Tim Cook wrote a winning recipe for Apple. From The Economist

Apple’s market value has grown 11-fold on Mr Cook’s watch as, counting everything including dividends, he has stuffed some $4.6trn into the pockets of Apple’s shareholders. That is over $850m for every day of his long tenure.

The invention of Wales

Traditionally, one thing stood in the way of Welsh independence: the Welsh.

So true.

The Economist

Adam Tooze’s Chartbook Newsletter about April’s IMF and World Bank meetings.

Chartbook 440: Between complacency, escapism and cognitive dissonance. Impressions from the spring week in Washington, April 2026.

In one particularly candid, off the record exchange, a well-connected DC/corporate operator remarked to a large table: “We know we are burning the house down. An entire system is being reduced to ashes. Its a historic transformation. But, you know, new growth flourishes after a fire.”

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.”