CONSIDER THIS: The Prompt-Engineered: Prophet: Banal Merde and the Great AI Career Protection Racket

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Madrid, Sunday 2nd May 2026

Listen, before we start, let’s just take a moment to look at the word “Futurist.” What is a “Futurist”? In the old days, a futurist was a mentalist in a silver jumpsuit who thought we’d all be eating pill-form roast dinners while commuting to a moon colony via jetpack. Now, it’s just a title for a man in a sharp suit who’s managed to monetise the act of stating the fucking obvious with the hollow conviction of a cult leader selling “ascension” for forty quid a month.

And here he is. Banal Merde. A man who looks like he was synthesized in a lab from the DNA of a LinkedIn “Top Voice” and a wet cardboard box.

His latest piece of career-advice-slop, “The New AI Career Divide,” is the kind of breathless, sycophantic corporate fan-fiction that makes you want to go and live in a cave and communicate only through the medium of throwing stones at consultants.

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SATURDAY GIG: The Great Transformation Race – 2026/05/02

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Madrid, Saturday 2nd May 2026

Large vintage film reel on a beach with a digital wave and futuristic city skyline.
A vintage film reel rests on a beach as a digital wave crashes before a futuristic city skyline under the aurora borealis.

SATURDAY: The Great Transformation Race (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vapid LinkedIn Word-Salad of the Techno-Toffs)

I was reading LinkedIn the other day. I know. I know. It’s a cry for help. LinkedIn is the only place on the internet where people talk like they’ve been lobotomised by a McKinsey PowerPoint presentation and then fed through a shredder. It’s a digital business park where everyone is wearing an invisible lanyard and shouting “Synergy!” at a pigeon.

And there he was. Bernice Carr. The Bernice Carr. A man whose job title, “Strategic Business & Technology Advisor,” is basically Latin for “I possess a library of blasers and a subscription to ChatGPT, and I will use both to make you feel slightly anxious about things that don’t exist.”

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Reclaiming May Day: The New Knowledge Economy

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Madrid, Friday 1st May 2026

The arrival of May 1st, International Workers’ Day, is often framed through the sepia-toned lens of 19th-century industrialism: coal dust, steam whistles, and the clatter of the Spinning Jenny. Yet, to view Labour Day as a relic of the manufacturing age is to commit a grave anthropological and strategic error.

For the modern “knowledge class”, those architects of algorithms, curators of data, and high priests of information, May 1st is not a historical curiosity. It is a mirror. To celebrate it is to acknowledge that while our tools have shifted from the physical to the metaphysical, the structural dynamics of power, exhaustion, and civic duty remain unchanged.

Here are ten reasons why those who trade in bits and bytes should reclaim the spirit of May Day.

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HOW NOT TO: Embrace the AI Swarm: Your Business’s Digital Survival Guide

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THE COMING DIGITAL LOCUSTS: Why Your Pathetic ‘Enterprise Solutions’ Are Just Seasoning for the AI Swarm

Madrid, Wednesday 29th April 2026

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2026 TRENDS: Transforming Finance with AI and Tokenisation

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Madrid Sunday 26th April 2026

Two people arguing in silhouette on a stage with a large neon mechanical gear behind them
Two silhouetted figures argue passionately in front of a glowing neon gear.

Welcome to the definitive, hyper-disruptive, AI-augmented, thought-leadership-as-a-service (TLaaS) guide to 2026. If you aren’t already feeling the “frictionless” vibration of a “mind-bending” paradigm shift, you’re clearly still living in the analog dark ages of 2025.

Here are the 7 “revolutionary” trends that Brendan Miggins, the man who never met a buzzword he didn’t want to marry, is definitely getting paid to tell you will “reshape the universe.”

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CONSIDER THIS: Is the Cognitive Engine a Real Threat or Just Hype?

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Madrid, Thursday 23rd April 2026

Large vintage film reel on a beach with a digital wave and futuristic city skyline.
A vintage film reel rests on a beach as a digital wave crashes before a futuristic city skyline under the aurora borealis.

Oh, look what the algorithm dragged in. It’s an article by Julian Sterling-Vane. A “Temporal Architect.”

Now, before we begin, let’s just pause and dismantle the job title “Temporal Architect,” shall we? In any sane civilisation, a “Temporal Architect” would be a man in a tinfoil hat shouting at a pigeon in a precinct. But in our current late-stage capitalist hellscape, it’s a bloke in a slim-fit navy blazer who gets paid fifty grand a head to tell HR directors that, by 2030, their staplers will have “emotional intelligence.”

