Nearly 1 in 6 UK species are threatened with extinction.
We've lost 97% of our wildflower meadows since the 1930s.
We have 73 million fewer birds than in the 1970s - a decline of almost a third.
And yet some politicians still just see wildlife as a blocker to progress.
The EU now requires all Mobile Phones to be sold with easily replaceable and standardised batteries, as they used to be.
From 2027 they all will be again, in Europe.
I’m so proud of my parents, 60s and 70s respectively, who now run a Linux only household 🔥
Palantir is its own agnotology machine. Do not engage with their discourse, which throws spaghetti at the wall of media: every strand introduces a new kind of doubt. You try to consume & debate it but in the end all you are is tangled in spaghetti and covered with marinara.
We've thus far had over three times more UK General Election polls with April fieldwork than Scottish and Welsh polls combined (13 v 3 + 1).
There won't be a UK General Election until 2029, maybe 2028.
Welcome to the Minty side!
Memo to messrs Offord and Findlay. Of the 790k people in Scotland who are currently economically inactive:
122k are retired
185k are students
124k are looking after family
267k are long-term sick
The idea that '800k inactive people' are choosing not to work to live a life on benefits is ludicrous
This is just to say
I have collapsed
the lobbying group
you set up 16 years ago with Ben Wragg Prosser
And which
you were probably
saving
to line your own pockets.
Forgive me,
It was delicious
So lucrative
And so corrupt
When Angela Rayner underpaid £40,000 in stamp duty, Richard Tice said it was "morally completely indefensible” and she should resign if she had “any moral decency”.
Now we learn he set up four shell companies that let him avoid paying £100,000 he owed in tax and to then transfer the cash to Reform
Diane Abbott, "It's just not possible that No 10 did not know"
"And to try and pretend that No 10 did not know when anybody who follows these issues would know that can't be true, is a kind of thing that undermines people's faith in politics"
"The denial seems Trumpish"
I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”
These are rolling out all over Scotland.
Inscrutable why the Electoral Commission has allowed this.
The guy doing it was kicked out of UKIP for being a Holocaust denier.
www.thenational.scot/news/2599217...
Really appreciate you flagging this!
Exterior of a polling place in Edinburgh (Getty).
We're urging everyone who is eligible to register to vote before the deadline at 11:59pm on Monday 20 April 🗳️
You can also apply to vote by post or proxy instead of going to a polling place📮
With voting now open for this year's British Fantasy Awards, we're calling for jurors. Once voting is closed, the shortlist goes to a jury of peers to choose a winner. Fancy being part of the action?
Nominate yourself to be a juror for the British Fantasy Awards here: forms.gle/Kv1JTHBeSXaJ...
The thing that itches me about the DeWitt story is that the marketing role of authors has become so much a part of our culture that the prize simply couldn’t imagine being chill about it, even though it’s clear they simply do not need to market themselves
What’s the point of being in government if you have no vision for how it should be done? If you believe in nothing and have no ideas for how to make our lives better?
It’s that private-school “debate the side you’re given” attitude taken to an absurd extreme.
Why do we even bother with endnotes--this is my personal pet peeve as a historian, I need to read the spicy, sassy, whiny footnotes immediately
Orbán is out, but the think tanks, funding and relationships built under his government won’t just disappear overnight.
So we’re making that investigation free to read
At Scottish Labour Conference in Feb 2025, a leadership-backed motion to adopt a transphobic policy on single-sex spaces in schools was defeated. Party members and affiliates voted it down.
Today Scottish Labour's leadership put that transphobic policy into its manifesto for May's election anyway.
I love that he lists a bunch of reasons for Scotland to become independent at the end!
More to the point, this is why the SNP strategy for indy isn’t working: there is no mechanism to trigger a referendum short of winning power in Westminster, which a party that only stands in Scotland cannot do.
It is absolutely incredible that HMRC thought (and still thinks) that it is acceptable to tell every sole trader in the country that they have to file digitally, but that HMRC isn't providing any means to do, that you probably need to get some software from somewhere, and that it sucks to be you.
Brilliant to see the French government move to adopt Linux. Would love to see more proactive digital sovereignty work here in Scotland and the UK.
linuxiac.com/france-launc...
My hot take is that if you’re going to post about national statistics, you should specify which nation you’re talking about
In France, legislation came into effect recently for all car parks that have over 80 spaces to be covered with solar panels. Estimated to add around 11GW of renewable energy capacity to the national grid. Why not do likewise in Scotland? Braehead, Silverburn, Glasgow Fort etc.
a screenshot of a google search for "nearest star" with a pop-up asking if you'd like to "see results closer to you?"
i don't think that'll make the result any more precise, but sure
I think I'm coming to view LLMs as essentially being the Fae.
The Fae are usually seen as not having souls, and therefore not having consciousness in a way we can recognize;
they don't understand the difference between lies and truth, kindness and cruelty;
>
If you're in Scotland, Reform UK is sending election leaflets through the mail without paying the postage!
So the recipient pays to receive their grotesque racist spam. Niiiiice.
www.reddit.com/media?url=ht...
(Source: old.reddit.com/r/Scotland/c...)
Will I get in trouble for this.
"“Gender critical” is an inaccurate term for a movement which is anything but ‘critical,’ in the academic sense, in its approach. “Gender criticality” is marked, in fact, by a profound lack of intellectual inquiry."
Helen DeWitt on turning down a $175k Windham-Campbell Prize because she wasn't able to handle the prize's mandatory publicity requirements. Imo a moving, deeply relatable, and darkly funny story about money, obligation, mental health, & executive dysfunction
paperpools.blogspot.com/2026/04/we-l...
