The idea that you mustn't change leader in time of war was one Boris Johnson's team pushed hard. As I wrote at the time, the UK has a long history of doing just that. Indeed, "The ability to change leader during a crisis was once regarded as a strength of the UK system". www.ft.com/content/e131...

Maybe if Labour are worried about the Greens having mad policies they should reconsider donating so many voters to them?

One thing people don't seem to have noticed about driverless cars is how much easier it will be to cause significant traffic disruption once they are common enough. It's directly a consequence of them being safer so will be extremely challenging to fix

Nearly every Take relating to this has been done except one, which is - why would the European leaders take advice from Starmer on how to beat the far right? Who among them envies his popularity or admires the sagacity of his advisors? www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec...

Given that the ad breaks will probably be for gambling ads most places, it raises the possibility that these 'welfare' breaks in one of the most watched events worldwide will result in an increase in deaths.

On 16th March, 1968 Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jnr was flying helicopter recon for a US attack on My Lai, an alleged Viet Cong-controlled village in Vietnam. But as the attack developed below, Thompson realised he was witnessing something something else: A massacre. He decided to act. 1/28

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. But teach a man how to fish and Pete Hegseth will murder him.”

“Help us make Keir Starmer better!”

The model for what they need is probably "Early Access Game" dev log. Less "I", more "we" and plenty of "how this fits into our overall vision" where they combine restrained but obvious enthusiasm for that vision with a mildly apologetic tone for not making progress faster. Does require a vision

I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking about Hitler’s Olympics in 1936.

This abject fawning to someone whose Government only today announced that they want to promote ethnic-nationalism in Europe and are impatient at the unwillingness of Europe to allow Russia to grab want it wants by force is utterly mortifying. It is soul-cringeing.

The question: Is a man who was overtly racist at school in the 1970s, famous for making a number of racist seeming remarks over the years, who lost a job for remarks considered racist in 2020 and was somewhat racist last week still racist? Not really a stumper is it?

"are you enjoying duo mobile" does a hamburger enjoy being made of quarks. does a fish enjoy linear time. does the mountain enjoy the first taste of a cup of hot chocolate when you get back to the ski lodge. your question means nothing to me. i couldn't enjoy duo mobile even if i tried

This just seems like the wrong end of the telescope to me. Review should be into barriers to employment, not diagnosis. I really *do* have a fine motor condition, but in the 21st century this poses absolutely no barrier to me working in 90 per cent of jobs in the UK.

I swear Wes Streeting has "SUCKER" tattooed on his forehead in UV or something. Somehow every scammer going has him cold.

I see a business selling a product intended to intentionally screw over its users in favour of its customers got a 7-figure investment.

I wonder if this is a case of people confusing inflation (official carefully designed and collated metric intended to give a good indication of the behaviour of prices overall) and inflation (subjective increase in the prices an individual sees which will not always correlate closely)

Watched BBC 6 o clock news. Just a completely unserious broadcast. Chris Mason, acting like a children's entertainer, giving a prolonged impenetrable editorial. Not a whiff of informative content about the Budget or what it means for the country. Just playschool blah blah bollocks.

Chris Mason - doing a job he doesn't understand both boringly and badly. The current BBC in a single lacklustre personality.

The fact that AI will pretty much never tell you that you are an idiot is both a fatal flaw and probably a reason for it being popular with a great many people.

If we assume that the AI promises are correct, we should be able to see it in the form of a significant unexpected uplift in company results outside the AI sector from now on. Microsoft (early and heavy adopter) should be showing greater profits, more innovation and better quality products already.

"The allegations that I used to use hammers to murder rabbits are only being made because people don't like my policy of killing rabbits with hammers."

Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷

And honestly I don't give a fuck if it's popular or not. It's going to make a lot of kids' lives better. That's the point of government. Not an opinion poll.

A film within a film about a remake of a fictional film within a film.

I see the Government plan to tackle the cost of living by reducing the cost of fixing a trial

Because people *still* don’t understand that overseas students subsidise home students. This is punishing everyone involved.

Zero is almost exactly the right amount of gratitude for Trump's 'efforts' to find an equitable peace agreement to settle the Russian invasion of Ukraine

There are three sorts of SW engineering I think, none is superior or requires more cleverness (just different skills) to the others but they require slightly different ways of thinking about things. 1/

Paraphrasing an old programming joke: Any political problem can be simplified by ignoring one caveat and ignoring one trade off until you have a simple, popular policy that doesn't work.

1/ What a Russian breaking of the ceasefire will look like, step by step. There are far better experts on this, but I was an Australian diplomat in Ukraine in 2014 so I've seen this play out up close. So join me, brothers and sisters, as we count down to a fullscale re-invasion.

Isn't a 0.2% quarterly rise, when compared to a 3.6% annual inflation rate in practice an unexpected *fall* in real terms? It's not good, but I don't think it's a rise greater than a reasonable person might have expected?

We will struggle to explain to future generations how something so transparent and stupid was able to take place youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/arent-you-...

One of the stories about the 7/7 bombers that I recall, possibly incorrectly, was that they were not that radical until they spent lots of time in a room talking to each other and feedback-looped themselves into being terrorists Which is far too similar to the way people interact with AI Chatbots

Ok but this is totally something Charlotte Church would do

If, like me, this utter betrayal by Labour is making your blood boil, can I ask you let them know your feelings here www.gov.uk/government/c...

Trump is conspiring with Putin to sell out Ukraine – and the security of the whole of Europe along with it. The Prime Minister must convene the Coalition of the Willing to stop this betrayal in its tracks.

That American politics went off the rails after Barack Obama and British ethnonationalism has reared its head after Rishi Sunak is the real tell about how committed some people are to integration and post racial politics.

Surely there can only be one median voter?

If you're cheering Trump on then you have no right to call yourself a patriot. You absolute moron.

Whatever they end up with, double it and you have a working estimate of when I might consider labour worthy of governing again.

It's telling that Farage is not particular about which national leaders he's willing to collude with to damage the UK.

A brief thread on Trump renewing his threat to sue the BBC. (Note I am not an American lawyer, this is perspective of an English legal commentator.) >

Everything is marketing and marketing is going to destroy the world

Theory: Older people have trouble with technology not because it's complex or alien but because it is more often than not shit and they haven't been interested enough in it to learn the various strategies and techniques people use to get around the shitness.

Seems unfortunate. Who could have predicted this?

Glad that someone has finally taken responsibility for the appalling assault on democracy that was the Jan. 6 insurrection. Slightly confused that it's the Director-General of the BBC, but what do I know?

Seems very Tim Davie to resign in disgrace over something the BBC got right.

I don't think it's healthy or accurate to think of AI or any algorithm as 'deciding' or 'choosing' or otherwise having agency. They follow a chain of inevitable logic according to decisions made (often unwittingly) at the time they were designed or their training material was selected.