Sterling-Vane has written a piece titled: “Why the Cognitive Engine Isn’t a Bubble (But It Could Still Topple the Counting House).” It’s a masterpiece of the genre I like to call “The Professional Network Shrug.” It’s the prose equivalent of a man trying to sell you a monorail while simultaneously backing away toward an escape pod.

Let’s let the combined psychic energy of Aloysius Snarl, Montgomery Metal, and St. John Spleen take a look at this steaming pile of visionary “content.”

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CONSIDER THIS: LinkedIn – 2026/04/09

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Smartphone surrounded by many social media posts and red heart like icons
A smartphone surrounded by numerous social media posts and like icons, depicting digital interaction

Madrid Thursday 9th April 2026

Right. LinkedIn.

You know, I was thinking about this the other day, or rather, I was forced to think about it because some algorithm had decided that what I really needed at 7:42 in the morning, while I was still half-asleep and trying to remember why I exist, was yet another notification telling me that Kevin from Supply Chain Optimisation had “viewed my profile.”

Kevin. From Supply Chain Optimisation.

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Coco, el perro que superó a Wall Street

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Martyn Rhisiart Jones

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CONSIDER THIS: The Industrial Revolution for People Who Wear Turtlenecks

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Large vintage film reel on a beach with a digital wave and futuristic city skyline.
A vintage film reel rests on a beach as a digital wave crashes before a futuristic city skyline under the aurora borealis.

Oh, look what the algorithm dragged in. Gather ’round, you beautiful, deluded LinkedIn-scrolling corpses, for another sermon from the Church of the Silicon Rapture.

Here we have Blithering Binge Drinking Marge, or as I prefer to call her, Barbara von Blathertron, the internationally best-selling author, professional nodding enthusiast, and ladylikelady whose “futurist” predictions have the shelf life of an open tuna sandwich. He’s back to explain how AI is “rewriting filmmaking” while insisting that “craft” still wins. Bless his little heart. It’s like watching a Victorian gentleman politely announce that the guillotine is merely a “disruptive time-saving device for high-speed haircuts.”

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DATA WORLD: Data Architecture Lessons from Easter

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The Catholic, Church of Wales and Anglican traditions don’t actually have a secret PowerPoint on data architecture hidden in the Vatican archives or the Book of Common Prayer. But if you sit with the Easter story… the deliberate march to Calvary, the cross, the tomb, the impossible Sunday morning… and with the Jesus who keeps saying “I am the way, the truth and the life,” you start noticing the same patterns that good data people chase when they’re not busy filling in GDPR forms.

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TECH HOUR: Warehousing Your Data: A No-Nonsense Guide to the Right DBMS in 2026

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Warehousing Your Data: A No-Nonsense Guide to the Right DBMS in 2026

Listen, you glorious data martyrs. You noble sufferers who have spent far too many evenings coaxing historical rows into slowly changing dimension tables while the rest of the office has gone home to sensible lives. You know the drill. The star schema looks perfect on paper, the fact table is append-only and cooperative, but then someone asks for last year’s corrected customer segments. Suddenly, your backfill script is performing open-heart surgery on a live production warehouse.

In 2026, vendors are still shouting about infinite scalability and “agentic AI” (whatever that means this week), but what actually matters is a system that lets you shove yesterday’s data into those dimension objects without it feeling like a hostage negotiation.

I have been asked to examine the most appropriate database management systems for effective data warehousing, with particular attention to the pain of backfilling dimensional tables. The brief is clear: functionality, reliability, scalability, extensibility, maintainability, performance, cost, ease of use, and a total lack of corporate nonsense.

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TECH HOUR: Snowflake’s Cortex Code: The Agentic Reckoning

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Cortex Code: The Agentic Reckoning,  Or, How Snowflake Finally Gave Data Engineers a Break from Their Existential Crisis (Now With 300% More Technical Guts)

Yesterday I attended Snowflake’s breakfast date in Madrid, and here are some of the great things I learned. So, without more ado…

