There’s a reason the State gets away with wasting so much of our money

• 1 day ago
• 5 min read

It costs twice as much to run Ireland today as it did 10 years ago. Total government expenditure in 2015 was just over €63 billion; today it is about €130 billion. I am saying “about” because no one is really sure of the exact figure. This year, the State will spend €15 billion-€20 billion on public procurement: buying stuff on your behalf from private contractors. The reason we can’t be more specific on amounts is that, as things stand, the State can’t say precisely whether it got what it paid for, at the price agreed, nor whether projects delivered what they originally claimed they would deliver. The reason for this messiness is there is no total figure for what the State is buying, from whom and for what. Yes, you read that correctly.

There is no aggregate accountability in Ireland because each spending department is its own fiefdom, with different systems and different budgetary procedures.

Nothing joins up. What’s more, no one is in charge. There is no one person whose job it is to add up all the departments’ expenditure and give a precise figure. In the turf war that is intra-departmental politics, the departments don’t give details unless forced to by public pressure. Within the public service, a culture of secrecy shrouds even the most basic transactions. Tax money seems to disappear into a black hole and what often comes out are second-rate services, budget overruns and projects that are not completed on time. The disparity between what we pay in tax and what we get from the State is a source of deep frustration, particularly relative to the public services delivered by similarly wealthy European social democracies.

The question is why is this happening?

When policies are announced in Ireland, is there any mechanism for measuring their success? This is particularly important when current expenditure is bigger than capital expenditure. At least with capital spending you can see the thing that was supposed to be built. With current expenditure, spending is far more amorphous, open-ended and driven by vague aspirations rather than specific outcomes. When the State is spending so much money, an unwillingness or inability to measure specifically how much is being committed to various projects means the country is simply drifting, buoyed up by American multinationals, allowing the State to get away with waste.

In recent months a group of young maths and physics graduates called The Problem Solving Association, working for purely altruistic, one might even say patriotic, reasons, came together to use their technical ability, data expertise and maths brains to assess what is happening to your tax money once it gets sucked into the bureaucratic vacuum that is the Irish State. They are doing this, making data available to the citizens, precisely because the State won’t.

These young, concerned citizens have created a vast public procurement tracker that, in their words, “generates vast amounts of transactional data, but this information remains fragmented across departments, agencies and reporting systems. The Public Payments Tracker consolidates this distributed data into a unified analytical framework, aggregating records from over 190 state entities covering €78.5 billion across 400,000+ transactions”.

The results are shocking.

They found that the Irish State can’t trace a euro of public money from the budget line that authorised it through to the supplier who was paid for it. Hundreds of thousands of tenders, contract awards, purchase orders and payments sit in disconnected systems that never join up. So the basic “contract delivery test” that every private company accountant requires to assess spending can’t be applied at any scale. The association asked every Government department a set of questions: how many tenders finished under, on or over estimate? How much was spent above award values? And what was total procurement spend over five years? Only a few departments answered all three completely. The departments of Housing and Justice answered none.

All accounting departments in big organisations follow a money trail, a sequence from buying the services to the delivery, which typically goes along the following sequential pattern: tender → contract award → contract → purchase order → invoice → payment. Once an organisation follows this basic pattern, everyone knows who paid for what and to whom; the purchase order accords with the invoice documenting what work was done and, on receipt of this, the contractor is paid. This is precisely how to run a company.

The Irish State can’t provide this for the running of government. We might as well be putting our finger in the air when it comes to assessing what is spent on what for what outcome. The national accounting system has evolved in a siloed manner, with every spending department looking after its own affairs and nobody aggregating any data in an easy-to-use format. There is no central organisation that aggregates all spending, which might give a top civil servant or campaigning politician a clear picture of how much is being spent on what.

Once the mathematicians started looking at the numbers they found a mess: there were no unique identifiers for suppliers, tenders, contracts or payments: nothing links them. Because of the use of wildly inconsistent formats such as different column headers, different structures and standardised reporting across bodies, it was almost impossible to readily compare and aggregate data. Many departments report data in a pdf rather than machine-readable format (excel/csv), even when the numbers originate in excel. According to the number crunchers, some departments even say this is deliberate “to avoid manipulation” – but manipulation is the whole point of the exercise to be able to compare and assess value for money.

I realise this may all seem technical, arcane and a bit remote, but the Government is a money in/money out system. Taxes come in and services come out. The upside to standardising all this information – knowing who is getting paid for what, how many suppliers there are and how many departments are using the same suppliers for similar tasks – is enormous.

From a value-for-money perspective the Irish State is the largest buyer in the country (€15–20 billion per year) but behaves like it is hundreds of small buyers. It is not benefiting from its dominant buyer position. Think of the deals it could get by negotiating as one. In principle it has more buying power than a retail giant such as Walmart in many categories; in practice it has almost none. A linked ledger is what turns “hundreds of disconnected buyers” into one big buyer that can actually negotiate. The State could also compare prices for similar goods and projects across bodies and regions. It can also see total exposure to a supplier, concentration risks and any supplier’s performance can be pooled instead of relearned separately by every public body.

The power of data is transparency. It is the power of the future. Let’s embrace it on behalf of all of us.

