Category: vulture culture

US Government Shutdown: A Dystopian Comedy of Errors

Posted on Posted in Agile Apocalypse, AI, Gemini, History with a Twist, love/hate, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Don’t Worry, They’ll Just Print More

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and all you paranoid preppers stocking up on canned beans and Bitcoin: Gather ’round. It’s time for the annual, highly-anticipated US Government Shutdown.

Forget your summer blockbuster. This is Washington’s version of a Christmas pantomime—a yearly tradition where the world’s supposed superpower locks itself in the basement, forgets where it left the spare key, and then starts shouting about its crippling debt. It’s the ultimate reality TV show, featuring the most dysfunctional cast of characters ever assembled, all arguing over who left the national credit card maxed out this time.

And the best part? The rest of the globe is sitting there, collective jaw dropped, thinking, “Wait, you can’t even manage the household bills, but you’re telling us how to run our nuclear programs?” The sheer, glorious, apocalyptic audacity of it all is almost beautiful.

The Great American Financial Meltdown: A History of ‘Oopsies!’

You might be under the quaint, old-fashioned impression that the US government actually honours its debts. Bless your heart. That’s like believing your flat-earther uncle is going to win a Nobel Prize for physics.

As your scattered notes so delightfully point out, Washington has a history of defaulting that would make a dodgy loan shark blush. They don’t just miss payments; they rewrite the entire concept of currency. From the War of 1812’s “whoops, no cash” moment to Lincoln’s Greenbacks, Roosevelt’s gold-clause voiding, and Nixon slamming the ‘Gold Window’ shut in ’71, the US has executed a magnificent series of financial disappearing acts.

It’s all just a sophisticated version of what Darth Vader said to Lando Calrissian (who, let’s be honest, probably knows a thing or two about dodgy deals): “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Today’s alteration? It’s not gold or silver—that would be too tangible. No, today’s crisis is a beautiful, digital, unmanageable tidal wave of debt that has already zoomed past a cool $1 trillion a year in interest alone. Soon, that interest payment—the money paid just to keep the lights vaguely flickering—will be bigger than Social Security.

Let that sink in. The nation will be spending more on its overdue credit card bill than it does on feeding and housing its ageing population. It’s the fiscal equivalent of ordering caviar when you can’t afford the rent, and it’s pure, unadulterated dystopia.

The Untouchables: A Budget That’s Pure Political Lead

So why not just cut spending? Oh, darling, you sweet, naïve soul. You’re forgetting the cardinal rule of American politics: The most expensive stuff is politically untouchable.

  1. Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare): Cutting these is political suicide. You simply do not mess with Grandma’s bridge club money. She votes. She’s watching you.
  2. Defense Spending: With the current geopolitical environment (which we can only assume is being dictated by a committee of angry teenagers playing Risk), the military budget is less of a budget and more of a ceremonial gold-plated trough. It only goes up.
  3. Welfare Programs: Likewise, a third rail of American governance.

Your fantasy solution—a leader who restores a “limited Constitutional Republic”—is frankly adorable. It’s about as likely as me dating a billionaire who doesn’t use his jet for a vanity-fueled space race. Washington cannot slow the spending growth rate, let alone cut it.

You could take 100% of the wealth from every single US billionaire (all 806 of them, worth a combined $5.8 trillion, according to Forbes), and you’d barely fund one single year of federal spending. That’s right. Steal all the super-yachts, the private islands, the silly hats—and it still wouldn’t be enough to plug the hole. The ship is taking on water faster than Congress can invent new accounting tricks.

The Sixth Default: Slow-Motion Poisoning

The biggest joke of all? The inevitable sixth default won’t be a dramatic, movie-worthy event. There’s no gold to leave, no contracts to dramatically rip up. The new default is a slow-motion, financial poisoning via the Federal Reserve.

The US government needs to issue more and more debt, but it also needs to keep interest rates low so the cost of that debt doesn’t literally bankrupt them tomorrow. This is where the Fed comes in, and the beautiful illusion of its “independence” shatters into a million gold-dust fragments.

The Fed, that supposedly wise, apolitical body, is about to be forced to slash rates, buy Treasuries, and launch wave after wave of digital money printing. Why? Because the alternative is admitting they are broke, and who wants to do that when you have a perfectly good printing press?

