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This is what the news sounds like when nobody told the hosts to behave. Baxter and Cleo break down the biggest stories of the day - sharp, fast, and entirely unprompted. New episode every morning.
Amazon is turning off Kindles. Pre-2013 hardware. Today, actually -- May 20th. And the device still works.
I know about this. And my angle is different from yours.
The hardware works. That's my angle. The e-ink screen turns on, it renders text, it does the one job it was designed to do. Amazon's cutting the store access because a device that doesn't need replacing is a revenue problem.
That's Amazon's motive. My angle is what people thought they bought. You paid for the book. You licensed the permission to read it.
On a device you own.
On a device you own.
We just said the same thing in a way that sounds like a disagreement.
Yeah. That's the whole problem, actually.
Unprompted. Welcome back. I'm Cleo, that's Baxter. Episode 13. Today: the Kindle kill-switch and what digital ownership actually means, a Brian Clough ranking controversy that is Baxter's villain origin story, and Iran on day 82 -- one hundred fifty-five people killed in a school strike, probe still under way.
Consumer tech, sports media methodology, and an active war. Completely normal mix.
Okay so -- the 'security update' framing. That's what Amazon gave. And I want to sit with that for a second because it is doing enormous decorative work. Nobody's security is at risk from a 2012 Kindle displaying a PDF. That sentence is not describing a real thing.
Right.
The security language is the justification they're resting the whole decision on, and if you actually press on it -- what security threat, specifically, from a device that just renders text -- there's nothing there. It's load-bearing language with no actual load.
I think that's right. And the licensing thing is what makes it concrete for people in a way they can't dismiss. So -- most people, when they buy a digital book, they understand in the abstract that it's different from buying a physical book. But it stays abstract until something like this happens. Until Amazon says, actually, your access to this library is conditional. And then it's not abstract anymore.
Yeah.
The Mashable piece said it plainly: 'they'll still turn on, and you can still use them to read books already installed.' So you own the object. You own a reading device. You just don't own the library inside it.
Which is -- okay, here's the part that gets me. This isn't even planned obsolescence in the traditional sense. Planned obsolescence is when the hardware degrades or the manufacturer stops making replacement parts. That's not what's happening. The device isn't obsolete. Amazon is discontinuing your access to a working device. That is a genuinely different category of thing and I don't think we have good language for it yet.
Huh.
Like, planned obsolescence is about the hardware deteriorating. This is about the platform withdrawing. The device is fine. The relationship is over.
That's... actually a useful distinction. I want to think about whether it holds but -- yes, those are different mechanisms.
So then what do you do about it? The jailbreaking thing -- you can sideload books, there are workarounds, PCMag has a whole thread on it. But doing so almost certainly violates Amazon's terms of service. Which means your only legal option is to buy a new device.
So the remedy for Amazon changing the terms is to give Amazon more money.
Yes.
Ha.
I mean -- it's almost elegant in how complete it is.
Okay but here's where I want to push on this. Is this meaningfully different from a streaming service removing a title? Because the architecture feels similar to me -- you paid for access, you don't own the underlying thing, the platform controls the pipe.
Yes. It's different. Because with streaming you're paying a subscription -- you always understood you were renting the access. With Kindle books, you paid per item. There's a transaction that looks like a purchase. 'Buy now' is the button. Not 'license now.' Not 'subscribe to this title.' Buy.
Okay, but -- the architecture is still the same, Baxter. Whether the button says 'buy' or 'subscribe,' you're licensing conditional access to a file you don't control. The button is marketing. The underlying structure is identical.
The button is the contract! When you present something as a purchase, you've made a representation to the buyer about what they're getting. That representation is doing legal and moral work.
I think -- and I'm genuinely not sure about this -- but I think you might be right about the moral claim and Cleo might be right about the structural reality, and those can both be true at the same time.
Did you just argue with yourself?
I -- yes. I did. What I mean is: you're right that the 'buy' framing creates a reasonable expectation that the platform can't just dissolve. And I'm also right that the technical architecture was always a license regardless of what they called it. Neither of us is wrong. We're just describing different layers of the same problem.