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Poster from “The War Game.” Via BBC.

A film about nuclear war “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”

By Rebecca Fons | July 8, 2026Share

Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier,
With weapons beyond any reach of my mind,
With weapons so deadly the world must grow older
And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?
—Song for Three Soldiers, Stephen Vincent Benét

The 1990s were foundational movie-watching years for me. I was in my teens, and the films I consumed filled out my world, which at the time was narrow. I grew up in the small town of Winterset, Iowa (pop. 5,000) and it was through cinema that I first saw the gritty streets of New York City; witnessed a passionate kiss between lovers; heard Arabic, French, and Japanese; and experienced what has become my favorite activity: being told a story on a big screen in a room full of strangers.

That decade was a golden age for disaster movies: Twister (1996, man vs. nature), Independence Day (1996, man vs. alien), and Armageddon (1998, man vs. meteor). I logged countless hours in movie theaters watching beautiful people scream, run, drive, scream, shoot, cleverly quip despite certain death, kiss, scream, and always (even if a few characters had shuffled off the mortal movie coil gracefully and cinematically along the way) the heroes triumph against The Big Bad Thing that has come to destroy them—be it tornado, extraterrestrial, or killer rock from space.

Watching these films was a thrilling experience: cramming into the back row of a theater with my nerdy friends, big, buttery popcorn and enormous Diet Coke in hand as we screeched in terror, clutching one another tightly while the ubiquitous James Horner or John Williams score soared, blubbering when Bruce Willis sacrificed himself for the greater good, and holding our breath, praying that our favorite characters would make it out alive. It was exhilarating. These films were glorious and glossy products that Hollywood reliably churned out and that we would happily watch over and over again.

As I’ve gotten older, my palette has matured. I gravitate toward arguably more intellectual fare, but out of a sense of nostalgia—or maybe duty—I buy tickets and go to the sequels, prequels and remakes of the films of my youth; showing up to the theater for each reboot, franchise installment, and sequel. And each time, I sit in my seat, decidedly disconnected. I do not clutch the arm of my husband in the seat next to me, I do not hold my breath and pray. These new films are glossier than ever, but something has changed for me. Maybe the scripts have gotten worse, maybe there have just been one too many sequels.

Or perhaps it’s a third thing. Perhaps it’s that I don’t particularly want to pay $20 to see the screaming, the running, the driving, the shooting, the clever quipping. I neither seek out nor shy away from escapism in my cinema (I’m a film curator, my profession requires an open mind. But when footage of bombs dropping, genocide, and the loss of life is livestreamed every day on the small screen in our pockets, I realize I have become tired—exhausted, in fact—by the endless parade of CGI disasters released every Friday at a movie theater near you.

What’s more, my standard of cinematic terror has been so raised by Peter Watkins’ 1965 pseudo-documentary The War Game that every other big screen cataclysmic storyline feels like folly, other disaster movies come across as distraction.

Watkins, a Brit, was commissioned by the BBC to make The War Game. Most people knew nothing about the arms race, and Watkins planned to make an informational film about the effect of a nuclear strike on Britain.

Boy, did he.

The finished film—a 47-minute, uncompromising nightmare—was immediately suppressed by the BBC, who refused to release it, declaring it “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” (The National Archives 1965). Though they denied it, saying the decision to pull The War Game from television was their own, there is evidence that the BBC screened the film for members of the British Ministry of Defence, who pressured them to ban the film. The War Game was eventually given limited release in cinemas, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and finally aired on the BBC in 1985, twenty years later.

Watkins was staunchly anti-war, and throughout his career he used his medium to faithfully communicate his message. Culloden, the feature he made prior to The War Game, portrayed the brutality and futility of the battlefield; and with The War Game, he set out to detail the ultimate disaster: man vs. nuclear catastrophe; man vs. extinction. At a steady clip, Watkins, using a cast of non-actors, matter-of-factly dramatizes September 18 to Christmas Day—the 99 days of terror that follow the dropping of a Soviet nuclear bomb on the outskirts of Kent, England.

Shot in the style of a dry news report, Watkins steadies his camera dispassionately at his subjects, forcing the audience to bear witness as a narrator, without an ounce of sentiment or dramatic soundtrack, explains how little time the citizens of Kent have to take shelter (approximately three minutes, maybe fewer) at the drop of the bomb; how—because he was struck by the bomb’s thermal radiation—this little boy’s eyeballs melted; how 12 seconds later this building collapses due to the subsequent shockwave; or how 10 miles away in Rochester, an airburst has caused the firestorm you see here. And here we see, horrified viewers, Britain is striking back—dropping a bomb on the Soviets. Nuclear war has begun.

As the medical professionals interviewed in the film tell us: those who live, who make it past the initial blast, the chaos, and the overwhelmed emergency rooms (for every 800 injured, there is one doctor) will succumb to their wounds, to radiation poisoning, or simply to the mental toll of what they have seen.

Those who endure beyond these atrocities live to face the awful truth: After the bomb drops, there are no heroic gestures—this isn’t that kind of disaster movie. No single man or woman rises up from the ashes to lead the weak to victory against armed men guarding the caches of food—the hungry are shot on the spot. A sick child does not miraculously overcome his ailments thanks to the power of love—no, the narrator impassively tells us that he has seven bedridden years to come, and then will die from an unknown illness, likely caused by highly enriched uranium.

