Should potholing be banned?

You'll only drive it underground.

we all know I have no life, so:

"Did you know that the politician was friends with a nonce when you appointed him?" is not a question that should ever be answered with "which one"

My advice to Labour is don't let Starmer resign as the press will chase out the next one too, and the next one. Just go fuck it.

Maybe I could write that as my big airport inspirational Ted Talk book, "Fuck 'em, they hate you anyway, don't play by their rules, you can't win. Just go fuck it."

Wow, this is bizarre. My nana's name was Hannah, and her nickname was Dolly.

Hey, Brits. There's going to be a hurricane called "Nana". This means lots of chat about class semiotics, what does it mean to call a hurricane Nana versus Nan versus Granny versus Grandma versus Grandmama. Going to be great. Maybe some conversation about lunch/tea/dinner/supper, just for a treat.

women next to me at the cafe discussing a European couple they know who moved to London and hired a schools consultant (?) who advised them on what neighbourhood to buy a house in so their kids could get into the best state school, so I reckon that we actually could tax high earners a bit more tbh

Bob playing himself

everyone with real American manliness and a basic knowledge of military history knows that serious war efforts have never been derailed by such trifling matters as "communicable diseases"

Emails show Amazon colluding with other firms to raise prices, California authorities allege The previously redacted messages were unveiled as part of an antitrust battle with California attorney general Rob Bonta

Emails show Amazon colluding with other firms to raise prices, California authorities allege.

What is it doing in the UK? Will any regulator even investigate?

Exec pay linked to profits. Every incentive to rig the market, fleece customers.

Yes

Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet.
This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.

29

I met my wife forty years ago this week. I know this, because it's the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. We were rehearsing in a theatre in Liverpool, while a cloud of nuclear fallout was drifting slowly over our heads from the stricken power station...

Jonathan Keir
Harker Starmer
🤝
Not having enough questions about
their good friend, the Prince of Darkness

I do despair when I see people constantly saying that "no-one is reaching out to white working-class men". Rich white men control the world's most powerful algorithms. If they wanted to steer white working-class men towards all the fantastic advice on the internet they would. But they don't.

We must require ALL data centers and other extremely large corporate users of electricity to generate their own electricity at their own expense If we don't do this, we are either idiots and/or masochists.

Unpleasant and dangerous?

Is this his way of announcing he's making X an unvetted Reform UK Councillor?

I'm always skeptical of BBC-bashing, but BBC News website hasn't reported on the Tice tax scandal since 12 April, when the headline was "Tice £91,000 tax row is 'minor administrative error', party claims".

Successive governments have failed to learn lessons of Grenfell Tragedy The conditions that facilitated the tragedy remain unchecked

Corporate capture of the state.

The Post Office with help from Fujitsu, accountants, lawyers illegally convicted postmasters for fraud.

£1.5bn+ compensation paid from public purse. Perpetrators paid ZERO.

No one charged/prosecuted for lying in courts. Fujitsu gets govt contracts.

Who governs?

If you're having trouble telling the difference between badgers and marbles, remember this: One is a small glass ball used for a variety of recreational & decorative purposes, and the other is a mid-sized nocturnal mustelid primarily found in the northern hemisphere

Totally fine that large parts of the British government are jumping into bed with a company whose public statements are "we are, at a fundamental level, absolutely batshit crazy neofascists".

Footballer player Cole Palmer with a monk style haircut

When you’ve got United in the 21st century at 8pm and vigils in the 14th century at 5am

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

In case you’re confused - the £100k of tax Richard Tice failed to pay here is totally different to the
- £92k of tax not properly withheld on dividends
- the £600k side-stepped via highly aggressive tax avoidance
Industrial scale grifting revealed by @danneidle.bsky.social and Gabriel Pogrund

Reform dragged into tax row by Richard Tice’s unpaid £100,000 The party’s deputy leader says he will ‘pay what is owed if numbers need rechecking’ after more revelations from The Sunday Times

@gabrielpogrund.bsky.social:

‘Exclusive: Richard Tice failed to pay £100k in tax, benefiting his investment firm — which then gave big sums to Reform

Tice gave contradictory reasons for why four shell companies paid zero tax. @DanNeidle says they flouted "basic" rule, face HMRC probe’

NASA and Mamdani are proving that Americans are desperate to see their money spent in ways they feel good about.

This, however, is not the same thing as simply spending the money on things we would feel good about but never know happened. People need to be able to see it.

I've built a socioeconomic system that depends on everyone to do useful work and act ethically except the people at the top, who get unimaginable rewards for being antisocial frauds and criminals. And I think it will stand the test of time

That is it exactly.

Just here to second 168 songs, an interesting way to tell the Manics story.