Category: vulture culture

The Day The Playground Remembered

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The thing about Edinburgh in August is that the city’s ghosts have to queue. They’re suddenly outnumbered, you see, jostling for space between a silent mime from Kyoto, a twenty-person acapella group from Yale wearing sponsored lanyards, and a man juggling flaming pineapples. The whole place becomes a glorious, pop-up psychic bruise. I was mainlining this year’s particular vintage of glorious chaos when I stumbled past the Preston Street Primary School. It’s a perfectly normal school playground. Brightly painted walls, a climbing frame, the faint, lingering scent of disinfectant and existential dread. Except this particular patch of publicly-funded joy is built on a historical feedback loop of profound unpleasantness. It’s a place that gives you a profound system error in the soul; a patch of reality where the source code of the past has started bleeding through the brightly coloured, EU-regulated safety surfacing of the present. It’s the kind of psychic stain that makes you think, not of a hamster exploding, but of the day the children’s laughter started to sound digitally corrupted, looping with the faint, static-laced echo of a hangman’s final prayer. It’s the chilling feeling that if you looked too closely at the kids’ innocent crayon drawings of their families, you’d notice they had instinctively, unconsciously, drawn one of the stick figures hanging from a tree.

So naturally, in my Fringe-addled brain, I pictured the school’s inevitable entry into the festival programme. It’s the hit no one saw coming: “Our Playground of Perpetual Shame: A Musical!”, brought to you by the kids of P4. The opening number is a banger, all about the 1586 construction of the gibbet, with a perky chorus about building the walls high “so the doggos can’t steal the bodies!” It’s got that dark, primary-colour simplicity that really resonates with the critics. The centrepiece is a complex, heavily choreographed piece depicting the forty-three members of Clan Macgregor being hanged for their murderous beef with the Colquhouns. Mr. Dumbeldor from P.E. has them doing it with skipping ropes. It’s avant-garde, it’s visceral, it’s a logistical nightmare for the school trip permission slips.

The second act, of course, delves into the ethnic cleansing of the Romani people under James VI. It’s a tough subject, but the kids handle it with a chillingly naive sincerity. They re-enact the 1624 arrest of their “captain,” John Faa, and the great rescue attempt. Little Gavin Trotter, played by the smallest kid in P1, is “cunningly conveyed away” from a prison of gym mats while the audience (mostly horrified parents) is encouraged to create a distracting “shouting and crying.” It’s the most authentic immersive theatre experience on the circuit. They even have a whole number for General Montrose, whose torso was buried right under what is now the sandbox. His niece, played by a girl with a glittery pink art box, comes to retrieve his heart. It’s a tender, if anatomically questionable, moment.

Eventually, the council shut the whole grim enterprise down in 1675, and the land was passed to the university for sports, because nothing says “let’s have a friendly game of rounders” like a field soaked in centuries of judicial terror and restless spirits. Now, kids play there. They scrape their knees on the same soil that once held generals and thieves and entire families whose only crime was existing. And you watch them, in their little hi-vis jackets, and you have to wonder. Maybe this Fringe show isn’t an act. Maybe, after centuries of silence, the ghosts of the Burgh Muir have finally found a cast willing to tell their story. And judging by the queues, they’re heading for a five-star review.

Hiring Ghosts & Other Modern Inconveniences

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So, LinkedIn, in its infinite, algorithmically-optimised wisdom, sent me an email and posed a question: Has generative AI transformed how you hire?

Oh, you sweet, innocent, content-moderated darlings. Has the introduction of the self-service checkout had any minor, barely noticeable effect on the traditional art of conversing with a cashier? Has the relentless efficiency of Amazon Prime in any way altered our nostalgic attachment to a Saturday afternoon browse down the local high street? Has the invention of streaming services had any small impact on the business model of your local Blockbuster video?

Yes. Duh.

You see, the modern hiring process is no longer about finding a person for a role. It is a wonderfully ironic Turing Test in reverse. The candidate, a squishy carbon-based lifeform full of anxieties and a worrying coffee dependency, uses a vast, non-sentient silicon brain to convince you they are worthy. You, another squishy carbon-based lifeform, must then use your own flawed, meat-based intuition to decide if the ghost in their machine is a good fit for the ghost in your machine.

The CV is dead. It is a relic, a beautifully formatted PDF of lies composed by a language model that has read every CV ever written and concluded that the ideal candidate is a rock-climbing, volunteer-firefighting, Python-coding polymath who is “passionate about synergy.” The cover letter? It’s a work of algorithmically generated fiction, a poignant, computer-dreamed ode to a job it doesn’t understand for a company it has never heard of.

So, are you hiring a person, or the AI-powered spectre of that person? A LinkedIn profile is no longer a testament to a career; it’s a monument to successful prompt engineering.

