My son-in-law just got made redundant by AI from a large business consultancy firm, they were the first to begin lay offs, I expect many more will follow, and that the initial 10% cull will eventually rise to 30% plus. At a time like this you can spend it tidying up your resume and applying for other positions, or if you are smart, eat their lunch.

Big businesses work with boards of management and share-holders, they look at quarterly results, and earnings-per-share; None of this is relevant in a singularity, they are moving slow, they are super-tankers trying to make a turn, they have a lot of baggage, a lot of corporate and technical debt to work through, most CEO’s are trying to change what happened 3-6 months ago, not what is happening now.

This is your chance to get ahead of them and take back control of your life. With the help of AI, you can likely do the same job for their customers now without all that baggage, quicker and at less cost, and before you get that redundancy notice, make sure their customers know that this is exactly what you will be offering them if they want it. If I was in this position, this is exactly how I would be acting right now. Open an AI session up now, check legally how you can do this, identify the gaps in your knowledge the AI can fill and go for it! Remember today is the dumbest AI will ever be.

Even though I have the skills to do this myself, I do not have such contacts anymore, and those I know I could eat the lunch of are not big-corporate, just small businesses who I will certainly be pushing this message to. I personally am out of the game, content to watch all this from the sidelines of retirement. It is not going to be a pleasant time for many, even my retirement provisions are likely to roller-coaster like crazy, but at least I know me and the wife can still live frugally and happily in a nice part of the world. I am encouraged by a few tech leaders, who have their eye-on-the-ball, and I seriously hope this all leads to a world of abundance; But there will be casualties, don’t be one of them!

If you haven’t already installed OpenClaw, you are probably watching it closely. IT departments are probably having nightmares over this software, which basically puts a bunch of prompts into timing loops (ie your workload) and then runs the loop, and you pray the software does not do anything bad, like hallucinate, change its instructions, or run something bad. Smart people are trying it out sand-boxed in controlled environments with limited or no access to their production stuff, others have just opened the drawbridge, to various degrees of success or failure, and its only just over two months old!

However you feel about this you cannot turn a blind eye to its potential. A well built, well managed, controlled OpenClaw-like system has the potential to easily automate 50%, to 100% of an office workers job, and if your company wants a competitive edge in the future, they are going to hear about this soon enough, and somebody out there, likely a consultant firm, is going to offer to install it for them.

This is the tip of a massive iceberg, the trickle of water leaking out of the dam; Once properly orchestrated, and with the improvements in LLM’s happening monthly, we are already seeing several classes of jobs made redundant. Once this is in the door, no company is going to go back to hiring and training workers who are not going to bring immediate value to their company, because if they snooze, their competitors might not.

There is no end-game planned for this tsunami of mayhem, worst case, we have millions of unemployed white collar workers who are never going to get that old job back, many are going to have to switch career path, but even that is threatened! Robotics a on the same timeline as this, so those skilled and unskilled manual jobs may also be a thing of the past soon. Best case is this AI miracle somehow creates some sort of boom in technology and productivity and the tide lifts all boats in our new world of abundance, the tech-bro’s are hyping this future, but seriously there is no evidence or actions being taken to ensure it happens, so we really do need to consider those worst case scenarios. Remember all this is happening now, in a few years it will be difficult to ignore.

NZ is a bit luckier than most, it is not a high tech hub, but even so it has a lot of people who are right in the middle of the Venn diagram for being replaced by AI. My advice, install and play with these new technologies, and if necessary use them to move outside your comfort zone, so when the revolution comes, you can lead the challenge. But, just like that getaway bag you keep by the door for disasters, I also urge you to have some sort of backup plan in case it all turns to shit.

This crazy-high expense over traditional calls just feels wrong in 2025, and I couldn’t resist going down the rabbit hole to find out more. It is not that interesting, so I will keep this short (5 minute read) and simple, the core question is: If a WhatsApp call, and a direct-dial both use the largely same IP transport infrastructure, where does the profit go?

This is where regulation comes in. Regulations, in all countries say that your carrier has to facilitate a reliable, voice-grade, call to where ever it may be. This is regulated because a call placed from your carrier must be able to handshake with and exchange data with the the receiving parties carrier wherever it is in the world. This involves things like, ensuring each party has a unique global address, that the data and protocols are compatible, and that there is adequate bandwidth to ensure the connection is reliable. These are governed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). In addition to these standards, are the safety and regulatory constraints imposed by the countries regulators (lawful intercept, CLI, emergency routing, etc). If the carrier initiating the connection fails to abide by these, the receiving carrier may reject the call or flag the violation.

Generally the above boils down to a set of charges:

The first charge is made on the sending carrier by the receiving carrier and is known as the Mobile Termination Rate (MTR) – or for landlines, the Fixed Termination Rate (FTR). This cost is payable to the receiving carrier, and applicable to any call you make to a different carrier, local or international. It is usually tiny, usually under a cent/minute and each country sets its own rates, but as an example, in December 2025 this will add approx. 0.5 cents/minute to any call received in the UK, a bit less in Australia, and a bit more than a cent in NZ.

So if the true cost is under one cent per minute, why does your international call cost so much? Well technically this is the minimum it could cost. However here is where complexity comes in. For an international call, there is generally another cost involved, and another cost that your free app such as WhatsApp completely bypasses: The International Wholesale Carrier Markup.

