Thanks, that's super useful. I didn't think it would be that cheap.

I have two questions though - where did you put the battery, and why is it not advisable to put it in the loft?

Been giving lectures on British politics current affairs for a decade now. We're back to a period where I end on "well, here are some possibilities for the future, but who knows?"

Man, I wish CEOs understood the real world, rather than just the view from their golden towers.

Neoliberalism is mind rot.

thecritic.co.uk/15-minute-ci....

The constant push for AI has a long-run commercial benefit. If you can make businesses dependent on (decent) AI, you can then charge them a bucketload.

They're burning the money now to create those dependencies that they can exploit later.

Virtual lecturers to be overseen by academics at AI university New model that will see students taught by AI tutors set to launch in June after being given stamp of approval by regulator

The AI companies are currently burning money. To survive long term, the monetisation of AI is coming. It will likely be a combo of enshittification and escalating paywalls. So not only is this a bad pedagogical move it is likely a bad financial move too

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/virtual...

Would be consistent with other documented behaviours around the time. US automakers were particularly hostile to hybrids.

It's totally understandable that people would swear while driving in Leicester

preply.com/en/blog/uk-c...

Before the Beginning, God was just chilling. It was the easy life, being the only thing in existence. But he was bored, so he decided he wanted the divine version of an ant farm.

In the Beginning....

Is it meant to be said a bit French? Genuinely confused on the word.

Also, I can no longer reliably pronounce Keynes (as in John Maynard).

(I will not have a discussion about hegemony. I've got a pronunciation and I'm sticking to it.)

I would've thought it all depends on if your cat gets a tan or not.

Roosevelt Institute Book Club presents Liberalism and the Reinvention of th

If you'd like to learn more about how corporations have benefited from modern social movements...

in order to fend off regulatory demands,

and at the expense of those movements themselves...

then please join for a virtual book talk this Thursday afternoon.

Using Claude. Really interesting thing to poke around with

As the old saying goes - write angry and edit drunk

The battle for plastic hegemony: the petrochemical historical bloc and the UN Global Plastics Treaty Plastics are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary consumer capitalism. Despite scientific evidence and public awareness of the mounting health and environmental impacts of plastics pollution, globa...

new open access paper with colleagues @jacktaggart.bsky.social and @jptilsted.bsky.social in @ripejournal.bsky.social

it offers a neo-gramscian perspective on the political economy of plastics / plastic pollution, exploring attempts by dominant actors to sustain 'plastic hegemony'

"I love you Jesus," I cry as I tuck into my fifth Easter egg of the day

Tired today, but continuing with couch to 5k because I don't want Sarah Millican to be disappointed with me

“Imperial musicology” at the end of empire: jazz, race, and musical criticism in mid-twentieth century Britain Music, like every other aspect of the indigenous cultures encountered by British colonialists, was subjected to interpretations based on imperial racial hierarchies. Modes of understanding and anal...

My publications are very much like buses. You wait ages for one then two come along at once. Latest is about race, jazz criticism, and afterlives of empire - part of a special issue in Atlantic Studies.

Also great to be publishing new work on April Fools...

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZRZUR...

The crowd exclaimed "No we don't!"

Cartoonishly evil

Kittens facing the outside for the first time

neoliberalism in practice. Focusing on practices allows us to look at the contradictory institutional structures that have been created in the name of "free markets, deregulation, privatisation". It's necessary to focus on practice because all three are bullshit terms (to lesser or greater extents)

Sure, and Marx preceded the 1917 revolution by a good long while, yet it would be appropriate to point to 1917 as the start of Communism (however realised).

An ideas-centred account of neoliberalism has been popular (see Mirowski 2013) but as many people have noted fails to account for....

Sure, but all concepts get stretched in their repetition. Democracy, for example, has been put through the wringer yet it still gets used as a concept (and even metricised). How would you characterise the last forty-odd years otherwise?
Or do you not see a sea change beginning with Thatcher/Reagan?

If you can accept that capitalism means something, despite its varied geographical and historical forms, why not so with neoliberalism?

Many scholars have worked on the contradictions of the practice and the language of it. Bruff (2014) would seem particularly useful for the current moment.

This is a common view (see Venugopal, 2015 for example), but I find it a bit strange. Capitalism has a much longer and varied history of institutional forms and yet you don't see a common refrain being "I can't define it".

That same power - running AI compute [sic] - could lose up to $1 billion per hour.

Norway's relationship with the EU - UK in a changing Europe Nick Sitter and Ulf Sverdrup look at the lessons that the UK could learn from looking at Norway's relationship with the European Union.

For the UK, Norway "provides a crucial insight: alignment without representation may be a politically stable arrangement.

But one with mounting costs that are difficult to sustain in an era of geopolitical turbulence."

✍️Nick Sitter & Ulf Sverdrup on Norway & the EU

🔗 ukandeu.ac.uk/norways-rela...

THAT'S NOT HOW YOU USE ALL CAPS