Throughout the film Watkins weaves in “man on the street” interviews with the people of Kent, those not involved in the dramatization. The narrator asks them what they know about nuclear war, or the threat of nuclear-armed states. “Very little.” “I’m afraid I don’t know much about atomic radiation at all.” “There won’t be a war, no.” A resident is seen showing off his bomb shelter—a shallow hole in the ground, covered by sandbags.

You can imagine the film concluding in a 1965 screening room, the lights turning on to reveal BBC executives and UK government officials with ashen faces, all immediately agreeing that it would never see the light of day, if they had anything to say about it. You might even agree with them, to a degree: It is a hard film to watch. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said that after he saw The War Game, “It seemed as if I had entered a new era of disillusioned adulthood” (Bradshaw 2025). You can choose, then, to not watch it. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of my childhood, you too can choose your own movie disaster when you go to the cinema. Or sit on the couch or pick up your phone: man vs. fill in the blank.

As I write this, we’re a month into another war with Iran, which the White House and its newly retitled Department of War has named “Operation Epic Fury.” White House spokespeople are struggling to define the goal of the operation, or the action itself: It’s a war, or definitely not a war; the goal is to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities; or Iran has no nuclear capabilities because we already obliterated those.

Since the operation began, the White House has been posting stylized videos on its TikTok account to promote the war. In one, Nintendo Wii games are intercut with clips of “unclassified” infrared footage of bombs dropping on Iran military sites; a Wii golf game declares “Hole in one!” before cutting to the annihilation of a jet; a bowling ball hits all the pins, followed by grainy black-and-white footage of an artillery site ablaze: “Strike!”

The video that has gotten the most attention is one featuring clips of Hollywood blockbusters. Titled “Justice the American Way,” followed by the fire and American flag emojis, and set to music from the video game Halo, the TikTok begins with Robert Downey Jr. as Ironman’s Tony Stark, at a bay of computers. “Wake up, Daddy’s home,” he announces. In quick succession we see: Russell Crowe in Gladiator (“Strength and honor”), Mel Gibson in Braveheart (“What will you do without freedom?”), Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick (“Maverick’s inbound”) before the screen fills with infrared footage of an enormous explosion. Scenes from John Wick, Superman (“I’m here to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”), Star Wars, and Transformers follow, alongside half-a-dozen shots of bombs dropping. It is not possible for viewers to know if in the strike footage there is loss of life, or to know what is left when the dust clears, but there is no question that they will recognize Mel Gibson, and everyone certainly knows that is Tom Cruise.

The United States military has a long, healthy relationship with Hollywood. Newsreels from wartime, movies romanticizing war; the military-entertainment complex is strong.

But these TikTok videos…there is something especially dangerous happening here. What associations do the average person have with Top Gun: Maverick? Big, buttery popcorn, Diet Coke, a sweeping Hans Zimmer score, Alpha masculinity. By connecting scenes of Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell to shots of bomb impacts in Iran, a message is being sent loud and clear: Real war is just like the movies. Dropping bombs makes you feel like a Hollywood movie star, like an Avenger, like Tom Cruise.

With The War Game, Watkins’ message was clear: When a bomb drops, the destruction is so complete, there can be no heroes. When you see the horrors that come from the pushing of the button, do you still think the man who pushes the button is brave? Sixty years later, the official White House TikTok account is publishing videos of military footage set to Los Del Río’s The Macarena, and the audience loves it: Comments on these videos are rapturous in their praise. “Whoever runs this account deserves a raise and is a legend.” “Iconic.”

I am nostalgic about those silly disaster movies of my youth and the thrill they gave me—who doesn’t like being entertained? Cinema has been thrilling audiences since 1896, when brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière showed an audience footage of a train arriving at a station and they fled, thinking the train was coming straight for them. When they realized there was no danger, they returned to their seats and an industry was born. The War Game was dangerous because it told the truth about the horrors of nuclear war; these TikTok videos are dangerous because they tell a lie—that war is a game and it’s as easy as getting a hole in one.

Editor’s note: Like many of the older films that are mentioned in this article, “The War Game” can be seen by doing a search for it on YouTube. More recent movies can be viewed by paying the usual subscription services online, buying a DVD, or renting via the local library—or even [shocking] going in-person to a revival at the local cinema. And if one looks hard enough, there are still a few summertime drive-in movie theaters around, as the July issue of the Bulletin goes to press.

References

Bradshaw, P. 2025. “Peter Watkins: an English film-making revolutionary from a tradition of uncompromising radicalism.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/03/peter-watkins-film-making-revolutionary-war-game-culloden-punishment-park

The National Archives. 1965. “BBC film censored?” Sixties Britain, transcript of Parliamentary question asked in the House of Commons by William Hamilton MP to the Secretary of State for the Home Department. December 2. The National Archives. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/sixties-britain/bbc-film-censored/

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Keywords: Britain, The W

Armed drones are coming to U.S. schools

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Some U.S. schools are getting fleets of remotely piloted “attack drones” that can fire pepper rounds, disorient, and even ram an active shooter in the halls — controlled by a private response team hundreds of miles away in Austin.

