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Greetings beautiful people,

It’s now officially summer. While you’re (hopefully) relaxing with your feet up on holiday or doing the absolute minimum possible at work until September, unfortunately, there’s no rest for the wicked over at The Pint HQ.

I say this whilst writing in my swimming trunks, 3 spicy margs and 2 beers down. Whoops.

Anyway, let’s get you up to speed with what happened this week through home-crafted memes and silly commentary.

⏰ Today's reading time is 5 minutes

Not wanting to be outdone by reports that its main AI rivals are preparing for their respective IPOs, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has announced an $84.75bn fundraise. The original figure was $80bn, but subsequently upped by $4.75bn due to high subscription demand.  

Alphabet estimates that it will spend $180-$190bn on capital expenditure in 2026 alone due to “unprecedented consumer demand” from enterprise users meme lords generating AI slop on nano banana.  

$10bn of the capital raised will also be provided by Berkshire Hathaway in a private placement.

Warren Buffett has no doubt woken up in a cold sweat from his afternoon nap and is now shouting at the TV as you read this. 

For context, this fundraise aims to raise more money than the three biggest ever IPOs (Aramco, SoftBank, and Alibaba) combined, showing how capital-intensive this stage of the AI buildout is for even cash-generation monsters like Google.  

This fundraise shouldn’t come as a surprise, however: Investors are throwing absurd amounts of cash at anything with the word AI attached, and are about to do so in the IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

Maybe that’s why CEO Sundar Pichai decided to get ahead of the queue, as questions mount about whether LLMs will ever be profitable. 

He also tacked on a cheeky $30bn for paying taxes in connection with Google’s employee share scheme. Hey, why not pull a George Osborne and fix the roof while the sun shines?

And throw up a new garage while you’re at it.  

There are reports of a collective sigh of relief in maternity ward nurses across Switzerland, as voters look set to reject a referendum proposal to cap the country's population at 10 million ​people, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday.

Which means they won’t be asked to ‘take care of’ any extra babies that push the population over the limit anytime soon.

Concern ‌about rapid growth in Switzerland's population, which climbed to 9.1 million last year from 7.3 million in 2002, and its impact on public ​infrastructure has fed support for the proposal.

Backed by the right-wing Swiss People's Party, it would require the government to start restricting immigration if the population hits 9.5 million, and would almost certainly force Switzerland to abandon its free movement agreement with the EU if it hits 10 million.

Switzerland's population currently stands at just over 9 million.

Switzerland's own parliament has formally recommended a no vote, but the last time an incumbent government tried to recommend a ‘no’ vote, we got Brexit. So go figure.

Its largest business federation warns of catastrophic labour shortages. The government says it would damage prosperity and violate international obligations.

For context, Switzerland has a birth rate of 1.3 children per woman, meaning that without immigration, the population would be shrinking. The proposal is essentially a vote to make that problem considerably worse, faster.

This week, negotiations between the European Parliament and European Commission have yielded an agreement in principle on significant reforms to the EU’s migration policy. 

Changes approved include allowing member states to move migrants subject to deportation orders to concentration camps “return centres” outside the EU, conduct home raids on suspected illegal migrants, and detain migrants pending deportation.

Moderates have praised the reforms for allowing EU members to effectively control migration. 

EU countries currently struggle to ensure that rejected asylum seekers and people with expired visas leave their territories, and ​only about 20% of people ordered to leave an EU territory actually leave.

The changes will come into force once formally adopted by both bodies, but have been received poorly by progressives. Reasons cited include the “ICE-style” home raids, the extension of pre-deportation detention periods, and migrants being detained outside the EU. 

The Parliament and Commission were silent on whether training agents to shoot bystanders ICE-style will also be mandatory at this stage, or come into effect at a later date. 

The early frontrunners to take the first return hubs are the human rights bastions of Rwanda, Uganda, and Uzbekistan, so it’s about as likely as receiving a fair trial in any of those countries (very unlikely). 

This is almost guaranteed to be held up in court and turn into an exercise in pissing money up the wall, like the UK and Italy’s previous attempts at offshoring immigration. 

