"As the appetite for ground warfare has waned, the allure of quick, cheap and easy air campaigns has grown. But air warfare is no longer what it once was. [Trump's] Operation Rough Rider [against the Houthis holding the Suez to ransom] was supposed to be a decisive show of force against an under-equipped, internally divided third-world nation. Instead, it ended up looking like the last hurrah of a truly antiquated form of warfare, unable to cope with cheaper and better anti-air weapon systems.
"All of these limitations make the current talk about a new bombing campaign against Iran utterly surreal. ...
"With exploding deficits, a growing internal political crisis, and a slowly collapsing military, America is a leopard that lacks the wherewithal to even attempt to change its spots. The generals know that the jig is up: the old model is broken, there is no new model coming, and nobody has the energy left to do much about it all. ...
"The gravity of what happened in Yemen will only assert itself once the political class is ready to deal with the new world we are now living in: one in which the US has no new military rabbits to pull out of its hat, and those that it does have simply aren’t enough to get anywhere close to victory."
"New Zealand’s low wages can be blamed on low productivity, and low productivity can be blamed on poor regulation. To raise productivity, we must allow people to spend more time on productive activities and less time on compliance. ... "In a nutshell: If red tape is holding us back, because politicians find regulating politically rewarding, then we need to make regulating less rewarding for politicians ... "
"Policies come and go, allies are cast out as enemies and then welcomed back ... thing[s] may change from the beginning of a speech to the end. But the slogan never changes: Make America Great Again. It’s been so steady that everyone knows it just by its initials, MAGA. You talk about MAGA followers or the MAGA Party [or MAGAts] , and everyone knows what you mean. ...
"And yet, every day we see Trump tear down the things that have made America great ... What era does 'greatness' refer to?
"Look at some of the things Trump thinks will make America 'great again' and ask yourself what era they belong to. ['Great again'? When exactly?] Invariably, they fit a Napoleonic view of greatness, not a 21st-century view: Territorial expansion. ... Mercantile dominance ... Manliness ... A Great Leader. ...
"But think for a minute about what has made America great these last hundred years: Science.... Trustworthy institutions... The rule of law... Education... Alliances and treaties... Immigration... Moral leadership... Freedom....
"Now look at what the Trump administration has been doing. ...
Trump’s attempt to cut America off from the world economy via his ever-shifting tariffs, and his focus on tax cuts in spite of trillion-dollar deficits has prompted a “sell America” response from the rest of the world....
"So is Trump pursuing national greatness? Yes, but according to a notion of greatness that passed its sell-by date centuries ago. He aspires to a Napoleonic greatness and is oblivious to everything that makes a 21st-century nation great. ..."
"Politicians eagerly do what the Treaty of Waitangi does not: they dispense [political] favours and [legal] privileges to Māori. "They want to establish 'partnerships' not because the Treaty demands them, but because they claim to be invoking 'principles' established more than 100 years after the treaty’s signing."
"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterised by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they then will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."
"It reorients politics away from redistributing scarce resources, away from moralising about people’s consumption, to focus instead on production.
"Abundance 'speaks of a cornucopia, all good things for everybody. But the world of abundance has trade-offs, and trade-offs require choices' ... It asks: can we solve our problems with more supply?
"If there aren’t enough houses, make construction cheaper and build more. The trade-off is that house prices might go down for existing homeowners. If we need more windmills, accept you can’t hold them up with consenting regulation. ...
"The scarcity advocates miss the role of economic growth in solving environmental problems as much as creating them. Rich countries have more re-forested green spaces than poorer countries because they’re not worried about having enough to eat.
"Without exception, countries do better at protecting their ecology as they get richer. If we hadn’t wiped out moa and dodo when we were poor, we would be trying to save them today when we are richer.
"It was scarcity, not abundance that drove them to near extinction.
"Scarcity versus abundance ... [is] the next fault lines of politics."
"Race-based funding is racist. A statement so obviously true that it ought to be stitched onto the curtains of the Beehive and should be self-evident to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. ...
"Yet... [t]his fetish for ethnic exceptionalism has become the most expensive fiction in New Zealand’s policy landscape. The central myth - that Māori are uniquely deprived and therefore must be uniquely subsidised - collapses under the slightest statistical scrutiny. But facts, regrettably, are of little use to those whose salaries depend on ignoring them.
"The Māori economy now exceeds $70 billion. That is not a typo. Seventy billion dollars, according to BERL. Māori businesses thrive in agriculture, fisheries, energy, tourism, construction - you name it. We are not talking about a struggling underclass. We are talking about a sovereign economic force with the political influence of a Middle Eastern oil bloc. And yet, astonishingly, we are still expected to believe that Māori are victims — infantilised, eternally fragile, and unable to function without a phalanx of publicly funded 'navigators,' 'equity officers,' and 'tikanga consultants' to shepherd them through modernity.
"This narrative is insulting, inaccurate, and intolerably expensive.