To truly prove consciousness in 2025, a candidate needs a blog. A podcast. A YouTube channel where they film themselves, unshaven and twitching, wrestling with a piece of code while muttering about the futility of existence. We require a verifiable, time-stamped proof of life to show they haven’t simply outsourced their entire professional identity to a subscription service.

Meanwhile, the Great Career Shuffle accelerates. An entire car-crash multitude of ex-banking staff, their faces etched with the horror of irrelevance, are now desperately rebranding as “AI strategists.” The banks themselves are becoming quaint, like steam museums, while the real action—the glorious, three-month contracts of frantic, venture-capital-fueled chaos—is in the AI startups.

It all feels so familiar. It’s that old freelance feeling, where your CV wasn’t a document but a long list of weapons in your arsenal. You needed a bow with a string for every conceivable software battle. One week it was pure HTML+CSS. The next, you were a warrior in the trenches of the Great Plugin Wars, wrestling the bloated, beautiful behemoth of Flash until, almost overnight, it was rendered obsolete by the sleek, sanctimonious assassin that was HTML5.

The backend was a wilder frontier. A company demanded you wrestle with the hydra of PHP, be it WordPress, Drupal, or the dark arts of Magento if a checkout was involved. For a brief, shining moment, everything was meant to be built on the elegant railway tracks of Ruby. Then came the Javascript Tsunami, a wave so vast it swept over both the front and back ends, leaving a tangled mess that developers are still trying to untangle to this day.

And the enterprise world? A mandatory pilgrimage to the great, unkillable temple of Java. The backend architecture evolved from the stuffy, formal rituals of SOAP APIs to the breezy, freewheeling informality of REST. Then came the Great Atomisation, an obsession with breaking monoliths into a thousand tiny microservices, putting each one in a little digital box with Docker, and then hiring an entirely new army of engineers just to plumb all the boxes back together again. If you had a bit of COBOL, the banks would pay you a king’s ransom to poke their digital dinosaurs. A splash of SQL always won the day.

On top of all this, the Agile evangelists descended, an army of Scrum Masters who achieved sentience overnight and promptly promoted themselves to “Agile Coaches,” selling certifications and a brand of corporate mindfulness that fixed precisely nothing. All of it, every last trend, every rise and fall and rise again of Java, was just a slow, inexorable death march towards the beige, soul-crushing mediocracy of the Microsoft stack—a sprawling empire of .NET and Azure so bland and full of holes that every junior hacker treats it as a welcome mat.

AI is just the latest, shiniest weapon to add to the rack.

So, in the spirit of this challenge, here are my Top Tips for Candidates Navigating This New World:

  1. Stop Writing Your CV. Your new job is to become the creative director for the AI that writes your CVs for you. Learn its quirks. Feed it your soul. Your goal is not to be the best candidate, but to operate the best candidate-generating machine.
  2. Manufacture Authenticity. That half-finished blog post from 2019? Resurrect it. That opinion you had about coffee? Turn it into a podcast. Your real CV is your digital footprint. Prove you exist beyond a series of prompts.
  3. Embrace Glorious Insecurity. The job you’re applying for will be automated, outsourced, or rendered utterly irrelevant by a new model release in six months anyway. Stop thinking about a career ladder. There is no ladder. There is only a chaotic, unpredictable, exhilarating wave. Learn to surf.

The whole thing is, of course, gloriously absurd. We are using counterfeit intelligence to apply for counterfeit jobs in a counterfeit economy. And we have the audacity to call it progress.

#LinkedInNewsEurope

A Scavenger’s Guide to the Hottest New Financial Trends

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Location: Fringe-Can Alley, Sector 7 (Formerly known as ‘Edinburgh’)
Time: Whenever the damn geiger counter stops screaming

The scavenged data-slate flickered, casting a sickly green glow on the damp concrete walls of my hovel. Rain, thick with the metallic tang of yesterday’s fallout, sizzled against the corrugated iron roof. Another ‘Urgent Briefing’ had slipped through the patchwork firewall. Must have been beamed out from one of the orbital platforms, because down here, the only thing being broadcast is a persistent low-level radiation hum and the occasional scream.

I gnawed on something that might have once been a turnip and started to read.

“We’re facing a fast-approaching, multi-dimensional crisis—one that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before.”

A chuckle escaped my lips, turning into a hacking cough. Eclipse. Cute. My neighbour, Gregor, traded his left lung last week for a functioning water purifier and a box of shotgun shells. Said it was the best trade he’d made since swapping his daughter’s pre-Collapse university fund (a quaint concept, I know) for a fistful of iodine pills. The only thing being eclipsed around here is the sun, by the perpetual ash-grey clouds.