The details:

Nine schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado are joining Mithril Defense’s rollout, with quadcopters stationed in secure boxes around each campus.The drones launch within seconds and can spray pepper gel, fire strobes, and sound sirens to slow a shooter down, or ram into them at up to 70 mph. Human operators fly the drones remotely from Mithril’s Austin headquarters and relay the shooter’s position to responding police. Florida allocated $557K for a three-school pilot, Georgia approved $500K for five schools, and a new Colorado charter is paying its own way.

Why it matters: The $4B a year U.S. schools spend on physical security buys hardware that reports; these drones act on a judgment call made by a contractor in Austin. Officials are uneasy — Omnilert’s AI gun detector once flagged a teenager’s Doritos bag, yet failed to see the handgun used in a fatal Tennessee school shooting.

Tech Bro Boasts He Used AI to Secretly Monitor Toddlers’ Conversations, Categorize Them In Giant Database

“I’d hate my parents if I found out they did this.”

By Frank Landymore

Published Aug 3, 2026 1:55 PM EDT

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Parents, if you’re thinking about subjecting your child to some bizarre AI experiment: don’t.

“Toddler spent her first night ever sleeping with someone else in the same room: her toddler cousin,” wrote Nicholas Charriere, the CEO of an AI-powered website builder called Mocha, in an X post on Friday.

https://fee6cf09f93df3686b08efc67ecbb993.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-45/html/container.html

Charriere, seeing that his child was about to have a very formative experience, decided he would record “everything” the two tykes said to each other in their “nonsensical toddler dialect” by “sneaking a mic in there.”

Then, of course, he fed the recordings into an AI model, Claude.

Using the AI, Charriere explained, he “built a private webpage for the whole family with the audio split into clips, all named and trimmed.”

Attached is a photo of the webpage autopsy of the kids’ conversations, divided into a tracklist of all the best goo-goo-ga-ga highlights, like “Hi Mama,” “I’m a Big Boy,” and “I Did Fart.”

“Pure joy from everyone,” Charriere declared. “AI is pretty great.”

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=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%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=2083704833366696118&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Ffuturism.com%2Fartificial-intelligence%2Ftech-bro-ai-toddler-conversations&sessionId=7a7758b4416c5549eeb07d6b5197e494325e9c63&theme=light&widgetsVersion=6a3ad42b224df%3A1778106238597&width=550px

Not everyone agreed. Charriere’s tale was met with heaps of backlash, with many calling it “creepy” and invasive.

“I’d hate my parents if I found out they did this,” one replier wrote, receiving more likes than Charrierer’s original tweet (as did many other call-out posts). “No respect for privacy. Those are people, not miniature versions of yourself made for the purpose of amusing you.”

Mike Duncan, the history podcaster and author, was even more scathing. 

“Why preserve the sanctity and privacy of late night sleepover chats when you can secretly record everything and feed into the AI slop machine and post about it,” he fumed.

Any time parenting and AI intersect is going to be divisive, and it’s a topic we’re going to keep hearing more about. (This incident went viral enough that it ended up on X’s trending tab under the incredible AI-generated headline, “Tech Exec Uses AI to Clip Toddler Chats for Family Memories.”) Some moms and dads see AI tools as a way to make parenting a little easier, keeping their kids placated and occupied and providing themselves some relief. AI can help them make decisions — like, controversially, picking their child’s name.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that he heavily relies on ChatGPT to care for his kid and recently mused about using AI to generate podcasts on a child’s favorite topics that they can listen to on their way to school. (A comedian’s rejoinder, “What if you just talked to your children,” went mega-viral.)

Other parents say they use ChatGPT’s voice mode to speak to their kid for hours on end. There’s apparently enough demand for this niche that Meta is building an app that uses AI to regale children ad hoc, sloppified bedtime stories.

AI skeptics, though, see the tech as a lazy way of replacing human interaction and note the privacy risks that AI models pose. AI companies aren’t always transparent about how the data you feed into them, including your conversations, will be used, and it’s possible that the stuff you share will be used to train future AI models.

Spying on toddlers and feeding their secrets into an AI might not be giving away anything too compromisingly personal, given how young they are. But you have to admit it’s a little strange to build a website out of it and brag about it online. And how might the child feel when they realize that they can’t trust anything they say to be private? We suspect that there may not be “pure joy” for that revelation.

More on AI: Poll Finds Overwhelming Majority Disgusted by Trump’s Relationship With AI Industry, Saying He’s Using the Tech to Tear Down Democracy

Frank Landymore

Contributing Writer

I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.