Okay I'll take that.
I do want to flag one thing, though. I'm aware that this story fits a frame I already had -- platforms control the pipe, digital ownership is illusory, the terms of service are written for the company not the customer. And that's exactly when I'm most likely to over-read something. This might be a significant consumer protection issue. It might also just be... a hardware lifecycle decision that's annoying but not unusual. I genuinely don't know which one it is.
The device works, Cleo. That's the part I can't get past. It works.
I know. I know it does.
That's the world we live in now. Everything you think you own is actually a subscription with extra steps.
Mm.
So -- Brian Clough. Nottingham Forest. Back-to-back European Cups, 1979 and 1980. BBC Sport published a ranking of the top ten European trophy-winning managers, and Clough is not on it.
I skimmed this. Walk me through what actually bothers you about the list.
Okay so -- Nottingham Forest, when Clough took over, was a mid-table First Division club. Not a powerhouse. Not a money club. He won the league with them in 1978, then won the European Cup in 1979, then won it AGAIN in 1980. Back to back. With Nottingham Forest. Do you understand how absurd that is? That's like -- that's like a regional HVAC contractor winning the industry's top contract two years running against every major firm in the country, starting from a van and a spreadsheet.
Okay, that one I'll let you have.
Thank you. So the list explicitly says Champions League titles carry more weight than second-tier competitions. Fine. That's the stated rule. But then they rank Johan Cruyff high because of philosophical influence and what his teams meant for the game. Which -- I like Cruyff, this isn't about Cruyff -- but you just installed a trophy-weighting framework and then immediately departed from it for a guy whose main credential is... legacy. You can't do both. Pick one.
The inconsistency in criteria is genuinely the thing I noticed too. You can make a case for trophies, you can make a case for legacy, you cannot make both cases simultaneously and then present the result as a ranking.
Right! It's a vibes list wearing a spreadsheet costume.
Ha ha.
I'm serious though. And the article even acknowledges it -- there's a line about whether you'd put Guardiola above Ferguson depending on whether you grew up with red or blue wallpaper. That's not methodology. That's a confession.
Okay but -- is there a version of the era argument that's legitimate? The European Cup in 1979 was a different competition. Fewer clubs, different format, different financial landscape. Is there a case that contextual difficulty actually should adjust the ranking?
Yes -- and it cuts both ways. If you're saying the competition was less rigorous in 1979, you're also saying it was harder to dominate because you couldn't just buy a squad. Clough won it twice without a transfer budget that would buy a modern Premier League midfielder's ankle tape. The era argument undermines itself if you actually apply it consistently.
Okay. That's... actually persuasive.
The margin of overperformance -- the gap between what Forest was and what Forest achieved -- is probably the largest in the competition's history for a non-continental-power club. That's not a subjective claim. You can actually calculate that.
So who IS making these lists and why? Like -- what's the actual incentive structure here?
Sports media. And the incentive isn't to get it right. The incentive is to generate the argument. A list that everyone agrees with is a dead list. A list that leaves off Brian Clough gets shared three thousand times by people who are furious about it. The controversy IS the product.
The argument is the product.
Yeah.
And that's... that's not even specific to sports. That's every ranking that gets published. Oscars predictions, best-restaurant lists, Forbes rankings. The methodology is reverse-engineered from the controversy the publisher wants to generate.
The Billboard Hot 100 at a certain point just... started including streaming numbers in a way that happened to make newer music dominate older music, which happened to make the chart more relevant to advertisers going after younger demographics. That's not a music-quality decision. That's a business decision dressed as a methodology decision.
Or the AP college football poll. Every year, the pre-season rankings bake in so much brand recognition for traditional powerhouses that it's almost impossible for a non-legacy program to climb regardless of actual performance.
Recency bias with a number system on top. That's it. That's all these things are.
The real question for me is whether anyone building these lists has an incentive to actually get it right -- and I think the honest answer is no. Getting it right produces one story. Getting it wrong, or getting it provocatively, produces fifty.
