The overwhelming ethos of Trumpism is “bully who can dish it out but can’t take it”

A special award for Jennie Formby for finding the worst possible reason on God's green earth to leave the Labour Party.

It's just fascinating to me how the Bluesky team keeps taking active steps to look bad. They don't just randomly step on rakes. They go into the shed, lift the rake off where it's hanging on the wall, carefully place it on the grass, and then step full force on that motherfucker.

Drowning meme, showing Bluesky leadership paying attention to AI while the codebase drowns, and why's phone dead at the bottom

The maddening thing is, it's right there in the released files for all to see.

Quiet Posters feed not working

why.bsky.team subscribed to the anti anti ai block list, blocking over 300 000 users

If you wonder why the "Quiet Posters" feed doesn't work for you anymore, it is because the @why.bsky.team subscribed to an anti-anti-ai block list, rendering it useless for over 300 000 users. Good job bsky team!!

smart people create burner accounts to make lists and feeds, so that it's not dependant on their main account.

people who dunk their phones in the pool to cool it down (why.bsky.team) do it on main and fucks it up for everyone

We already had some of the worst air quality in the country in Memphis and now the mechahitler factory is only making it worse and worse

www.fox13memphis.com/news/fox13-i...

Man whose wife killed herself cleared of rape and manslaughter Christopher Trybus, of Swindon, also found not guilty of coercive and controlling behaviour towards Tarryn Baird

"Baird made more than 100 visits to her GP, the court heard, where she reported she had been raped, and displayed bruising, which she said had been caused by beatings."

I’m delighted that repair works to the Tumbling Weir in #Guildford are set to begin in late May.

I’ve worked closely with the National Trust & Guildford Borough Council to help ensure the much‑loved towpath can reopen for residents to enjoy once again!

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/surrey...

Hopefully the government will come to its senses and avoid creating a West Surrey Council that will be bankrupt on day one, but otherwise those poor fools elected to run the new council (of which I hope to be one) will have a horrendous and impossible job ahead of them.

I continue to maintain that the only practical solution here is a government debt bailout, with the exchequer taking on bad local government debt, and nationalising the problem, rather than creating bankrupt, doomed-from-the-start new councils which will only breed deprivation and populism.

Until and unless the government does something then it is highly likely that 700,000 people will be facing big council tax rises, and the utter decimation of local services for the most vulnerable, simply in the name of sending 40% of the council budget to the Treasury in debt repayments.

And that's all very well and good and abstract until you remember that what this translates to is massive spending cuts for the children's service that failed Sara Sharif, for social care for disabled people, for libraries and community services, for playgrounds, for road safety, etc.

It is, ultimately, a mess entirely of central government's own making, in that they created the conditions where some councils were bound to get themselves in trouble, but central government has refused to actually deal with the consequences, and is instead relying on wishful thinking.

The results of this are unlikely to surprise you.

Some councils borrowed wisely to make careful investments, but some went the way of Woking, Thurrock, Spelthorne, etc and borrowed billions to sink into incredibly risky investment projects. And without a functioning audit system, no one spotted it.

The real scandal here is that Eric Pickles scrapped the local government audit commission, which monitored council spending, then cut local government funding right before giving them an unlimited ability to borrow along with instructions to generate commercial income from investments.

The fallacy of central government thinking is that bigger, simpler local government will magically mean lots of savings and, somehow, more economic growth.

Unfortunately that doesn't really work if local government is slashing 40% of public services simply to service debt.

Net savings from merging multiple councils aren't expected to arrive for 5 years, and when they do they will be in the order of £20 to £30 million a year for West Surrey.

But the debt servicing cost is £320 million a year.

Local government reorganisation in Surrey is being speed-run by the government, largely because the treasury thinks it's a panacea to deal with the debt crisis in councils like Woking and Spelthorne. But in practice the new West Surrey Council, serving 700,000 people, will be bankrupt on day one.

Table showing the gross debt financing costs for the existing councils due to make up the future West Surrey and East Surrey councils. The table shows that West Surrey will be spending £320 million, or 39.9%, of its 2026/27 net revenue budget, on debt financing costs. East Surrey will be spending £52 million, or 7.6%, on debt financing costs.

There's not been much coverage, anywhere, of the insane debt crisis facing the new West Surrey Council, apart from my facebook post.

So, to reiterate, this new council will start out in its first year spending *40%* of its budget simply on servicing debt.

www.facebook.com/georgepotter...

West Surrey Elections:

Daily Telegraph poll shows only the Lib Dems can beat the Conservatives and Reform in West Surrey on 7 May.

Labour and the Greens are too far behind.

Vote for two Lib Dem candidates in your division to ensure the first West Surrey Unitary is led by a progressive party.

This forecast is about vote share by borough - which unintentionally favours Labour.

With any significant degree of anti Labour tactical voting, this turns into a catastrophe for them.

How dare democrats grab for power when we all know that power belongs to this volk we imagined

Taps sign while Badenoch is speaking...

A) the Torygraph are idiots, "try and avoid using slang or idioms that don't translate" is perfectly sensible when communicating with the public.
B) "raining cats and dogs" always makes me think of the Sheogorath quest where you make burning dogs fall from the sky to mess with the villagers 😆

AND THEY STOLE THE FUCKING RIGHT CTRL KEY FOR IT

Ironically I switched to Linux to get reliable sound because that's how broken Windows is now

In case there are any left-wing people supporting a universal subsidisation of energy - and unfortunately in the UK it's Green Party policy - this is what it means. The only fair and just thing to do is for rich countries to accelerate decarbonisation and limit fossil fuel use as much as possible.

At this point the only reason to call it the Labour Party is it lasts too long, hurts like hell, and people keep popping in and out to check on your genitals.