"Consider life expectancy. In 2002, the average Māori lifespan hovered around 68 years. As of 2022, it stands at 74.3. That’s an increase of more than six years in two decades. Māori smoking rates have halved since 2006. Educational attainment among young Māori has risen steadily. Tertiary enrolments are at record highs. And in urban areas, Māori household incomes are now statistically indistinguishable from the Pākehā average.
"So where, precisely, was the need for a separate Māori Health Authority? ... [for o]ur state schools [to] have become temples of cultural appeasement ... [for] 'Māori housing strategies] that will [allegedly] solve intergenerational poverty [but simply mean] priority access for iwi developers and whānau collectives ...
"Māori make up 51% of our prison population. We are told this is a result of systemic racism. No - it is a result of systemic dysfunction. ... race-based funding enables this dysfunction. It reinforces dependency. It signals that failure will be rewarded, not rectified ...
"None of this is a call to ignore Māori disadvantage. It is a call to address it with honesty, rigour, and standards. The previous model did precisely the opposite. It flattered tribal elites, funded unaccountable bureaucracies, and delivered nothing but resentment and division.
"So dismantle the rest. ...
"Let the iwi aristocracy, so fond of preaching commercial wisdom, compete on a level playing field in the free market. Let them earn their fortunes without the insulation of state patronage.
"This romanticised vision of Māori as an eternally wounded, noble caste is not merely ahistorical. It is politically corrosive. It distorts justice, misallocates resources, and entrenches mediocrity. ... New Zealand must decide: do we believe in equality under the law or cultural exceptionalism? One cannot have both.
"Race-based policy is not just unsustainable. It is immoral. And if the National Party had any spine, it would say so."
"[I]n perception and rhetoric the Left has certainly lost or even surrendered the high ground. Conservatives have successfully seized the mantle of free speech advocacy in many public debates. But whether that shift reflects a deeper, principled commitment to the ideal remains to be seen ... "
"The question was posed, 'Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?' A lady named Bev answered it this way:
“'You all don't get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.
"'They don't give a shit what he does. He's just something to rally around and hate liberals. That's it, period. "'He absolutely realises that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it. "'The fact that people act like it's anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around. "'If you keep getting caught up in 'why do they not realise this problem' and 'how can they still back Trump after this scandal,' then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It's fuck liberals, that's pretty much it. "'Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable, and they'll explain some way that rationalises it that makes zero logical sense? "'Because they're not even keeping track of any coherent narrative, it's irrelevant. The only relevant thing is: fuck liberals.
"'Trust me; I know firsthand what I'm talking about. "'That's why they just laugh at it all because you all don't even realise they truly don't give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about. "It's just a side-mission story that doesn't matter anyway. "'That's all just trivial details — the economy, health care, whatever. "'Fuck liberals. ...
"'Look at the issue with not wearing the masks. "'I can tell you what that's about. It's about exposing fear. They're playing chicken with nature, and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal. ...
"'They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species, and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers, which they find disgusting, but it's that disgust that is a true expression of their natural superiority. "'Go ahead and try to have a logical, rational conversation with them. Just keep in mind what I said here and be forewarned.”
"[O]ver recent decades, the world trading system has drifted into a distorted, sub-optimal equilibrium, shaped by regulatory and political asymmetry, integration clubs and rule-based inertia. ...
"So, while tariffs fell, supply chains over-concentrated. The post-1990s decline in tariffs between different economic structures enabled deep global supply chains. This increased efficiency — but also vulnerability, dependency, and strategic exposure.
"In turn, non-tariff barriers [in the form of excessive internal regulation] rose, especially in the European Union. It seemed like a good idea at the time – for some people – but the reduction in market access for outsiders and entrenching of the local status quo was less transparent. ... the expansion of the European Union from 9 members in the 1980s to today’s 27 ... has privileged trade for insiders, whilst diminishing the relative position of external players. ... amounting to a reversal of the principle of mutual recognition [and] the foundation of liberal trade ... [along with] a deeper recalibration of the global trade order towards more explicit trading blocs (which crucially will need to deregulate internally to grow) ...
"This will not be painless. The transition out of a long-standing but sub-optimal equilibrium rarely is."
"The struggle of well-fed pressure groups for larger shares in the national booty is not a battle which engages the highest faculties of the human heart or mind. It is the consequence of our material health as well as of our spiritual sickness that from the exaggerated structure of the state there emerges something less than the human voice."
~ Hubert Witheford, from his prose article 'Background to a Magazine,' Arachne No. 2, Feb. 1951 (p. 20)
From the folks who brought us the Keynes v Hayek rap battle ...
Live from Davos, it’s your morning update on the future of the planet. Representing the alarm bells and carbon cuts, it’s environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore, but he’s not alone. Enter the unapologetic fossil fuel defender, Alex Epstein, armed with charts, charisma, and a whole lot of hydrocarbons. Just when things start boiling over, in steps Mr. Moderate—Bjorn Lomborg—trying to cool the room with cost-benefit calculations. Is the planet on fire? Are fossil fuels the secret to success? Or is there a third path no one wants to rap about? Tune in, turn up, and try to keep your cool—this is the DEFINITIVE Climate Change Rap Battle.