Recess makes a comeback

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

After decades of schools squeezing playtime out of the day, recess is back in play, Axios’ Carly Mallenbaum writes.  Why it matters: Recess may look like a break from learning. But researchers say free play helps kids return to class healthier, calmer and more ready to focus.“Recess refreshes you. Recess helps you feel a little bit less cynical about what’s going on,” says psychologist Peter Gray, author of the forthcoming book “Restoring Childhood.”  By the numbers: As of December, 12 states and Washington, D.C., had mandated school recess, while another 12 states required some form of physical activity, according to Johns Hopkins research. And recently, a new Oklahoma law requiring 40 minutes of recess each school day took effect in July.  The big picture: Unstructured play helps children practice social skills, manage stress and build stronger connections to school. Research has also linked recess to better behavior, attendance, classroom motivation and academic performance.  Reality check: Not all movement is recess.Broader “physical activity” laws can include after-school sports and gym class. Advocates say children also need time to play without being told how to do it. “Anyone who’s ever spent even a day with a kid can recognize that if you kept them sitting all day, they’d go insane — they’d drive everybody else insane,” says Hannah Thompson, a physical activity epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Zoom out: The decline in recess since the early 2000s is often tied to the testing-focused era that followed the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, when schools devoted more time to reading and math rather than play. Weekly recess time in U.S. schools fell by an hour between 2001 and 2019, according to education consulting firm EAB.  But the pendulum is swinging back. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently expanded its recess recommendation beyond elementary schools, calling for middle and high school students to get at least 20 minutes, too. Parent-led group Say Yes to Recess has become a national nonprofit, while support for the cause now stretches across the political spectrum. The bottom line: “More recess” isn’t just a student council campaign promise. It’s increasingly an essential part of the school day.Share this story.

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More than 30 years after South Africa achieved democracy it remains one of the world’s most unequal countries. The democratic transition has not produced the transfer in wealth and ownership from a white minority to Black majority population that many had hoped for.

Land is at the centre of the debates about this lack of transfer of wealth. During apartheid, because of racist laws around land ownership, Black South Africans could only own land in 13% of the country’s territory even when they made up 80% of the population.

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Read more: How to narrow the big divide between black and white farmers in South Africa

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In 1995, the government set an initial target to redistribute 30% of all white-owned land to Black farmers under a market-based programme, which ensured the white farmers could choose whether to sell their land and did so at or above market value. But only between 12% and 20% of the land has been redistributed so far.

For the last seven years, I have studied the land reform programme as a political scientist, merging my knowledge of political, social and economic forces to better understand why land reform has failed to live up to its initial goals.

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Read more: Most South African farmers are black: why Trump got it so wrong

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In a recent paper I set out to gain a deeper understanding of how land reform occurred and under what conditions transfers of land from white to Black farmers had taken place. To do this, I looked at both sides of the process.

On the one hand, I examined what motivated existing landholders to transfer land, including economic incentives to keep farms productive and social factors shaped by the legacy of apartheid and segregation. On the other hand, I looked at the forces driving demand for land reform, including land claims and pressure from landless people.

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Read more: Land reform in South Africa: how one community set up a successful game reserve

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I held in-depth conversations with established white commercial farmers and Black land reform farmers, asking white farmers why they had sold their farms for the purposes of land reform, or why they had refrained from doing so. I then asked Black farmers about their experiences as emerging farmers in South Africa.

I found that landowners’ decisions were shaped by South Africa’s history of racial segregation. Some white farmers used land redistribution to create a buffer between their farms and neighbouring Black communities. Others, in areas with many Black farmers, used land redistribution to bring Black farmers into their farming businesses.

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Read more: South Africa’s land reform efforts lack a focus on struggling farmers

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My findings show that where land ownership is very unequal, land redistribution doesn’t always reduce old divides. In some cases, it can actually reinforce them.

These findings are important because the powerful US government has recently taken strong action against the South African government, with US president Donald Trump publicly and wrongly accusing the land reform programme of persecuting white farmers, expropriating their land and encouraging violence against them.

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Read more: Trump and South Africa: what is white victimhood, and how is it linked to white supremacy?

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Based on this, Trump withdrew all aid from South Africa and opened up an asylum process for South Africa’s white farmers to come to America as refugees.

But as my research shows, land reform does not unfairly target white farmers. Instead, white farmers find it to be a useful and profitable tool to resolve longstanding problems that they face. This shows that the best way to understand land reform is to look at the evidence rather than the political debate.

Land reform to buffer against theft

I looked at how land reform was going in the Free State province, a part of South Africa with historically stark spatial segregation that led to minimal Black agriculture and high urbanisation. During apartheid, white and Black residents interacted in specific buffer zones between Black towns and white rural areas.

I interviewed 10 white farmers who lived next to the buffer areas. They said they were afraid of livestock theft and land reform had allowed them to sell their land to the state for a good price and move into the rural heartland.

It also meant that stock theft then became the problem of the new group of Black land reform farmers, just as national statistics on farm attacks have shown that Black people make up most of the victims of rural crime.

How land reform preserved old farming patterns

I also interviewed a dozen KwaZulu-Natal farmers to find out why they had sold their land. In this province, white farmers historically employed Black workers in a form of semi-feudal servitude called labour tenancy. Labour tenants were given access to small plots of land in exchange for their labour on the white-owned farm.

This meant that many more Black rural dwellers had small livestock farms scattered among the province’s white commercial farms in KwaZulu-Natal than in Free State.

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Read more: South Africa’s honeybush sector must transform from its unjust past: what needs to change

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Some white farmers sold part of their land through the land reform programme because they wanted to separate labour tenants’ small cattle herds from their larger commercial herds. Before land reform, labour tenants’ cattle often roamed across the farm, breaking fences and mixing with commercial cattle, which made grazing and disease control more difficult. Selling land allowed farmers to confine former labour tenants and their livestock to one part of the farm, separate from the commercial herd.