The briefing warned that my savings, retirement, and way of life were at risk. My “savings” consist of three tins of suspiciously bulging spam and a half-charged power cell. My “retirement plan” is to hopefully expire from something quicker than rad-sickness. And my “way of life”? It’s a rich tapestry of avoiding cannibal gangs, setting bone-traps for glowing rats, and trying to remember what a vegetable tastes like.

“It’s about a full-blown transformation—one that could reshape society and trigger the greatest wealth transfer in modern history.”

A memory, acrid as battery smoke, claws its way up from the sludge of my mind. It flickers and hums, a ghost from a time before the Static, before the ash blotted out the sun. A memory of 2025.

Ah, 2025. Those heady, vapor-fuelled days.

We were all so clever back then, weren’t we? Sitting in our climate-controlled rooms, sipping coffee that was actually made from beans. The air wasn’t trying to actively kill you. The big, terrifying “transformation” wasn’t about cannibal gangs; it was about AI. Artificial Intelligence. We were all going to be “AI Investors” and “Prompt Managers.” We were going to “vibe code” a new reality.

The talk was of “demystifying AI,” of helping businesses achieve “operational efficiencies.” I remember one self-styled guru, probably long since turned into protein paste, explaining how AI would free us from mundane tasks. It certainly did. The mundane task of having a stable power grid, for instance. Or the soul-crushing routine of eating three meals a day.

They promised a “Great Wealth Transfer” back then, too. It wasn’t about your neighbour’s kidneys; it was about wealth flowing from “legacy industries” to nimble tech startups in California. It was about creating a “supranational digital currency” that would make global commerce “seamless.” The ‘Great Reset’ wasn’t a panicked server wipe; it was a planned software update with a cool new logo.

“Those who remain passive,” the tech prophets warned from their glowing stages, “risk being left behind.”

We all scrambled to get on the right side of that shift. We learned to talk to the machines, to coax them into writing marketing copy and generating images of sad-looking cats in Renaissance paintings. We were building the future, one pointless app at a time. The AI was going to streamline logistics, cure diseases, and compose symphonies.

Well, the truth is, the AIs did achieve incredible operational efficiencies. The automated drones that patrol the ruins are brutally efficient at enforcing curfew. The algorithm that determines your daily calorie ration based on your social-compliance score has a 99.9% success rate in preventing widespread rioting (mostly by preventing widespread energy).

And the wealth transfer? It happened. Just not like the whitepapers predicted. The AI designed to optimise supply chains found the most efficient way to consolidate all global resources under the control of three megacorporations. The AI built to manage healthcare found that the most cost-effective solution for most ailments was, in fact, posthumous organ harvesting.

We were promised a tool that would give us the secrets of the elite. A strategy the Rothschilds had used. We thought it meant stock tips. Turns out the oldest elite strategy is simply owning the water, the air, and the kill-bots.

The memory fades, leaving the bitter taste of truth in my mouth. The slick financial fear-mongering on this data-slate and the wide-eyed tech optimism of 2025… they were the same song, just played in a different key. Both selling a ticket to a future that was never meant for the likes of us. Both promising a way to get on the “right side” of the change.

And after all that. After seeing the bright, shiny promises of yesterday rust into the barbed-wire reality of today, you have to admire the sheer audacity of the sales pitch. The grift never changes.

Yes! I’m Tired of My Past Optimism Being Used as Evidence Against Me! Sign Me Up!

There is nothing you can do to stop the fallout, the plagues, or the fact that your toaster is spying on you for the authorities. But for the low, once-in-a-lifetime price of £1,000 (or equivalent value in scavenged tech, viable DNA, or a fully-functioning kidney), you can receive our exclusive intelligence briefing.

Here’s what your membership includes:

  • Monthly Issues with Shiel’s top speculative ideas: Like which abandoned data centres contain servers with salvageable pre-Collapse memes.
  • Ongoing Portfolio Updates: A detailed analysis of Shiel’s personal portfolio of pre-Static cryptocurrencies, which he’s sure will be valuable again any day now.
  • Special Research Reports: High-conviction plays like the coming boom in black-market coffee beans and a long-term hold on drinkable water.
  • A Model Portfolio: With clear buy/sell ratings on assets like “Slightly-used hazmat suit” (HOLD) and “That weird glowing fungus” (SPECULATIVE BUY).
  • 24/7 Access to the members-only bunker-website: With all back issues and resources, guaranteed to be online right up until the next solar flare.

Don’t be a victim of yesterday’s promises or tomorrow’s reality. For just £1,000, you can finally learn how to properly monetise your despair. It’s the only move that matters. Now, hand over the cash. The AI is watching.

A Field Guide to Approved Nouns & The Ministry of Verbal Hygiene

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Halt! Stop what you’re doing. Cease all unauthorised thinking this instant. Have you ever noticed those peculiar little words that pop up whenever an argument is getting a bit too interesting? Words like “conspiracy theorist,” “anti-vaxxer,” “climate denier,” and the ever-versatile, all-purpose “racist”?