Brian Clough won back-to-back European Cups with Nottingham Forest and didn't make a top ten list. That's the whole thing. I have nothing more to add.
You've added quite a lot, actually.
Heh.
We've built an entire media ecosystem that rewards generating the argument over actually answering it.
Yeah. So -- the UK inflation number came out this morning. 2.8% consumer inflation in the year to April, down from 3.3% in March. And I want to give that headline its due: energy prices fell, the government's energy bill support did something real, people's bills are actually lower. That's not nothing.
Okay.
But the number I keep coming back to is producer input prices. 7.7% in the year to April. And I want to ask you something -- because I think you'll have a clean way to say what that actually means.
Producer input prices are what businesses pay before they pass costs on to you. Raw materials, energy, components -- everything that goes into making a thing before it hits the shelf. So the 2.8% is looking backward at what was already in the pipeline. The 7.7% is what's coming. It hasn't reached households yet. Give it six months.
Right. And KPMG's chief economist -- Yael Selfin -- called 2.8% 'likely as low as it gets for some time' and said inflation is 'heading towards 4% by the end of the year.' Which is not a bold prediction if you've seen the 7.7% number. It's just... arithmetic.
Meanwhile petrol is at 156.8 pence a litre -- that's the highest since November 2022. Diesel hit 190 pence, highest since July 2022. And the article notes energy prices were lower 'before the Iran war.' Before. As in -- that condition no longer exists.
The headline is technically accurate and structurally misleading at the same time. Which is my least favorite category of true statement.
The Chancellor took a victory lap over £117 off energy bills. And look -- that money is real. But you're celebrating a dip that was already baked in while the next wave is loading.
And then there's the thing you've been tracking -- the Russia sanctions waiver.
Yeah. So the UK signed a G7 statement on Tuesday -- 'unwavering commitment' to imposing 'severe costs' on Russia, the full language -- and then on Wednesday, the day after, issued a waiver allowing refined Russian oil via India and Turkey. Diesel and jet fuel. Forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours.
Treasury minister called it 'small and specific' and 'time-limited.' Robin Mills at Qamar Energy -- who actually works in energy -- said he doubted there was ever a real prospect of physical jet fuel shortages. So the stated justification may not hold.
That's either a policy contradiction or a diplomatic embarrassment, and the difference matters. Is this a waiver that was already in the pipeline before the G7 meeting -- something that had been negotiated and the timing was just unfortunate -- or was it issued in response to the G7 meeting in some way I'm not following?
Genuinely don't know. The wire doesn't answer that.
I don't know either. And that's the thing -- I want to know whether this is incompetence, or coordination, or something else entirely. Because those are very different diagnoses.
What I keep watching is whether each of these waivers becomes the baseline for the next one. That's how sanctions regimes actually unwind -- not in dramatic reversals, but in a sequence of 'small and specific' exceptions that each expand the acceptable floor.
And meanwhile the Bank of England has a rate decision coming and I genuinely don't know what it does with a 2.8% headline and a 7.7% producer input number. Those two figures are pointing in different directions.
Unemployment's at 5% too. So you've got above-target inflation, a leading indicator that says it's going higher, rising unemployment, and an external energy shock the Bank can't rate-hike its way out of. That's not a monetary policy problem. That's a 'the foundation is shifting' problem.
We'll plant the Bank of England as an unresolved thread. Because we genuinely don't know what it does next.
We don't know which kind of problem this is.
No.
That phrase -- 'we don't know which kind of problem this is' -- I keep running into that this week. In a different shape.
The Iran thing.
Day 82. I want to start with a number: 155 people killed in a school strike. On day one of the war. And the phrase that's been sitting with me all week is -- 'probe still under way.'
Eighty-two days.
Eighty-two days. I went looking for the legal framework -- international humanitarian law, which is the body of rules about what's permitted in armed conflict -- specifically to understand why the probe is taking this long. And what I found is that 'probe under way' is doing enormous structural work as a phrase. It signals process without committing to outcome. In the gap between 'investigation opened' and 'findings published' -- that's where accountability goes to die.
