Deb

Not again

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Look, if you’d been awake all night texting on social media you probably need an afternoon nap too…

[Deep Psychology @DeepPsycho_HQ]

“When the rich rob the poor, its called business. When the poor fight back, it’s called violence.”

- Mark Twain

[Deb @Ccdebin2050]

@EVERALDATLARGE So are you going to stop going to Church?

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Apart from anything else, I’d say that Charlie Pickering has seriously offended a large chunk of his potential audience that was prepared to give him a go. Dumb with a capital D.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Today the EU made American AI illegal in 27 countries.

The reason is ONE sentence Microsoft's own lawyer said under oath:

This morning in Brussels, EU Tech Chief Henna Virkkunen unveiled the Cloud and AI Development Act. It's the most aggressive anti-American tech move from Europe since GDPR.

The law forces EU public sector procurement in banking, healthcare, defense, and energy to apply mandatory non-price factors favoring software and hardware built inside the EU. Microsoft Azure can be cheaper, AWS can be faster, Google Cloud can have the better model, and EU governments MUST legally prefer European alternatives.

AWS, Microsoft, and Google currently control roughly 70% of the European cloud market. Brussels is now openly targeting greater independence from US providers in cloud, AI, and semiconductors.

The largest regulatory market-share transfer in tech history is being written into law right now.

But the real story is how this happened...

On June 10, 2025, a man almost no one outside Brussels had heard of walked into the French Senate. His name is Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France.

Senator Dany Wattebled asked him under oath whether he could guarantee that data belonging to French citizens, stored on Microsoft European servers, would never be transmitted to US authorities without explicit consent from the French government.

Carniaux answered honestly. He admitted he could not guarantee it, because Microsoft must comply with the US CLOUD Act regardless of where European data physically sits. One sentence of sworn testimony from Microsoft's own counsel killed every sovereign cloud defense Big Tech had spent five years building.

It became the legal foundation for the law unveiled today.

Then Trump accelerated the divorce.

January 2025 brought executive orders expanding US surveillance authorities. Vance went to Munich and attacked European democracies on stage.

The tariffs followed and so did the Pentagon's $200 million AI contract war that ended with OpenAI replacing Anthropic after Hegseth labeled it a supply chain risk. So did OpenAI's Stargate and yesterday's Trump AI Executive Order, whose Section 3 lets the White House pick which AI companies get 30-day early access to frontier models. American AI was officially declared a US government strategic asset.

Europe heard every word of it.

On May 12, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told the French National Assembly that Europe had 24 months to build sovereign AI infrastructure or become a permanent US VASSAL state.

And the response came fast:

April 24: Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha for $20 billion with both Germany's and Canada's digital ministers in the room at the Berlin announcement. May 30: SoftBank committed up to $87 BILLION for French nuclear-powered data centers, the largest AI infrastructure project in European history.
Yesterday: EU Parliament announced it's dropping Google for French search engine Qwant tomorrow. France ordered every government workstation off Windows and onto Linux.

Today the Cloud and AI Development Act made all of it law.

- Mistral is building a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris by 2028 with Nvidia, MGX, and Bpifrance
- SAP's EU AI Cloud, launched last November, runs on Cohere, Mistral, and SAP's own sovereign infrastructure
- McKinsey forecasts $600 billion in sovereign AI needs by 2030

None of that money is going to Silicon Valley.

The America First AI policy built a wall around the world's most regulated economy, and American companies are on the wrong side of it.

Microsoft's lawyer told the truth in a Senate hearing nobody watched. Trump turned that admission into a national security narrative while the EU turned that narrative into procurement law.

And one entire continent walked away from the American tech stack...

[Peter FitzSimons @Peter_Fitz]

I repeat: One Nation is a circus, Senator Hanson is the ringmaster, and Barnaby the clown.
#Discuss.

[Prime AI @primemans]

Two economists just published a mathematical model arguing that AI could break the economy if nothing changes.

Not might. Not could. Their conclusion is stronger than that.

The paper is called “The AI Layoff Trap.” Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.

The conclusion is one sentence:

“At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand.”

An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.

Here is how you get there.

A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.

Because the workers who were fired were also customers.

When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.

The loop has no natural exit.

The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.

Every single one failed in the model.

The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.

No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.

Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block’s workforce and said publicly: “Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion.”

Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.

Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.

Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.

Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University

[Kanika @KanikaBK]

A Persian scholar finished a single math book in 9th century Baghdad that quietly became the foundation for every line of code running on Earth today.

His name was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

The book is called The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. I started reading about him at midnight and could not believe how many things in my daily life trace back to one man.

Every time you say the word algebra, you are saying his book title.

And every time someone says the word algorithm, they are saying his name.

Both English words come from him. Both are Latin transliterations of Arabic and of his own identity. The man did not just contribute to mathematics. He named it.

Al-Khwarizmi was born around 780 CE in Khwarazm, in what is now Uzbekistan. He moved to Baghdad and worked at a research institution called the House of Wisdom, which during the Islamic Golden Age was the single most important center of learning on the planet.

The caliph al-Mamun hired the best mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers from across three continents and put them in one building with one job.

Translate, study, and produce new knowledge. Al-Khwarizmi finished his book on algebra around 820 CE. The Arabic title contained the word al-jabr, which referred to one of the two operations he used to solve equations.

When the book was translated into Latin in the 12th century, the Latin world did not have a word for what he had built.

So they kept his Arabic word. Al-jabr became algebra.

The discipline was named after a single Arabic word in the title of a single book by a single man. The deeper insight is what he actually changed about how humans think.

Before al-Khwarizmi, mathematical problems were solved geometrically.

↳ You drew shapes and measured them
↳ You compared areas

The Greeks had built an entire mathematical tradition on visual proofs and physical constructions. It was beautiful and limited.

