Kamala Harris absolutely ran on the issues most important to voters. The problem is she was in an administration that voters mostly blamed for those same issues. There wasn’t really a way around that.

One reason for this is that Labour's vote was absurdly stable in raw terms (with a steadily declining trend). So who won an election was mainly a function of how the Conservatives were doing.

I just asked Claude to turn one of my lectures into the script for an Adam Curtis documentary and I am not sorry

I increasingly think we messed up letting firms use the acronym 'AI' and thus avoiding having to use the word 'artificial' repeatedly

It's not "matches". They did it on their second try with an actual science payload to orbit and beyond. Blue Origin/New Glenn missions to Mars: 1 SpaceX/Starship missions to Mars: 0 Suck it Elon.

Cravendale tastes so good…

You don't even wanna know what Dan's ancestral voices tell him

A friend of mine once messed up his shoulder in a permanent visible way cycling, and when I asked if it could be fixed he said no it was really cool because Mark Cavendish has the exact same thing. Dudes rock I guess.

And the story behind that story is majority size isn’t a stable indicator of power in the U.K. any more. It’s no longer a PM or party specific issue at this point. It’s structural.

A genuinely cheering thing here: there's a positive correlation between trust and consumption in the main cluster.

The Today Programme.

If you think a Nordic welfare state is antithetical to the populist radical right you might want to ask who wins ~20% of the vote in all these countries, is in the governing coalition in two, and is the largest opposition party in a third.

Yep. This even has its own acronym - MUU (mixed, unclear, or unstable). It constitutes the majority of Prevent referrals as of the 2024 Independent Review.

FUNDED PhDs! We are advertising for three ESRC-funded PhD scholarships! Any specialism permitted, depending on departmental supervision available. Spread the word! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPH631/e...

One of two new vacancies at the Quill Project. www.pmb.ox.ac.uk/vacancy/writ...

Tolkien would have despised Musk for several independent reasons

One more push: please help spread the word about my crowdfunding effort to support Arabic-language access to ancient Gazan literature & financial support for a Gazan translator!

When the AKP was wrecking various parts Turkey in the simultaneous pursuit of aesthetically terrible projects and democratic backsliding I thought it was a coincidence. Not so sure now.

Good peice. But for some reason just thought of this.

Sad. He usually expects more respect from junior colleagues

For reasons too complicated and embarrassing to explain I saw Expend4balls in the cinema. There were four people there, including me and my partner. One walked out and the other seemed to only still be there because he was eating an entire bag of oranges and wasn’t done yet.

These guys should get together www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbea...

Anyone remember the bit where Gondor had a mad leader who did such a terrible job defending against an expansionist power to the east that it took an unlikely multi-ethnic coalition to step in and do it for him?

The Republican Party's greatest media triumph in the 2020s has been defining the Dems through the lens of fringe left-wing social media accounts and not anything the mainstream party says or does.

Democrats mostly campaign on economics. In addition to @rachelporter.bsky.social's evidence, this is true for the national party's platforms and legislative priorities, and what Dem MCs tweet about, regardless of their district or if they are a Progressive! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

To paraphrase Talleyrand, these people have learned nothing and forgotten nothing about what failed in the Corbyn project the first time.

Call for papers for a workshop on Economic Aspects of the Constitution: www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_...

Really excelled myself with uplifting titles this year 🤦‍♂️

Sure, but you only have to submit once a year for the next century and it becomes a near certainty

The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and insane lament

Imagining this like a form of NI consociationalism where if the First Minister is going to heaven the Deputy First Minister must be going to hell. You can't form a government without both.

An interesting secondary effect of this is the Commons moved to the Lords, who moved to the Royal Robing Room. But the Law Lords, who previously used the HoL chamber, began sitting in a committee room instead. They liked it so much they more or less stayed put until the Supreme Court opened in 2009.

The AWS outage today is a good reminder that there is no "cloud", there's just somebody else's computer.

A weird tick of Trump's is he consistently talks about nations as if they can go insolvent and be liquidated in the next recession

One of those sentences which gets progressively worse with each clause

Guys I think this might be AI. The F/A-18 doesn’t have anything like this payload capacity

Did not know that former InfoWars employees have found a home at TPUSA but guess the talent pool is smaller than it seems

One way of interpreting this is just that the London bashing got worn out and they’re onto a new city. Next stop Manchester

Shades of the Jon Stewart “March for Sanity” way back. Guess we lost that fight

Every political scientist on a daily basis:

Here's a cool use of AI tools. I wanted a visualisation for a lecture of educational backgrounds of US Supreme Court Justices. Wikipedia has a good list page but no graphs. Using just the page URL @anthropic.com Claude generated an interactive graph I took these from.

Really interesting analysis. The Government may not have a specific case to answer here but this is still a pretty embarrassing failure of the national security system.

British.

Important to note that the Chancellor does not run the university. Despite names the Vice Chancellor is the executive. Hague doesn’t have the power or the influence to do anything like this and statements like this are just red meat for the anti-woke press.

#OnThisDay in 1920, the first women received their Oxford degrees 🎓 📷 | St Anne's College Oxford