The “execrable” erotic poems of RFK Jr

Is AI a bubble?

It’s easy to make the case that artificial intelligence is a bubble, say Derek Thompson and Timothy Lee on Substack. The spending is “insane”. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Oracle splurged $106bn on mostly AI-related capital investment last quarter – almost 1.4% of America’s entire GDP and the equivalent of three “Manhattan Projects”. In a worrying echo of 2008-era financial chicanery, the big tech firms are using complex arrangements with private lenders to keep this gargantuan outlay off their books. Equally bonkers are the sums being given to AI start-ups. The founders of Thinking Labs raised $2bn without even telling investors what they were working on, and are now eyeing a valuation of $50bn – “more than the market caps of Target or Ford”.

Yet there’s also a decent argument it’s not a bubble. People are adopting AI at twice the pace they did for the internet. While many of the much-heralded productivity gains are yet to materialise – in one study programmers who used the tech took 19% longer to finish tasks than those who didn’t – it’s already proving transformational in some areas. Teachers who use AI regularly, for example, say it saves them six hours a week. As for the money, the tech giants can afford it. Those huge AI investments still account for less than half the cash they have available to spend. Nvidia’s $4.3trn valuation is high, at around 30 times its future earnings, but still a fraction of the 100-times valuations we saw before the dot-com crash. And unlike with the internet in 1999, AI revenues are climbing fast – from $7bn two years ago to more than $60bn now. They’re currently on course to hit $650bn in 2029. “That’s right on schedule.”

Last week the US transport secretary, Sean Duffy, called for a return to the “golden age” of air travel, says Claire Fahy in The New York Times, criticising modern-day flyers for wearing their pyjamas to the airport and forgetting their manners when speaking to airline staff. I can see why he’s longing for flying’s heyday. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, women wore pearls and heels while men opted for suits and hats. Passengers entertained themselves not with mindless re-runs of average TV but by reading the paper or playing chess. They dined on hot meals served on china, often prepared by famous restaurants, and were given wool blankets, large pillows and padded eye masks. Planes frequently flew half full, giving everyone far more room, and by the 1970s some had multiple lounges for drinking and socialising. A handful even had piano bars. Bliss.

The Christian origins of our magpie superstition

I’m not usually superstitious, says William Atkinson in The Spectator: “I’m pessimistic enough to assume that everything usually turns out for the worst.” But I cannot resist counting magpies. If I spy one, I know it will be a miserable day; two, and all will be lovely. Lone birds are always greeted – “Hello Captain” – and told the date. Everyone knows the rhyme: “One for sorrow/ Two for joy/ Three for a girl/ Four for a boy” and so on. The first records are from 1780: one in an anthology of English folklore, another in Samuel Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Regional variations persist. In Lancashire it goes up to 13: “Beware, it’s the devil himself.”

The Romans admired the magpie’s cleverness; the Greeks associated it with Bacchus, God of wine. The superstitions began with the Christians, who taught that it was the only bird that failed to cry at Christ’s crucifixion. Piero della Francesca’s Nativity features a single magpie, foreshadowing Mary’s sorrow at the foot of the cross. It was said that magpies spoke like humans; refused to enter Noah’s ark, perching and swearing outside instead; and carried “drops of the devil’s blood on their tongue”. They hardly helped themselves, pinching shiny objects, scavenging near battlefields and gallows, and preying on pheasants’ nests. Attempts to ward off bad luck range from my simple greeting to raising an imagined hat, spitting three times over the shoulder, asking after the creature’s wife, and even flapping the arms and mimicking the bird’s call. In Somerset, carrying an onion was believed sufficient. Perhaps they’re not really an ill omen. But I might keep saluting, “just to be on the safe side”.

🐦‍⬛🇨🇳 Mistrust of magpies is a distinctly Western phenomenon. In East Asia, they are symbols of good fortune. According to Chinese folklore, each year magpies fly to the Milky Way to form a bridge, “enabling a cowherd and a weaver girl to continue a forbidden romance”.