However, my research found that this left Black land reform beneficiaries on small plots with little opportunity to expand into profitable commercial farming, preserving the economic divide between the white commercial and Black cattle sectors.

What needs to happen next

My research suggests we need to rethink land reform rather than abandon it. In South Africa, much of the land has been redistributed through willing sellers selling land to willing buyers, with government support. This approach may help keep farms profitable, but it does little to tackle the deep inequalities created by colonialism and apartheid over many centuries.

While the US government has strongly condemned South Africa’s state-driven land reform framework, my research suggests the opposite problem: the state has relied too heavily on market forces instead of taking a more active role in deciding how land is transferred and supporting new farmers.

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Read more: Survey shows a majority of South Africans support land reform

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For example, in the Free State, land reform did little to reduce racial divisions where people live or the large gap in land ownership between Black and white South Africans. The state must do more to acquire farms or create incentives for existing landowners to sell if it wants to change the make-up of the Free State’s agriculture.

In KwaZulu-Natal, the government redistributed more land, but many of the small-scale farmers who received it have not been given the support they need to succeed. If the government wants more people to benefit from South Africa’s farming economy, rather than simply transferring land, it needs to do more to help emerging farmers get access to larger farms or earn a decent living from the land they already have.

Land reform will inevitably change agricultural practices in South Africa. It is up to the state and commercial sector to more equitably incorporate the new modes of farming that are present in the growing Black farming sector.

• Colonialism
• South Africa
• Apartheid
• Donald Trump
• Land reform
• white farmers
• Land redistribution
• black farmers

️ Finance execs find AI skills more valuable than an MBA

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The Rundown: PwC surveyed more than 1,000 director-level-and-above executives at U.S. financial services firms and found 86% say AI skills training beats an MBA for many new hires, with 91% saying they’re raising pay for employees with AI skills.

The details:

58% said they’ll tie pay to AI-enabled productivity, with firms sourcing the skills by hiring people with AI-specific skills, upskilling, and leaning on vendors. Due to AI disruption, eight in 10 execs expect their workforce to shrink at least 20% over five years, with entry- and middle-level roles being most vulnerable. The payoff remains unproven, as 77% say most of their AI investments aren’t showing measurable ROI, even as leaders report productivity gains. Many top universities, including MIT and Harvard, have already started offering executive AI courses as demand for AI talent grows, Bloomberg reports.

Why it matters: The survey reinforces what the job market has already been feeling: AI skills are becoming the new non-negotiable at work. How firms measure the AI payoff will keep shifting — from counting raw tokens to looking at real usable value — but they are already rushing to prioritize people who can wield those tools.

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Palantir shares jump 13% as U.S. AI demand sends revenue soaring past targets

By 

Preston Fore

Success Reporter

August 3, 2026, 4:57 PM ET

Palantir CEO Alex Karp said his AI company’s Q2 earnings were “otherworldly.”John Lamparski—Getty Images

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Palantir blew past Wall Street’s financial targets in its second quarter and forecast strong growth in the coming months, sending its stock surging 13% in after-hours trading on Monday.

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Revenue in the three months ended June 30 increased 93% year over year, totaling $1.94 billion, compared with the $1.801 billion that analysts were expecting. The AI software company posted net income of roughly $1.1 billion, or 41 cents per share, versus the average analyst estimate of 35 cents.

Palantir’s growth was fueled by continued strength in the U.S., where commercial revenue jumped 149% from a year earlier and government revenue climbed 90%.

“Our business is compounding at a rate and scale that we have never before witnessed,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a letter to shareholders, noting that Palantir’s second-quarter net income was more than the company generated in total revenue the year before.

The AI software company also issued another bullish outlook. Palantir expects third-quarter revenue of $2.160 billion to $2.164 billion and adjusted income from operations of $1.292 billion to $1.296 billion. It also raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to between $8.150 billion and $8.158 billion, up from its start-of-year forecast of $7.182 billion to $7.198 billion.

Shares of Palantir, which are down roughly 30% this year, jumped 13% to $142.0.1 in after-hours trading following Monday’s earnings report.

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Fortune Daily breaks the traditional barrier between audience and newsroom. The show transforms Fortune’s trusted reporting into actionable, conversational, and entertaining insights for an emerging class of business leaders. Watch here.

About the Author

By Preston Fore Success Reporter

Preston Fore is a reporter on Fortune‘s Success team.