“'The case of Guillermo Yeatts (1937-2018) for subsoil privatisation should eclipse ‘climate change’ as the number one policy initiative of the 21st century. This friend of private property, free markets, the rule of law, and civil society, a successful entrepreneur in his own right, a thinker and doer, has set up an excellent opportunity for a new political era in his beloved Argentina.'
“'The history of oil production in Argentina has been characterised by a continuing tug-of-war between the state as owner of the subsurface and private producers in the pursuit of profitable production of the resource. ... The effectively monopolistic position of the federal oil corporation displaced the private sector ... '
"'[P]ublic ownership of the subsurface has been the foundation of a model of forced redistribution of rent in the oil industry. [Government] institutions are the royalties system, public oil production, and the establishment of reserves, quotas, regulations, registries, permits, etc. They have also caused stagnation in the industry and relegated the country’s oil resources to oblivion.'
“'Privatisation … is the institutional change required to reduce risk and allow internalisation of externalities through private, voluntary, and mutually beneficial agreements. Privatisation of the subsurface will ... encourage innovation among surface owners and oil prospectors. ...'
"'This change is about unobstructing minds and freeing them from restrictions. It appeals to the initiative of thousands of surface owners who will discover new business opportunities and new means to obtain profits.'”
The New Zealand Government's gross debt — the amount taxpayers must service — will now increase by another $73b by 2029, reaching a massive $283b. That's $94,000 for every New Zealand family (with nearly $6000 of that just to pay the government's interest!).
Things are desperate. It's the middle year of an election cycle. Time for something bold.
No?
No.
Its not about doing more with less, or vainly trying to to. It's about doing less with less. Less with our money.
Several years ago when Helen Clark's Labour Party was about to lose an election , then Finance Minister Michael Cullen placed a fair proportion of New Zealanders onto welfare. His Welfare for Working Families programme made sure that, until ended, more than half of the country will now be beneficiaries. On the mooch. More than half of the country pulling down more from other taxpayers than they can ever give back.
This National Party Finance Minister could have done nothing with the programme — allowing inflation to make the maximum threshold for the programme dissolve.
She could have ended it altogether — signalled in good time, of course, to let folk plan ahead — but ending it could have saved $2.5-3billion.
Instead, she raised that threshold below which working families get welfare. Around 142,000 New Zealand families. Which means even more working New Zealanders will continue to be moochers off (further normalising the behaviour perpetuating the Welfare State).
Many years ago a National Party Finance Minister introduced an Accommodation Supplement to, supposedly, help out poorer renters. Of course, it did nothing of the sort: instead if helped out their landlords, who could simply raise their rents to meet this new "supplemental" monetary demand for their supply. The Supplement — a grant to landlords — currently costs around $5 billion.
This National Party Finance Minister could have announced a lowering of the Supplement, saving some of those billions.
She could have announced it would end altogether, saving them all (while lowering rents). Instead, another expensive, destructive market-distorting subsidy continues.
I highlight these two measures because, for all Nicola Willis's hand-wringing about being prudent, about being responsible, about needing to achieve a surplus — and with the economic system flatlining while government debt vaults up decade by decade, bold measures to get there are not just a nice-to-have but a have-to-have — this budget is neither prudent, nor careful nor responsible.
Not being bold is to be irresponsible.
It's to be a coward.
Opposition parties are trying to paint this as an austerity budget. National Party pollster David Farrar boasts that it isn't.
"Nicola Willis has failed,” says Taxpayers’ Union Spokesman Jordan Williams. “This Budget could easily have been delivered by Grant Robertson."
“Willis promised to tackle the last Government’s ‘addiction to spending’. Spending is going up as a proportion of the economy in this year’s Budget compared to the current year. Core Crown Expenses are forecast to be 32.9 percent in 2025/26 compared to 31.8 percent under Robertson in 2022/23.
“She promised to balance the books. The OBEGAL never gets into surplus according to Treasury forecasts. Willis has had to make up a new measure to exclude the ACC deficit to create an illusion of a laughably small surplus in 2029.”
“And she promised growth. But the headline measure – an accelerated depreciation regime – is basically no better than what the last Labour Government tried immediately after COVID.”
“According to the Budget documents, the Government's headline ‘growth’ policy adds just 1 percent to GDP over 20 years. It is laughable in its small size.”
“More spending, more debt, and nothing to materially shift the dial and grow the economy. It’s not a Growth Budget, it’s a fudge-it."
It's very much a centrist budget to not please those wanted a balanced budget and shrinking of the state, and of course isn't a budget of new grand larceny and profligate handing out to preferred causes, it basically just holds the line of NZ's Jacinda-era bloated state. ... a[nother] kick-the-can-down-the road budget.
