Universal healthcare is a wildly popular centrist position. It is also a pro business position as it boosts labor market dynamism and removes what for most firms is a non core operation and cost. Asking how it will be paid for in a system as rife w/ inefficiencies as the US sort of misses the point

this is what losing soft power looks like

How China’s A.I. Is Surging Across Africa

In African tech hubs, developers are picking China’s cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over more powerful U.S. ones.

nytimes.com

Iran is going to figure out how to run Kimi 3 and then set an agent loose on Sallie Mae and erase everyone’s student loans and it will be the biggest wartime propaganda victory in all of history

Imagine taking on the Persian Empire and believing it would be done in a few days 😵

15 minute drive from neighbouring town. One driver in front overtook a tractor with full trailer (doing 60kph in an 80 zone) across solid line into completely blind bend. Closer to home an oncoming car swung into my lane to pass a car that was turning into a house driveway, making me brake hard.

heh, at least yer man here learnt ;)

Ben Goldacre@bengoldacre.bsky.social · yesterday

Apologies: I’m not online much, I haven't paid any attention to Rod Liddle for a long time, I didn't really know his extremes. I do now: I wouldn’t have posted if I'd known. I’ve seen death of difficult people up close (and its impact on others): that’s the only reason it was on my mind as an issue.

Knock knock Race condition Who's there?

just like farmers voted for leopards eat their faces apparently the tech moguls [who are putting in a metric shite tonne of optical networking gear] have also voted to have leopards eat their [P&L] faces too enjoy the comeuppance silly valley tech bros

Ruo Shui@ruoshuiresearch.bsky.social · yesterday

Innolight has like 30% share of the global datacenter transceiver market

As Paul Samuelson admitted in his old age: The balanced budget myth (deficit myth) is necessary because it acts as Old Time Religion to keep the dirty masses in their place and never ask for a government created dollar to pay their banks back:, youtu.be/4_pasHodJ-8?...

Paul Samuelson: The balanced budget superstition

YouTube video by wonkmonk

youtu.be

How close are we to the “oh fuck” part of that timeline

James Murray@james-bg.bsky.social · 4d ago

In fairness it starts and closes by making clear that economic and food security is under grave threat. But then provides next to no insight about what we should do about it beyond worrying about the cost of decarbonisation and undertaking some ill defined form of adaptation.

Hmm #BMW need to realise that if they build a car that is a mobile phone on wheels and users pay for a data plan subscription then there are “issues” when pushing adverts to the device connected to the public communications network under the ePrivacy Directive www.techspot.com/news/113327-...

BMW is putting Spider-Man ads on your dashboard, after promising it never would

The promotion began on July 27, 2026, and is scheduled to run through August 10 across more than 70 markets. On supported vehicles, starting the car brings...

techspot.com

I have a personal update: Next monday, I will be starting at @OpenAI working on better cyber (which will also entail some efficiency work). I'm pretty excited about the things I will learn and the things we will do.

Nobody quite knows how to take a shitty hand and play it like complete dog shit like him

If you are into John le Carré you'll enjoy this very insightful and entertaining read. "He said of spying: “It’s a journalistic job done in secret”" - and having worked in both fields, this rings true. criticalflame.org/john-le-carr...

John le Carré’s Life Beyond The Pigeon Tunnel

David Cromwell, a little like Smiley.

criticalflame.org

@mewtype.online your advice to just block bsky llc folks is pretty good idea, much obliged

If a elderly 83yo driver tots up 24 (!) penalty points for speeding through a camera close to her home, it indicates she no longer has the capacity to drive and DVLA should revoke until she passes a driving test. I don't give a fuck if it's famous author Lynda La Plante. Ban her before she kills.

Some shower of ignoramouses living in Finglas - Some of the objections are absolutely horrendous: www.irishtimes.com/ireland/hous...

Hundreds object to plans for Ireland’s largest new town

New town of 18,500 homes planned on 1,000 acres beside what was once Dublin’s main landfill

irishtimes.com

Eg. Climate harms and adaptation are almost as much a metaphor here as a concrete element in French politics, but the foreseeability of the need for more firefighting resources and the complex logic of how to respond are, reasonably, big issues now foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/31/f...

France’s Wildfires Are Swallowing Its Politics

The country’s next presidential election is more ominous in the glow of its latest environmental disaster.

foreignpolicy.com

Romania blew up ‌a rock outcrop on Monday to help redirect vital cooling water from the drought-hit Danube to its last working nuclear reactor.

Genuinely don't think we're hearing nearly enough about the effective youth/GenZ protest movements in middle and lower-middle income countries in the past couple of years foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/30/c...

How Gen Z ‘Cockroaches’ Beat Modi at His Own Game

India’s prime minister is famous for his savvy use of social media. Now he’s getting a wake-up call.

foreignpolicy.com

alt text: google are a shower of chancers who sent me the wrong way i'm sure AI would solve this ofc /s

a junior butterbar lieutenant's job as a commanding officer's aide de camp is become not-junior yeah, they do take notes [and do a lot of other admin] -- but the point was never the damned notes famous examples: a) Alexander Hamilton, the one from the musical b) our own Michael Collins 👇read🧵

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 4d ago

Then they have all the transcripts (and the ai token bill) but no sensemaking. so they make another app — a layer that will make sense of all the useless transcripts. But of course sensemaking isnt just pattern spotting. It’s interpretation. AI cannot do either because AI cannot be curious

also how the fuck has firefox for android been sitting on their asses not making <input datalist> work for seven years? bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi... we have combo boxes in html now, it’s great, but no we don’t because mozilla are too busy working on stupid AI bullshit

i really gotta get started on zyn

𝔻𝕒𝕟 🏈🍻💀@danmynrd.bsky.social · 5d ago

dog that keeps bringing the co60 vial back every time you drop and run

thankfully both my birth and adopted countries didn't join in on the racist shite from the EU commission

Joe Noonan@joenoonan.bsky.social · 5d ago

Ireland, France, Luxembourg and Portugal declined to join this mob of 22.

it's wild that in a democracy you need to convince the politicians and not the people

It's truly depressing to be in a group call where an expert is sharing several possible approaches to a recurring problem and someone keeps interrupting the conversation to share what ChatGPT/Claude thinks about what we're discussing and doing. It's someone who should really know better, too.