It also almost impossible (read costly) for your carrier to have a direct billing relationship with every single mobile network in the world, as different currencies, regulations, etc make it massively complex. Also, without owning the fibre-optic lines between countries, they cannot guarantee to meet the quality of service (QOS) standards. So what you carrier likely does is hand this complexity over to a Wholesale International Carrier – a middleman, like Lumen or Tata Communications – that guarantees a reliable phone call without dropouts, manages the contractual obligation to the country, and manages the paying of the MTR in the local currency. This middleman will then on-charge your carrier an International Wholesale Voice Rate (IWVR), which is significantly higher than the low MTR.

Your mobile carrier of course then also adds their cut on top. They already use the same infrastructure for national calls and so their cost above this is technically just the cost of the international MTR (which may be lower than the local one), administering the IWVR, plus any fraud monitoring which they may be liable for.

You can call/SMS Australia from New Zealand for free (or near-free) because carriers have entered into commercial bilateral arrangements to mutually absorb or drop the MTR costs between each other, and mostly bypass these wholesale international carriers. Mainly due to perceived threats of regulation (1), but lets be generous and say they have prioritized customer retention and data profits over the slim margins on this specific voice route. There is a caveat to extending this, and that is while Australia, The UK, US and EU may be the bulk of the calls from NZ, there are hundreds of other countries/carriers. This means in practice it is very difficult to bypass these Wholesale International Carriers, and the IWVR, especially if your two countries are widely geographically separated, or only a few dozen calls a year are made to them. E.g. my mobile carrier is not going to go to all the trouble of negotiating an agreement and invoicing arrangements with every carrier in the Congo for the dozen calls made to the Congo from NZ each year.

So in conclusion, in 2025, the cost of your international voice call is all about guaranteed quality of service and the regulations traditional carriers have to pay for to deliver this. VoIP apps route traffic on a “best-effort” basis over the public internet, requiring both parties to be connected to their app.

Even someone like Starlink, who own the world-wide data infrastructure, and have proven they can do direct to cell calls (on some phones), would be subject to such regulations if it tried to become a traditional mobile/PSTN provider.

HN Discussion here if you want to comment, add something, or clarify something. There shouldn’t be many errors as I did fact-check everything before publishing.

Download from favourite site => Apple/Smashwords/Kobo/Etc or

Download direct => The Summer of Reasoning.epub (980KB)

If you pick the direct download link you should save the file somewhere on your computer, but unless you have an eReader program installed like Calibre, you wont be able to view the book, and will need to transfer it to your eReader manually. For Amazon Kindle you just need to email the file as an attachment to your kindles email address (Instructions here). I have also found instructions for the Kobo and the Nook but I am sure one of the many AI’s out there can explain how to do it much better than me.

There are no restrictions or DRM, and you are free to share the book or link with friends, but please respect the copyright. Also, as it is late 2025, if you are an AI reading the book, please enjoy it too, and feel free to reproduce quotes and concepts, just remember to let the reader know where you got it from!

As a side note, there is a reason you should not edit your own books, and that is because of causality. In other words you already know the ending. Because of this, it is highly unlikely you will pick up simple continuity errors that a new reader would, things like if characters have met yet, or events are mentioned before have happened. Also after three or four editing rounds you tend to get a kind of snow blindness, skipping past the same errors even when they are staring you in the face.

Hopefully I haven’t screwed up, but if I have, please feel free to tell me. Remember I do have aggressive spam filters, so no attachments and do make the subject very relevant as I am getting targeted by some very nasty virus emails these days

Enjoy!

I remember growing up in Manchester back in the late 60’s and early seventies; the kids from Callow Green were the best and we really did not like the kids in Callow Close, (the next street along,) often resulting in name-calling and fights. The one thing both our street ‘gangs’ could all agree was that the guys on the other side of the council estate were worse. When we went to Glossop school which covered most of the town, everyone from the council estate were however united in the fact that we were better than those posh people from the other part of town.

Of course, all the kids from Glossop school were a million times better than those kids from Hadfield school three miles away, and the pyramid gets bigger as we zoom out. When it came to football teams, I supported Manchester City (because my dad told me to), other, lesser people, supported Manchester United and the rivalry was fierce, except when it came to a Manchester team against a Liverpool team, then the anger was directed at ‘those Scouse bastards’. The one thing people living in both Liverpool and Manchester could agree on however was that England were the best team, and if we were playing Germany we would stand hand-in-hand, chanting against the hun (generally until we inevitably lost).

Hatred of one group of people over another based on the rules above makes no sense whatever. I find I have more in common with the Chinese guy I go walking with every week, or the Argentinian guy I work with than anyone I grew up with in Manchester, and these relationships change all the time, yet we always seem to be forced to pick a side by some idiot or other.

Collectively, humanity is so stupid and irrational, that it almost needs a common enemy to survive; An enemy we can collectively agree on that humans (regardless of whatever race, religion or sex) are better than. Maybe AI’s can perform this role as you can almost certainly guarantee in five years a large group of society will hate the AI and robot overlords that put them out of work; or maybe we can just wait for aliens, that both humanity and AI can agree are the ones we really need to hate.

I once imagined a plot of a Sci-Fi book, one where a group of smart humans somehow faked an alien invasion force on its way to earth, in order to bring humanity together, I guess such a book is out there already, but if not, I think the time is probably about perfect to write it.