I recently spent some time with former colleagues from academia. All of them brilliant, peak human capital. Almost all of them fundamentally unable to plug into the economy, inoculated against productivity by a youth spent experimenting in laboratories instead of building wealth for society. Dealing with real people in the real world. 90% of them have left academia in the last 10-15 years, and 90% of those are functionally unemployed. Grad school does a lousy job of training scientists to be professors (since most of them don't get the good postdoc or tenure track position) and an even worse job of preparing people for real life. We complain that our societal infrastructure is collapsing, our state capacity is low, our incumbent industries are faltering. Where are the next generation of leaders that can push us forward? A huge fraction of them were conveyor-belted into academia by schooling systems that have no mechanism to channel ambition and 99+%ile competence, and our universities are mostly hedge funds with glorified psych wards/academic departments on the side, running an insane pyramid scheme that exists only to prove, over and over again, the Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. We literally poured trillions of dollars into state-funded research and effectively neutered our elite civilian technical leadership development programs. I recently asked a few academic friends if they were finding AI useful in accelerating their programs of research. You know, to solve the Big Problem their entire field exists to solve? Some were. But most were complaining about how it created pedagogical issues, explaining how their department decided to ban the use of AI, or how it took 18 months to approve an enterprise account, or how they tried Gemini 2 on a puzzle a year ago and it wasn't very helpful, or repeating nonsense about datacenters and water consumption, or supposed IP theft by model companies, as though that has any bearing on their ability to, eg, accelerate a cure for cancer. Elon sometimes calls AI a supersonic tsunami - a huge wave you don't see coming. I see it coming. But even the people who you'd think have been waiting for this their entire careers are steadfastly looking in the other direction.

McGill's accuse Swinney of behaving like dictator over bus plans bbc.in/4sbVe4g

Excellent article by @CitySamuel at @thetimes on @neso_energy's challenges in running the grid She quotes Andrew Larkins, an energy consultant and former Ofgem adviser, saying: “They’re at risk of normalising something that’s meant to be part of an emergency system… It shows how hard they’re having to work to keep the lights on.” Juliet points out the lack of transparency at NESO which limits our ability to understand what's going on, comparing it to Australian system operator @AEMO_Energy which takes a more open approach She says: "The broader answer is that governments, regulators and owners of the system have indulged a decade of wishful thinking and under-investment, pretending they know how to pull off a radical energy transition when they have devoted appallingly little forethought, planning and money to the question. The electricity grid used to run off a hundred or so fossil fuel generators, which can be turned up and down on request and are mechanically stable because they spin big, heavy rotors. Demand also tended to follow a pattern. This made balancing power supply and demand fairly straightforward. Now, large portions of our power (some days, all of it) come from a mix of undersea cables, renewables plants and batteries, all of which can abruptly and unpredictably turn off and on. Small units, such as rooftop solar, don’t even send data to the grid. Customers are using new, variable gadgets like smart meters and electric cars. Forecasting and responding to changes has become, to be technical, a total bloody nightmare. “We can’t see how much reserve we have,” says the engineer." She concludes: "Governments, regulators, operators and owners have all conspired in the delusion that everything is fine and we can keep going at breakneck speed to “clean power 2030”. But the strain is showing and the engineers won’t pretend any more. You can’t run an electricity grid on a news grid." Of course, her column was written before today's issues - frequency going outside both the lower and upper operational frequency bounds and lots of within day interconnector trades against the market direction, violating the trading limits affecting large parts of the day NESO's insistence that there's "nothing to see here" is wearing very thin indeed #EnergySecurity @Miatsf @mgshanks @AndrewBowie_MP @ClaireCoutinho @HarrietCross_MP @ColinMoynihanUK @drlukeevans @Ashley7Fox @TiceRichard @cmackinlay @mattwridley @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @afneil @mattotele @Jonathan__Leake @energygovuk @ofgem thetimes.com/comment/columni…

This is an absolute scandal, and a textbook example of what happens when people spend other people's money without being held properly accountable for it. £642,000 of taxpayers' money allocated to tackling Scotland's addiction crisis, and the public bodies responsible cannot produce sufficient evidence to demonstrate precisely how it was spent. Not £642. Not £6,420. Nearly two-thirds of a million pounds. A quarter of Aberdeenshire's alcohol and drug funding. And here's the truly astonishing part. Auditors raised serious concerns in 2022. Four years later, the same fundamental failures remain. What exactly have these people been doing for four years, apart from attending meetings, producing reports and collecting salaries? Milton Friedman famously described the problem of spending other people's money on other people. When you're spending your own money, you have a powerful incentive to control costs and demand value. When you're spending taxpayers' money, those incentives can become remarkably weak, particularly when there are no personal consequences for failure. Scotland's addiction bureaucracy appears determined to prove his point. Of course, the auditors haven't established that the money was stolen or misspent. They've established something quite damning enough: the system cannot provide adequate assurance about how substantial public funding was used. And NHS Grampian's response is breathtaking. Apparently, changing the funding arrangements would create financial difficulties elsewhere. So institutional financial convenience becomes an argument for maintaining arrangements that auditors have identified as fundamentally inadequate. You really couldn't make it up. Imagine a small recovery charity telling its funder that it couldn't adequately account for a quarter of its funding, despite having been warned about its financial controls four years earlier. Its funding would be at risk, its governance questioned and its trustees expected to explain themselves. Yet when it's the NHS and the addiction bureaucracy, we get another improvement plan and assurances that lessons will be learned. This is institutional incompetence protected by institutional privilege. Meanwhile, 1,133 people died drug-related deaths in Scotland last year. Families are burying their children, parents and partners while the institutions entrusted with tackling this catastrophe struggle to demonstrate where the money goes, never mind whether it's changing lives. And that's the deeper scandal. We've created a system that can tell us how much money it has been allocated, how many committees have met and how many strategies have been published, but apparently cannot always demonstrate what the public has received in return. The money doesn't belong to NHS Grampian, the Alcohol and Drugs Partnership or the officials administering it. It belongs to the public. It was allocated for the benefit of people whose lives are being devastated by addiction. Yet those whose money funds the system have little meaningful oversight, while those whose lives depend upon it are left wondering what difference any of this expenditure has made. Four years of warnings. £642,000 without adequate financial assurance. Another 1,133 people dead. And where is the personal accountability? At what point does incompetence become grounds for dismissal rather than another taxpayer-funded action plan? Other people's money. Other people's lives. Apparently nobody's responsibility. pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/new…

