Yeah. You gotta put it out to tender so the usual suspects can get their rents.

Onshore wind = no brainer, cover every hill and dale. Offshore wind = ngngh maybe not?

A great day for cheap power enthusiasts as 5GW of solar comes in at £65/MWh and 1.3GW of onshore wind comes in at £72.24/MWh. Both prices are in £2024 and are below the wholesale price, meaning that these projects will cut costs. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/698a0d...

I see Genius Political Strategist Dominic Cummings has been researching voter attitudes, and concluded there's a massive opportunity to win votes by stoking voters fears about migration.

Anas Sarwar's failed coup has stabilised Keir Starmer's position, but for his leadership to actualy recover, here are the first things he'll need to do:

Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs xkcd.com/3204/

I think in quite fundamental way the career politician/journalist/think tank nexus doesn’t understand what are quite core everyday experiences of some classes of people. We talk about this all the time wrt working class people but it’s also now true of the professional classes.

Kind of wish Stephen Baxter would just bite the bullet and release some light commentary around his spreadsheets instead of trying to write “characters” or “stories”.

One thing I'm very aware of when coding with Claude is when the code gets to the point of being a *total* black box. That's when you need to poke around inside (or even just ask Claude to explain what's going on and check the most important bits).

xorvoid: SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes xorvoid.com/sectorc.html

What is Dominic Cummings up to? observer.co.uk/news/politic...

why we stop making computers look fresh

Woah! That Bluesky map is really accurate.

Coventry's light rail technology a 'game-changer' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I think one of the more upsetting aspects of modern politics is that there's no sense of something positive and worthwhile pushing through the mess. I kind of get why "the voters" are unhappy.

Imagine you are ace politician "Steer Kalmer" and you want to do a thing. Imagine your closest adviser has had to resign because he told you to appoint a famously corrupt weirdo as ambassador to a major country.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always operated on the assumption that all correspondence I write on a computer might become public at some point. The weird think about Mandelson is how much he seems to assume that his emails *wouldn’t* be public.

Can There Be A Techno-Progressive Left?

Boring opinion: if people know the name of the Downing Street Chief of Staff, the CoS is not doing a good job.

Seeing a lot of people saying "oh actually economic growth is impossible for governments to do, so (implicitly) it was foolish of Labour to base its strategy on economic growth happening".

“I wish the UK would become the most socially progressive country in the world.” Monkey’s paw curls

The guy photographed numerous times hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, to zero ramifications, has some thoughts that he gets printed verbatim. Very cool political journalism we have. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

*Pointing to my worst behavior in public* I did that as labor to uphold society, Marx says you have to be nice to me

Prime *Minister* Ed Miliband. *Prime* Minister Ed Miliband. Prime Minister *Ed* Miliband. Prime Minister Ed *Miliband*.

My Instagram ads are getting weirder

So the AngloFuturist Right wants to “reverse Blair’s constitutional vandalism”. I suppose you have to give them credit for working out our problems are constitutional (Blair obviously didn’t go far enough).

Americans on Bluesky derive the concept of "holiday" from first principles

It's interesting to me that the praxis of the political strategist class is very different from the praxis of the pollster and political scientist class (the latter two groups aren't always right, of course, but a lot of political strategy at the moment seems to be seriously wrongheaded).

Someone pointed out that influencers use serotonin/dopamine/cortisol/oxytocin like they’re the four humors and now I can’t stop seeing it

Proper English cuisine.

Kind of feel like it should be mentioned that Wes Streeting had a majority of 528

Delighted to have a Blood and Treasure extract in Foreign Policy today. foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/06/b...

Wow I need to re-watch that film.

VIETNAM/VNR733.GIF

I miss it so much.

Real talk: but the Peter Mandelson stuff has made me all the more paranoid about trusting random people. It seems like his (PM's) schtick was just... schmoozing people who might be able to help him somehow? Just bafflingly poor judgement.

This little detail about Starmer has always struck me as odd. The fact he doesn’t fundamentally understand that being PM is commanding the support of the House of Commons, which is made up of MPs.

The McSweeney people* have always had this utterly mad blindspot around Ange, they all thought that her having to resign was somehow a good thing for them when it *very obviously* was going to make their position worse.

#prediction #timestamp

One reason the government should spend lots of money on projects is it normalises spending lots of money. It should of course be paid for by a mix of borrowing (if appropriate) and increased taxes.

Can’t believe we haven’t chosen to make the quantity of MPs in the House of Commons the weed number bsky.app/profile/iron...

‘If I think about what this means, I want to cry’: what happens when a city loses its university? | England | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/environment/...

maybe this is a bit galaxy brain, but they should merge IT and NICs into a single new tax called "new national insurance", thereby saying they abolished income tax

We can improve the incentives by also charging NI on pension income. We could call it….an income tax.

The thing about this that absolutely kills me is that the House of Commons is too small to fit all the MPs in. It only seats 420 or so. So we are paying £15bn (before inevitable overruns make it 40) for a building that is fundamentally unfit for purpose. We literally cannot have all MPs in chamber.

It’s interesting to track the drift of my political outlook from my attitude to the teevee show The West Wing: 1) Strongly pro (clueless teenager) 2) Strongly anti (late twenties) 3) Actually this is Quite Good (early thirties)

So why is a Japanese fusion restaurant playing the 1987 Italo-disco hit Boys (Summertime Love) so loudly it can be heard from the other side of the street

“England” is clearly an artificial construct of the perfidious Wessexers, as any proud Mercian will affirm.

i actually prefer it when the mods actively hate the user base and vice versa, that’s how every great message board worked for years and i think we should give it a whirl