Pete Hegseth: "We need our warriors to embrace the Spartan mindset" U.S. Military: *suffers crushing defeat to the Persians*

Oh ok. Let’s abolish the department that is at the present doing the most massive reorganisation of funding streams in 20 years that have left Uk scientists in limbo for the past 12 months. What could possibly go wrong.

The red flag here is to continue treating AI as simply an opportunity when so many people see it as a threat to impersonalise life even more. Now such are the trade offs, but if unrecognised expect a reaction.

I've changed my mind, we need to bring back Starmer - 2 years minimum of this is going to be too annoying

Why not just replace the minister with a ChatGPT terminal. Or maybe something shiny from the Palantir suite. (For the avoidance of doubt, please don't do this.)

Don't continue to pretend away the trade offs, ten plus years of that has gone us into this situation of unstable governments.

"don't cite what you haven't read" remains the basic entry level academic responsibility; & if your discpline "doesn't have that as a norm" then sorry, your discipline needs reforming for this new world. Citations are structural parts of trust and knowledge building, not trinkets or optional extras

Any incoming minister for AI should be tasked with replacing a load-bearing spreadsheet from a critical service, to give them the insights into why no one has done it yet. The ministerial equivalent of breaking a horse.

4-0 is a decent score, but you don't really know until both sides have had a chance to bat

Abingdon, outpost of Russian royalism

When I redownloaded The Peripheral by William Gibson on Audible, the version mysteriously changed. Lowbeer is now Scottish

Goodwin should be clever enough to know this would be attempting to pervert the course of justice?

Very German political scandal, this. It could only be more German if it turned out that the baby was plagiarised. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'm just annoyed that we *already* had a political philosophy called Manchesterism. Do Cobden and Bright mean nothing to you people? There's a reason it was The Free Trade Hall.

I am not sure that we appreciate how much hostility there is from the far right to the learning and speaking of languages. 1/2 www.thetimes.com/article/9a33...

I dunno maybe like "the Odiessey" and it is Odie all stabbing cyclops garfield in the eye. Odie all tied to the mast of his ship so he can hear the song of the sexy nermal sirens. Odie all taunting the gods and punished his hubris. Jon get turned into a pig.

Oh we are all monumentally fucked

What time does the rioting start? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

By revealed political preference there's two things we hate in this country: economic growth and foreigners. So, you know, this would make sense.

Yeah, I do think the fact that the Tory party still sent a speaker to share a stage with a spokesperson for sex traffickers, a convicted felon and multiple Holocaust deniers should probably cause some soul searching amongst what's left of the centre right.

What I hope everyone reading this story actually takes away from it is that a household with two people each earning £38k are in the richest 20 per cent of the population.

So much of this is literally meaningless. What do you mean, 'post-globalisation'. Discuss with reference to, say, food prices.

And whatever long term benefits that is derivable from it, I am not hugely sure that is worth balancing against the soft climate change denial from the right that you are laundering by doing it

They can get themselves in real trouble if they give the impression of not having much of a clue…a few daft ideas…

I enjoyed the Odyssey but they should have set it in the original Dublin

Andy Burnham is going directly against the 2024 Labour manifesto by doing this (as the BBC correctly and prominently notes). That opens a door that his team have tried hard to keep shut. If he can go against the manifesto for *this*, he will hear, why not for other issues?

So, people like me (old softish Left) had our values dismissed because McSweeney thought we would put up with it indefinitely - where else were we going to go? And Starmer allowed it all, he used none of the power of his office to reign McSweeney/Mahmood in. It is *completely* on him.

We’re seeing a wave of these “Why are people returning to a technology that works well and doesn’t constantly get more expensive, less convenient, and more dysfunctional?” articles and I guess that’s good

'We're gonna keep consuming gas but will ban it's domestic production' isn't really very coherent is it

Think the more likely “dreadful deal for our cohort in retirement” is “the state pension is decent, but when we slip and fall on a cracked pavement it takes an hour for the ambulance to show and two years for the hip replacement”.

I expect 99% of those policy platforms would very quickly turn-out every bit as half-cooked and stupid as anyone else’s the moment they were exposed to a) the scrutiny of millions of stakeholders and b) the laws of physics

So excited* for the 6 month retrospectives around Christmas as they 1) quite reasonably blame the Starmer government for the situation 2) look anywhere but themselves for their own lack of work and thinking *other, less euphemistic words available

Ironically he talks like the Starmer last-ditchers: as if the government has made a bunch of hard policy choices that will make for an easier run-in to 2027-9, as opposed to the stations of the cross that they have actually constructed for themselves.

Why Britain’s privatisation experiment is so extraordinary by international standards. www.arguably.uk/p/can-andy-b...

It's absolutely due to the PM, who chose neither to use his government's powers as a regulator or legislator, or to exercise moral leadership to fight the forces in politics driving this stuff.

'The best PM we've had in a decade plus' - inflation is up, racism is up, we've nationalised the railways without a plan and the government's spending plans are to go into the next election cutting spending at Cameron era rates and raising taxes at Sunak era ones. What a great record!!

Did you know your dealer can offer advice on common conditions like coughs and colds, and even support your mental health, reducing the burden on the NHS?

Out taking Polaroids in my VHS hat.

The things men will do to avoid going to therapy.

Is anyone else perpetually annoyed that noone isn't a word?

Argh! 29 minutes late! Missed out on half hour Delay Repay money by 1 minute! The worst amount of lateness!

The best we in the UK can do is: Since William Ewart Gladstone stepped down as PM in 1894, every single Prime Minister has been alive at the same time as Harold Macmillan.

Low T this, male loneliness epidemic that. As a mother, I’m still waiting for the hard-hitting exposé of the real threat facing today’s young men. But nobody wants to talk about the house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun, even though it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy.

Woke mind virus in the second stage engine?

My pedantic point for all the commentators out there is - much as I am extremely wary of The Burnham Agenda* - saying “we made a number of wrong choices in the 1980s” is not “back to the 70s”, it’s saying when offered choices on how to transition out of the 70s, we picked the incorrect ones.

Ketamine side effects?

Avoiding discourse by putting the jam on top of the cream on top of the jam and now everybody's mad with me?

Did you not read the bottle label "sauce for geese - not to be used on ganders"?

Honestly quite surprised I had to find this myself and hadn't been sent it by at least 4 of you.

Reminded by another thread, does anyone remember an anecdote by someone on The Bad Place of someone meeting an old gay guy who said he was 3 shags away from a Russian hussar who fought Napoleon's army in 1812?