The @AuditScotland @NHSaaa Report November 2025. Say’s it all really and got worse…@scotgov @AConstance23 . audit.scot/uploads/2025-11/s…

Spicy take incoming. 🔥🔥 The combined bomber offensive in WW2 finally crippled the Axis powers by destroying their fuel supply chain. Then it took the industrial might of the entire US to build tens of thousands of bombers. Now anyone between you and the Middle East can burn down a refinery, tank farm, pipeline, or tanker, with an easily assembled robotic flying bomb that costs less than my AI subscriptions. @PeterZeihan predicted "the tanker war" would happen in the Indian Ocean but it doesn't matter where. There's only one country that could plausibly enforce global peace on shipping lanes and only one industrial power that is self sufficient on oil supply, and it's the same country. Trump asks Iran and Zelensky to please stop blowing shit up for five minutes, but the primary victims of this phase of the kinetic conflict are China and Europe, both places that have spent decade(s) ignoring and/or undermining the Pax Americana and, in Europe's case, going out of their way to destroy their own economies. China wants to be a big boy on the global stage? Let them spend their own blood and treasure pacifying the Middle East. Europe wants to stick it to Trump? It's easier to tell the yanks to get fucked if you don't rely on them for literally every aspect of your industrial infrastructure and economic stability. I've been in rooms with senior energy ministers from Europe and China. The Chinese are rational and pragmatic, the Europeans are functionally comatose, but neither party has a better plan than getting into a bidding war to buy whatever LNG the US can spare, forever. It is blindingly obvious to me that the least unstable future equilibrium is one where oil users localize supply using solar synthetic fuel tech, essentially a silico-industrial form of farm-to-table agriculture. Short supply chains, locally secured. It is equally obvious to me that a generation of people who grew up in the "developed" world are going to endure a decade or more of severe hardship before they, collectively, accept the L and move to the next step. Most people would rather watch their neighbor freeze than admit they were wrong.

I remember being absolutely sickened by the commentary at the time. People I once respected were falling over themselves to portray girls aged just 12 to 14 as racist thugs and aggressors. The implied accusations of racism were disgusting, as was the extraordinary eagerness to condemn children before establishing what had actually happened. And now we know. A grown man made sexual remarks towards a 12-year-old girl, assaulted her and behaved threateningly towards four young girls. His sister admitted dragging another girl to the ground by her hair and striking her. The sheriff rejected his account of events. The punishment? Community service. Not a single day in prison. I find that utterly disgraceful. What message does that send about the seriousness of intimidating and assaulting children? But there is another elephant in the room. Class. I cannot help wondering how differently this would have unfolded had these been middle-class girls from an affluent neighbourhood, rather than working-class girls from Lochee. Would they have been branded racist thugs quite so readily? Would their distress have been dismissed? Or would we have heard endless lectures about safeguarding, trauma, sexual harassment and violence against women and girls? I think we know the answer. There is a particularly ugly form of class prejudice among some of our supposedly enlightened commentators. A frightened middle-class girl is a victim deserving protection. A frightened working-class girl with the wrong accent and postcode is apparently a thug. And the implied racism narrative made it worse. The nationality of the adults involved should have been irrelevant. Had Scottish adults behaved this way towards Bulgarian girls, I suspect the outrage would have been deafening. Some people were so desperate to identify racism that they appeared willing to overlook the actual abuse of children. Police Scotland subsequently acknowledged that its initial account did not fully reflect what happened. @JohnSwinney apologised. But where are the apologies from those who so confidently vilified these girls? I've spent decades working with people whom respectable society finds easy to dismiss. I know how quickly prejudice can masquerade as moral superiority. What disturbed me most was watching people who endlessly preach compassion, equality and protecting the vulnerable apparently abandon those principles when the victims didn't fit their preferred political narrative. I lost respect for people over this. Not because they initially got the facts wrong, but because of how eagerly they embraced a narrative that suited their prejudices. Some of these very people have built entire careers on claiming to speak for and defend the working class. Yet when confronted with vulnerable working-class girls who didn't fit their preferred political narrative, their much-vaunted compassion seemed to evaporate. It was a deeply revealing moment. I learned rather more about their prejudices than I ever did from their lectures about mine. If your compassion depends on someone's nationality, class, accent or political usefulness, it isn't compassion. It's prejudice dressed up as principle. These were children. Working-class girls who deserved protection, not public vilification. And if we've reached the point where protecting a political narrative matters more than protecting children, something has gone very badly wrong. Shame on those who condemned them. And shame on those who still cannot bring themselves to admit they were wrong.

The AI Rally Trapdoor Just Swung Open Violently zerohedge.com/markets/ai-ral…