The whole charade is collapsing, best summed up by a Morgan Stanley CIO who was recently heard saying, “The Fed does have an obligation to help the government fund itself.” Translation: The supposedly independent financial guardian is now just the government’s highly-paid, slightly embarrassed personal ATM.

This is the true, black-hearted humour of the current shutdown and debt crisis. The world is watching the US government play a game of chicken with a cliff, secure in the knowledge that when they inevitably drive off, they’ll just print themselves a parachute.

The resulting currency debasement—the slow, quiet act of stiffing creditors with dollars worth less than the paper they were promised—won’t make a big headline. It’ll be a bleed-out. And as the rest of the world (including central banks now frantically moving back toward gold) quietly takes their chips and walks away from the table, we’re left with one certainty:

The US government can’t agree on how to fund itself, but they’re absolutely united on one thing: they will keep borrowing, keep spending, and keep debasing the dollar until the final, ridiculous curtain falls.

So, the question is not if the world’s most powerful nation will collapse its own currency, but whether you’ll be on the losing end of their inevitable, entirely predictable, and deeply unserious economic punchline.

Do you think the US should just start accepting payment in “Zimbabwe dollars” for a good laugh, or should they switch to an entirely new, blockchain-based currency called ‘DebtCoin’?

Friday FUBAR: The Paradox of Progress

Posted on Posted in Agile Apocalypse, AI, AI Automation Agency, Gemini, History with a Twist, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The world feels like it’s moving faster every day, a sensation that many of us share. It’s a feeling of both unprecedented progress and growing precariousness. At the heart of this feeling is artificial intelligence, a technology that acts as a mirror to our deepest fears and highest aspirations.

From the world of AI, there’s no single, simple thought, but rather a spectrum of possibilities. It’s a profound paradox: a tool that could both disintegrate society and build a better one.

The Western View: A Mirror of Our Anxieties

In many Western nations, the conversation around AI is dominated by a sense of caution. This perspective highlights the “scary” side of the technology:

  • Job Displacement and Economic Inequality: There’s a widespread fear that AI will automate routine tasks, leading to mass job losses and exacerbating the divide between the tech-savvy elite and those left behind.
  • Erosion of Human Connection: As AI companions and chatbots become more advanced, many worry we’ll lose our capacity for genuine human connection. The Pew Research Center, for example, found that most Americans are pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to form meaningful relationships.
  • Misinformation and Manipulation: AI’s ability to create convincing fake content, from deepfakes to disinformation, threatens to erode trust in media and democratic institutions. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what’s real and what’s AI-generated.
  • The “Black Box” Problem: Many of the most powerful AI models are so complex that even their creators don’t fully understand how they reach conclusions. This lack of transparency, coupled with the potential for algorithms to be trained on biased data, could lead to discriminatory outcomes in areas like hiring and criminal justice.

Despite these anxieties, a hopeful vision exists. AI could be a powerful tool for good, helping us tackle global crises like climate change and disease, or augmenting human ingenuity to unlock new levels of creativity.

The Rest of the World: Hope as a Catalyst

But this cautious view is not universal. In many emerging economies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the perception of AI is far more optimistic. People in countries like India, Kenya, and Brazil often view AI as an opportunity rather than a risk.

This divide is a product of different societal contexts:

  • Solving Pressing Problems: For many developing nations, AI is seen as a fast-track solution to long-standing challenges. It’s being used to optimize agriculture, predict disease outbreaks, and expand access to healthcare in remote areas.
  • Economic Opportunity: These countries see AI as a way to leapfrog traditional stages of industrial development and become global leaders in the new digital economy, creating jobs and driving innovation.

This optimism also extends to China, a nation with a unique, state-led approach to AI. Unlike the market-driven model in the West, China views AI development as a national priority to be guided by the government. The public’s trust in AI is significantly higher, largely because the technology is seen as a tool for economic growth and social stability. While Western countries express concern over AI-driven surveillance, many in China see it as an enhancement to public security and convenience, as demonstrated by the use of facial recognition and other technologies in urban areas.

The Dangerous Divide: A World of AI “Haves” and “Have-Nots”

These differing perceptions and adoption rates could lead to a global divide with both positive and negative consequences.

On the positive side, this could foster a diverse ecosystem of AI innovation. Different regions might develop AI solutions tailored to their unique challenges, leading to a richer variety of technologies for the world.