Eric Crampton mentions some political sleight-of-hand:
"At some point, we have to wonder about the fiscal responsibility provisions in the Public Finance Act matter, because those effectively say you should not be running structural deficits for a decade, and we will have been running structural deficits for a decade. The ones during Covid were excusable - now, not so much. ....
"If you want to see the state of the government's books on the more traditional OBEGAL measure, rather than the one that excludes substantial ongoing ACC deficits, you have to go to the "Additional materials" in the online appendix.
"The Growth Budget" has just one growth-oriented policy [i.e., accelerated depreciation for business investment], estimated by Treasury to raise GDP by a mere 1% over 20 years (0.5% in total in the next five).
"[T]he government chose to title its effort [yesterday] 'The Growth Budget.' The Minister spoke today against a backdrop emblazoned repeatedly with that label.... the Prime Minister made a big thing of the need to accelerate growth ... The Minister of Finance in announcing the Budget date ... [boasted] 'the Budget will contain bold steps to support economic growth' ...
"They did not deliver.
"There was a single growth-oriented initiative in the Budget ... [T]he best Treasury estimate is that it will lift GDP by 1 per cent, but take 20 years to do so
"This year’s Budget represents another lost opportunity, and probably the last one before next year’s election when there might have been a chance for some serious fiscal consolidation. The government should have been focused on securing progress back towards a balanced budget. Instead, the focus seems to have been on doing just as much spending as they could get away with without markedly further worsening our decade of government deficits. ...
"We used to have some of the best fiscal numbers anywhere in the advanced world, but as things have been going – under both governments – in the last few years we are on the sort of path that will, before long, turn us into a fairly highly indebted advanced economy, one unusually vulnerable to things like expensive natural disasters. ...
"The government seems to have become quite adept at rearranging the deckchairs (cutting spending that they consider low priority and increasing other spending) but they are choosing to make no progress at all in reducing the structural deficit. ...
"Which brings us to the most recent IMF Fiscal Monitor released a few weeks ago [showing how our] primary deficit now compares ... Depending on your measure we were (based on HYEFU/BPS numbers) worst or close to worst in the advanced world. Today’s Budget will have done nothing to improve that ranking."
"My definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree?…how much of what I earn belongs to you—and why?"
"If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn."
"Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.
"There is no moral argument that justifies using the coercive powers of government to force one person to bear the expense of taking care of another."
"Government has no resources of its own…government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person’s property to give it to another to whom it does not belong."
"We don’t have a natural right to take the property of one person to give to another; therefore, we cannot legitimately delegate such authority to government."
"Exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another."
"No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong."
"The better I serve my fellow man…the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That’s the morality of the market."
"The act of reaching into one’s own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pocket is despicable."
"New Zealand’s superannuation costs are spiralling out of control and threaten the country’s long-term fiscal health. "As the number of superannuitants continues to grow, so too will the burden on the taxpayer. The longer we delay reform, the harder it becomes for future governments to respond without drastic tax hikes or cuts to essential services [sic] elsewhere.
"Treasury’s projections show that by 2060, superannuation expenditure could balloon to 7.4 percent of [GDP] This is not just an accounting issue - it’s a generational issue. Young and future New Zealanders will be forced to bear an ever-growing welfare bill for their parents and grandparents. Without reform, or significant productivity growth, future taxpayers face a nightmare scenario: higher taxes, deeper debt, and reductions in public services. ... "Raising the superannuation age to 67 and indexing it to life expectancy would slow the growing burden ... Even with the higher age, retirees would still receive NZ Super for as long, or longer, than previous generations....
"I detested Bob Jones for many years. My loathing had its genesis in the run-up to the 1975 election when Bob was the brains and financial brawn behind billboards mushrooming across the capital depicting Labour leader, the able, affable and unfailingly courteous Bill Rowling as a timid mouse. It was a malicious propaganda campaign that contributed hugely to the landslide victory of National’s coarse, unfailingly belligerent Rob Muldoon. ...
"[W]hen our paths finally crossed [in 1979] at a cartoon exhibition ... I sported a flaming-red lumberjack beard and had a ginger Jimi Hendrix Afro to disguise my receding hair that wasn’t fooling anyone – least of all Bob. He said, “You’re losing your hair, old man, and you’re fat!” I told Bob that next time I drew him I would make him look even more like PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who he uncannily resembled. ...
"Early on I had no reason to report on Bob in my Listener columns, but in 1983, disgusted with the National government’s wage and price freeze and authoritarian ways, he formed the New Zealand Party with the express intention of removing his old chum Rob Muldoon from office. This left me no option but to cover him. He was great copy, amusing and disarmingly candid to the point where the news media often had to protect him from himself.
