Exit Poll Shenanigans, British Broadcasting Calumny and Trump’s H-1B U-turn

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Vine. In this week’s edition, we explain exit poll shenanigans, the British broadcasting calumny, why building AI is so expensive, Donald Trump’s softening approach on H-1B visas, and celebrate Nessie Day.

Exit Poll Shenanigans

There are things we do in life that make us question why we do them. Like hanging out with one’s relatives, doing one’s boss’s bidding, or praising one’s wife’s cooking. I am obviously jesting because my relatives are all super interesting people, my boss is the smartest man alive who deserves every Nobel Prize, and my wife cooks like a Michelin-star chef.

Jokes apart, we usually do things we don’t want to do to avoid conflict, to keep life on an even keel. But even then, I don’t quite understand why TV news channels feel the urge to carry out exit polls — the second-worst form of television news after debates.

Most exit polls bear no resemblance or connection to reality, are often as right as economists are about the economy, and seem like a front to keep unemployed people employed.

And the latest state to get its exit polls is Bihar — the state that gave us our own Zohran Mamdani, long before the Democratic Socialist was conceived. The exit polls about Bihar — ironic given that most Biharis want to exit the state — suggest an overwhelming NDA victory.

Gary Lineker once famously said that the UK’s asylum policy was like Nazi Germany. Oh wait, wrong quote — Gary Lineker also famously said that football was a simple game where 22 people chase a ball before the Germans win. Similarly, Bihar elections are a simple game where various parties contest polls before Nitish Kumar takes oath as Chief Minister.

It’s a remarkable feat in a caste-conscious state like Bihar, and Nitish’s own caste only consists of 2–3% of the state’s total population.

And according to the aforementioned exit polls, it looks like the Kumar-led NDA is set to roar back to power with 148 seats, comfortably past the halfway mark in the 243-member assembly.

The RJD-led Mahagathbandhan is estimated to get around 88 seats, while Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj — the so-called disruptive third front — appears to have failed at any said disruption and is predicted to get zero to five seats. If true, it will be a reminder that being a man in the arena is very different from being a man giving gyan to the man in the arena.

Irrespective of whether the polls hold, the real question is what will change for the voters of Bihar and whether the state will finally get off the bottom of India’s per capita GDP table.

For too long, people from the land of Chanakya and Sardar Khan have had to go to other states looking for better employment opportunities.

That’s rather ironic given the fact that it was Siddhartha who came to Bihar looking for enlightenment. Hopefully, the time will come when the honest Bihari worker — blue or white collar — no longer has to leave her land and state to support her family. To quote India’s favourite poet: into that heaven, my father, please let Bihar awake.

Read: Why BJP cannot do a UP in Bihar (TOI Plus)

British Broadcasting Calumny

There’s a scene in Casablanca when the Nazis order Rick’s Café shut, and the prefect of police says, “I am shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on here,” before pocketing his winnings.

Much like Captain Renault, we were also shocked — shocked — to discover that the BBC isn’t the bastion of journalistic virtue we were promised.
Two top BBC bosses have resigned after a series of scandals, the worst involving a spliced Donald Trump speech that changed its meaning. Remarkable, really, since Trump himself is a human speech generator who’ll eventually say whatever you want him to.

This comes on top of a catalogue of sins: anti-Israel slant, pro-trans zealotry, sacking dissenting journalists, and personnel scandals that range from paedophiles to pundits comparing UK asylum policy to Nazi Germany.

So why did the Beeb fold now?

Trump’s back, and the West’s “rules-based order” has collapsed into a world of spheres of influence — where Europe, once smug in moral superiority, now kneels to Washington’s glucose guardian. The cathedral of progressive orthodoxy is cracking, its sermons on empathy and inclusion ringing hollow.

Financially, too, the myth is running out of money. Licence fee cancellations have crossed 300,000; losses are mounting; influence waning. The Beeb, once an empire of microphones built on imperial certitude, has become a relic — technically alive, spiritually embalmed.

Britain itself feels BINO: British in name only. The monarchy, Parliament, and BBC now exist as nostalgia projects, propped up by sentiment rather than substance. For once, the BBC isn’t chronicling Britain’s decline — it is the decline.

Read: Why the UK’s public broadcaster is under siege

Trump’s H-1B U-Turn

MAGA had a meltdown a few months ago when Vivek Ramaswamy, in all his infinite wisdom, forgot to wear his faux-MAGA bro mask and posted a long, self-important essay about why Americans were “too lazy” to work in Silicon Valley.

