As I think @beijingpalmer.bsky.social first said, the great thing about Gavin Newsom doing those parody posts was that it really focused your attention on how crazy it was when anybody else was doing the exact same thing.

The Ryder Cup has once more proved that golf is God's own game, invented by Him for the specific purpose of getting people out into the open who needed to be struck by lightning.

as a christian, one thing i love about trump is that he explicitly rejects the teachings of jesus

An entire political press just pretending that the president didn’t post a deepfake of *himself* announcing a total overhaul of healthcare based on science fiction then delete it twelve hours later cause that would be… difficult? Weird? Confusing? Disruptive? They simply won’t report him as he is.

@hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social You are praising a conman in your own party while simultaneously saying you will fight the conman in The White House. The former is why no one believes you on the later.

Didn't ask, says local dad

Have they mistaken ILR for the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme? Will parkrun be lumbered with validating ILR people the way it is with D of E? (Personally I think compelling teens to volunteer if they don't want too is bullshit too)

Cornwall looking pretty nice as the season comes to an end

Looks like it’s time for another Analysis™ of the intrinsically layered, self-referential character of meaning and the complex hermeneutics surrounding Presidential statements in an era of viral social media and AI. Or to just simply pretend brain-poisoned stuff like this isn’t constantly happening.

The battle between "sneaking regarder" and "hurler on the ditch" as terms of art for describing American political commentary.

This is the laziest bullshit imaginable. It is quite simply less accurate about the UK than any other European or Anglosphere western democracy. A cursory look at education, income and national identity data makes this simplistic nonsense untenable

Also, Reform voters are a) the most opposed to ID cards b) the group who benefit the least from having them!

this most "this could have been an email" thing i've ever heard

The speech was quieter on racism than the Sun article. There is an attack on prejudice in abstract and coded rather than concrete terms. I didn't hear the word racism used, rather than "the industrialisation of grievance".

elon musk: the only reason any westerner might have for living in thailand is pedophile sex tourism also elon musk: there might be any number of reasons for visiting little saint james island that have nothing to do with anything unsavory, from the pristine beaches to the intellectual fellowship

Looking for a big policy thread to just reply to with "the existence of Doritos implies the probable existence of Doros" just to make people think how the hell did the topic drift that far.

I have to say, I don't think this is true

Give it a month and Keir Starmer will tell someone interviewing him that he hadn't read this morning's speech before delivering it.

Right-bloc 44 plays Left-bloc 47 in this one, so it's an absolutely ghastly FPTP distortion. I disagree that MRPs this far out are useless btw - they don't give us predictions, but they can be interpreted, in this case pointing out that we're well past the tipping point for REF seat efficiency

magnificent: it turns out there is no productivity crisis, it's just that the tech sector is wildly unproductive and is dragging everything else down with it.

Stafford Beer had some very "silicon valley" views on 10x programmers and the like backofmind.substack.com/p/the-greate...

my former schoolfriend is now in the category "not committed treason, but not quite in the same way in which you or I have not committed treason" www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Maybe...try making some EVs people want to buy?

Right, this is actually the use case for government ID - should empower citizens issue a token that says absolutely nothing, cannot be used to steal your data, but does say to an estate agent 'yes this person can rent this home, yes this person has the right to work'.

The absolutely chaotic energy of Devon refugee protests continues, as it turns out that the local protesters ended up feeling sorry for the refugees and moving the flags somewhere else so as not to bother them eastdevonnews.co.uk/2025/09/09/a...

Repeatedly saying "brits" here is the tell that would enable James Bond to spot that Starmer is actually a Russian spy, no Englishman talks like this

I see the progressive fightback has started.

We have one of the highest minimum wages in the OECD! I am just begging for a government that actually engages with the economy and the public policy choices we *actually have*!

Goodwin was radicalised, I have it on multiple good authority, by the fact he was such a terrible hang that nobody in the circles he moved in could bear to be around him, which he perceived as elite snobbery. Terrible patter in a public figure should not be ignored, it always leads somewhere dark

CHOTINER: how spicy is the spicy tofu? SANDWICH GUY: CHOTINER: look I don't do it all the time SANDWICH GUY: CHOTINER: that would be like expecting Sammy Davis Jr to tapdance everywhere, I just want a sandwich SANDWICH GUY: I'm saying fucking nothing until my lawyer gets here.

What are the main ways in which a Digital ID would have a different impact in accessing work compared to existing right to work checks by employers? x.com/Peston/statu...

The Treasury chucks 50p in the direction of the Finchley Road, stares expectantly for 10 seconds, then shrugs its shoulders and walks away saying "we can't just keep throwing money at the problem".

sitting around engraving something into a bullet is just total loser behaviour, IMO. presumably it's an attempt to get around media organisations' decision to pay less attention to shooter manifestos, but really

not too keen on the way that "Liz Truss" has taken over from "there's no money left" as the one thing that generalist journos remember about the bond market.

Christ imagine having to talk to these people as part of your job and always be going hahaha Toby, you have the most excellent patter, very banterific, you're kind of like that guy from in the thick of it

In 1992, Scott Bessent was one of the team at Soros Fund Management which speculated against sterling's membership of the ERM. What a long strange trip it's been.

a testable subsidiary prediction would be that the tech and VC industries have also shown themselves to be massive cowards, so you'd expect anyone with any bits of leverage over them to come knocking soon to see if there's a general fund of Danegeld.

So that's a delay to Northern rail plans, Midland Mainline electrification pulled, no support for Bakerloo in London or even smaller stuff like Peckham. Even if they get close to 1.5m homes, it'll be car based sprawl at this rate.

This government has been falling over itself to give off the vibe of "we will capitulate, my god we will, we don't even know what a confrontation is", so it's not surprising that seasoned international business people recognize this and decide to have a go at threatening us to see what shakes out.

As I said a couple of months ago, things which increase the productivity of the solution factory often also increase the productivity of the problem factory.

RIP Danny Thompson. Here's a playlist featuring just some of the hundreds of songs that were graced by his bass playing. Includes Nick Drake, Pentangle, Donovan, John Martyn, Sandy Denny, Marc Bolan, David Sylvian, Kate Bush, Talk Talk, Lilac Time, Julian Cope etc ▶️ open.spotify.com/playlist/4XS...

A broader framework to put this in is a kind of de-financialization of the economy - a substantial fraction of wealth owners swapping more liquid, money-like forms of wealth for forms that give more direct control over production. bsky.app/profile/maxr...

This post contains possibly the most evil invention I have ever come up with

at the 'stack, I start asking uncomfortable questions about management and AI, and implore readers with more LinkedIn clout than me to bother their friends... backofmind.substack.com/p/middle-man...

Surprise so many people are going "thank god we're so back" when this poll actually shows RefCon at 48 and LabLDGr at 46. We're definitely not out of the "FPTP Random Number Generator" woods here

was out for beers the other day and was trying to describe doing a vendor inventory and interlocutor said "oh if i wanted to do that i'd just point chatgpt at my work email and tell it to pull all the invoices"

It's up! I try to liven up one of the most tedious subjects imaginable by using it as a metaphor to talk about risk management regulation www.ft.com/content/ce26...

And this is the original reporting from @jacobsilverman.com www.jacobsilverman.com/p/revealed-t...