"Bob invented Fake News long before it became a thing. After Muldoon called the snap election in 1984, [his] New Zealand Party swung into action and selected an impressive raft of candidates. Bob allowed television news crews a quick peek from the door into their campaign headquarters in downtown Wellington – it resembled the Houston space flight control centre on steroids. Gorgeous women sat at clacking keyboards and flickering screens while fax machines and printers buzzed and hummed. Bob told me later that computer companies renting office space from him were induced to provide the electronics and he provided the women. It was an elaborate ruse designed to demoralise National and it worked. Their normally well-oiled machine corked and hamstrung morale, and discipline crumbled. ...
"I attended a rowdy lunchtime speech Bob gave standing on a trestle table in the smoko room of the local freezing works. Taking questions from the floor Bob was asked by a burly slaughterman if New Zealand’s problems stemmed from our short, three-year parliamentary term, meaning economic policy changed all the time, and as a result 'interest rates went up and down like a whore’s drawers.' 'Can I just correct you there,' grinned Bob, 'trust me on this, whores don’t wear drawers!' Deafening applause, the stamping of boots on concrete and hearty laughter rolled on for ages. ...
"Despite running the best campaign, saturation advertising and Bob’s noisy, colourful presence ... David Lange’s Fourth Labour Government romped into office. Despite getting 12 percent of the vote and contributing to National’s crushing loss, the NZ Party failed to win a seat. [But it was their manifesto that Lange's Government implemented - Ed.] ...
"Bob’s death, while a shock, was not entirely unexpected – for most of his life he burnt millions of candles at both ends. There was no one else like him and there will never be anyone like him again, proof, if any were needed, that God doesn’t make the same mistake twice."
~ Tom Scott from his obituary ahead of today's memorial service for Bob Jones: 'Tom Scott farewells Bob Jones'. Read on there for Steve Braunias's postscript on the very best of Jones's twenty-four books ...
"Whatever lanyard man said, whatever you think of Winston, positive or negatively, if you want to go back to the world where people didn't face pile-ons for their political views, then don't do it when someone has views you don't like. It's shades of Stalinist struggle sessions. "And yes, I know the hard-left absolutely thrives on doing this and you might have joy doing it back - but just don't.
"When I was a public servant [sic] it was perfectly okay to oppose the government you were serving, as long as it was not being critical of any of the work of your department or the Ministers you served. You could be critical of education policy, but be advising on local government and say nothing about the latter. The idea you could work for a private contractor and not be able to heckle (without being threatening) is absurd.
"Of course that contractor can have its own employment rules, and that's its choice, but let's not have a culture of digging into trenches and having the ends justify the means. That's not a thriving liberal democracy that makes it easy for people to change their minds, it's political tribalism."
"It is only in regard to concretes or particulars, implementing a mutually accepted basic principle, that one may compromise. For instance, one may bargain with a buyer over the price one wants to receive for one's product, and agree on a sum somewhere between one's demand and his offer. The mutually accepted basic principle, in such case, is the principle of trade, namely: that the buyer must pay the seller for his product. But if one wanted to be paid and the alleged buyer wanted to obtain one's product for nothing, no compromise, agreement or discussion would be possible, only the total surrender of one or the other.
There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one's silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one's property. ...
"Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise [on basic principles] does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim. ...
"In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube . . ."
It's been a very long time since I've praised Elton John ...
.... okay, in truth I've never praised the bald, bland, over-played jingle-maker.
But this morning, I come to praise Mr John, not to berate him.
The issue is so-called artificial intelligence (AI). And the rights of "content creators," from whose content the "learning models" steal without either attribution or payment.
The US is facing what Trump calls a "Big Beautiful Bill" that will add a staggering $3.8 trillion to the national debt. It alsoincludes a 10-year exemption from regulation for artificial intelligence (AI)— a "safe harbour [that] would give Big Tech another free ride on the backs of artists, authors, consumers, all of us and our children." (No coincidence that Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights, "less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models." This, just after the Copyight Office finalised their report they've been making for 2+ years, concluding that Generative AI trained on Copyrighted works is probably NOT "Fair Use." )
Similar legal protection for theft of copyrighted works is being introduced in the UK, where Elton John has (correctly) branded proposed AI copyright changes there as "criminal" and accused officials (again, correctly) of "committing theft" from artists.
Should the government proceed with the plans allowing AI firms to use artists' content without paying, they would be "committing theft, thievery on a high scale," the music legend said.
He's right, you know. Exempting 'Big Tech' from complying with copyright law simply hands the creative output of every individual to AI companies.
For free.
"The danger is for young artists, they haven't got the resources to keep checking or fight big tech," John said in a BBC interview on Sunday. "It's criminal and I feel incredibly betrayed."
Betrayed because he supported Starmer on the back promises to support young musicians. Still, it's the first time I've felt sympathy for the world-class purveyor of middle-class muzak. Because even tedious tunes best used for sleep still need to be written by someone before they'e copied by a prowling plagiarising-information-synthesis system (PISS) — and, if the plagiarising process is legalised, then every creator's work becomes fair game for misappropriation,
John's statements come in response to a controversial proposal that would ease copyright laws in the country, allowing AI developers to train models on any creative works to which they [currently] have lawful access. ...
