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AI isn’t paying off in the way companies think. Layoffs driven by automation are failing to generate returns, study finds

The ongoing dialogue regarding the ever-imminent displacement of white-collar workers by AI is predicated on the assumption that the technology will become as skilled as the very workers it threatens to displace, thereby cutting labor costs. But a new study found that’s not quite what’s playing out in many companies that have carried out AI-related layoffs.

A survey of 350 global business executives with an annual revenue of at least $1 billion by the research and advisory firm Gartner found that many have reduced their workforce irrespective of AI adoption. While 80% of those surveyed who have piloted an AI or autonomous technology have reported workforce reductions, the businesses cut jobs due to automation regardless of whether the technology was actually generating returns.

“Looking only at layoffs is shortsighted in terms of getting value from AI,” Helen Poitevin, VP analyst at Gartner and a key researcher of the study, told Fortune. “Chasing value only through headcount reduction is likely to lead most organizations down a path of limited returns.”

Similar data from a broader range of perspectives supports the conclusion that there;s a gap between AI adoption and successful implementation. Great Place to Work surveyed nearly 4,000 workers across 25 countries and found that while 82% of executives said that their company provides AI tools to help them do their job better, only 48% of frontline managers and just 38% of individual contributors said the same. At typical workplaces, only 15% of employees were change enthusiasts and 35% were open to change.

The looming threat of AI automation has many employees fearing for their jobs. But a growing number of business leaders and economists are skeptical that the technology will actually spur layoffs. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok recently argued the Jevons paradox: a 19th century theory that explained why the demand for coal increased even as steam engines became more efficient and coal became cheaper. The paradox also applies to the AI age, Slok argued, and it predicts the technology will lead to more jobs, not less. 

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Land, energy, water for data centers are ‘non-negotiable prerequisites’ for global AI infrastructure, digital embassies: WEF

The infrastructure for the global digital control grid that was slowly being constructed over the past five years is now in the acceleration and implementation phase: perspective

There can be no globally shared AI infrastructure or digital embassies without giving data centers all the land, energy, and water they need, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The plan is to build data centers in host countries that have all the money and resources to do so, and then allow other countries to access the AI infrastructure through what they call “digital embassies,” which grant them “AI sovereignty.”

And when it comes to building AI infrastructure, there are two categories of prerequisites that are “non-negotiable” — technical and institutional, according to the WEF and Bain and Company report, “AI Infrastructure in the Age of Sovereignty: Requirements, Strategies and a Trusted Framework for Digital Embassies.”

On the institutional side, it’s about policy, talent, and financing.

For the technical side, it’s all about feeding data centers with enormous amounts of energy, water, and land — enough to sustain the needs of entire cities — while access to this AI infrastructure will move beyond borders.

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Democrat Congressional Candidate Arrested After Pulling Firearm on Two Government Workers – Previously Issued Chilling Threat Against Councilman’s Executive Assistant

A crazed Hawaii Democrat achieved his 15 minutes of infamy last week after pulling a gun on public officials. But there were signs of trouble before, including a horrifying threat that was seemingly ignored by police.

The Honolulu Civil Beat reported that 40-year-old Kirill Basin, a candidate for Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District, was arrested for threatening two Maui County workers around 9:30 am on Friday, before running away and being arrested hours later.

Basin has been charged with Terroristic Threatening in the First Degree.

According to The Honolulu Civil Beat, Basin entered a Maui County government building and brandished his gun during an argument with county workers.

Police, however, were not called for an hour and a half.

Maui Police Chief John Pelletier issued the following written statement after Basin’s arrest:

The Maui Police Department will not compromise public safety, and incidents of this nature are taken extremely seriously in Maui County.

I am extremely proud of the quick response and professionalism displayed by our personnel, which helped ensure a peaceful resolution.

It’s not clear at this point why Basin entered the building or who his alleged victims were. But a possible explanation has arisen.

Basin’s behavior follows another disturbing incident two days prior. Basin had to be escorted out of a town hall meeting after arguing with a council member and his staff.

Basin then confronted the council member’s executive assistant in a parking lot after the town hall, causing the police to intervene again.

But Basin’s history with the executive assistant goes back even deeper, and it’s shocking.

From the Honolulu Civil Beat:

Two days before his arrest, police escorted him from a South Maui town hall meeting after he was involved in an argument with Council member Tom Cook and members of his staff, police said.