Listen up, you glorious data martyrs, you noble sufferers who’ve spent years knee-deep in the festering swamp of undocumented ETL pipelines, chasing lineage graphs that resemble a deranged spider on acid after a three-day bender, and muttering dark incantations at 3 a.m. because some crusty Python script decided “customer churn” meant “every table that vaguely smells like a customer, plus that one VIEW nobody documented since 2019.” I stand before you today, your erudite, slightly unhinged technical prophet (with a heavy dose of stand-up bile and a side order of schema diagrams), to deliver the good news: Snowflake has unleashed Cortex Code, the AI coding agent that doesn’t just autocomplete your misery,  it inhales it, digests the entire governed data estate, and burps back production-grade, hallucination-free SQL, Python, and dbt YAML while respecting your PII tags and warehouse economics like a paranoid compliance officer on Red Bull. This isn’t your garden-variety Copilot having another existential meltdown over a missing import. This is Code Context incarnate, an agentic beast that has swallowed the Horizon Catalogue whole, metadata, lineage graphs, semantic layers, role-based access controls, Dynamic Table lag policies, and the soul-crushing reality of your credit burn rate.

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GRIFTER’S CORNER: The Impact of Agentic AI on Gammon

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Ah, March 25th, 2026, the sun is shining, the Snowflake croissants are buttery, and another LinkedIn prophet has risen to bless us with his latest dispatch from the mountaintop of thought leadership. Thank you, dear reader, for stumbling upon “AI Special Agents Are About To Change Gaming and Maiming Forever” by the one and only Berneice Barr, world-renowned futurist, eighty-million-follower magnet, and woman who has written more books about AI than most people have had hot dinners.

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MASTER CLASS: Mastering Data Warehousing: Balancing Pre-Emption and Back-Filling

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In the ever-evolving world of enterprise data warehousing, one of the most persistent and critical challenges is how to intelligently expand subject areas and the associated data within the core data warehouse database, while maintaining architectural integrity, data quality, and governance, without venturing into data mart considerations.

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GRIFTER’S CORNER: Navigating AI Choices in 2026: Beyond Model Selection

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March 20, 2026. Yes, that’s right, the calendar has finally caught up with the grift, hasn’t it? Thank you, thank you, for bothering to read my latest steaming pile of corporate word salad: “Choosing The Right AI In 2026 Is No Longer About Choosing The Right Model.” Because obviously, in 2026, choosing the right model would be far too simple, far too honest. No, no, we’ve evolved beyond that. We’re now in the rarefied realm of “capability profiles” and “orchestral conducting.” Please, hold your applause until I’ve finished flogging this dead horse made of buzzwords.

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GRIFTER’S CORNER: The Global Grift: The Industrialisation of Technical Fraud – Surf’s Up

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To neutralise the “industrial-scale rot” of global hiring, your vetting process must shift from a posture of trust but verify to one of hostile interrogation. The goal is to break the “proxy” (where a different person speaks or codes) and the “emulator” (where the candidate uses AI or pre-written scripts).

Here is a three-stage, “Zero-Trust” technical vetting framework.

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GRIFTER’S CORNER: The Global Grift: The Industrialisation of Technical Fraud – Surveying The Estate

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The Global Grift: The Industrialisation of Technical Fraud –

The digital gold rush has ended not in a utopia of global connectivity, but in a sprawling, multi-jurisdictional wasteland of institutionalised deception. As remote work dismantled the physical perimeter of the office, it simultaneously liquidated the last vestiges of vetting. We are currently witnessing the “Great Dilution”, an era where the global supply of IT talent is being systematically poisoned by industrial-scale charlatanry.

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Building Insight: Revolutionising Corporate Estate Management – Book Review

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Angelica Bush, Madrid, Monday 16th March 2026

The Architecture of Insight: A Masterclass in the Corporate Built Environment

In the grand, sweeping narrative of global commerce, we have long obsessed over the movement of capital and the flux of labour. Yet, we have been curiously blind to the very stage upon which this drama unfolds: the corporate estate. In his magisterial new work, Building Insight: Data, Information and Advanced Analytics in Corporate Real Estate, Martyn Jones, a “whisperer of unruly data” with a pedigree that reads like a Cold War thriller, seeks to rectify this oversight.

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Building Insight: The Future of Corporate Real Estate – Book Review

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Francesca Fraser, Sunday Madrid 15th March 2026

Review: Building Insight: Data, Information and Advanced Analytics in Corporate Real Estate, by Martyn Jones

In the quiet corners of corporate life, far from the glamour of mergers, the drama of markets, or the mythology of founders, lies a function that quietly consumes billions: corporate real estate. Offices, campuses, warehouses, data centres, and laboratories. They are the stage sets on which modern organisations perform. Yet the management of this built world has often been treated as a back-office craft rather than a strategic discipline.