Concerns around artist permission and compensation guarantees have brought John alongside an alliance of artists to gather support in an open letter to help warn of how the government's planned changes could affect creators.
The artists are calling on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to back amendments filed by Baroness Beeban Kidron over the so-called Data (Use and Access) Bill, citing an urgent need for "transparency over the copyright works ingested by AI models."
The open letter was signed by notable figures like Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ed Sheeran, and Dua Lipa, along with over 400 signatories from groups including the National Union of Journalists, Getty Images, and Sony Music Publishing. ...
McCartney told the BBC that the proposed changes could disincentivise writers and artists and result in a “loss of creativity.”
The former Beatle said: “You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it, and they don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off.”
“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere … Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote Yesterday?”
“We’re the people, you’re the government. You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job. So you know, if you’re putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them.” ...
In December 2024, McCartney ... signed a petition, alongside actors Julianne Moore, Stephen Fry and Hugh Bonneville, stating that “unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”
John told the Sunday Times that he felt “wheels are in motion to allow AI companies to ride roughshod over the traditional copyright laws that protect artists’ livelihoods."
This will allow global big tech companies to gain free and easy access to artists’ work in order to train their artificial intelligence and create competing music. This will dilute and threaten young artists’ earnings even further. The musician community rejects it wholeheartedly.” Last week, disagreements over the Data Bill raised concerns about whether AI companies should disclose the data used for training models, as legislators pushed for stricter rules to help creators determine if their work was scraped.
However, the House of Commons has rejected certain amendments proposed by the House of Lords, including those requiring AI firms to obtain permission before using copyrighted materials.
It's said that it's no big deal. That any man's work is public property. That artists have always "borrowed" from each other.
Artists have been learning from each other for centuries. When you create, you expect that other artists will learn from you. You learn from myriad sources, including active & passive learning from other art, studying textbooks, and taking lessons. Much of this you (or someone) pays for, supporting the entire ecosystem.
In generative AI [however], commercial entities valued at millions or billions of dollars scrape as much content as they can, against creators’ will, without payment, making multiple copies along the way (which are subject to copyright law), to create a highly scalable competitor to the training data. It is beyond belief that people suggest these should be treated the same. I feel increasingly confident that people only use this argument because other arguments for gen AI scraping are, incredibly, even worse.
As a creator himself, of tunes for which people willingly (and unaccountably!) pay money, Elton John recognises thatthe Bill “will allow global big tech companies to gain free and easy access to artists’ work in order to train their artificial intelligence and create competing music. This will dilute and threaten young artists’ earnings even further. The musician community rejects it wholeheartedly.”
"We're complaining about people's legacy, whether they're young writers, whether they're young playwrights, journalists, whatever; some people aren't like me, they don't earn as much as I do, but when they're creative and it comes from the human soul and not a machine — because a machine isn't capable of writing anything with any soul in it — [then you're going] to rob young people of their legacy and their income.
"It's a criminal offense, I think.
“I think the government are just being absolute losers - and I’m very angry about it, as you can tell.
“Big tech has so much money - and if you’re a young person and you’re fighting big tech, good luck.
“I want the government to see sense; I want it to come back on our side. Because if they don’t, I’m going to feel like a suffragette.”
AI's developers have created something themselves. That's clear. But their creation, as they know, is an industrial-scale process for scraping copyrighted content, while leaving the artist's soul behind.
A hallmark of the AI developers is that they routinely discount, or even detest, the artistic soul, going so far as to both ignore it and then try to claim all of its enduring, exalted riches for themselves. They foolishly value mere money and market caps, whence, over the long term, it is the soul alone that is the best long-term investment, as the soul alone is immortal. It is the artist and creator who invests in the soul, it is the artist and creator who risks it all to express their vision, and it is the artist and creator who thus naturally and rightfully owns their art, and who owns the right to profit from it. ...
“Hell is the soulless place where all art, music, literature, film, philosophy, religion, history, science, and poetry are generated by AI. Even Dante would be horrified.”
The elephant in the room is that AI does nothing well, not even cheating. AI can only cheat as well as its creators teach it to cheat.
Since it's Budget Week again, here's my helpful compilation of quotes to help journalists looking to spice up their budget-week blogs and broadcasts. (You're welcome.)
“Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.” ~ Terry Pratchett
"To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation." ~ Jeff Daiell
"I don't know if I can live on my income or not — the government won't let me try it." ~ Bob Thaves
"The best things in life are free, but sooner or later the government will find a way to tax them." ~ Anon.
"A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right." ~ Anon.
"Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilised society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilised world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. ~ Mark Skousen
“For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It's sad to realise that most citizens do not even notice the irony of being bribed with their own money." ~ Anon.