Shortly after 3 p.m. on Friday, Cook’s executive assistant, Jared Agtunong, filed a petition for a temporary restraining order against Basin. According to the petition, after police had escorted Basin from the town hall, he confronted Agtunong in the parking lot, requiring police to intervene once again.

That wasn’t the first time Agtunong had come into contact with Basin. According to the restraining order petition, Basin had called Agtunong and sent a series of profane and cryptic texts.

“I did not answer Basin’s phone call, but he left a message telling me that I’m a piece of trash, said I should think of my family, and insisted I call him back,” Agtunong wrote in his petition. “In additional texts sent on the same day, Basin wished me luck with prison, then at 9:00 p.m., Basin’s text said ‘you’re f**ked.’”

This all suggests that Basin has some severe mental health problems that need to be addressed.

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“It’s All So Tiresome”: UK’s Social Media Ban Trudges Ever Onward

The UK government’s “consultation” on social media harm is over, and – brace yourselves – it turns out they’re going to have to do something about it.

I know, I was shocked too.

The main talking point is that “social media is like cigarettes”. Everyone is saying that, it’s the meme of the day.

It’s a sentiment originally taken from a new report submitted to the consultation by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

Titled “Growing up in an online world”, it contains this hilarious line in the foreword:

…there is, I think, an overwhelming consensus that excessive screen time can harm children and young people and we need to call this out unflinchingly rather than passively wait for someone else to prove causation”.

Which is a pretty neat summary of how our political system works in general, and certainly in this case: We don’t know if there’s even a problem yet, but by God we’re gonna do something about it.

That the something they end up doing makes them rich and powerful is just one of the curious coincidences tyrants can always rely on.

{Sidenote: This morning the BBC had “Overwhelimg consensus” in their headline on this story, but at some point the absurdity of that quote was realised, and the headline changed. Now there’s this disclaimer near the end: “There is no consensus among the wider scientific community that screen time overall is harmful to children.” Funny stuff.}

Elsewhere, the report wails about “a wave of radicalized children” who pose “a real risk to society”, and calls social media “an incredibly powerful and uncontrolled commercial detriment to health”.

In a similar vein, The Guardian is warning of a “tsunami of harm”, and has assembled an all-star cast of interested parties to talk up the scariness of social media meanness.

After meeting with “bereaved parents” earlier today, Keir Starmer has “vowed to take action”.

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‘Ceasefire Is a Joke’: Israeli Soldiers Recount Ongoing Indiscriminate Killings in Gaza

Israel Defense Forces soldiers interviewed for an article published Friday by The Associated Press described ongoing indiscriminate killing of Palestinians – including civilians – despite a purported ceasefire.

One IDF combat soldier told the AP that he saw his teammates “yelling in celebration” and “congratulating one another” after blowing up a vehicle driving near the ever-expanding so-called “yellow line” dividing the Gaza Strip into Israeli and Palestinian-controlled zones. The strike killed everyone inside the vehicle.

“It was a jungle,” the soldier said. “After the ceasefire, the order was: If someone crosses the line, you shoot them.”

The problem is, the yellow line is often unclear, invisible, and often shifts. It cuts through farmland, roads, neighborhoods, and areas where Palestinians live and work.

Nadav Weiman, an IDF veteran who is now the executive director of the veterans’ whistleblower group Breaking the Silence, told the AP that the military’s permissive shoot-to-kill policy has “created a reality where countless civilians have and are being killed for crossing invisible lines.”

One IDF soldier interviewed by the AP said “there was a general feeling that human lives are not valuable.” The soldier said his commanding officer told him it would be “too much work” to clearly mark the yellow line, and that Palestinians were supposed to somehow know where it was.

According to the AP, one soldier said that “sometimes snipers fired warning shots at people close to the line… but commanders told troops to do more to protect themselves. The soldier understood that to mean firing more lethal shots.”

“Soldiers shooting or ordering drone strikes don’t always know who’s crossing the line,” the AP reported, citing interviewed troops. “Although soldiers must provide coordinates and get approval from superiors before striking, it’s hard to give exact information as people are moving,” and soldiers reported colleagues “calling in coordinates based on a hunch or the last place they saw someone.”

IDF troops interviewed by the AP also described “a sense of confusion” and “a lack of clarity on rules of engagement around the yellow line.” Some commanders “paid lip service” to the ceasefire agreement that’s been in effect since last October, but in practice ignored it.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, Israel has violated the ceasefire more than 3,005 times, resulting in more than 900 Palestinians killed and nearly 2,800 others injured, despite the truce.

“To call it a ceasefire is a joke,” one IDF soldier told the AP.

Israel claims that the entire length of the yellow line is now clearly marked. However, as Common Dreams reported this week, the IDF has incrementally shifted the boundary deeper into Gaza, where Israel now controls more than 60% of the coastal strip. This has left Palestinians sometimes waking up to learn they’re in “open-fire zones” where they are subjected to being shot on sight.

Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including thousands of people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Israeli troops have previously described indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians, including children and aid-seekers.

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U.S. Tech Professional Exposes Chinese Enclaves, Discrimination at Facebook/Meta

Meta, the company that used to be called Facebook, has allowed at least one department to be run by Chinese migrants, according to a former employee who says the company allows discrimination against Americans.

“At Meta, 90% of my coworkers were Chinese, and non-Chinese were routinely excluded, disadvantaged, and targeted for layoffs,” said Jeremy Bernier, who was recently fired from a software engineering job at Meta. He added:

6 out of the 7 layoffs I observed targeted non-Chinese despite non-Chinese being the vast minority. Certain org[anizations] like ads and MRS [Meta Recommendation Systems for prioritizing Facebook posts] are notorious for being Chinese dominated.

“On Wednesdays and Fridays I’d often be the only non-Chinese person on my team in the office, and they’d all get lunch together without inviting me,” Bernier said in a series of posts about his experience with the company.

“I think Americans would be outraged if they knew that their own citizens were getting marginalized and laid off at their own companies, while Chinese promote themselves up, conquer entire orgs, and reap millions [in pay and bonuses],” said Bernier, who is a 2012 graduate of Virginia Tech.

“Americans are practically non-existent in the most coveted, high paying tech jobs in the world at American companies in America,” he said on May 30, echoing 2025 comments by Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.

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Is It Legal to Be White in the United Kingdom? The Tragic Fate of Henry Nowak – Brutally Stabbed by a “Protected Minority”… Then Handcuffed and Mocked by His Own Police

In modern Britain, if you are attacked in the street while being white, you don’t face just one enemy. You face two: the thug trying to kill you… and your own government, which has already decided whose side it’s on.

Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak never even got the chance to fight back.

The promising Polish-British accounting and finance student was walking home from a football night in Southampton on December 3, 2025. A Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, 23, carrying a 21-centimeter “ceremonial” — how about that? — dagger legally protected by “religious exemption,” stabbed the teenager five times — in the chest, legs, and face.

Henry tried to flee, leaving a trail of blood as he begged for his life.

Then the police arrived.

And that’s when the second attack began.

Instead of treating the bleeding, dying boy as the victim, officers — fed years of “white privilege” brainwashing — immediately believed the stabber’s lie: that this white teenager had racially attacked him and knocked off his turban. Henry Nowak was slammed to the ground, handcuffed, and allegedly dragged across gravel while he repeatedly screamed: “I can’t breathe!” “I’m dying!”

According to multiple accounts from the pre-trial, officers reportedly laughed in his face. “I’ve been stabbed!” One allegedly replied, “I don’t think you have, mate.” They left him cuffed and bleeding for minutes before finally realizing he was telling the truth — as he lay dying in his own blood.

Henry Nowak didn’t die just because a violent degenerate plunged a blade into his soul.

He died because the British state had already chosen the side of the “protected minority” over one of its own native sons.

The myth of “White privilege” is a murderous cult

This is not an isolated tragedy. This is the logical, mechanical, and inevitable result of a decade of poison imported from America’s worst universities and European postmodern garbage — Foucault, Marcuse, and the entire “white privilege” death cult.

According to this deranged ideology, simply being white is itself a privilege that must be punished. When the government is confronted with a white victim and a non-white perpetrator, it must always side with the non-white to “correct” the so-called privilege.

The result? British police treat a dying white teenager like a criminal while protecting the man who just butchered him.

The family of the killer even hid the murder weapon. Yet the initial police response was to arrest the victim.

And now? The Hampshire Police are refusing to release the bodycam footage — even though it is perfectly legal for them to do so. They know what the public will see: the final moments of a bright, kind, football-loving young man being mocked and neglected not only by his murderer by the very people sworn to protect him.

The British people are not stupid. The rage is building. Those bodycam videos will surface, one way or another.

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Is A New Iron Curtain Inevitable?

Russia’s consequent focus on the western front might embolden US-backed NATO member Turkiye to accelerate its power play in the south at the risk of sparking another regional crisis after Ukraine.

Russian Ambassador-at-Large Artyom Bulatov warned in a recent interview that “Westerners, with energy worthy of a better cause, are erecting a new ‘Iron Curtain’, seeking to make irreversible the rupture – provoked by themselves – of socio-economic, trade, transport, interpersonal, cultural, and historical ties that have been built in the region not over years, but over centuries.” He also condemned the weaponization of regional interaction mechanisms like the Council of the Baltic States against Russia.

Truth be told, a new Iron Curtain is inevitable and has been since summer 2024 when the Baltic States and Poland combined their respective border fortification plans along NATO’s Eastern Flank to unveil what they now officially refer to as the “EU Defense Line”, which readers can learn more about here. This initiative will likely be expanded to include Finland too, thus stretching from the Arctic to Central Europe. Even in the event of a Russian-US rapprochement, which is now unlikely, these barriers will still remain.

Russian experts, who operated for so long under the influence of the wishful thinking fantasy that the EU is challenging Russia at its senior US patron’s behest and not due to its own ideologically driven hatred of Russia (contrary to its objective interests), are finally waking up to reality. New President of the Russian International Affairs Council Dmitriy Trenin, who issued an unprecedented clarion call in April for correcting foreign policy misperceptions, published a relevant piece in parallel with Bulatov’s interview.

Titled “The EU, Like ‘NATO 3.0,’ Will Remain Our Adversaries”, it dramatically begins by informing readers that “For the first time since 1945, the most pressing military threat to Russia is coming from Europe—European states themselves. This represents the most significant military-political shift for Russia since the victory in the Great Patriotic War.” The goal, Trenin believes, is “to split the Russian Federation into externally controlled components and turn them into semi-colonies of the European Union.”

This will be pursued through indefinitely perpetuating the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine together with ramping up sanctions and military pressure for undermining domestic political stability.

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The Iran Obsession

I was reading an old Atlantic Monthly from November 2007 and came across this quote:

We’ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we’ve got to multitask… We’ve got to talk about Iran – Iran is more dangerous than Iraq – and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

That was Rudolph Giuliani, speaking as a Republican presidential candidate in July 2007.

Back then, the saying was that everyone wants to go to Baghdad but that real men want to go to Tehran. Weirdly, neither Iran nor Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. What those countries did have was oil – and lots of it.

The Iran obsession persists, of course, and it’s shared by both political parties. When she ran for president in 2024, Kamala Harris identified Iran as the greatest adversary the United States faced in the world.

The truth is that neither Iran nor Iraq posed a direct or imminent threat to the USA. What each country possessed was an enormous amount of oil and political leaders who didn’t want to kowtow to U.S. economic imperatives.

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Israeli Claims About an Iran ‘Threat’ Were Always a Lie. Now We Have Proof

Could it be that Israel’s 30-year narrative about Iran – one that persuaded US President Donald Trump to wage a criminal and disastrous war of aggression – was always a fiction, an invention cooked up in Tel Aviv?

Far from Tehran posing an existential danger to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for decades, might Israel’s real fear be that a stronger Iran would undermine its unique leverage over Washington, threatening its status as the region’s sole – and unmonitored – nuclear power?

Might large parts of the globe be facing economic meltdown simply so that Israel can remain the Middle East’s top dog – an unaccountable apartheid state committing genocide against the Palestinian people and ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon?

We got a definitive answer last week, care of the New York Times. It is an uncompromising yes to all of these questions.

The newspaper reported that Netanyahu not only mis-sold Trump on the idea of quick regime change in Iran following a short “shock and awe” bombing campaign. He also identified to the White House who was going to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader.

Extraordinarily, according to the Times, Netanyahu named the man for the job as former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The aim at the start of the air campaign was for Israel to kill Khamenei, then liberate Ahmadinejad from house arrest by striking the guards who were confining him.

Presumably, Ahmadinejad was then supposed to storm the citadel and seize the keys to the palace. But only Khamenei’s assassination went according to plan.

Ahmadinejad, who had reportedly been consulted on the scheme beforehand, is believed to have been injured in the Israeli strike near his home. He got cold feet, possibly suspecting he was being set up for assassination too, and went into hiding. His current whereabouts and medical condition are unknown.

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