You could not solve a problem you could not draw.

Al-Khwarizmi did something nobody had done before him at this scale.

He said you could solve any problem using abstract symbols and rules.

↳ You did not need a shape. You needed a procedure
↳ You moved terms across the equation
↳ You cancelled like terms on both sides
↳ You isolated the unknown

He invented the idea that mathematics is a manipulation of symbols according to rules, not a study of physical figures.

That single shift made everything that came afterward possible.

Calculus. Differential equations. Linear algebra. Quantum mechanics.

None of it works if math is locked inside geometry. He pulled it out.

The second thing he did is the one that changed how the world counted forever. He took the Hindu numeral system from Indian mathematics, refined it, and wrote a book introducing it to the Arab world.

That system included:

↳ The concept of zero as a placeholder
↳ A positional notation where the value of a digit depends on its location

Roman numerals could not do complex calculation. Hindu-Arabic numerals could. When his book on numerals was translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum, the word Algoritmi was just the Latin spelling of his own name. Europeans started calling the new method "doing algorism," then "running an algorithm."

The word for the most important concept in computer science is literally his name in Latin. The third thing he did is the part that should haunt anyone who works in tech. His method of solving problems was systematic:

↳ Step one, do this
↳ Step two, check that
↳ Step three, if condition A, then do X, otherwise do Y

He wrote down procedures that could be followed by anyone, anywhere, who knew how to read.

The procedure did not depend on intuition or genius. It worked because the steps worked. That is exactly what an algorithm is. A finite, deterministic procedure for solving a problem. He did not just give us the word. He gave us the entire concept of programming a thousand years before there was anything to program.

When Alan Turing built the first abstract model of computation in 1936, when John von Neumann designed the first stored-program computer in 1945, when every engineer at Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind writes code in 2026, they are working in a paradigm that started with one man in Baghdad twelve centuries ago.

The strangest part is what happens when you walk into any tech office in San Francisco or Bangalore or Lahore today.

Engineers say the words algebra and algorithm hundreds of times a day.

They do not know whose name they are saying.

Almost nobody can spell al-Khwarizmi correctly on the first try.

His legacy:

↳ Original Arabic manuscript preserved at Oxford
↳ Book on Hindu numerals survives only in Latin translation
↳ The Latin version was the textbook that taught medieval Europe how to count

The man who built the foundation of the AI revolution did not live to see a calculator.

He died around 850 CE, a thousand years before the first electric current was sent through a wire.

The civilization he built mathematics for collapsed. The library he wrote in burned. His own grave is unmarked.

But every algorithm running on every machine on Earth right now still answers to his name.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Iran has just been nominated to preside over the UN Committee for the protection of women's rights, human rights, and the prevention of terrorism.

YES, IRAN. And it was supported by the United Kingdom, Spain, and France.

This is not a joke. It's real.

- @isaacrrr7

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Extraordinary. The President of the United States, occupant of the Oval Office, supposedly the most powerful man in the world: posting like some addled, drug-fucked 14yr old wetting himself in his bedroom.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump posts an image of himself on Mount Rushmore

[Phil Kelly @PhilKelly959078]

@dwatsonhayes From his Facebook page: What an honour. My two worlds colliding... I’m honoured to be performing at the State of Origin ...!
Extremely proud to be carrying on the Mortimer legacy, started by my dad and uncles on the rugby league paddock...

[Andrew Waddison BEM @AWPRCO]

Angry doesn’t even begin to cover it..

Today at Snettisham beach protected area for ground nesting birds including Little Ringed Plover, Oystercatcher, Ringed Plover…...

Signage EVERYWHERE asking for dogs on leads.

📸 Derek Bromage - Snettisham Village Facebook Page.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years putting up barn owl nest boxes on weekends. This year, the region saw 308 owlets hatch.

His name is Robert Salter. He's 56 and does bricklaying full time. In 1990, he saw a piece on the news about a man in Lincolnshire installing barn owl boxes, and decided he'd do the same. He started with five.

He now has more than 350 boxes scattered across fields, farms, outbuildings, and trees in East Yorkshire. Every June, he takes four weeks off from bricklaying and visits them with his wife Sue. Scrambling up ladders, ringing chicks, cleaning boxes, repairing the ones the weather got to. He's a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology.

In 2024, the region ringed 95 owlets. In 2025, the count was 308. The Barn Owl Trust says that nationally, this year was "pretty poor" for barn owl breeding, but east Yorkshire is the exception, and it's the exception because of one man with a ladder.

The barn owl population in the UK was estimated at 4,000 pairs in the mid-2000s and crashed to roughly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The species is still recovering.

Most of conservation is one person who refuses to give up.

[John Urane @UraneJohn]

Albanese, terminate her NOW!
It is outrageous that $200,000 of taxpayers' money was gifted by Jillian Segal to a former PM Morrison's adviser.
Segal issued a contract ignoring public tender process.
Who ever granted Segal's authority is either negligent or criminal!
Kickbacks???

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Astounding. Without any tender, Jillian Segal quietly hands a plum, 6-figure ‘consultancy’ to Scott Morrison’s former head kicker Yaron Finkelstein…

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

I am a card carrying atheist, but I’m increasingly liking this Pope.

https://t.co/8vlxbZuTSh via @NYTimes

[David Marler @Qldaah]

Just pay for it yourself, Sen Bridget McKenzie. All Australians wish your son & bride the absolute, very best.

Are you short of a quid? No, then use your personal bank account to book flights & accommodation. We Australians do it all the time. #auspol https://t.co/2NiwgKI2MW

[Rabbi Poupko @RabbiPoupko]

I am not a doctor.

Is there someone who can explain to me the medical use of all these materials found in the Shifa hospital in Gaza?