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Harnessing Data for Corporate Real Estate Management Success – Book Review

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Gemma Esmerelda Jones, Sunday Madrid 15th March 2026

Building Insight: Data, Information and Advanced Analytics in Corporate Real Estate

In an era where corporate real estate management (CREM) is no longer a mere back-office function but a strategic lever for sustainability, efficiency and value creation, Martyn Jones’s Building Insight arrives as a timely manifesto. Drawing on decades of experience advising blue-chip firms from Adidas to Xerox, Jones, a Welshman based in Spain with a flair for data architecture, argues that CREM’s future lies in harnessing data, information and advanced analytics. This is not a dry textbook on property spreadsheets; rather, it is a thoughtful exploration of how insight can transform bricks-and-mortar decisions into competitive advantages. At a compact yet comprehensive length, the book bridges the gap between CREM practitioners and the broader C-suite, echoing the analytical rigour of industry journals while infusing a personal, almost anthropological lens on the field.

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Winning Wars With Agile: Fear and Loathing – Revisited

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“Logistics is all of war-making, except shooting the guns, releasing the bombs, and firing the torpedoes.”

ADM Lynde D. McCormick, USN

In the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the corridors of Whitehall, the gospel of agility has become a mantra for efficiency and innovation. Borrowed from the frenetic world of software development, where iterative sprints and self-organising teams promise to outpace lumbering bureaucracies, agile methodologies, scaled up through frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), are now touted as universal elixirs. But can these principles, honed in the digital realm, truly orchestrate the chaos of armed conflict? Or do they risk injecting perilous uncertainty into arenas where hesitation can spell catastrophe? This question, once a provocative thought experiment, gains urgency amid evolving threats, from hybrid warfare in Eastern Europe to cyber skirmishes in the South China Sea. Drawing on historical precedents, contemporary military adaptations, and a dash of Celtic scepticism, we dissect whether agility’s allure holds water on the front lines, echoing the resilient pragmatism of Welsh soldiery through the ages.

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Laughing @ Data.Com: A Satirical Take on IT Industry Hype – Book Review

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Penelope Parker, Madrid 10th March 2026

The tech industry has long been a parade of expensive suits, hollow acronyms, and “digital transformations” that possess all the structural integrity of a damp Digestive biscuit. Into this landscape of algorithmic overpromise and professionalised grifting comes Martyn Jones with Laughing @ Data.Com, a book that, by all rights, should be required reading for anyone currently being held hostage by a Jira ticket.

Jones, a man once heralded as a top-tier database expert back “when that kind of accolade still meant something,” has produced a work that is less a technical manual and more a weary, satirical travelogue through the “Kafkaesque scrum of buzzwords and bootlickers” that defines modern IT.

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Laughing@Data.Com: A Candid Review of Data’s Absurdities – Book Review

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Rebecca Trentt

Book Review: Laughing@Data.Com by Martyn Jones
A survival manual for the data-industrial complex, delivered with a raised eyebrow and a sharpened knife

There are books about data. Then there are books written by people who have survived data.

Laughing@Data.Com sits firmly in the second category.

Martyn Jones’ latest contribution to the already groaning shelf of “data thought leadership” arrives like a heckler in a TED Talk. Where most books on artificial intelligence, analytics, and “digital transformation” read like a PowerPoint deck translated into prose, Jones offers something rarer: a long, irreverent laugh at the entire enterprise.

Not a joyful laugh, mind you. More the hollow, existential chuckle of someone who has spent thirty years watching corporations spend millions trying to discover that spreadsheets still work.

And that, in many ways, is the point.

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Laughing@Data.Com: Hilarious Heresy Against the Hype Machine – Book Review

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Lila de Alba

In the digital colosseum where data evangelists duel with dashboards and AI prophets peddle predictive panaceas, Martyn Jones arrives not with a sword, but a seltzer bottle. His latest tome, Laughing@Data.Com (self-published, 2025), is a riotous romp through the absurdities of the IT industry, a book that skewers the sacred cows of big data, machine learning, and that perennial favorite, “digital transformation,” with the precision of a Welsh coal miner’s pickaxe. Jones, a grizzled data architect who’s consulted for everyone from Adidas to the UN (and survived to tell the tale), channels the spirit of Swiftian satire into a manifesto that’s equal parts Wired’s gadget glee, CIO’s boardroom battle cry, and FT Weekend’s urbane eyebrow-raise. If Dave Trott’s advertising yarns met Stewart Lee’s stand-up scorn in a Zurich banker’s lounge, this would be the offspring: witty, worldly, and wonderfully wicked.

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