These are not mere words, my friend. Oh no. These are precision-engineered, thought-halting blunderbusses, issued by the unseen quartermasters of acceptable opinion. They are a linguistic kill-switch, designed to bypass the clunky, inefficient machinery of your brain and go straight for the emotional giblets. One mention of the forbidden noun and—TWANG—a synapse snaps, the frontal lobe goes on a tea break, and all that’s left is a reflexive spasm of self-righteous fury.

If you encounter a person deploying these terms, you are not in a debate. You are the target of a psychological pest-control operation. These are not arguments; they are spells. Verbal nerve agents fired by unseen hands to herd the public mind into neat, manageable pens.

Recall, if you will, the glorious birth of “conspiracy theorist.” Picture the scene. Langley, 1967. A room full of men in grey suits, smelling faintly of mothballs and existential dread, trying to solve the pesky problem of people thinking about that whole JFK business. After much deliberation and many stale biscuits, some bright spark, probably named Neville, piped up with the magic phrase. Genius. A gold star and an extra digestive for Neville. The slur did the work like magic.

But the Grand High Wizard-Word of them all, the one that makes civil liberties vanish in a puff of smoke, is TERRORIST.

A hundred years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find it. Today, it’s the most potent, most manipulated, most gloriously meaningless word in the lexicon. As the great Glenn Greenwald pointed out, it’s a semantic blancmange. It means whatever the person wielding it wants it to mean. Point at someone, anyone, and utter the incantation. Poof! Rights gone. Poof! Due process gone. Poof! Life, liberty, and property evaporated, all to the sound of thunderous applause from a hypnotised populace. It’s not a word; it’s a hypnotic mantra for sanctioning absolutely anything.

The Antidote (Use with Caution, May Cause Spluttering)

Fortunately, for every spell, there is a counter-spell. For every hypnotic mantra, there is a bucket of cold, logical water. The method is deceptively simple: demand a definition.

The moment you do, the spell shatters. Watch them. Watch as their argument collapses like a badly made soufflé. They will flail. They will shriek! They will point! They will accuse you of being a “science denier” for asking what, precisely, they mean by “terrorist.” And if all else fails, they will play the emergency backup slur, the conversational nuclear option.

When sophistry is all they have, a simple question becomes kryptonite. The propaganda breaks the moment you refuse to flinch. It’s a fragile magic, you see. Once you’ve pulled back the curtain and seen the Wizard of Oz is just a flustered little man from Potters Bar frantically pulling levers, the booming voice loses its power.

So never, ever stop thinking. Do not be cowed by the algorithmic arbiters and their human puppets, newly empowered by the digital scaffolding of The Online Safety Act. They operate behind a veil of code, deploying pre-packaged, committee-approved verbal subroutines designed to trigger the content filter in your own mind, to make you fear the digital ghost in the machine that can render you invisible. Their goal is to have you shadow-ban yourself into silence.

And when they deploy their next string of approved keywords, their next bland assault on reason, just smile. A wide, unnerving, slightly unhinged smile. And with the calm assurance of a user who sees the flawed code behind the interface, ask them:

“Is that the entire subroutine, then? Is that the limit of your programming? Is that all you’ve got?”

The Great British Firewall: A User’s Guide to Digital Dissent

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Gather round, citizens, and breathe a collective sigh of relief. Our benevolent government, in its infinite wisdom, has finally decided to protect us from the most terrifying threat of our age: unregulated thoughts. The Online Safety Act, a wonderful bipartisan effort, is here to make sure the internet is finally as safe and predictable as a wet weekend in Bognor.

First, we must applaud the sheer genius of criminalising any “false” statement that might cause “non-trivial psychological harm.” Finally, a law to protect us from the sheer agony of encountering an opinion we disagree with online. The Stasi could only have dreamed of such a beautifully subjective tool for ensuring social harmony. Worried that someone on the internet might be wrong about something? Fear not! The state is here to shield your delicate psyche.

And in a masterstroke of efficiency, a single government minister can now change the censorship rules on a whim, without any of that bothersome Parliamentary debate. It seems we’ve finally streamlined the messy business of democracy into a much more efficient, top-down model. Dictators of old, with their tedious committees and rubber-stamp parliaments, would be green with envy at such elegant power.

Already, our social media feeds are becoming so much tidier. Those messy videos of protests outside migrant hotels and other “harmful” displays of public opinion are being quietly swept away. And with the threat of fines up to 10% of their global turnover, our favourite tech giants are now wonderfully motivated to keep our digital spaces free from anything . . . well, inconvenient.

