ChatGPT requests are starting to turn up as evidence in criminal trials and these ones are going to be hard to beat
Stephen Buggy
@stephenbuggy.bsky.social
I work with data and on Homelessness. I am learning Portuguese. I live in Belfast
I'm on the train from Montréal to Toronto. There's just been a reminder that it is MANDATORY to use headphones when watching video. I can't believe this guys have resorted to legislation, rather than our system of having 75% of the carriage sit in murderous, futile rage.
Fair play to John Healey, who managed to time his 5.5-week break from government to coincide exactly with the World Cup
Labour won by 20 points and net immigration is down by over 80% in two years. But sure write your column again.
White people globally seem to hate immigrants more than they want healthcare.
Sarah Creighton @saraita101.bsky.social · 2mo agoReports this morning that health staff in Northern Ireland have received letters telling them to leave the country or they'll be burnt out of their homes.
Per most recent figures, net migration to NI *over the past 22 years* has been ~62,000 people. Only 3% of Northern Ireland’s population currently belong to an ethnic minority. Pogroms in Belfast (as with Ballymena last year) are just gutter-level "One Is One Too Many" racism, and nothing else.
If Muslims or members of the Asian and Black community had set fire to white people’s homes with children running for their lives, do you think we would be discussing legitimate concerns or focussing on who radicalised them and ideological and contributing cultural factors?
Homelessness is a housing issue: -Toronto and Vancouver have the highest rates -Halifax rockets up as the housing market breaks post COVID -Calgary declines as oil bust keeps housing market weak
Man in Tescos (with what might be considered a surprising amount of urgency): Dolores. Stay with me. I haven’t got a clubcard.
2026 Me: Hey 1996 me, in 30 years time you'll be furious at everything Tony Blair says and think John Major makes some pretty sensible points 1996 Me: Fuck, so I'm doomed to become more conservative as I get older 2026 Me: Well not exactly
A livestream of a volcano in the Philippines captured a meteor crashing to Earth today. What are the odds? Mayon Volcano, Location: Albay, Luzon, Philippines
I'm genuinely relieved how lackluster the enhanced games have been. Drugs don't seem to have mattered much.
Gabe Fernandez@thelatinochild.bsky.social · 2mo agoHunter Armstrong, a non-juiced, "non-enhanced" athlete won the 50-meter backstroke at the Enhanced Games, beating two athletes who spent the last few months taking PEDs under stringent medical supervision. www.sfgate.com/sports/artic...
the FT has two pieces on the slow-motion collapse of UK higher ed. 4/5ths of unis are doing voluntary layoffs; 38% are doing compulsory. Meanwhile Britain and its flatlined productivity growth sleepwalks through its unprecedented loss of advanced capabilities www.ft.com/content/8097...
From their own words; the now infamous on here "I'll fight till hell freezes over and then I'll cut the ice and fight on" quote was specifically in response to seeing a slaveowner auctioning off his own barely teenaged daughter
Megaweapon@megaweapon5.bsky.social · 2mo agoSomeone here a while back said that the average Union soldier went from “why am I fighting this war?” to “I’m going to burn every square inch of the accursed south to the ground and salt the ashes” when they realized how much sexual depravity was baked into southern plantation culture.
YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK
Not sure if this is one of my most rightwing or my most leftwing takes, but if you believe there is such a thing as “excessive profits” in a sector you really should just go ahead and insource the service you’re paying for:
Social care providers may face caps on ‘excessive’ profits
Steve Reed, the local government secretary, says he will crack down on ‘unreasonable cost escalation’
thetimes.com
Remembered this on the EU vs. US productivity discourse.
I don't want to wade too much into this, but the chart going around from that FT birth rates article raised my "making causal claims from time series data" alarm. Compare the figure in the article with the raw TFR data from 1960 onward.
Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 3mo agoAnyway, I am side-eyeing this, which I feel begins in an interesting enough way and then dies by a thousand charts giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... and draws some very conservative conclusions, driven by correlation, that worry me as a feminist sociotechnical researcher
this continues to be the dumbest point, because it's basically 'yes, this is genocide, but what about what people who don't know anything about genocide think genocide has to be?'
I still think these two paragraphs from Ganz are the most important contemporary political writing
Bolsonaro has now spent over 40 pages of this 107-page script in the hospital, which is probably the most accurate thing about the movie
The answer to this question always was, and always will be, HOUSING @financialtimes.com I earn 3 times my mother. Yet I live in a place about half hers, and paid rent for 15 years the get there.
Day 15 of #30dayChartChallenge, correlation. Getting real stupid with it. It actually took me ages to find a source of data that would even mildly correlate. Spurious correlations are hard! Colleague: "I don't know what to say". Me: "Get me The Economist on the phone"?
This story is based entirely on dodgy advisers lying to potential clients to get money out of them. The one person they actually spoke to who used this 'service' was rejected and returned to Pakistan and has since been blocked from returning to the UK.
CJ McKinney@cjmckinney.bsky.social · 4mo ago“One immigration adviser boasted that she had spent more than 17 years helping bring fake claims and said she could arrange for someone to pretend they'd had a gay sexual relationship with a client” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Shabana Mahmood’s migration changes are expected to save just £600m – about 6% of the £10bn the home secretary claimed, according to the government’s own data. FOI data was obtained by @jdportes.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Mahmood’s migration changes will deliver fraction of claimed savings, data suggests
Exclusive: Analysis of government figures indicates public finances will gain £600m not £10bn if migrants’ access to benefits is reduced
theguardian.com
Literary studies - The author's intention isn't that important; what matters is what the work actually does. An architect could have a brilliant plan for a building but if it's built and the roof leaks the plans to keep everyone dry don't matter.
M. Nolan Gray 🥑@mnolangray.bsky.social · 4mo agoWhat's something that experts/practitioners in your field universally agree upon, but that remains a "hot take" among the general public?