Some generic drugs that go for $97 at Costco can cost $19,200 at a specialty mail order pharmacy run by a PBM. (Matt Stoller on Substack)

Smedley Butler – Wikipedia

In addition to his speeches to pacifist groups, he served from 1935 to 1937 as a spokesman for the American League Against War and Fascism.[67][68] In 1935, he wrote the exposé War Is a Racket, a trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject are summarized in the following passage from the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:[15]

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was an American major general in the United States Marine Corps, writer, anti-war activist, and whistleblower.

Ralph Towner, March 1, 1940 – January 18, 2026, died in Rome.

I first came across Ralph Towner’s name in an interview with Larry Corryell in NME, who described him —wait for it— as the world’s greatest guitarist! The interviewing journalist had never heard of him, so Coryell directed him to Weather Report’s 1972 album I Sing the Body Electric where Towner delivered an acoustic guitar solo on the track The Moors.

The first Towner album I bought was Diary, in around 1974. A track, called Icarus, featuring Towner playing both piano and guitar, got me hooked. Throughout his career he mainly played nylon-strung classical guitars and steel strung acoustics, but he was something very special with a 12-string— and he played it with the fingers. His ability to play against louder instruments has always shocked me.

Then there was the album Solstice (on ECM) in 1975. Jan Garbarak on saxophone, made other ’jazz’ seem dull and parochial, Jon Christensen on drums with a minimalist kit, and Eberhard Weber on double and electric bass (I once saw Eberhard play in a primary school one evening in Vienna). Two tracks, Oceanus and Nimbus demonstrate what I think were Towner’s unique set of musical and technical skills. Different style and genre, but it was like listening to Hendrix for the very first time.