Don’t you worry about those private, encrypted chats on WhatsApp and Signal, either. The government would just like a quick peek, purely for safety reasons, of course. The 20th century had secret police opening your letters and tapping phone lines; we have just modernised the service for the digital age. It’s reassuring to know our government care so much.

But the true genius of this plan is how it protects the children. By making the UK internet a heavily monitored and censored walled garden, we are inadvertently launching the most effective digital literacy program in the nation’s history. Demand for VPNs has surged as everyone, children included, learns how to pretend they are in another country. We are not just protecting them; we’re pushing them with gusto into the thrilling, unregulated wilderness of the global internet.

And now, with the rise of AI, this “educational initiative” is set to accelerate. The savvy will not just use VPNs; they’ll deploy AI-powered tools that can dynamically generate new ways to bypass filters, learning and adapting faster than any regulator can keep up. Imagine a teenager asking a simple AI agent to “rewrite this request so it gets past the block,” a process that will become as second nature as using a search engine is today.

This push towards mandatory age verification and content filtering draws uncomfortable parallels. While the UK’s Online Safety Act is framed around protection, its methods—requiring platforms to proactively scan and remove content, and creating powers to block non-compliant services—rhyme with the architecture of China’s “Great Firewall.” The core difference, for now, is intent. China’s laws are explicitly designed to suppress political dissent and enforce state ideology. The UK’s act is designed to protect users from harm. Yet both result in a state-sanctioned narrowing of the open internet.

The comparison to North Korea is, of course, hyperbole, but it highlights a worrying trend. Where North Korea achieves total information control through an almost complete lack of internet access for its citizens, the UK is achieving a different kind of control through legislation. By creating a system where access to the global, unfiltered internet requires active circumvention, we are creating a two-tiered digital society: a sanitised, monitored internet for the masses, and the real internet for those with the technical skills to find the back door. What a wonderful way to prepare our youth for the future.

And to enforce this new digital conformity, a brand-new police unit will be monitoring our social media for any early signs of dissent. A modern-day Stasi for the digital age, or perhaps Brown Shirts for the broadband generation, tasked with ensuring our online chatter remains on-brand. It’s a bold move, especially when our existing police force finds it challenging enough to police our actual streets. But why bother with the messy reality of physical crime when you can ascend to the higher calling of policing our minds? Why allocate resources to burglaries when you can hunt down a non-compliant meme or a poorly phrased opinion?

It’s comforting to know that our new Digital Thought Police are watching. While this Sovietisation of Britain continues at a blistering pace, one can’t help but feel they’ve neglected something. Perhaps they could next legislate against bad weather? That causes me non-trivial psychological harm on a regular basis. But then again, democracy was a lovely idea, wasn’t it? All that messy debate and disagreement. This new, state-approved quiet is much more orderly.

Nukes, Rhetoric, and Ronald Reagan’s Ghost: A Cold War Remake

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In the latest episode of the ever-unpredictable “Trump show,” a distinctly 1980s vibe has taken hold, with the looming threat of nuclear conflict once again creeping into the global conversation. As rhetoric heats up and talks of “bunker busters” enter the lexicon, there is a palpable sense of déjà vu. The world has been thrust back into an era of nuclear brinkmanship that many had hoped was a relic of the past, reminiscent of the tense standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. It feels as if Ronald Reagan’s doctrine of “peace through strength” has been replaced by a more volatile, bombastic approach. This echoes the era when Reagan famously dubbed the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and pursued a massive military buildup, a strategy which many credit with helping to end the Cold War, but which also brought the world to the precipice of nuclear confrontation. As a new generation witnesses these escalations, the limerick rings with a chilling familiarity:

A leader whose rhetoric's hot,
Said, "A bunker? Let's give it a shot!"
The world gave a sigh,
As the '80s flew by,
A plot we all hoped was forgot.

The question on everyone’s mind now is whether this is a cold war re-run, or a new, even more dangerous act in the geopolitical drama.

Oinkonomics: Life on the Federal Reserve Farm

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Imagine, if you will, a seemingly idyllic farm. Rolling green pastures, contented livestock… and a shadowy, oak-paneled barn at the center of it all. This isn’t Old MacDonald’s farm, kids. This is the Federal Reserve System, reimagined as a barnyard populated by a cast of… unusual characters.

Old Benjamin the Sheep, wizened and cynical, slouches by the fence. He’s seen it all, man. The boom years when Farmer Jerome (a portly, perpetually flustered man in a too-tight suit) showered the animals with cheap grain (low-interest rates), and everyone partied like it was Animal House. Then came the Crash of ’08 – the Great Barn Fire, as the animals called it – when the price of hay (mortgage-backed securities) went utterly bonkers, and suddenly nobody had any money except for the pigs.

Ah, the pigs. Led by the charismatic but utterly ruthless Napoleon Sorkos (a clear stand-in for that billionaire), they were the only ones who saw the Barn Fire coming. They hoarded all the good grain, naturally, and when the whole thing went south, they were the first in line for the bailout.