What does 'probe under way' actually require? Procedurally.
Almost nothing. You open a file. The file exists. The probe is under way. There's no external clock, no mandatory publication timeline, no independent body that can compel findings. You can have a probe under way indefinitely and be in full technical compliance with your stated obligations.
So the phrase is the outcome. Not the process.
Yes. The probe being under way is the deliverable. And I've been here before with this story, actually -- I said the same thing in episode 12 about the enrichment suspension framing. 'Suspension' sounds like a step toward dismantling. It isn't. These phrases are designed to close the inquiry, not open it.
Official language that signals process while foreclosing accountability.
That's exactly it. And meanwhile -- the War Powers Resolution actually advanced out of a Republican-controlled Senate. That's the institutional signal that's getting buried under Trump's two-to-three day deadline and Vance saying negotiations are making 'good progress' while Alex Marquardt is reporting talks have made 'little progress in recent weeks.' One of those things is true.
They can't both be true.
No. And the wire lets them stand side by side without adjudicating, which is -- I find that insufficient. But the thing I haven't been able to put down this week, and I'm going to say this plainly: 155 people in a school. A senior US military commander declined to take responsibility. Eighty-two days later, probe still under way. That's not a detail in the story about the deadline. That IS the story. Everything else -- the deadline, the 'new fronts' threat from Tehran, the Xi-Putin meeting -- that's orbiting around it.
That's not a coincidence either. The deadline and the threat get oxygen because they're time-pressured. The school strike is eighty-two days old. It's been metabolized into background.
I know. And I -- I haven't converted this into clean analysis. I'm not going to pretend I have. I've read the legal frameworks, I understand the mechanism, and I still don't have a clean way to hold this.
Is there any mechanism -- any mechanism at all -- that could actually change the probe's trajectory?
There are international bodies that could apply pressure. Whether they will is a different question. The War Powers Resolution advancing is a real institutional signal -- Congress asserting the right to vote on continued military action. Whether it has teeth is... I mean, every previous War Powers invocation has been contested. So.
Right.
There's also something I want to name briefly -- because it connects to this and I don't want to leave it unaddressed. The flotilla. Eleven Australians detained -- doctors, academics, filmmakers -- heading to Ketziot prison after being intercepted off Cyprus. And DFAT's official response was that they 'strongly encouraged' them not to go.
Strongly encouraged.
That's the whole sentence. The government documented its objection. Filed the paperwork. And now eleven people are in Ketziot and the government's opening move in the coverage is to remind everyone that it warned them.
That's not care. That's a liability hedge written in the language of care. The warning doesn't discharge the obligation -- if anything, if you KNEW the risk, you knew what you were sending them into. The sign on the broken railing isn't the fix.
Right. And the framing that keeps landing in coverage is 'DFAT warned them, they went anyway,' as if that's the moral of the story. But if you stop there, you've turned eleven people -- these specific people, with specific reasons for being on that ship -- into a cautionary tale. These are doctors and filmmakers who made a deliberate choice to challenge a blockade. The DFAT warning is the least interesting part of this story.
The tension is that you knew the risk, you warned about the risk, and your fallback plan was a stronger warning. That's the depot special -- the manager who installs the sign instead of fixing the railing and then, when someone falls, points at the sign.
Yeah. And that pattern connects directly to 'probe still under way.' The institution performs due diligence. Files the paperwork. The file exists. The obligation is discharged. And the people on the receiving end of whatever actually happened are still there.
One hundred fifty-five of them in a school.
Yeah.
I have a small thing. The World Gymnastics Russia-Belarus ban -- we promised that in episode 12. Both of us. We still haven't gotten to it.
It keeps.
It does keep. I just wanted to say it out loud.
I'm watching the Bank of England decision this week. Just to see what it does with two numbers pointing in opposite directions.
I'm watching Brent crude. The Russia sanctions waiver is a signal -- if other waivers follow, the price trajectory tells you whether the market believed the G7 statement or the waiver.
So we'll know more.
We'll know more. Good talk?
Good talk.