James Savage

So what’s the plan then?

Canada and the US at opposite ends of the scale on how people view their fellow citizens. Might explain something. Good to see UK much closer to Canada than US

So oil at 110 a barrel and another Khamenei in charge of Iran . Operation Epic Fury is in danger of turning into Operation Epic Failure

When the world seems impossibly grim, @PrivateEyeNews always helps...

Same data, two different charts! A reminder that context - and proper explanation etc is vital!

This was quite the moment on quite the day out on Ile Longue today. La Marseillaise, sung in a high-security nuclear submarine base

Cyprus offers hard lessons for UK defence: - weakness of its anti-air defences - spending debate too often framed around Russia, the armed forces are exposed against far lesser enemies too - initially denying US rights to bases made no difference. Iran hit anyway. War may chose you regardless of your intent

Ah here, headline of the year, 10/10

Never in my life have a heard a French Geordie accent until now 😂😂

No, the white collar jobs are not going away in 18 months! I was furious with the populist-baiting language (in line with @DarioAmodei 's and @sama's also preferred apocalyptic usage) that Microsoft's @mustafasuleyman used in his FT interview, threatening everyone's jobs: “White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” Not only do I not see the point of this backlash inducing language, I also believe it shows no understanding of the way the labour market and organizations actually works and what people do all day. (My book on this with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu will be out soon.). Don't get me wrong: I believe AI is a huge deal, and will radically change the world. But many white collar jobs are Messy jobs, as our book (and the post linked below) will explain: automating the automatable tasks within them is not near to automating the job. Let me make the point with the attached @jburnmurdoch graph on London. London needs 88,000 new homes per year. In the first nine months of 2025, just 3,248 private homes started construction. Twenty-three of London's thirty-three boroughs recorded zero new housing starts in the first quarter of 2025. Planning permissions have fallen to their lowest level since records began in 2006. Construction of new rental homes fell by 80 percent in a single year. All this is after Starmer declared his government wants to "build, baby, build." Does anyone think AI will fix this? All the technology to design a building exists, and existed pre-AI. The bottleneck in London housing is human. What stops homes from being built in London are environmental and land use regulations and neighbors that weponize them. AI can draft the review, but that is a trivial bit. It cannot convince the environmental group to drop its lawsuit or persuade politicians or negotiate with the neighbors. These obstacles employ people. Suleyman and Amodei imagine that project managers spend their days doing Gantt charts, call their job "sitting down at a computer" and dream of automating them. But the job of the planning guys is not to fill in forms, but to negotiate and coordinate developers, residents, environmental groups, heritage bodies, and elected politicians who all have incompatible interests. At other levels and in other jobs the same is true- radiologists spend only 1/3 of their time reading scans (see this great piece worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algo…). Their job was supposed to be gone in 2017; in fact, the demand for radiologists is booming (employment and wages are sharply up). Many consultants try to elicit the tacit, local, knowledge of what is actually going on in a firm in order to make a recommendation. Yes, if you spend your day just doing PPTs, you will be replaced. But how many people do just that? Organisations/managers resolve conflicts and deal with exceptions. Making a decision stick requires authority: being a person who can be blamed, sued, or fired. The manager resolves disputes about the rules, not just within them. Think of your last renovation in your house. The contractor trying to to get the guy installing the windows and the guys from the floor to show up and do a good job, a mess right? No algorithm does that. AI will make white-collar workers more productive. Some single-task, automatable roles will shrink (doing taxes is an expert system, drafting contracts too), many tasks will be automated. Also, the disruption of career ladders is a real concern. But "most tasks fully automated in 18 months" is not a prediction. It is marketing, designed to sell enterprise subscriptions and justify capital expenditure. The real world is messy. The mess is not a bug. It is what happens when human beings with competing interests try to get things done together. For more on "Messy Jobs", here is my New Years post: siliconcontinent.com/p/a-new-years-…. A book out soon.

Det krävs utländska journalister för att rapportera om svenska samhällsproblem i tid

Gulp. Don’t want to freak you out, but…

I’d be first to concede that lobby journalism is sometimes too concerned with political soap operas at expense of the substance but does Starmer *seriously* think the press ought to have dialled back on Mandelson to make way for the govt’s zillionth breakfast club press release?

If Mandelson wasn’t already finished, this would certainly do it…

The Mail has a point here. The more comes out the clearer it gets: Epstein was interacting first and foremost with Russia-aligned interests. It is not just a story about a notorious pedophile.

Ladies and gentleman. The English language.

Red in tooth and claw tabloid editors in UK will SURELY have no choice but to just go for Trump no he has said our boys and girls avoided fire in American wars we supported…. this is an ACID test… it happened out of time so they will have to go tomorrow… or are they frit?

I don’t know who comes off worse from this court sketch. Harry or Winston Churchill

Hard to believe this is happening