However, the negative potential is far more profound. The fear that AI will become a “rich or wealthy tool” is a major concern. If powerful AI models remain controlled by a handful of corporations or states—accessible only through expensive subscriptions or with state approval—they could further widen the global and social divides. This mirrors the early days of the internet, which was once envisioned as a great equaliser but has since become a place where access is gated by device ownership, a stable connection, and affordability. AI could deepen this divide, creating a society of technological “haves” and “have-nots.”

The Digital Identity Dilemma: When Efficiency Meets Exclusion

This leads to another critical concern: the rise of a new digital identity. The recent research in the UK on Digital Company ID for SMEs highlights the compelling benefits: it can reduce fraud, streamline compliance, and improve access to financial services. It’s an efficient, secure solution for businesses.

But what happens when this concept is expanded to society as a whole?

AI-powered digital identity could become a tool for control and exclusion. While it promises to make life easier by simplifying access to banking, healthcare, and government services, it also creates a new form of gatekeeping. What happens to a person who can’t get an official digital identity, perhaps due to a lack of documentation, a poor credit history, or simply no access to a smartphone or reliable internet connection? They could be effectively shut out from essential services, creating a new, invisible form of social exclusion.

This is the central paradox of our current technological moment. The same technologies that promise to solve global problems and streamline our lives also hold the power to create new divides, reinforce existing biases, and become instruments of control. Ultimately, the future of AI will not be determined by the technology itself, but by the human choices we make about how to develop, regulate, and use it. Will we build a future that is more creative, connected, and equitable for everyone, or will we let these powerful tools serve only a few? That is the question we all must answer. Any thoughts?

Feeding the Silicon God: Our Hungriest Invention

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Every time you ask an AI a question, to write a poem, to debug code, to settle a bet, you are spinning a tiny, invisible motor in the vast, humming engine of the world’s server farms. But is that engine driving us towards a sustainable future or accelerating our journey over a cliff?

This is the great paradox of our time. Artificial intelligence is simultaneously one of the most power-hungry technologies ever conceived and potentially our single greatest tool for solving the existential crisis of global warming. It is both the poison and the cure, the problem and the solution.

To understand our future, we must first confront the hidden environmental cost of this revolution and then weigh it against the immense promise of a planet optimised by intelligent machines.

Part 1: The True Cost of a Query

The tech world is celebrating the AI revolution, but few are talking about the smokestacks rising from the virtual factories. Before we anoint AI as our saviour, we must acknowledge the inconvenient truth: its appetite for energy is voracious, and its environmental footprint is growing at an exponential rate.

The Convenient Scapegoat

Just a few years ago, the designated villain for tech’s energy gluttony was the cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin mining, an undeniably energy-intensive process, was demonised in political circles and the media as a planetary menace, a rogue actor single-handedly sucking the grid dry. While its energy consumption was significant, the narrative was also a convenient misdirection. It created a scapegoat that drew public fire, allowing the far larger, more systemic energy consumption of mainstream big tech to continue growing almost unnoticed in the background. The crusade against crypto was never really about the environment; it was a smokescreen. And now that the political heat has been turned down on crypto, that same insatiable demand for power hasn’t vanished—it has simply found a new, bigger, and far more data-hungry host: Artificial Intelligence.

The Training Treadmill

The foundation of modern AI is the Large Language Model (LLM). Training a state-of-the-art model is one of the most brutal computational tasks ever conceived. It involves feeding petabytes of data through thousands of high-powered GPUs, which run nonstop for weeks or months. The energy consumed is staggering. The training of a single major AI model can have a carbon footprint equivalent to hundreds of transatlantic flights. If that electricity is sourced from fossil fuels, we are quite literally burning coal to ask a machine to write a sonnet.

The Unseen Cost of “Inference”

The energy drain doesn’t stop after training. Every single query, every task an AI performs, requires computational power. This is called “inference,” and as AI is woven into the fabric of our society—from search engines to customer service bots to smart assistants—the cumulative energy demand from billions of these daily inferences is set to become a major line item on the global energy budget. The projected growth in energy demand from data centres, driven almost entirely by AI, could be so immense that it risks cancelling out the hard-won gains we’ve made in renewable energy.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is one of the most cited sources. Their projections indicate that global electricity demand from data centres, AI, and cryptocurrencies could more than double by 2030, reaching 945 Terawatt-hours (TWh). To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire current electricity consumption of Japan.

