I kind of think you never can tell, really. And overall I've just utterly lost faith with British politicians. There is clearly some kind of systematic sickness or inability.

I basically thought Starmer would be a boring, sensible, technocrat, who would deliver most of Corbyn's agenda while also not scaring the horses. I think it's worth reflecting personally on how my judgement was wrong about him.

I think the main lesson to take from Starmer's premiership is that it's important not to let other people push you around or define what you stand for.

two men talking in front of a sign that says electrical products Alt: Dennis Reynolds in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, saying "because of the implication"

Wow

I don't mind showing up early. It's a whole day of travelling anyway, so who cares?

Yes. As ever we seem to have decided that middle class people don't deserve or shouldn't need a welfare state. Major error imo.

So if you drive from Stansted to Braintree, the A120 is a genuinely gorgeous bit of D2 two lane dual carriageway. After Braintree it turns into a tiny country lane that becomes a linear car park at rush hour.

I read where a lot of middle class people (correctly) think if they didn't have a big chunk of cash savings readily available to pay their mortgage if they lose their job, then they'd be completely screwed. Don't know why this is worse(?) in the UK than elsewhere though.

It's genuinely just a decent chess app, and I wouldn't otherwise have bothered spending money on a chess app. I keep seeing ads for language learning apps that talk about immersion and suchlike, and with AI I think they might work pretty well.

I've basically given up on learning French/German/Spanish on Duolingo and I'm now just using it to learn chess. And of course the thing about chess is you can actually "do the thing" on Duolingo, so you do actually get reliably better at it, which is amazing.

There was a gap of maybe 18 months between getting my first graduate job and actually getting a decent smartphone. So silly.

This is something I genuinely had to learn, consciously. There are so many categories where, once you actually have "enough" money, you really should spend it on things rather than otherwise.

A screenshot of a white-on-black terminal depicting a 19x19 go board in ascii graphics, with empty grid intersections as periods, and black and white as Os and #s

It’s absolutely incredible that one of the largest Japanese-run Go servers, which has been running since 1992, is still accessed entirely via Telnet. And while most players use GUI clients that use Telnet under the hood, you can still connect manually and get ASCII graphics streamed to you

Because you want to preserve your streak.

Ironically the only place I’ve actually witnessed this sort of bare faced shoplifting was an Amazon Fresh store.

It’s classic agility/discipline/pluralism/feedback. You need a big stock of potential talent/ideas/approaches and then have them ruthlessly competing with each other, with real consequences for failure.

By paying more than it had to, the navy left itself with a surplus of captains and admirals on half-pay and without a command at any given time. That surplus, though, was to prove useful. Because any captain at sea would be aware that if he failed to do his duty, a replacement was ready and raring to go. Duncan Weldon Blood and Treasure: The Economics of Conflict from the Vikings to Ukraine #kindlequotes

While I remember, Duncan Weldon’s description of the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail reminded me of this description of how WWII US generals were managed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxZW...

Reeves vows to cut link between gas and electricity prices in UK Chancellor says she will look at ways of ensuring the wholesale price of electricity is set more often by renewables

Reeves vows to cut link between gas and electricity prices in UK www.ft.com/content/2adc...

In 1953, a visiting American academic, attending a dinner party at a British university, was surprised to hear 'an eminent man of the left to say-in utter seriousness-that the British Constitution was "as nearly perfect as any human institution could be" . He was even more surprised that "No one even thought it amusing"! Vernon Bogdanor Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution #kindlequotes

In 1953, a visiting American academic, attending a dinner party at a British university, was surprised to hear 'an eminent man of the left to say-in utter seriousness-that the British Constitution was "as nearly perfect as any human institution could be" . He was even more surprised that "No one even thought it amusing"! Vernon Bogdanor Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution #kindlequotes

Poor Sleep Linked To Gong Instrument’s Loud, Resonant Crash Can Be Disruptive

Poor Sleep Linked To Gong https://theonion.com/poor-sleep-linked-to-gong/

Comic. One... two... THREE! [text in red] X Deprecated [line break] One... two... three... GO! [text in red] Deprecated [red curly bracket around top two lines] Too easy to mix up [line break] Three... two... one... GO! [text in green] [check mark] ISO Standard [caption] If I were in charge of ISO, the first thing I’d do would be to standardize the way people count out loud before doing something in sync.

Countdown Standard

xkcd.com/3232/

Which resources do you think should be redirected to building more wind and solar?

Well that's because they're already "maxing out" wind and solar. That's the current policy.

Eligibility and withdrawals of UC incl child element, social housing/LHA, child benefit, childcare, tax rates @ £1200/mth housing, this family’s disposable income is:

£25k job ~ £25k
£40k job ~ £29k
£60k job ~ £23k
£80k job ~ £32k
£99k job ~ £43k
£115k job ~ £32k

‘Well done lads, good process’

Limbostructure What is stopping Leeds getting a tram?

Limbostructure - Michael Dnes michaeldnes1.substack.com/p/limbostruc...

The goal of the Industrial Revolution was not to create jobs.

Think an underrated part of why Starmer is Like That is that like most very successful people, he has had a long career of “I can reshape my work load to avoid my areas of weakness”, and you cannot be an effective prime minister on that basis.