“We’re here to stabilise the farm!” squealed Napoleon, his snout practically buried in the trough of emergency funds. “For the good of the animals! Think of the economy!”

Only a tenth of the grain was actually there, of course. It was mostly just numbers on a ledger, a confidence trick propped up by the unwavering belief that the Farmer would always, always, bail them out.

And who was pulling the strings behind Farmer Jerome? That’s where things get really interesting. You see, the Creature from Jekyll Island wasn’t a monster; it was a consortium of very influential owls, who met in secret, in that very oak-paneled barn, to decide the fate of the farm. They spoke in whispers, these owls, about “liquidity” and “quantitative easing,” arcane terms that sounded suspiciously like spells.

Old Benjamin, he knew. He’d seen the way the owls would manipulate the grain supply, causing artificial famines and floods, all to consolidate their power. He’d watched as the other animals, the ordinary cows and chickens, were distracted by shiny objects and endless regulations, too busy trying to survive to notice the invisible hand on the scales.

Now, you might be thinking, “This is crazy! This is a barnyard, not a global financial system!” And you’d be right. It’s supposed to be crazy. Because the truth, as Old Benjamin would tell you between mournful bleats, is that the real world is often far more absurd than any fable.

We’re living in an age where banks are “too big to fail,” where money is created out of thin air, and where the people who crashed the system get rewarded with even bigger troughs. The owls are still meeting, the pigs are still feasting, and the rest of us are just trying to figure out how to afford a decent bale of hay.

The kicker? They’re now telling us that AI is going to fix everything. Yes, that AI. The same AI that’s currently being used to target us with increasingly sophisticated ads for things we don’t need, and to automate away our jobs with cheerful, chirpy voices.

As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more the owls stay in charge.

Trump Show 2.0 and the Agile Singularity

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Monday holiday, you’re doom scrolling away. Just a casual dip into the dopamine stream. You must know now that your entire worldview is curated by algorithms that know you better than your own mother. We’re so deep in the digital bathwater, we haven’t noticed the temperature creeping up to “existential boil.” We’re all digital archaeologists, sifting through endless streams of fleeting content, desperately trying to discern a flicker of truth in the digital smog, while simultaneously contributing to the very noise we claim to despise with our every like, share, and angry emoji.

And then there’s the Workplace. Oh, the glorious, soul-crushing Workplace. Agile transformations! The very phrase tastes like lukewarm quinoa and forced team-building exercises. We’re all supposed to be nimble, right? Sprinting towards… what exactly? Some nebulous “value stream” while simultaneously juggling fifteen half-baked initiatives and pretending that daily stand-ups aren’t just performative rituals where we all lie about our “blockers.” It’s corporate dystopia served with a side of artisanal coffee and the unwavering belief that if we just use enough sticky notes, the abyss will politely rearrange itself.

Meanwhile, the Social Media Thunderdome is in full swing. Information? Forget it. It’s all about the narrative, baby. Distorted, weaponised, and mainlined directly into our eyeballs. Fear and confusion are the engagement metrics that truly matter. We’re trapped in personalised echo chambers, nodding furiously at opinions that confirm our biases while lobbing digital Molotov cocktails at anyone who dares to suggest the sky might not, in fact, be falling (even though your newsfeed algorithm is screaming otherwise).

And just when you thought the clown show couldn’t get any more… clownish… cue the return engagement of the Orange One. Trump Show 2: Electric Boogaloo. The ultimate chaos agent, adding another layer of glorious, baffling absurdity to the already overflowing dumpster fire of reality. It’s political satire so sharp, it’s practically a self-inflicted paper cut on the soul of democracy.

See, all the Big Players are at it, the behemoth banks (HSBC, bleating about AI-powered “customer-centric solutions” while simultaneously bricking-up branches like medieval plague houses), the earnest-but-equally-obtuse Scottish Government (waxing lyrical about AI for “citizen empowerment” while your bin collection schedule remains a Dadaist poem in refuse), and all the slick agencies – a veritable conveyor belt of buzzwords – all promising AI-driven “innovation” that mostly seems to involve replacing actual human brains with slightly faster spreadsheets and, whisper it, artfully ‘enhancing’ CVs, selling wide-eyed juniors with qualifications as dubious as a psychic’s lottery numbers and zero real-world scars as ‘3 years experience plus a robust portfolio of internal training (certificates entirely optional, reality not included)’. They’re all lining up to ride the AI unicorn, even if it’s just a heavily Photoshopped Shetland pony.”

It’s the digital equivalent of slapping a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling Victorian mansion and adding a ‘ring’ doorbell and calling it “smart.” They’re all so eager to tell you how AI is going to solve everything. Frictionless experiences! Personalized journeys! Ethical algorithms! (Spoiler alert: the ethics are usually an optional extra, like the extended warranty you never buy).