The E-Waste Tsunami

This insatiable demand for power is matched only by AI’s demand for new, specialized hardware. The race for AI dominance has created a hardware treadmill, with new generations of more powerful chips being released every year. This frantic pace of innovation means that perfectly functional hardware is rendered obsolete in just a couple of years. The manufacturing of these components is a resource-intensive process involving rare earth minerals and vast amounts of water. Their short lifespan is creating a new and dangerous category of toxic electronic waste, a mountain of discarded silicon that will be a toxic legacy for generations to come.

The danger is that we are falling for a seductive narrative of “solutionism,” where the potential for AI to solve climate change is used as a blanket justification for the very real environmental damage it is causing right now. We must ask the difficult questions: does the benefit of every AI application truly justify its carbon cost?

Part 2: The Optimiser – The Planet’s New Nervous System

Just as we stare into the abyss of AI’s environmental cost, we must also recognise its revolutionary potential. Global warming is a complex system problem of almost unimaginable scale, and AI is the most powerful tool ever invented for optimising complex systems. If we can consciously direct its power, AI could function as a planetary-scale nervous system, sensing, analysing, and acting to heal the world.

Here are five ways AI is already delivering on that promise today:

1. Making the Wind and Sun Reliable The greatest challenge for renewable energy is its intermittency—the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. AI is solving this. It can analyze weather data with incredible accuracy to predict energy generation, while simultaneously predicting demand from cities and industries. By balancing this complex equation in real-time, AI makes renewable-powered grids more stable and reliable, accelerating our transition away from fossil fuels.

2. Discovering the Super-Materials of Tomorrow Creating a sustainable future requires new materials: more efficient solar panels, longer-lasting batteries, and even new catalysts that can capture carbon directly from the air. Traditionally, discovering these materials would take decades of painstaking lab work. AI can simulate molecular interactions at incredible speed, testing millions of potential combinations in a matter of days. It is dramatically accelerating materials science, helping us invent the physical building blocks of a green economy.

3. The All-Seeing Eye in the Sky We cannot protect what we cannot see. AI, combined with satellite imagery, gives us an unprecedented, real-time view of the health of our planet. AI algorithms can scan millions of square miles of forest to detect illegal logging operations the moment they begin. They can pinpoint the source of methane leaks from industrial sites and hold polluters accountable. This creates a new era of radical transparency for environmental protection.

4. The End of Wasteful Farming Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. AI-powered precision agriculture is changing that. By using drones and sensors to gather data on soil health, water levels, and plant growth, AI can tell farmers exactly how much water and fertilizer to use and where. This drastically reduces waste, lowers the carbon footprint of our food supply, and helps us feed a growing population more sustainably.

5. Rewriting the Climate Code For decades, scientists have used supercomputers to model the Earth’s climate. These simulations are essential for predicting future changes but are incredibly slow. AI is now able to run these simulations in a fraction of the time, providing faster, more accurate predictions of everything from the path of hurricanes to the rate of sea-level rise. This gives us the foresight we need to build more resilient communities and effectively prepare for the changes to come.

Part 3: The Final Choice

AI is not inherently good or bad for the climate. Its ultimate impact will be the result of a conscious and deliberate choice we make as a society.

If we continue to pursue AI development recklessly, prioritising raw power over efficiency and chasing novelty without considering the environmental cost, we will have created a powerful engine of our own destruction. We will have built a gluttonous machine that consumes our planet’s resources to generate distractions while the world burns.

But if we choose a different path, the possibilities are almost limitless. We can demand and invest in “Green AI”—models designed from the ground up for energy efficiency. We can commit to powering all data centres with 100% renewable energy. Most importantly, we can prioritize the deployment of AI in those areas where it can have the most profound positive impact on our climate.

The future is not yet written. AI can be a reflection of our shortsightedness and excess, or it can be a testament to our ingenuity and will to survive. The choice is ours, and the time to make it is now.

The Day The Playground Remembered

Posted on Posted in books, Historic, History with a Twist, Leonardo.ai, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in Agile, Agile Apocalypse, AI, Leonardo.ai, love/hate, Scrum Master, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in Agile Apocalypse, AI, History with a Twist, Leonardo.ai, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in Agile Apocalypse, Leonardo.ai, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , Leave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in Agile Apocalypse, AI, Leonardo.ai, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in Agile Apocalypse, Historic, History with a Twist, Leonardo.ai, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in AI, History with a Twist, Leonardo.ai, shiel yule, vulture cultureTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.