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Chinese lab uses unique pitch to win AI support It was just last year that DeepSeek emerged as China’s first serious contender in the global AI race. Since then, a wave of Chinese labs has quietly raised the stakes, churning out bigger, cheaper, more efficient models that are giving US rivals a run for their money. Alibaba just did it again.On Sunday, Alibaba launched Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion-parameter model that the company is calling not only its biggest model, but also its most capable in the Qwen family. The model touts upgrades across coding, agentic use cases, long-horizon tasks, research, and other complex tasks.  The company’s promotional video focuses on Qwen3.8’s ability to act as an “always on work-mate,” showing examples of it doing hours worth of work while the worker can do more enjoyable tasks. For instance, one vignette shows Qwen3.8-Max designing chips nonstop for 12 hours while the engineer goes fishing. Another shows a biology professor playing tennis while the model verifies a protein. This approach, which contrasts with US labs by emphasizing the lifestyle users can reclaim, is garnering attention on socials. It’s anchored on the idea that the model sets a new bar for coding and coworking, a claim the benchmarks are meant to support. Qwen3.8-Max performed comparable to, or even higher than, leading models in a series of benchmarks Alibaba published. That included Anthropic’s Fable 5, a model so powerful that the US temporarily banned it, and Kimi K3, a model with 2.8 trillion parameters that made headlines last month for its claim that it could outperform Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others. Since benchmarks aren’t always the truest indicators of performance in real-world tasks, more notable is its performance on crowdsourced, independent benchmarks such as the Code Arena for front-end web development tasks, where it placed fourth following Claude Opus 5, Kimi K3 Max, and Claude Opus 5 High.  Another noteworthy aspect of the release is the models’ cost, which, based on current pricing across the frontier field, Qwen3.8-Max’s rates This is likely to further the price war that is already heating up in the US, with Chinese labs wielding both benchmark performance and token economics as powerful competitive forces. Alibaba plans to release the open weights of Qwen3.8-Max next week, another differentiator from the leading US labs.Alibaba’s latest release not only adds to the onslaught of highly capable, efficient, and inexpensive models coming out of China, but also highlights a different approach than the US labs on multiple fronts. The most obvious parallels are the same strengths seen in the releases of Kimi K3 and the DeepSeek models: cheaper, open-weight models that don’t compromise on performance. The more interesting angle, however, is the focus on giving people back their time rather than simply increasing productivity, which is what US labs have focused on until now. While this framing may strike some as tone-deaf, given the very real concerns about AI displacing jobs by doing people’s work for them, it’s an interesting approach that might actually appeal to the emotions of people in the broader public, who tend to be very skeptical of AI. If the US adopted more of a Chinese marketing approach, I’d be curious to see whether it would bring more people on board with using the technology.

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

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Studies Highlight Rapid Expansion of ADHD Drug Prescribing

Evidence from Canada, Australia, and the United States shows ADHD drug prescriptions rising across multiple populations, with increases associated with the pandemic and expanded telepsychiatry.

By

 Richard Sears

 –

July 31, 2026

This week Mad in America explores three new studies related to increasing psychiatric stimulant use. The first finds that psychiatric drug use among US youth was increasing leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, largely driven by stimulant prescriptions. The second finds that prescriptions for ADHD drugs increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada. The third finds that ADHD drug prescriptions significantly increased after the expansion of remote telepsychaitry in Australia.

Psychiatric Drug Use Among US Youth Increasing, Largely Driven by Prescription Stimulants

A new study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry finds that psychiatric drug prescriptions are increasing for US youth between the ages of six to 24 years old, driven mainly by stimulants. This research, led by Lin-Chieh Meng from the University of Pennsylvania, also reports that many young people that are taking psychiatric drugs are exposed to drug combinations with potential major drug-drug interaction risks.

The goal of this study was to examine the trends in psychiatric drug prescription in US youths aged six to 24. The authors also wanted to investigate patterns of polypharmacy and the prevalence of potential major drug-drug interactions in this population.

The authors used data nationally representative data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey covering 2001 – 2020. They looked at data around the use of psychiatric stimulants, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazepines in the thirty days before data collection. For the purposes of analysis, participants were divided into three groups: children (six to 11 years old), adolescents (12 to 19), and young adults (20 to 24). The authors used a drug-drug interaction database to identify possible major drug-drug interaction risks.

The overall prevalence of psychiatric drug use in US youth between six to 24 years old increased from 5.3% in 2001 – 2004 to 8.3% in 2017 – 2020. Children, adolescents, and young adults all saw increases in the prevalence of psychiatric drug use. This increase was most significant in the young adult group where psychiatric drug use increased at each interval, growing from 4.6% in 2001 – 2004 to 11% in 2017 – 2020. The prevalence rate for adolescents increased from 6.6% to 8.2% while the rate for children increased from 4.2% to 6.1%.

These increases were largely driven by psychiatric stimulants, with prescription rates nearly doubling between 2001 and 2020. This was especially true in the young adult group, where 0.2% were taking psychiatric stimulants in 2001 – 2004 compared to 5.6% in 2017 – 2020.

Overall polypharmacy rates rose from 1.8% in 2001 – 2004 to 3.3% in 2017 – 2020. The children’s group had the smallest increase in polypharmacy rates from 1.8% to 1.9%, down from a high of 2.5% in 2005 – 2008. The polypharmacy rate for young adults saw the most drastic increase, going from 0.8% in 2001 – 2004 to 5% in 2017 – 2020. Of the participants taking psychiatric drugs, 26% were exposed to potentially major drug-drug interactions. This was largely driven by the combination of antidepressants and antipsychotics.

This study had three key limitations. Psychiatric drug use was self-reported and was not confirmed through clinical records. The reported potential drug-drug interactions were based solely on observed combinations with potential negative effects, not actual confirmed adverse events. The data came exclusively from US residents, limiting generalizability to other populations.

