Working on a new departmental roster for the local council, inspired by Tory policy: Bins: [Neo-]Nazis Road Maintenance: Francoist Fascists (1956 ed.) Adult Social Care: Shining Path (keep away from Bins team?) I'm trying to tee up the Khmer Rouge for Education, but it keeps going to voicemail.

Working on a new departmental roster for the local council, inspired by Tory policy: Bins: [Neo-]Nazis Road Maintenance: Francoist Fascists (1956 ed.) Adult Social Care: Shining Path (keep away from Bins team?) I'm trying to tee up the Khmer Rouge for Education, but it keeps going to voicemail.

Brilliant letter from Stuart Thompson to Jeremy Clarkson about his comments that benefit claimants should write weekly thank you letters to tax payers detailing how they spend their benefits each week.

Do you know someone who is Surprisingly Nice in private, but a harrowingly awful twat in public? FYI, then, should it be needed: they are, in fact, Not Nice, and you have the moral compass and social discernment of a digestive biscuit.

I can't emphasise enough how much this would really have SO much value - there is so much we could do with just conscientious, pragmatic, sensitive, systems thinking approaches to solving people's problems. Even just "better data" has immense value. We have not finished the basics yet!

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 5d ago

Someone had just emailed me on a Friday night to ask if I have any thoughts to share on AI in digital govt and I think my answer is that we should focus on making basic services work for everyone and stop worrying about AI

I don’t have anything close to a knowledge base that would allow me to evaluate this from and education pov. BUT I am fascinated by one aspect. 1/n www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Burnham to tell schools in England to adapt teaching to local business needs

PM wants curriculums for students aged 14 and above to be more responsive to local jobs market

theguardian.com

🎵 ...Now you're just somebody that I used to know... 🎶

richard mortimer@richardmortimer.bsky.social · last wk.

The Heavenly Joy of Wall Furniture, Lucca #aofoto

Post a perfect album from the 90’s that isn’t Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, or Alice In Chains upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en...

Amy Hoy@amyhoy.bsky.social · last wk.

Post a perfect album from the 90’s that isn’t Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, or Alice In Chains

Karl Popper would have really loved Bluesky these days. Mainly as a rich and varied source of anecdotal evidence about "clearly nobody has read my fucking book", admittedly. Take this as your regular reminder that for some "questions", there is in fact only one side, plus some terrible pricks.

Reading a few interesting things about Burnham and "re-industrialisation". Agree with those suggesting it's probably not really going to be about heavy industry, etc. - obviously, the conditions, global trade structures, and basic human expectations don't align. Instead, people are talking of...

There’s massive fallacy at the very start and heart of this story - no amount of new oil and gas from the North Sea can bring down the cost of living - global markets set the price, even when we make it here - not us. www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Lots of talk at the moment about house building, as there generally is. What's missing from this debate, though? For me, it's "do we actually have a housing shortage?" That seems to be beyond orthodoxy in terms of questions, but I really think we should be clear on the answer. 🧵 /1

Clara Murray@claradoodle.bsky.social · 2w ago

Everyone thinks the UK should be building homes on brownfield land - but while we have a lot, most of it is in just a few urban areas. Most local authorites have less than five years' supply. Just one of many reasons Burnham will struggle to meet his housing ambitions

Not really seen much discussion on this yet; has anyone seen anything more concrete in terms of strategy/planning? Still slightly baffled by a weirdly non-pragmatic thing to drop into a vision - especially if devolved communities can presumably decide they're quite happy being de-industrialised...

Andrew Cherry@kolektiv.xyncro.com · 2w ago

Particularly struck by this line from Burham's piece in the Guardian this evening[0]: "...how we reindustrialise every part of Britain..." I... don't know what that means, or how it would work. What kind of "industry"? Making what? Selling to who? [0]: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Particularly struck by this line from Burham's piece in the Guardian this evening[0]: "...how we reindustrialise every part of Britain..." I... don't know what that means, or how it would work. What kind of "industry"? Making what? Selling to who? [0]: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I got an email today from make.com, which I used at some point in the past, entitled "Why your AI ROI number is probably wrong — and how to fix it", and wow - have I got a potential target customer for them! I don't know who at Google needs to read it, but @ me and I'll forward it over...