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” ~ Jean Baptiste Colbert
"There are no taxes which have not a tendency to lessen the power to accumulate. All taxes must either fall on capital or revenue. If they encroach on capital, they must proportionably diminish that fund by whose extent the extent of the productive industry of the country must always be regulated; and if they fall on revenue, they must either lessen accumulation, or force the contributors to save the amount of the tax, by making a corresponding diminution of their former unproductive1 consumption of the necessaries and luxuries of life. Some taxes will produce these effects in a much greater degree than others; but the great evil of taxation is to be found, not so much in any selection of its objects, as in the general amount of its effects taken collectively."
~ David Ricardo
"See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs." ~ humorist Dave Barry
"When the ... government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average [workers]." ~ Ron Paul
"If taxes and government spending are both slashed, then the salutary result will be to lower the parasitic burden of government taxes and spending upon the productive activities of the private sector." ~ Murray Rothbard
"It's not just a case of governments doing more with less. It's about governments doing less with less. When that realisation dawns, we may discover that most things the government can do, we can do better and a whole lot cheaper." ~ William Weld
"I’m all for reduction of government expenditures but to anticipate it by reducing the rate of taxation before you have reduced expenditure is a very risky thing to do." ~ F.A. Hayek
"The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever-rising tax rates to cover ever-rising spending." ~ Thomas Sowell
"LET'S STRIP AWAY THE political gloss and assess the Green Party’s 2025 budget for what it is: a document heavy on ideology, neo-Marxist buzzwords, and te reo, but dangerously light on pragmatism, economic credibility, and operational realism. ...
"Fundamentally, their budget is about lifting government revenue by taxing New Zealanders an extra $88billion over four years. They have no plan for growing the economy. ... for additional capital, the Greens have decided to simply borrow more. ...
"Included in the Greens tax grab are following revenue channels: Inheritance Tax [i.e., Death Tax]... Private Jet Tax ... 10-year Brightline test ... Labour’s removal of interest deductibility for residential property ... Companies/Corporate Tax [hike] ... Income Tax [threshold] change ... Mining Royalties [hike] ... Wealth Tax...
"It is worth remembering that the Green Party only claims these policies will generate nearly $90 billion in new revenue over four years. This is an implausibly optimistic figure. The reality is you can’t just plug in tax rates and expect static revenue. People adapt and restructure in reaction to law changes and shifting systems. Sometimes they just straight up leave. These are not 'guaranteed billions.' They are some pretty wild assumptions disguised as policy. ...
"CLAIMING TO HAVE FOUND $88 billion in additional revenue thanks to taxing the shizzzzz out of New Zealanders, the Greens have gone to town spending big. ... their budget is more manifesto than fiscal plan. At the heart of the document is the assumption that profit should be avoided and the state should act to hamper it as much as possible. Other assumptions of note relate to their allergic reaction to anything that remotely suggests that adults should be responsible for their own wellbeing. ...
"In classic modern Marxist fashion, they are determined to try things that have already failed multiple times over in other jurisdictions. ...The biggest problem with [their] extensive list of spending [outside the morality of altruism and theft, Ed.] ... is that there’s clearly a lack of capacity in our systems to deliver any of these services. ...
"It is also a strategy that assumes infinite government competence. The Greens are highly critical of our existing systems and yet they want to expand them, give them vastly more power, and put them under further pressure. ...
"'As Venezuelans have learned over the past 20 years of socialism, “free things” come at a high price'.' ...
"Most depressing of all, in my view is the way the Greens would set out to cause lifelong structural dependency on the state. Accusations of Marxism and socialism are often overblown, but in this case they are truly warranted. This plan contains no serious expectations of any personal responsibility nor any incentives to engage in commerce and grow the economy. Guaranteed incomes, regardless of effort, encourage longterm unemployment or permanent student life. There’s no point in saving, working hard, starting a business, or taking financial risks. In fact, those who do would be penalised severely by the Greens through taxation. This is a social model built not on empowerment, but entitlement. ...
"This budget is a blueprint for turning our country into the next Venezuela. It is easy to dismiss the insanity of the Greens as the fantasies of the irrelevant, but the assumption that will not get close to the levers of power is a naive one. ... unless MMP is overhauled ..."
"It's time for Ayn Rand's Power Question: What facts of reality give rise to the need for such a concept as X?
"Here, X is 'citizenship.' Why do we need this concept? Mainly, to determine who can vote. You can probably think of a few perquisites that attend to attaining the status of 'citizen.' But that status has nothing to do with the rights of man.
"The territory within the boundaries of a given country is the area in which its law has jurisdiction, the area in which a specific government, by its apparatus of compulsion, maintains a de jure and de facto monopoly on the use of physical force.
"We used to discuss whether the police, in a voluntarily financed laissez-faire nation, would protect the rights of non-contributors against criminals. The answer was: yes, mainly because the thug who would assault anyone is a threat to everyone, including the contributors. The 'yes' answer follows from practical, moral, and symbolic considerations. Defending the rights and freedom of everyone currently in the country is symbolic of a government devoted to justice.
