Just noticed the gym has a notice requesting users to “cover open wounds and wipe bar of any blood” and now I’m wondering how often that had to happen before they thought the instruction was necessary.
He said: "By shifting the vast majority of university funding into the hands of the aggregate decisions of 17-year-olds, the English system of choice has become an enormous machine for finding out who has the best marketing department, with some world-leading research sprinkled in certain places."
Quite the quote from the John Blake, the former director of fair access at the Office for Students
www.thetimes.com/article/1cb6...
Bought a strawberry flavoured (milk-based) protein shake recently and it took me a while to work out why it inexplicably tasted like a childhood memory.
Keir Starmer famously said there was "no such thing" as Starmerism. He was half-right: there is no such ideology. There is however an approach to managing and running the country that is core to so many of the government's difficulties that we probably should call 'Starmerism'. In tomorrow's paper:
An afternoon flight from Gatwick to Copenhagen became a surprisingly cheap evening flight from Heathrow with a different airline. I can’t remember the exact cost now but it was well under £100 (to my relief - I assumed it would be extortionate).
I struggled to believe they are real but have one in my mentions now explaining how if we get rid of Starmer that will stop us getting back into the EU.
Keir Starmer has been taking questions for so long that the Strait of Hormuz has closed and re-opened three times during his stint at the despatch box.
Funny to recall that this government, mired in scandal, policy u-turns and infighting, won a huge majority a little less than two years ago. And while the fiscal inheritance was bad, the bar for improvement was also set incredibly low. It was just so hard to see how you could end up here so quickly.
Somewhere Bismarck is looking down in confusion as Germany projects power by sending 4,000 pensioners, 12 buffet stations and a TUI loyalty program through the Strait of Hormuz
Slouching towards bedlam to be born.
Reminded of Miliband's best line
This is very sad. I only knew him through twitter and here, but a really good lawyer trying to make the world better.
Sure, and lots of people are also time-poor! I'm not convinced it's helpful to deploy claims of privilege to try and win this argument, particularly since it kicked off with an "if you can afford it" claim anyway.
I see that people are attacking the OP for being "privileged" and even if I disagree, you can run that argument either way if you want? "Oh, you have the time to hang around at airports with a book and a drink? Well the person in my head has to work three jobs before turning up for their flight."
Oh great, yet another hospital drama.
The second was particularly annoying because I had been chuckling about easyJet’s incompetence in sending me a “so how was your flight?” survey before I had even headed to the airport and it didn’t dawn on me what had happened until after I got there.
I have missed two flights through my own stupidity (forgetting my passport; turning up a day late (!)) and both were quick and cheap to fix but it hasn’t made me more relaxed about missing flights; I just kick myself a bit harder to not make the same mistakes again.
And you ended up working in a university, so there’s some sort of lesson here.
One reason for this is that if you want to justify a regime for (a) how universities deal with controversial speaking events and (b) you want that to have massive financial penalties attached, (b) requires you to push very hard on the idea these events are of relevance to the entire student body.
There is a tension between the uni critical view that university exists to produce day one work ready graduates who should be experts in [dice roll] AI and the uni critical view that it exists as a debate club where [dice roll] engineering students should be shocked and offended on a daily basis.
I had not heard that!
Sadly I can’t find a picture online but I can only imagine the high-fives in the Daily Record’s offices when he sacked his lawyers in the middle of a trial and they were able to run a front page saying, in the largest possible letters, TOMMY DROPS HIS BRIEFS.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
It’s much more serious than this but I did enjoy this excerpt from the Palantir manifesto. Nothing wrong with the cast of characters at the helm now, of course! Great bunch of lads; lucky to have them steering the ship.
Sure, I think that’s absolutely right, but that aspect is tacked on for just that reason rather than reflecting what the rule is (much more generally) there for.
Oh la di dah too big and important for us are you? (Yes, yes I am, I’m the prime minister, you dolt.)
My assumption is that a PM can’t spend much time on social media because you’re the victim of a completely different sort of attention economy where everyone around you competes for your time. But you want to appear normal which is why you implausibly say “yeah, I’m a generic social media user”.
I remember when there was talk of someone’s lectern not being ready and almost posted “this is ridiculous they don’t make a different one for each PM, that would be absurd” and I’m glad I didn’t but also, why?
Yes, but my inference is that the policy is “this is a cap which you should simply not exceed, and if you exceed it despite being told not to a whacking penalty attaches”. The problem is that people don’t have the same control over payments in as with eg an ISA and the bill is immediate.
Offord on the telly again talking about getting '800,000 economically inactive people back to work'.
High time journalists start properly interrogating this abject nonsense.
bsky.app/profile/step...
I was initially confused by the implied motivation but can imagine there have been points in recent Labour history where being politically restricted would have been a relief.