Nonetheless, any success in moving migrants offshore would represent a huge shift in handling irregular migration in the EU and beyond.

Ok fine. That was a bit low.

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Trouble in paradise.

According to sources, Trump's full message to Netanyahu was: "You're fucking crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this."

Pretty sure he stole that one from Regina George in Mean Girls, no?

Netanyahu's office released a statement afterwards saying Israel's position "remains the same”.

By “the same”, he means continuing a war that has displaced over 1 million people and killed over 3,000.

The row was triggered by Netanyahu threatening to bomb Beirut, which Trump felt was a perfectly reasonable military strategy going to torpedo his Iran peace negotiations. 

Trump told him bombing the Lebanese capital would further isolate Israel internationally.

Netanyahu, according to US officials, was subsequently "steamrolled" and said "OK, OK, just make sure everything is taken care of."

Immediately after the call, Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran talks were "continuing, at a rapid pace."

Israel will continue its operations in southern Lebanon.

The UK’s largest train operator, Govia Thameslink (GTR), has been taken into public ownership this week, as part of the government’s plan to nationalise the major railway operators in England. GTR carried more passengers than any other operator last year on its Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express, and Great Northern services. 

The majority of train operators are now under state control, to be run under the Great British Railways (GBR) brand. Only six franchised operators are still run privately, with these set to come under state control later this year as their operating agreements expire. 

GBR’s hope is that operating profits are retained and directed towards improving railway infrastructure, rather than paid out to private shareholders.

While promisingly communist in principle, there are concerns that lots of money generated in rail will still be banked as private profits, as ticketing and ownership of the trains themselves are both still handled privately. 

Sadly, ticket prices will also not come down following nationalisation, but hey, at least we have blue trains which, like my blue passport, will surely make me feel like a proper dickhead proud to be British. 

Will nationalisation actually lead to better railway services and better outcomes for travellers? Supporters of nationalisation often point to Swiss railways as a great example of how nationalisation helped to create and maintain the world’s best railway system. 

However, Switzerland also invests around €477 per capita in its rail system every year, whereas the UK only invests around €116 per capita.

They’re also Swiss. “Runs like a British train watch” never caught on for a reason.

Getting the investment part of the equation right here seems to be the key challenge for the government, otherwise nationalisation will just look like rearranging the deckchairs.

In a rare story about Ireland not involving taxes or Guinness, it broke this week that 83% of all alumina exported from Ireland is being shipped to smelters in Russia to be turned into aluminium. 

The finished aluminium is then sold to ASK, a company which supplies dozens of sanctioned Russian arms manufacturers, whose products have made their way onto battlefields in Ukraine. 

All of Ireland's alumina comes from one plant on its west coast, and the plant’s (obviously Russian) owners have claimed that it may have to close if they can’t ship alumina to Russia, potentially affecting up to 1,700 jobs. 

While this claim is questionable at best, I wouldn’t want to have to tell Putin that key imports have stopped because of fictitious reasons like “the democratic process” or “EU rules”. 

The story is concerning as Ireland has a stated policy of political neutrality in relation to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Supplying key raw materials for the Russian war machine, however, makes Ireland appear as neutral as the Swiss bankers during World War Two.

Concerns have also been raised this week about Ireland being a back door for Russian spies entering the UK via their common travel area, owing to a 90% approval rate of visa applications from Russian nationals since 2022.  

By an Irish MEP’s own admission, Irish security couldn’t keep an eye on Russian agents if it wanted to due to a lack of surveillance infrastructure.

Artists that have gone off the rails returning to X has become a bit of a recurring theme in recent years, with Hunter Biden becoming the latest wild child to return to your friendly neighbourhood internet town square.

Sure, Hunter isn’t perfect. But given that his first few tweets back were to call evil eunuch Stephen Miller ‘ugly as fuck’ and reiterate that he ‘has never stolen an erection’ in his life, he has earned our respect here at The Pint.

This one however, belongs in the Louvre. Take a bow, king.

We’d love it if you left us some feedback as to how you found this edition.

Our intern will get back to you within 4-5 business days, once we’ve let them out of the basement for some fresh air.

Thanks to Sam, Max & Charlie