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Greetings you rascals,

Lots to get through this week, but first, some housekeeping.

A select few of you have been selected by our team of definitely not sleep deprived interns to be part of a survey about The Pint and your experience with it.

If you are one of the chosen few to be raptured, you’ll receive it Monday. If not, sucks to be you and see you next week.

Let’s get you up to speed on what happened in the world this week, via memes and irreverent commentary.

⏰ Today's reading time is 7 minutes

In a move welcomed by the finance community as “soulless”, Robinhood announced plans this week to expand their trading hours.

At the time of writing, the platform is open 8PM Sunday ET to 8PM Friday ET.

Deciding 120 hours a week isn’t nearly enough, the firm declared that, as of next year, optimistic financiers will have 24/7 access to the trading platform, including weekends and holidays.

As the number of amateur and professional traders continues to grow, and market platforms are increasingly incentivised to distinguish themselves from the competition, Robinhood believes their new policy will attract a growing demographic.

“We’re keen to corner the market on desperate losers. I’m talking total nobodies with nothing going on.

No-friend-seein’, no-hobby-havin’, kissless virgins with nothin’ better to do with their Saturdays and Christmases than watch lines go up and down.”

In the same statement, the company also introduced AI-powered trading tools, allowing users to build their own agents that can ‘trade’ on their behalf.

“By the time we’re through, these dorks won’t even do the one thing they think they like doing. Isn’t that beautiful?”

On Tuesday, Andy Burnham announced at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool that he plans to get rid of the Triple Lock by 2030.

Great news for young people, bad news for anyone who’s been on a P&O Cruise in the last 2 or 3 decades.

He himself is aware that he will ‘pay a political price’ for this move, and other parties have been quick to jump on this.

Future disgraced MP Leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage has called his speech ‘the most Left-wing speech since the 1970s’, and has written an article for the Daily Mail about how Burnham has betrayed UK pensioners.

For those of you that are new here (welcome), or who just don’t care enough to remember, a quick reminder of what the Triple Lock is.

It was an initiative introduced by the Cameron coalition in 2011 to ensure that every April, the state pension would increase by the highest of three measures: inflation (measured by CPI), average wage growth or 2.5%.

On paper, the policy sound great. Take care of old people and let them enjoy the fruits of their labours. Hooray.

In practice, however, the Triple Lock cost the UK taxpayers a fuck tonne of money and, created an incentive structure within the British State where pensioners effectively held political parties by the balls in terms of policy, as they have by far the biggest turnouts in elections.

Since 2012, the UK State Pension bill is now £12.6 billion higher than it would have been under a smoothed earnings link. 

There are two major caveats to Burnham’s announcement:

Premier League heavyweights Manchester City, who stood accused of over a hundred instances of financial impropriety, have been found guilty of all charges.

When all has been accounted for, the sum-total of their inflated earnings is believed to exceed £900 million ($1.1 billion).

That number was reached over a 9-year period and through dozens of inaccurate record filings, sham contracts and artificially inflated revenue reports.

Perhaps, most despicably, the club has also been found guilty of price-gouging Pukka Pies, selling the disgusting slop-discs for an inexcusable £6.50.

Speaking to the press, the Premiere League’s chief executive has described the scandal as “the most significant case” in the league’s history, later saying:

“The sanctity of European football has been tarnished. We now fear that our beautiful game - known for its modesty, honesty, and spirit of fair play - will soon be associated with corruption and greed. Perish the thought.”

The UAE has issued a thinly veiled threat to the UK around future investments in the country, should their favourite money laundering operation instrument of soft power receive too harsh a punishment.

Maybe the Emiratis could take their mafia cosplaying a step further and ‘take care’ of the whistleblower who instigated the whole investigation, now that he is no longer in witness protection.

While the extent of the club’s punishment is not yet known, it is believed by insiders that City’s executive branch will be required to say “sorry, and mean it”, before being sentenced to 15 minutes on the naughty step.

Meet etn, Europe's daily live tech show.

If you want to know what's actually happening in European tech, without wading through endless press releases, ETN has you covered.

Every weekday, Luke Knight and Ronan go live on X from 12 to 3 BST with the people actually building the future.

This week alone we had the CEO of ElevenLabs and Anthropic's Head of Europe.

Their free (and amazingly named) newsletter, Continental Breakfast, goes out before each show with the line-up, the story everyone in tech is arguing about, and a sharp take.

Same banter and memes, more billion-pound founders. 👉 Subscribe for free. 

Following Winnie the Pooh Xi and Trump’s high-profile date in Washington last week, China and the U.S. have now announced a proposed series of tariff cuts on $60 billion worth of bilateral imports.

China may still be importing Iranian oil under the table (only 475,000 barrels per day in September), however small hiccups like this really aren’t important now that anything from U.S. corn to cosmetics, to Chinese-manufactured household appliances can now be imported with far lower tariffs.

Won’t somebody think of the toasters?!

Naturally, this agreement only applies to ‘non-sensitive goods’. Semiconductors and rare earth minerals were not up for discussion, which is not surprising given they were one of the only important items on the agenda.

Little old Taiwan/Chinese Taipei/Whatever you are allowed to call it under threat of Chinese sanctions is likely feeling a little shaky right now, given that the weapons the U.S. supplies to the island was pretty high up on Xi’s list of ‘things to discuss with the Orange Maniac’.

Throw in the fact that Trump has also now offered to sell weapons to China, still technically designated as an ‘adversary of the U.S, and things could get a little choppy.

In AI related news, the two superpowers also have agreed to set up a communication channel for AI incidents and hope to hold further discussions to follow up in November.

However, the comms channel will be through the new European equivalent of Microsoft Teams, so no one in their right mind is going to use it anyway.

On Wednesday, a FlyDubai flight carrying 174 passengers made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, after an Omani copilot allegedly stabbed Indian captain Smit Machchhar and signalled 'mayday' during the flight.

Authorities are investigating all possibilities, from terrorism to arguing over whoever left skid marks in the airplane bathroom mental disorders, as the UAE government examines 'whether it was linked to any terrorist purpose' regarding the attack.

According to witnesses, after the bloodied captain opened the cockpit door, passengers (including several ex-IDF soldiers) grappled with the copilot and eventually stabilised the aircraft, which plunged more than 20,000 ft during the commotion.

President Donald Trump, ever the wordsmith, put it more succinctly, saying that the plane was saved by “lifting up a stick.” Wink wink.

Israeli Prime Minister and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize Candidate Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Israel is joining the interrogation in coordination with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, while FlyDubai suspended all flights to and from Israel.

Anthropic is touted to be going public next month at a $2 trillion valuation, despite haemorrhaging $42 billion/year and scrutiny over their claims that AI is going to murder us all in our sleep if we don’t just give them complete control over its development.

But the continued insistence on humanity’s demise may not even be the weirdest thing about the company.

In a recent piece from The Atlantic, details emerged that Anthropic co-founder and President Daniela Amodei, alongside her husband, Holden Karnofsky, use stuffed animals as faux employees where they use them to act out mock scenarios to help make management decisions, high-pitch voiceovers and all.

“Mr Fuzzywubby, should we keep leaking safety breaches to the press to inflate our target IPO price and push for regulatory capture of the market?”

To be honest, an advisory board of stuffed animals still sounds like it’d be more useful than 99% of HR departments.

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 their legally mandated half an hour of fresh air.

Thanks to Jen & Pat (& Stavros)