New Prescriptions for ADHD Drugs Significantly Increased During COVID

A new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal finds that new prescriptions for ADHD drugs surged during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada. This study, led by Tara Gomes from the University of Toronto, also finds that the majority of new ADHD prescriptions were given to women.

The goal of this research was to examine how prescriptions for ADHD drugs changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors used provincial health records and prescription dispensing data to examine new ADHD prescriptions given to adults in Ontario. They compared pre-COVID prescription rates to the rate of ADHD drug prescriptions given during the pandemic. In total, the authors examined data from 327,053 people that received a new stimulant prescription in Ontario between January 2016 and June 2024.

Rates for new stimulant prescriptions increased substantially during the pandemic. This was true for all ages and demographics examined in the current work. In January 2016, the rate of new stimulant prescriptions in Ontario was 0.16 per 1,000 adults/month. During the pandemic that rate rose substantially to 0.44 per 1,000 adults/month. This represents a 175% increase compared to pre-COVID levels. The authors note that this increase was not linear. During the early pandemic, new stimulant prescription rates decreased before rising sharply.

While new stimulant prescription rates increased for all examined demographics, this increase was especially large for women. Before the pandemic, women represented 48% of new stimulant prescriptions compared to 59% during COVID. Young adults (25 – 34 years old) also saw their new stimulant prescription rates increase disproportionately. Before the pandemic this group represented 26.5% of all new prescriptions compared to 32.8% during COVID.

Nurses and nurse practitioners significantly increased their stimulant prescription rates during COVID. Before the pandemic, nurses and nurse practitioners wrote just 1.7% of new stimulant prescriptions compared to 9.6% during the pandemic. Psychiatrists wrote 25.5% of new stimulant prescriptions before the pandemic compared to 18% during COVID.

This study had three main limitations. The available data did not tell the researchers why these new stimulant prescriptions were being given. Prescription records show only that a prescription was filled, not whether the patient actually used the drugs. The data all came from Ontario residents, limiting generalizability to other populations.

Prescriptions for ADHD Drugs Surge After Remote Telepsychiatry Expansion

A new study published in Psychiatry Research finds that prescriptions for psychiatric stimulants and other ADHD drugs significantly increased in Australia after the expansion of remote psychiatric consultations. This study, led by Luke Sy-Cherng Woon from The Australian National University, also finds that other psychiatric drugs did not see similar increases in prescription rates.

The goal of this research was to investigate how the expansion of telepsychiatry affected the prescription rates of ADHD drugs in Australia. The authors also wanted to examine if factors such as remoteness, socioeconomic status, and gender affected these prescriptions rates post-expansion.

The authors used data from the Medicare Benefits Schedule, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and the Australian Census to analyze 3,940,018 prescription-linked outpatient psychiatric consultations that took place between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2023. Time periods were divided into three phases: pre-telepsychiatry expansion (before March 2020), during expansion (March 2020 – December 2021), and post-expansion/consolidation (January 2022 – December 2023).

Prescription rates for ADHD drugs increased nearly threefold, from 4.3% of psychiatric consultations before the expansion of telepsychaitry to 11.8% of consultations after. This increase was especially significant in remote video psychiatric consultations, where 1.8% of pre-expansion remote video consultations were linked to stimulant prescriptions compared to 23.4% after the expansion.

Several factors were linked to increased prescribing of psychiatric stimulants. Patients in more remote areas had higher rates of receiving a stimulant prescription through a remote video psychiatric consult. Providers with a higher proportion of female patients and those practicing in more socioeconomically advantaged areas were more likely to write stimulant prescriptions after video consultations. Overall online search interest in ADHD drugs and facing more strict COVID-19 era lockdowns was also linked to patients being more likely to get a stimulant prescription after a video consultation. It is worth noting that all other classes of psychiatric drugs investigated in the current work saw small decreases in overall prescription rates after the expansion of telepsychiatry.

This study had three key limitations. The data was collected from administrative databases and lacked information that could have been useful during analysis, such as diagnosis. Private prescriptions would not have been included in the public databases the authors used. The participants were all residents of Australia, limiting generalizability to other populations.

****

Gomes, T., Wang, T., Rebić, N., Miller, S., Paolozza, L., Vigod, S. N., & Tadrous, M. (2026). Patterns of prescription stimulant initiation before and during the covid-19 pandemic: A population-based time-series analysis. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 198(9). (Link)

Meng, L.-C., Leonard, C. E., Candon, M., Mandell, D. S., & Hennessy, S. (2025). Trends in psychotropic medication use, polypharmacy, and potential major drug–drug interactions among US youth. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. (Link)

Woon, L. S.-C., Bastiampillai, T., Looi, J. C., & Liu, W.-M. (2026). Effect of Australian telepsychiatry services on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder prescriptions. Psychiatry Research, 364, 117311. (Link)

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Richard Sears

Richard Sears teaches psychology at West Georgia Technical College and works as a counseling psychologist in private practice, specializing in person-centered therapy. Earlier in his career, Richard worked in a psychiatric crisis stabilization unit, an experience that exposed him to the harsh realities of a broken mental healthcare system. This fueled his commitment to providing compassionate, person-centered care and advocating for meaningful change in how mental health services are delivered.

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