Look at that blue sky! Thats how you know a foreign dignitary is in town.

*taps the sign again*

Pakistan warplanes bomb Kabul; Islamabad declares ‘open war’ on Afghanistan https://aje.news/aozifo

Nice to see everyone in UK BlueSky up so early for the big news today: India’s updated GDP series! Maybe the Indian economy is already bigger than Japan.

Not a politics guy but isn’t the story of Starmer partly about overreacting to by-election results? First in Hartlepool then Uxbridge. None of them really told us much about longer term electoral results.

Find the stories about ICE and kids almost too distressing to even think about.

Featuring me, questioning whether the Queen really was signalling pro-EU sentiments via the medium of headwear:

Wonderful Free Exchange column from Simon Cox (I repeat myself) on why Chinese people spend so much on food economist.com/finance-and-...

New Bagehot on the paranoid style in British politics and how everyone became a conspiracy theorist economist.com/britain/2026...

A viral research note on AI gets its economics wrong economist.com/finance-and-...

"The water, super-heated by rocks, will help drive turbines to generate electricity for 10,000 homes, but will also provide the UK's first domestic supply of lithium" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A viral research note on AI gets its economics wrong economist.com/finance-and-...

As if Labour hasn’t campaigned in exactly the same ways itself

@zackpolanski.bsky.social why has your Urdu election advert got pictures of Keir shaking hands with the Indian PM? Doesn't feel relevant to Gorton and Denton. I can hear the dog whistle.

Hoping when I open this article it just says “you are loved. You are enough”

Fantastic interview. Everyone should read it:

everything you read about AI is someone's FORECAST. To date, there is no evidence it has raised economy-wide productivity or destroyed jobs (even among graduates). Even the impact of the capex on GDP - which is a real thing - has been wildly overstated for the past 12 months

Not really. UK energy-intensive industry mostly declined well before electricity got expensive. This is good: softmachines.org?p=3234 It’s a massive issue for those industries still here, but I struggle with “biggest economic issue”

I'm getting worried about the narrative about how big a problem high electricity costs are for UK businesses. Whenever I look at the data... there are just hardly any industries spending more than a few per cent of their turnover on electricity.

cant.stop.laughing

This is less about noise, but when I came back to London after living in China, I met up with my dad and he commented “gosh it’s busy in London today”, while I’m stood there wondering what on earth he was talking about as Oxford Street seemed positively empty when Guangdong was my reference point.

The Citrini flapdoodle ft.trib.al/8XwIaPD | opinion

I grew up on forums. You think I'm worried about relevance

Really into this piece by Minh Tran and how it explores the way we are spoonfed things we don’t (often) realize we are being spoonfed www.couldabeenatthe.club/p/the-intern...

This left me with the impression that a lot of these guys want AI because they want to create a machine that can talk to girls for them.

there's a competitive victimhood in British politics. voters can only be seen as worthy if they are 'left behind', so everyone has to claim that status

India delays U.S. trade talks after Supreme Court rejects Trump tariffs, source says reut.rs/4c9oMJW

Wahaca is fine

Course in the good old days Andrew wouldn’t have waited around to be arrested, he would have fled somewhere like Ghent a few years back, built up a court in exile by welcoming disaffected sorts - Lord Mandelson, Prince Harry, Baroness Mone, ex-Mayor Johnson - then launched an invasion via Wales.

about that "eighth in line to the throne" thing

Attention and mental wellbeing, dramatically improve after RCT limited smartphone access cc @paulgp.com academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

in which I write many things which will look ironic when I am starving in the gutter begging for a few hours work tagging images for my robot overlords. backofmind.substack.com/p/finally-we...

Reporter: Do aliens exist? Obama: *chuckles* Technically no, a time ghoul is from Earth. Just not today’s Earth

This is so beautifully put. I'd recommend reading the whole thing. (I'm assuming this is @bryce.lol's prose in the latest Alphaville Substack post.)

The difference between the KPop industry and the Korean People's Army is that the KPA is probably better fed and operates under more humane working conditions.

I think a good way to try to understand the economy can be to think about where your salary goes. The biggest chunk is tax. Will AI leading to mass unemployment in healthcare, education and defence? I think it could change the nature of those things but I doubt there’ll be mass unemployment.

In many ways, believing that AI can only change things by replacing the exact human jobs is a form of techno pessimism, not optimism

Lot of good UK economic news recently - retail sales strong, tax receipts healthy, gilt yields and inflation down. Maybe - still a big maybe - productivity showing signs of life. That said, the jobs market still feels tough - perhaps the price of that better productivity. 1/3

British retail sales rose by more-than-expected 1.8% in January reut.rs/4rT0bxw

Important to remember that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor spent a lot of time not being arrested before he was.

To be fair Brazil and South Korea cracked down on Yoon and Bolsonaro *precisely because* they have been dictatorships in living memory, and the UK monarchy let itself be investigated like this *because* other monarchies collapsed. Assuming your institutions are unimpregnable per se... not so smart

If you've got a history book at home, take it out, throw it in the bin – it's worthless. The history books will now have to be rewritten.

Would be weird being locked up at your older brother’s pleasure.

Modi offers his MANAV (or human) Vision for AI @ #AIImpactSummit M: moral and ethical AI systems A: accountable AI governance N: national AI + data sovereignty A: accessible and inclusive AI V: AI should be valid and verifiable What these principles mean in practice in India remains to be seen.

Phenomenal journalism in my own publication here, reported from a Ukrainian border crossing where people fleeing occupied territories can get back into government-held Ukraine www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

Successful bakery chain in "selling people things they want" shock.

For people who love pre-ordering paperbacks. There's a discount on my book until Friday--enter code FEB26. Essential reading for the UK local elections in May, when much nonsense will be said and written about white working-class people. www.waterstones.com/book/underdo...

Very good Martin Wolf column on the great fertility panic. I’ve come to agree with him that it matters far less how many people there are and far more exactly what they are doing with their time. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Trains

Hope Gavin Newsom does become president so people learn how to pronounce my name.