Once again, I come back to the fact these guys have created a situation where one of the UK's leading, cis female athletes is scared to go to the loo alone, and the fact that they are celebrating this as a step forward for women's rights.

Equality and Human Rights Commission@equalityhumanright.bsky.social · 11h ago

Our code of practice for services, public functions and associations comes into force today. It provides practical guidance on how the Equality Act 2010 applies to services, public functions and associations. Find out more: https://ow.ly/alIf50Zwrkx

Miliband seems to have understood that you must wear a terrible suit when dealing with Trump

Jack Tindale@jacktindale.bsky.social · 1h ago

"Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, recently appointed to the role by the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, meets Secretary of State Rubio in Washington" is one of those lines that would sound perfectly plausible to anyone in 2015, but explaining the intervening period would give them an aneurysm.

My thoughts on the Brick Lane data centre is that I live in a different inner city London neighbourhood very close to a large data centre and I would bet my entire net worth that less than 5% of my neighbours know that it's there

an unfathomable amount of stuff has got better over the last 40 years - hell, even over the *last 15* - and anyone convinced it hasn't does not remember or know what things were like 15 or 40 years ago.

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 18h ago

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

Okay, but he does, though. Like there's no way Zack Polanski thinks it'd be okay for Wayne Couzens to be an MP. He just doesn't.

Andy Burnham Accepter@jorisbinned.bsky.social · 8h ago

Hello I'm an idiot

Preorder your copy of "I Haven't Made It Home Yet" for a discount: pwritersu.com/ihmihy PSST - if you live outside of the USA, reach out to us with any shipping questions! #anthology #litmag #printisnotdead

I wouldn’t want to see a diverse cast of plantation owners in the Confederate South either, so I agree with you. Having a diverse cast in an adaptation of one of the foundational myths of Western society though is a way of saying they belong in our society today.

It's genuinely a massive problem that the median voter both 1) believes "criminal illegal immigrants" to be an astronomically more serious threat than they actually are, and 2) believes that the legal immigration process is substantially easier than it actually is.

Sunsette / Cynthia Skye@sunderedmarches.com · 2d ago

I understand your position, but those are different situations. People straight up both envision a system much milder than exists and cannot imagine a modern world without that imaginary system. By default they have no real grasp of reality on the matter, but are usu. sympathetic to individuals.

Glad someone senior from the sector is pushing back. Labour MPs need to understand the serious real anger from graduates and the people who produce them. And the dangerous financial situation they have allowed to fester, or indeed worsened, in one of Britain’s leading sectors.

Labour has harmed universities as much as Trump, London School of Economics head says

LSE vice-chancellor Larry Kramer points to domestic student fees freeze, international student limits and rise in employers’ national insurance

ft.com

Latest blog is on how Kemi Badenoch can insist she’s not a climate denier, but she clearly doesn’t understand the nature of the threat, fails to comprehend why net zero was adopted, and currently has no plan on how to cut emissions. www.businessgreen.com/blog-post/45...

A hot messy summer

As the wildfires rage, what passes for climate discourse on the right of British politics is plumbing depressing new depths

businessgreen.com

British renewables generated more electricity than ever before in 2025. A record 52.1% of UK electricity generation came from: 🌬️ Wind ☀️ Solar 🌊 Hydro 🟩 Other renewables

Really annoying when someone uses a title I wanted, though I guess since he's been nominated for a Booker, I have to let Marlon James have it

I always thought Aristotle's defence of slavery was so bad it *must* be a joke

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · last wk.

one tendency that comes out about period films is the insistence that XYZ moral thought would not have occurred to anyone in the ancient world. to be sure there are moral innovations and changes but the existence of thorough dissatisfaction with the present moral order is not a modern phenomenon

Finally met a climate change denier in the wild, lads

People just desperately need to chill out about Will Stancil. The mob psychology people have around him is insane and disturbing.

I am terrible at self-promotion and therefore very nearly late to the party here, but I have written about The Odyssey once or twice, firstly on the topic of what it means to have 'read it' (and whether it matters): frankpodmore.wordpress.com/2022/06/17/d...

Do you have to read The Odyssey?

There’s been a discourse, everyone. Better duck. A great fact about Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush is that she’d never read the book when she wrote the song. Instead, it was inspired by…

frankpodmore.wordpress.com

I have a modest proposal for a new tax. It involves a deck of cards and a monkey throwing darts. Here are the rules:

It won’t be too big of a surprise that ‘of’ and ‘off’ come from the same Old English word. However, if we go further back in time, it turns out they’re part of a huge word family that includes ‘after’, ‘ebb’, German ‘von’, ‘aber’, and Ancient Greek ‘apó’. Click my new graphic to learn more:

Also funny that people keep saying, 'No, if you're poor you should take the £50k'. If you're poor it's even more important not to make bad financial decisions!

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · last wk.

Yes there is. If you were a lawyer or in some other advisory position and someone came to you with this question there is a correct answer, for almost every conceivable personal situation. I’m sorry if it’s not the one you would pick but that’s why we train people to think about things like this.

But is our hypothesis correct? We need to be very careful here. The data is consistent with our hypothesis, but it certainly does not prove it. There are potential counterarguments and alternative explanations:

Scotland raised its top income tax rate to 48% to make the rich pay more. New HMRC data suggests the result may have been the opposite: Scotland collected about £22m less. We can't be sure, but Scotland may have fallen over the Laffer curve. 🧵:

I really don't get how people can read stuff like this and fail to realise that it cannot be by William Blake (who did write a famous line about doors, but not this one). This has the cadence of someone parodying Tolkien, not of a romantic poet

Wrote an obituary for Guy Scott, the first and thus far only white man to run a democratic government in postcolonial Africa:

Guy Scott, former president of Zambia, 1944-2026

The academic and farmer was the first and only white man to lead an African democracy

ft.com

I actually have one political thought about this, which is that it's really funny that the BlueSky left has taken up a theory of behavioural economics I would have associated with Ronald Reagan

Frank Podmore@frankpodmore.bsky.social · 2w ago

Can anyone link me to an explanation of the actual maths involved here? I don't care about the politics/psychology of it, just genuinely interested in the numbers!

Are you a British straight non-trans person? Imagine seeing this if you were trans & noticing he has it set so you can’t reply? Why? Because he, like the rest of the UK Labour Party, is pretending he doesn’t know that his Party has banned trans ppl from public spaces* Serious gaslighting.

I reposted Sadiq Khan because I agree with the sentiment but @robertbohan.bsky.social's right, he should explicitly condemn and fight the government rather than doing this boilerplate thing

Dr Robert Bohan@robertbohan.bsky.social · 2w ago

Are you a British straight non-trans person? Imagine seeing this if you were trans & noticing he has it set so you can’t reply? Why? Because he, like the rest of the UK Labour Party, is pretending he doesn’t know that his Party has banned trans ppl from public spaces* Serious gaslighting.

Turns out all the institutions we built to prevent human beings from collapsing into the epistemological method of “it’s true because I believe it and my friends all say I’m right” were REALLY important. We discovered this by building a much bigger machine that functions on the second principle.

Ed Miliband is also much better than he used to be. Publicly losing is bruising to the ego and it's also a valuable learning experience. We don't expect, e.g., tennis players, to retire when they lose a match!

Phil Tinline@philtinline.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is why the "B..but he stood for leader before and lost! Twice!" discourse was so dumb. Maybe people staying in politics when they lose or fail & sticking at it makes them...better? If we applied today's norms on when you're meant to leave politics, Churchill would've been gone after Gallipoli