Dom Ervolina@dominicervolina.com · 2w ago

Wow, Google's free cash flow is negative for the first time in over 10 years because of their relentless spending on AI products no one wants "Alphabet's spending on AI is now expected to hit as much as $205b...Alphabet's combined quarterly revenue hit $119.8b." www.bbc.com/news/article...

Another fascinating ordering of complaints here... "It's too expensive! Also, it's legally sketchy as fuck and clearly utterly amoral, but... Did I mention too expensive though?"

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · 2w ago

Industry executives have balked at the fee and the potential legal risks of a new data service that would provide ‘faster’ access to posts from the top accounts on Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social. ft.trib.al/4gn0otB

As an aside on this, the whole "if the hyper-rich leave, you're losing job creators!" seems like a weird thing to say for a (presumed) capitalist, right? Surely if there are profitable jobs to be created, and an incumbent leaves, the market would correct for that with new job creators?

Andrew Cherry@kolektiv.xyncro.com · 2w ago

The excuse of "well, they'd just leave! And then we'd be poorer!" You know what? Fine. Let them go and corrupt somewhere else more directly. If we're supposed to respect "Brexit making us poorer is ok actually because sovereignty", then we can choose to be poorer for other ideological reasons too.

Spam calls getting lazier by the day. Just had one "We provide recovery services for money lost online. Have you ever experienced this loss?" Ummm, no. "Ok, thanks for your time." I mean, points for being polite, but at least buy a list of vaguely potential customers!

Additionally: we should be bold enough to say that taxing the hyper-rich back to reasonably rich is a good thing, even if it doesn't raise enough money to solve all problems. It solves one problem: hyper-rich people existing, which has a distorting and corrupting influence on society as a whole.

Helen McCarthy@glider.bsky.social · 2w ago

If #Labour is not willing to be radical on behalf of the working class and in the service of every citizen under the law, then Labour has been possessed by some other philosophy and needs an intervention.

PSA on the Victoria Line tube in London. Phillipson and every other GC weirdo needs to take note.

So, we have a first AI Minister attending Cabinet (not an AI Minister, perhaps sadly, but a Minister for AI, to be clear). I'd missed this interview when it came out last year, but it doesn't fill me with confidence. /1

Zoë Crowther@zoecrowther.bsky.social · 2w ago

Kanishka Narayan is the first UK AI minister to attend Cabinet My interview with Narayan last autumn provides insight into his approach to the brief 🧵👇 (1/6)

Fascinated by the order in which the impacts are listed.

Bloomberg News@bloomberg.com · 2w ago

Economists say European governments will need to invest billions of euros to protect citizens from increasingly dangerous heat waves that are already cutting productivity, hurting industry and resulting in significant numbers of deaths. Read more: bloom.bg/4wkIIAO 📷️: John MacDougall/Getty Images

ADMIRAL: And this is HMS Agamemnon, she- WES STREETING <interrupting>: Okay so I'm gonna stop you right there

The "honesty" we actually need from this government, or any government, is admitting that we face two major problems: demographic change and environmental collapse. Everything else is symptoms or ephemera. Unless you tackle those two head-on, nothing else you do will make much difference.

Here's something I post from time to time. My answer to a reader who asked me: what could journalists do NOW to break with some of their more corrosive habits.

[AFTER KEIR STARMER RESIGNS] ME: PAL: ME: PAL: Lot of human rights abuses for a hu- ME: A LOT of human rights abuses for a human rights lawyer!

Hannah Elias@hannahelias.bsky.social · last mo.

In the end, there were just a lot more human rights abuses than I was expecting from the human rights lawyer.

Whoever included the brief parp of vuvuzelas in that number, hats off to you.

While I think a "no knobheads" rule is a Good Thing in a general sense, it doesn't feel like the kind of thing you should need to explicitly impose. That it's seen as a sign of change does tell you something about an organisation...

flyingrodent@flyingrodent.bsky.social · 4w ago

This is unfortunate because the whole lot of them - the ones who actively wrecked and insulted their supporters, and the ones who sat quietly doing and saying nothing, watching the others do it - absolutely deserve to be tormented for eternity by the utterly horrible bastards they empowered.

binface vs farage vs lawrence fox is like el classico for “different ways your mate’s dad could end up taking the divorce”