Latest monthly visa application figures are out. Skilled workers? Still dropping. Health & care workers? Still dropping. Slow clap.

Home Office Ministers state publicly, on the record, that they are deliberately making life worse for older people and people with disabilities who depend on care services, but it's worth it because it reduces net migration.

Starmer urges EU to curb ECHR to halt rise of far right. Because as we know, the way you beat the far right is to accede to all their demands and adopt racism as your central principle.

New Home Office impact assessment finds that cutting skilled and social care visas will cost the UK up to £10 billion with a central estimate of -£5.4 billion. It would be good if this got even a fraction of the coverage devoted to the endless debate about boats, flags and Turkish barber shops

So the Daily Mail owner's wife has just given £50,000 to Nigel Farage's Reform UK

Steering telling the medical profession they're diagnosing all wrong, presumably based on his background in (checks notes) studying history. Uh huh. Sigh.

🧪#R code-sharing experiment🧪: this plot shows sector economic output as blocks: jobs * output-per-job (West Yorkshire ITL3s). It’s made in a self-contained R file that you can run yourself, changing geographies, times etc. Online slides explain how here: danolner.github.io/RegionalEcon... 1/3

Party McPartface?

I understand what the authors are trying to convey, but I think the landscape is much more nuanced (albeit no less problematic) than the one portrayed here. The key issue is that the R&I system systematically favours some forms of engagement and impact over others, with good work often 'crowded out'

An X user asks Elon Musk why they’re seeing tweets from left-wing lawmakers. Musk: “Because we are failing very badly with the recommendations algorithm. Doing my best to address this.”

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-...

Still very fond of this paragraph. Seven years old now, good lord. Via www.danolner.net/2018/09/hone...

NEW: @propublica.org investigated the Chicago apartment raid where kids were zip-tied and citizens detained for hours. They find: - NONE of the arrested were criminally charged - NO evidence the building was "filled with TdA terrorists." - ZERO legitimate reason for DHS to rappel from a Blackhawk.

And then when it inevitably collapses these great libertarian titans of industry will go cap in hand to the state to save them.

Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments: One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

Self-hosting is a fun way to cut big tech platforms out of your life, but if the cops come knocking you need to know how to defend the privacy of you and your users. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Gosh, all the billionaires really are dreadful aren't they?

The timing on this is likely because air traffic controllers are going to get an email notification about their next paycheck Thursday which will read $0. That will push more to call out sick as they scramble to find side jobs so they can pay the bills.

Angola to sign exclusive oil exploration agreement with Shell, government says reut.rs/4qzRBnx

Really important piece

Took a look at the entry they have for me in Elon's Grokipedia. There are some surprisingly deep details, dredged up from interviews I'd long ago forgotten about, and then there are some incredibly big points that are completely wrong. Let's roll the tape.

My statement on the reported rise in racist incidents targeting nurses across the UK follows recent analysis from @rcn.org.uk which found that reports of racism at work from nurses have increased by 55% over the past three years:

Bertrand Russell wasn't impressed with him: youtu.be/6TK9c-caEcw?...

Vol. 1 of our graphic novel SWEENEY'S PROGRESS is finished. An ecological fable set in C7th Ireland, from one of the great medieval poems. Script by me, art by @zaraslattery.bsky.social. To read the book online & help with the making of Volume 2, visit our Patreon: www.patreon.com/c/sweeneyspr...

Today I am having severe "having to try and understand some idiot's code and that idiot is past me, what a total arse". There are comments that I *thought* would make sense, but I don't think past me really cares about present me.

"The result would be removals on an epic scale. The comparison with Idi Amin's expulsion of Ugandan Asians is not one many Tory MPs welcome. Some appear unaware their own policy was that monstrous, until Lam spelled it out in a newspaper interview" - Guardian www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Conservative immigration proposals cannot be allowed to stand without a profound and widespread statement of moral condemnation inews.co.uk/opinion/tori...

Draft Tory legislation on removing indefinite leave to remain is insane. Would chuck out those not earning over £38K - including many pensioners! + social protections seems to include child benefit, so load of people with (British!) kids! They'd remove my sis & mum who've been here 50 years.

Includes a post by me about prototyping better open econ tools by testing/learning. "Do data work openly where we can. It will support collaboration and learning / will help build a shared sense of ground truth / will avoid wheel reinvention." Interested? Lemme know. y-pern.org.uk/blog/prototy...

The draft legislation is crackers. It would fail immediately if we stayed in the ECHR but it disappears the human rights act. if passed after that it would involve mandatory loss of ILR for up to 400,000 people + refusal of 2-3 million others, though without no credible means to identify or remove

1985: TV's first A.I. presenter, Max Headroom, debuted on Channel 4 www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

I was looking at some Scottish cause of death data yesterday and the extent to which transport accident deaths in young men have all but disappeared is pretty remarkable. Nice to find a good news story in this data for a change.

Caerphilly Senedd By-Election Voting Intention: RFM: 42% (+40) PLC: 38% (+10) LAB: 12% (-34) CON: 4% (-14) GRN: 3% (+3) LDM: 1% (-1) Via @survation.bsky.social, 7-14 Oct. Changes w/ 2021.

One of the things I love about London is how inconquerable it is. There's just too much of it to ever believe you'll discover it all. I first stumbled on this mosaic a few months ago, about a minute's walk from the flat I've lived in for 8 years.

"How did he know the people he saw were badly integrated? Did they not speak English? Did they hate Eastenders, or the local football team, or the pub, or Sunday lunch? God knows. Certainly he doesn’t. All he can see is that they’re not white."

Between 2019 and 2024 in real terms EU exports grew by 11%. UK exports also grew. By 0.89%. That's the total. Goods exports were lower in real terms in 2024 than in 2014.

👀 Nicely done.

Over 40% of corn grown in Indiana is used to make ethanol that cars burn. One acre of corn yields about 16,500 vehicle-miles per year of ethanol, which sounds high until you realize that one acre of solar yields about 2,700,000 vehicle-miles per year: 16,000% more driving for a given plot of land.

Asking people to pay for goods would kill the shoplifting industry ...

I was lucky to be there at the best moment for it, when it was full of potential. I dunno how someone starting a career now would find their audience, particularly on the liberal left.

Big presence on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 too.

How authoritarianism creeps in And how it can be uprooted Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Ivan Ehlers in the Los Angeles Times Sept 7 2025 www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

The always brilliant Anjana Ahuja calls out the Royal Society for failing to stand up to Elon Musk. www.ft.com/content/d4eb...

See this FT article also - US reverses only slightly denting direction of travel (~5% dip in renewables deployment by 2030, not just US-caused; a sizeable chunk but nothing that'll stop where it's going.) www.ft.com/content/2fa6... (cough cough openversion cough archive.ph/hvKK8)

Hahahahaaaargh.

It breaks my mind that two British political parties have seen scenes like this and decided to try and replicate it in Britain. Thuggary, lawlessness, state brutality. Farage and Badenoch decided they liked the look of it.