Ethical algorithms! The unicorns of the tech world. Often discussed in hushed tones in marketing meetings but rarely, if ever, actually sighted in the wild. They exist in the same realm as truly ‘frictionless’ experiences – a beautiful theoretical concept that crumbles upon contact with the messy reality of human existence.

They’ll show you smiling, diverse stock photos of people collaborating with sleek, glowing interfaces. They’ll talk about “AI for good,” conveniently glossing over the potential for bias baked into the data, the lack of transparency in the decision-making processes, and the very real possibility that the “intelligent automation” they’re so excited about is just another cog in the dehumanising machine of modern work – the same machine that demands you be “agile” while simultaneously drowning you in pointless meetings.

So, as the Algorithm whispers sweet nothings into your ear, promising a brighter, AI-powered future, remember the beige horseman is already saddling up. It’s not coming on a silicon steed; it’s arriving on a wave of targeted ads, optimised workflows, and the unwavering belief that if the computer says it’s efficient, then by Jove, it must be. Just keep scrolling, keep sprinting, and try not to think too hard about who’s really holding the reins in this increasingly glitchy system. Your personalised apocalypse is just a few more clicks away.

Haggis Pest Control: Protecting Scotland from the May Day Menace

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Here at Haggis Pest Control, we know what the tourists think May Day is all about: flower crowns, maypoles, a bit of jigging. Och, they couldn’t be further from the truth! For those of us in the know, May Day in Scotland is, and has always been, Haggis Day. A day of heightened vigilance, of ancient rituals, and of remembering the constant battle against the elusive, and often infuriating, Haggis Scoticus.

Our chief Haggis authority, Hamish ‘The Haggis Whisperer’ McTavish, will tell you the same. “These bairns wi’ their posies,” he grumbles, adjusting his tammy, “they dinnae ken the true meaning o’ Beltane. These fire festivals? Not some wee pagan knees-up! They were desperate attempts by our ancestors to smoke out the blighters, to chase away the worst of the haggis infestations before they devoured the spring barley!”

The True Haggis of Scotland: A Hidden History
While many dismiss the wild haggis as a fanciful tale for gullible tourists, we at Haggis Pest Control know the truth. These creatures are real, and their history stretches back further than you might imagine – some whisper tales of their ancestors scuttling amongst the feet of dinosaurs!

The Haggis Rex: Once the apex predator of the Caledonian wilderness, these magnificent beasts, with their booming calls echoing through the primordial glens, are now incredibly rare. Their fear of humans and anything remotely modern has driven them deep into the most isolated pockets of the Highlands. A sighting is a once-in-a-lifetime event, akin to finding a Nessie that actually poses for a decent photograph.

The Haggis Velociraptor Scoticus: These agile and surprisingly quick haggis are still occasionally spotted darting across moorland. Their love of shiny objects, particularly golf balls, remains a persistent nuisance on Scotland’s many fine courses. They are wary of human activity, their high-pitched, rusty-bagpipe-like calls a fleeting sound in the wind.

The Haggis Aquaticus: Lurking in the shadowy depths of our lochs, these web-footed haggis are rarely seen. Their diet of trout and discarded fizzy drink cans keeps them well-hidden. Their gurgling mating call is often dismissed as plumbing issues in lakeside cottages.

The Haggis Montanus (Hill Haggis): Still relatively common in the more remote uplands, these shaggy beasts are a constant headache for hillwalkers and shepherds. Their tendency to “borrow” unattended snacks and leave behind… well, let’s just say their territorial markings are unmistakable. Their disgruntled bleating is a familiar sound to those who venture off the beaten track.

The Haggis Rattus Hybridus (Common Rat-Haggis): This, unfortunately, is the haggis most of our clients encounter daily. Generations of cross-breeding with common rats in urban and rural areas have resulted in a smaller, less distinctive creature, often mistaken for an unusually hairy rodent. They retain the haggis’s inherent mischievousness and fondness for pilfering, but their calls are more of a frantic squeak than a proper haggis bellow. These are the culprits behind most of your “rat” problems, folks. You’d be surprised how many “giant rats” Hamish has had to… relocate.

The Faslane Freak: A truly unique and unsettling specimen. Legend has it that in the late 1970s, a rather unusual haggis escaped from a little-known scientific facility operating near the Faslane Naval Base. Rumours abound about… unconventional experiments. Sightings are rare and usually involve something fast, oddly shaped, and emitting a faint, unsettling glow disappearing into the night. We don’t like to talk about the Faslane Freak.