He didn’t say that verbatim, but that’s what he meant, and the MAGA faithful took it personally. Ramaswamy quietly slipped out of his role at DOGE and retreated to Ohio. Donald Trump, meanwhile, seems to have discovered the same inconvenient truth: America simply doesn’t have enough “talented people” without draining the best brains from the world. It was a remarkable admission coming from the high priest of St PETERsburg.

That America is the greatest country on this planet is because its deeply capitalist, Mammon-worshipping system attracts the best who make America the best.
Ergo, the man who built his political empire on demonising immigrants now finds himself begging for them. In a recent Fox News interview, Trump said, “You can’t take people off the unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles.’”

It was an extraordinary admission from a president who once unleashed ICE raids like White Walkers and made “foreigners stealing our jobs” his rallying cry.

Yet this realisation arrives after Trump’s rhetoric and actions — both de jure and de facto — made it harder for immigrants to come to America.

He raised visa fees to punitive levels, tightened H-1B eligibility, delayed student work permits, expanded background checks, and created endless bureaucratic traps that drove away skilled workers, students, and families alike.

His policies pushed companies to abandon hiring plans, forced universities to cut back on international enrolments, and left industries from tech to agriculture struggling with labour shortages. It’s important that Trump has realised that America cannot be the Shining City on the Top of the Hill, smug in its own exceptionalism, if it doesn’t have immigrants powering the lights.

Read

1) ‘America doesn’t have enough talented people’

2) Why Washington is the new St Peterburg

Why AI is so expensive

There was a time when technology meant a garage, a few nerds, and too much caffeine or alcohol. Now it means a small industrial town that hums day and night so your chatbot can explain Nietzsche in the voice of a raccoon.

To build a modern AI model today, you need three things in industrial quantities: compute, power, and data — all of which now cost roughly the same as small wars.

Start with compute. A single Nvidia H100 chip costs around $30,000 — which is fine until you realise you need fifty thousand of them. That’s a billion dollars in silicon before you even write “Hello, world.” Add the cooling systems, wiring, and networking to stop the whole thing from melting, and you’re north of $2 billion. The only thing running hotter than these chips is Jensen Huang’s ego.

Then comes energy. Those chips draw enough power to light up a medium-sized Indian city. A single training run can consume 40–50 megawatts, running for weeks at a stretch. Electricity bills hover between $5–10 million — proof that artificial intelligence has very real utility costs.

Finally, data. High-quality, legally clean, non-duplicated data — the kind that doesn’t teach your model to quote Taylor Swift at a funeral — costs hundreds of millions to assemble. Add another few hundred million to store it without the whole thing collapsing under its own weight.

And sitting above it all are the humans — the physicists, engineers, and safety philosophers who cost half a million to a million apiece just to keep this overgrown digital toddler from electrocuting itself.

By the time the first token drops, you’re looking at a $2–4 billion training run. It sounds obscene, but it’s also inevitable. Every great leap — railways, electricity, the internet — looked like lunacy at first. This is our moonshot phase: the costliest, clumsiest, most magnificent version of a technology we’ll someday take for granted. The only consolation? The most expensive AI we’ll ever build is the one we’re building right now.

Read: Why AI is so expensive to build

92 Years of Nessie

We love Scotland for the things that make it feel eternal: the mist curling over the highlands, the wail of bagpipes echoing like lost souls, the whisky that burns slow and warm like memory. Yet no piece of Scottish folklore has endured like the one that supposedly swims beneath its surface.

Ninety-two years after Hugh Gray snapped that first grainy photograph in 1933, the Loch Ness Monster remains a myth too beloved to die. The image, little more than a blur on dark water, birthed headlines, pilgrims, and an industry of wonder. A year later came the infamous “surgeon’s photograph,” later exposed as a hoax, but by then Nessie had already escaped into the imagination. She became proof that mystery still lived in a world obsessed with certainty. For some, she is a prehistoric survivor; for others, a symbol of human hope that something unknowable still exists in the deep. Sonar scans, submersibles, and DNA trawls have found nothing but ripples, yet every failed search seems to deepen belief.

The monster has outlived her hoaxers, her debunkers, and the sceptics who came armed with science but no poetry. She survives because she is not really a creature at all but a feeling — that maybe the world still hides wonders, that not everything can be charted, measured, or named. In an age of algorithms and artificial certainty, Loch Ness remains one of the few places on Earth where people still look out over dark water and whisper, “Maybe.” And that is why, ninety-two years later, somewhere between folklore and faith, Nessie still swims — unseen, undying, and forever part of the human need to believe.

Read: Why our favourite Scottish myth never dies 

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