"The same considerations that require the government protect the rights of non-contributors apply to protecting the rights of non-citizens. ...
"But due process and all the safeguards are there to rein in and make safer everybody who faces the possibility of government interference. The safeguards are there to eliminate arbitrary power.
"Government is potentially a far bigger threat than criminals.
"To introduce a preserve within which government agents can exercise unsupervised power is a threat that dwarfs that of any gang of hoodlums (citizens or non-citizens).
"And this is what we are seeing with Trump's every action—the quest for arbitrary power, unconstrained by checks and balances or anything other than the will of Donald Trump.
"If Trump doesn't have to follow due process in regard to non-citizens, does he have to follow it in regard to determining whether or not the person is a citizen? That's not theoretical. That's today's headlines.
"It can't be repeated too often: the solution to crime is not "screening" or "roundups" of anyone; it's repeal of the drug laws.
"It can't be repeated too often: the solution to lawless behavior by immigrants is not lawless behavior by the police.
"You can avoid a criminal gang; you can even move to a different locale. You can't avoid a SWAT team, the FBI, or any part of the state's apparatus of compulsion and incarceration."
"In the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to individual objects or experiences sensorily—for the most part visually—remembered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of objects as distinct from their qualities.
"Without words as class names one might think of this man, or that man, or that [wo]man; one could not think of Man, for the eye sees not Man buy only men, not classes but particular things.
"The beginning of humanity came when some freak or crank, half animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain to invent the first common noun, the first sound-sign that would signify a group of objects: house that would mean all houses, man that would mean all men, light that would mean every light that ever shone on land or sea. From that moment the mental development of the race opened upon a new and endless road. For words are to thought what tools are to work; the product depends largely on the growth of the tools. [...] "The languages of nature peoples are not necessarily primitive in any sense of simplicity; many of them are simple in vocabulary and structure, but some of them are as complex and wordy as our own, and more highly organised than Chinese. Nearly all primitive tongues, however, limit themselves to the sensual and particular, and are uniformly poor in general or abstract terms. So the Australian natives had a name for a dog's tail, and another name for a cow's tail; but they had no name for tail in general. The Tasmanians had separate names for specific trees, but no general name for tree; the Choctaw Indians had names for black oak, the white oak and the red oak, but no name for oak, much less for tree. Doubtless many generations passed before the proper noun ended in the common noun. In many tribes there are no separate words for the colour as distinct from the coloured object; no words for such abstractions as tone, sex, species, space, spirit, instinct, reason, quantity, hope, fear, matter, consciousness, etc. Such abstract terms seem to grow in a reciprocal relation of cause and effect with the development of thought; they become the tools of subtlety and the symbols of civilisation."
~ Will Durant, from his classic book The Story of Civilisation: Our Oriental Heritage [hat tip Matthew Moore]
"[T]he Greens’ ... 'Green Budget' ... is more than just a Budget. It is their utopian vision for a different country. Unfortunately, it is also based on ludicrous assumptions and bad economics. ...
"The cornerstone of the Green revenue plan is a wealth tax raising $72.5 billion over four years. That is, well, optimistic. Just ask Germany, France and Sweden why they abandoned similar taxes. The reasons were capital flight, tax avoidance and administrative nightmares. ...
"Their plans for universal dental care ...is magical thinking, not policy. ...
"Their public housing plans ... offer no realistic plan for quadrupling construction capacity in a sector already facing severe workforce shortages and supply chain constraints.
"Their $395 weekly Income Guarantee ignores inevitable [inflationary] market responses. ... [guaranteeing] a return to similar inequality but with vastly higher government spending.
"The Greens have presented us with a textbook case of utopian thinking. And not coincidentally, 'utopia' literally means 'a place that does not exist'.”
Built just four years after the First World War, this was probably the world's first modernist house.
Designed and built in Los Angeles by Austrian emigre Rudolph Schindler for two families to share on site, almost every architect since has knowing or unknowingly borrowed from this seminal work of genius.
And yet architect Rudolph Schindler, a certified genius (and one of my own architectural heroes) is almost unknown!
A new documentary Schindler: Space Architect, showing this week and next (and later at some venues) at local Architecture Film Festivals is hoping to put that right.
If you have any interest in architecture at all, and you live in either Auckland, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, Hawkes Bay, Blenheim, Whangarei, New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Hamilton, or Dunedin (all the places the film-fest is being hosted) then I insist you get along.
It's really hard to be a pessimist when you're living in such beauty actually that beauty is all around all of us all the time but Schindler knew how to read it and how to bring it in so it was part of your life. That was his genius.
See it on the big screen while you can.
PS: And since everyone and his sister has been arguing recently about who's-the-biggest-feminist, I also insist you also see the film on another hero(ine) of mine: Eileen Gray, her beautiful house in the south of France, and how that pig of a man Le Corbusier vandalised what he could never have created it. Trailer here:
