Best Of

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after my arduous flight from Gatwick. I’m settled in a glamorous apartment in the Quattro Spagnoli, the old romantic Spanish quarters where Vespas fizz over the cobbles and the laundry hangs like flags of endless Italian surrender

I’ve got my AirPods3 in their shiny new pod. I’m ready to do my grand even futuristic experiment: do they really work as Babelfish? Does the translate function truly allow you to move smoothly through foreign languages, understanding everything, instantly?

Only problem: I’ve just discovered that Apple doesn’t offer instant Italian translation, yet. And you aren’t allowed to use these things in the EU, by law, so you can’t download the software

Situation excellent: avanti!

Should have invited my granddaughter along, as she is fluent in Italian and spent a year at Turin University !!!!

You're a trusting chap, Big G.

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after my arduous flight from Gatwick. I’m settled in a glamorous apartment in the Quattro Spagnoli, the old romantic Spanish quarters where Vespas fizz over the cobbles and the laundry hangs like flags of endless Italian surrender

I’ve got my AirPods3 in their shiny new pod. I’m ready to do my grand even futuristic experiment: do they really work as Babelfish? Does the translate function truly allow you to move smoothly through foreign languages, understanding everything, instantly?

Only problem: I’ve just discovered that Apple doesn’t offer instant Italian translation, yet. And you aren’t allowed to use these things in the EU, by law, so you can’t download the software

Situation excellent: avanti!

I don't believe you can use third party translation apps either.

I don’t know if it’s the EU law actually blocking my download or not - I do know these Babelfish AirPods aren’t legally functional in the EU (yes, they’re a Brexit benefit)

Anyway I just used a vpn routed via the UK and it’s worked. Just tested them now. It actually works

Now I’m heading out into Naples, Italy, to find people who speak Spanish, German or French

Obviously the Union of European Translators did enough lobbying against Big Nasty American Technology, on one of their monthly trips between Brussels and Strasbourg.

This is becoming a real issue for the EU. It is regulating new tech into oblivion, guaranteeing the EU falls critically behind at a crucial stage. Like a government outlawing steam power in 1836

No doubt Labour is desperate for Britain to copy Brussels


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/25/apple-warns-europeans-may-not-get-new-gadgets-because-of-br/

It's the first absolute clear-as-day Brexit bonus: our AI regulation can be different to EU's precautionary principle stuff.

Good morning everyone.

Can I pick up one thought from HYUFD's post FPT:

Thanks also for the kind messages and prayers sent to me and my wife after the birth of our stillborn son a few days ago. To update we have been able to hold him, read to him, write a card of our love for him and have a few days with him at least. The hospital chaplain also gave him a blessing. We named him Theo.

That sounds as though the hospital are on the ball, and have thinking about you as part of their practice - which is good.

But how do we mourn adults known to us who die? I see a reticence about that, sometimes - though things have changed significantly over say 3-4 decades.

(When my mum died in hospital in 2019, I went and spent some time with her body - saying goodbye, starting to put my memories in order and put her in the pas, and so on.)

@HYUFD I have been thinking of you on & off since hearing your very sad news. Wishing you & your wife the best at this most difficult time.

My wife still occasionally talks about the way a stillbirth affected her mother - grief can be very hard & can strike at the most unexpected moments. I hope you both have people you feel able to talk to whilst supporting each other.

WRT the US economy, it’s far less impressive than it’s touted to be. The US is far more a country of pettifogging bureaucracy, overtaxation (except for the super rich), absurd amounts of money wasted on a mediocre healthcare system, and grinding poverty at the bottom, than it is the land of the free and rugged entrepreneurs.

One of the big reasons it's done so well is because the average US person sticks their money into the stock market far more than we do here, where it's either cash or buying more houses - both of which are, in the round, non or low producing assets; whereas in the US the big companies have so much implied capital they can just buy anything halfway promising elsewhere in the world.

Stocks appear to be another thing people look at and say 'You made money in the markets? Then we should have taxed you more!'. Look at the perma-onanism around the idea of a financial transaction tax.

Most people don’t understand stocks, and see such investments as gambling. Whereas, if you spread your risk, it’s as safe as depositing money in a building society, with a far better rate of return.

I read in the Grauniad that Keith's speech is going to say that the answer to the rise of the far right is growth.

OK, fine. Poverty is the driver of all of these protests - people feeling well off and content in their lot do not feel the need to shout at buildings.

But *how* are we to get this growth? Because the investment we need to be making in jobs and skills and infrastructure we're not going to make because apparently we can't afford it.

To be honest I think the era of perpetual growth is over. What comes next? I don’t know. It probably won’t be great though.

We are on the verge of a tech inspired growth explosion that might be more impactful than the taming of fire. The real question is the extent to which that new wealth (and associated power) gets concentrated.

The other question is whether any of it at all gets concentrated in the UK.

They had the chap who confounded Games Workshop on R4 this morning talking about the Games industry in light of the Saudi buy and it’s the same story as with anything vaguely technological in the UK. People in the UK create great things, nobody wants to really throw funding into them and then a US company or similar swoop in, buy it and then pocket all the upside, the taxes, the growth.

This should be at the forefront of political thinking at the moment - I want to hear Kemi, or anyone, start putting together really strong proposals for keeping innovation in the UK so we reap the long term rewards.

Is it structural or is it cultural?

You can see the difference watching Dragons Den back to back with Shark Tank. The Americans throw vast sums at anything vaguely promising but the Brits will invest small amounts in basically a sure thing.

Are we just chronically risk adverse?

Private Equity says hello in a swashbuckling style. Pirates the lot of them.

Are their swashes really that buckled, or their buckles really that swashed?

An awful lot of PE seems to be buying up cash cows and loading them with borrowing.

Private Equity isn’t Venture Capital.

In fact it is something close to the reverse. Huge piles of cash looking for a certain return. Buying a going concern and finacialising it is a certain return in the short/medium term.

Whereas VC is about finding the 1% chance.

There is next to no VC in the U.K. - by the standards of the US.

I’ve been out. I presume various posters have apologised over their false assumptions about the Banbury gang rape case? https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/25501324.suspects-ethnicity-released-banbury-gang-rape/

Just a big reminder for all the tribally political men on this site...
'A woman aged in her 30s was attacked by a group of men at the churchyard of St Mary's Church in Banbury during the early hours of Sunday morning, September 28.'

Again, would you please give your heads a wobble on this site and remember that there is a yet another female victim here who suffered a horrendous sexual assault regardless of the make up of her attackers!! I just dispair of the way the actual female victims and their ordeals have been discarded and ignored on sites like this or on other social media sites while the focus becomes about a point scoring debate over the man/men who carried out the attack!!!

What’s most notable about our current economic and political malaise is how, frankly, “mid” it is. 6 and 7.

I was at a dinner last night, a continuation of what is becoming that worryingly unhealthy Autumn event season that by the end of it has you longing for a home dinner of tomato pasta and a cup of tea. Surrounded by international colleagues and clients in a ridiculous place called Bacchanalia in Mayfair. The dining room was decorated by the same interior designers behind Leon’s flat overhaul.



They all have the same economic doldrums, the same low-energy passive aggressive attitude towards their governments. None of their countries are doing particularly mad or stupid things (there were no Americans there). It is all just a bit mid.

Starmer it seems is one of those myriad politicians who’s respected and liked more abroad than at home. They were very complimentary about his support for Zelenskyy, especially after the Oval Office debacle. But also not surprised at his unpopularity here, because that’s the pattern everywhere.