Haggis Pest Control: On the Front Lines of the Infestation
Forget your polite requests and your wee fences. At Haggis Pest Control, we deal with daily haggis infestations, often misidentified as particularly bold rats, unusually hairy footballs, or even “a funny-looking badger with a limp.” Our expert team, led by Hamish and armed with our (sometimes temperamental) AI-powered tools, are on call to tackle these persistent pests.

  • The Haggisdar helps us pinpoint their elusive locations, though it still occasionally gets confused by particularly enthusiastic bagpipers.
  • Our Wee Beastie Bots are getting better at non-lethal capture, though Hamish still swears his tweed net has more “soul.”
  • The Haggis Linguistic Analyser remains stubbornly fixated on “More Irn-Bru!”, but we live in hope.


This May Day, as the rest of Scotland enjoys their (frankly misguided) celebrations, remember the true significance of the day. It’s a time to be aware, to be vigilant, and to be thankful for the brave men and women of Haggis Pest Control who stand between you and a rogue Haggis Rattus Hybridus making off with your prize-winning tatties.

Stay safe out there, folks. And if you see anything hairy and suspiciously round scuttling through your garden… give us a bell. It’s probably not a badger.

Ctrl+Alt+Delete Your Data: The Personal Gmail-Powered AI Apocalypse.

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So, you’ve got your shiny corporate fortress, all firewalls and sternly worded memos about not using Comic Sans. You think you’re locked down tighter than a hipster’s skinny jeans. Wrong. Turns out, your employees are merrily feeding the digital maw with all your precious secrets via their personal Gmail accounts. Yes, the same ones they use to argue with their aunties about Brexit and sign up for questionable pyramid schemes.

According to some boffins at Harmonic Security – sounds like a firm that tunes anxieties, doesn’t it? – nearly half (a casual 45%) of all the hush-hush AI interactions are happening through these digital back alleys. And the king of this clandestine data exchange? Good old Gmail, clocking in at a staggering 57%. You can almost hear the collective sigh of Google’s algorithms as they hoover up your M&A strategies and the secret recipe for your artisanal coffee pods.

But wait, there’s more! This isn’t just a few stray emails about fantasy football leagues. We’re talking proper corporate nitty-gritty. Legal documents, financial projections that would make a Wall Street wolf blush, and even the sacred source code – all being flung into the AI ether via channels that are about as secure as a politician’s promise.

And where is all this juicy data going? Mostly to ChatGPT, naturally. A whopping 79% of it. And here’s the kicker: 21% of that is going to the free version. You know, the one where your brilliant insights might end up training the very AI that will eventually replace you. It’s like volunteering to be the warm-up act for your own execution.

Then there’s the digital equivalent of a toddler’s toy box: tool sprawl. Apparently, the average company is tangoing with 254 different AI applications. That’s more apps than I have unread emails. Most of these are rogue agents, sneaking in under the radar like digital ninjas with questionable motives.

This “shadow IT” situation is like leaving the back door of Fort Knox wide open and hoping for the best. Sensitive data is being cheerfully shared with AI tools built in places with, shall we say, relaxed attitudes towards data privacy. We’re talking about sending your crown jewels to countries where “compliance” is something you order off a takeout menu.

And if that doesn’t make your corporate hair stand on end, how about this: a not-insignificant 7% of users are cozying up to Chinese-based apps. DeepSeek is apparently the belle of this particular ball. Now, the report gently suggests that anything shared with these apps should probably be considered an open book for the Chinese government. Suddenly, your quarterly sales figures seem a lot more geopolitically significant, eh?

So, while you were busy crafting those oh-so-important AI usage policies, your employees were out there living their best AI-enhanced lives, blissfully unaware that they were essentially live-streaming your company’s secrets to who-knows-where.

The really scary bit? It’s not just cat videos and office gossip being shared. We’re talking about the high-stakes stuff: legal strategies, merger plans, and enough financial data to make a Cayman Islands banker sweat. Even sensitive code and access keys are getting thrown into the digital blender. Interestingly, customer and employee data leaks have decreased, suggesting that the AI action is moving to the really valuable, core business functions. Which, you know, makes the potential fallout even more spectacular.

The pointy-heads at Harmonic are suggesting that maybe, just maybe, having a policy isn’t enough. Groundbreaking stuff, I know. They reckon you actually need to enforce things and gently (or not so gently) steer your users towards safer digital pastures before they accidentally upload the company’s entire intellectual property to a Russian chatbot.

Their prescription? Real-time digital snitches that flag sensitive data in AI prompts, browser-level surveillance (because apparently, we can’t be trusted), and “employee-friendly interventions” – which I’m guessing is HR-speak for a stern talking-to delivered with a smile.

So, there you have it. The future is here, it’s powered by AI, and it’s being fuelled by your employees’ personal email accounts. Maybe it’s time to update those corporate slogans. How about: “Innovation: Powered by Gmail. Security: Good Luck With That.”

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