Someone compiled the most recent data about the Skilled Visa roles. It's indeed heathcare, care and consultancy. www.reddit.com/r/SkilledWor...

Good thread, this is the key point. Far too many people in British politics seem to not understand that ultimately the thing causing the energy price shock is...the world doesn't have as much energy as it did before Trump invaded Iran, something with real and deadly consequences.

Wanted to buy one as a gift and found out that a) Apple refurbished M2 16 Gb Air costs the same; b) I have a good discount on a Lunar Lake touchscreen 16 Gb Dell, that also now costs £600 Annoyingly puzzled now! Neo is a better *gift*, but Air is a better machine and a Dell will be more familiar.

Not sure what it means if it even does, but both Iran and the US very actively use AI generated images in their war messaging.

the crazy part of this is that like 30% of federal research spending was cancer research. It's hard to exaggerate how much money the US government used to spend on cancer research.

I keep reposting it, but once again - what post-Brexit funding "rebalance" achieved here was a young Nobel prize winner physicist leaving the country with his whole lab. It is important he was only in his early 40s at the time. The lab had decades of forging new physicists still ahead of it!

Good piece. I think seeing “progressive” voters as “undecided” is a bit of a misread: every non-Reform voter I spoke to in Gorton & Denton was “unsure” who they were going to vote for but they had in a very real sense “decided” who they were voting for: the non-Reform party they judged most viable.

No one would be discussing it if this idea was peddled by e.g. oil or supermarket billionaires. But "tech" as in industry has that image that it's a smart person's domain ("maths adjacent!"), so people believe a top person in "tech" must be very smart and therefore their ideas are worthy.

The prevalence of nominally reasonable organisations discussing the increasingly wild, radicalised claims of the right as if they were real cannot be good for democracy.

And again, events in the Caribbean are not "a far away place of which we know little" for Europeans when over 3 million people in the Western Hemisphere are citizens of either full EU or overseas territories that are under the control of the UK and EU states.

Haha, their example is... Walmart? Truly "imagine a burger".

World leader goes to the UN. Says ‘I keep getting hit by missiles, I need a ceasefire’ UN says ‘go to Doha or Muscat. That’s where all the best Middle Eastern ceasefires get negotiated” World Leader looks downcast - “but Secretary General - …”

I wonder if the Brexit referendum is always going to be something that only happened recently to me. It's been 10 years, and more important and recent events overshadowed it - COVID and the Russian invasion, for example. But they all feel appropriately distant while the referendum somehow isn't.

On some non-trivial metrics this makes him the best UK PM since Harold Wilson

Guy literally bailed on Ukraine. Nearly all Ukraine aid is now paid for by the European countries. But Ukraine is why we should help him out of the trouble he and Bibi got themselves into? Yeah, no.

This unlocked the memory of how I was waiting for my order in a chip shop and a middle aged man came in only to announce loudly that "this fish comes from Scottish waters" before leaving just as promptly.

Interesting post on the upcoming elections in Armenia explaining how proportional representation isn't an easy cheat code against wasted votes or even the leading party winning a majority with a smaller share of votes: manougian.substack.com/p/the-first-...

Anyway, on a happier note, the actual content of what the government is doing on energy is much better than the rhetoric. The only good thing about Trump's war is that it is at a time when the government can hopefully design a better energy support package than the Truss madness, too:

What if it isn't just billionaires who love to privatise the profits and socialise the losses, but the 'ordinary hardworking people' and 'families' also enjoy it very much?

nobody wants to hear it but price signals are useful. it's bad that Donald Trump declared war on iran, but it's real and has consequences. oil prices go up, so we can afford less of it and have to cut back. trying to prevent this just means spreading the pain elsewhere with less information.

nobody is allowed to pay market price for anything, and you cannot explain markets to voters. refusal to explain this and pretend it is about greed means voters will blame the govt in 2 weeks when your fake policies don't change things.

I remain very annoyed at the "actually everything is a war crime and every US government official is a war criminal" crowd because now that we have the actual pro-war crimes administration it's very hard to get people to understand that this is actually quite a bit different

Time makes mugs of us all

just a quick Bluesky search for "temple Israel Zionist" and lemme tell you, this is the much better microblogging site from this perspective

It’s hard to blame woke DEI when the military is losing a war because of the straits.

Right now London Heathrow’s last sub freezing temperature was on morning of January 14th, never in the nearly 80-year record has the last air frost of season occurred in January. (1/2)

There was a lot of discourse about how borrowing from the Danish home policy doesn't have any electoral benefits even in Denmark itself, but the SocDem party still being 10 points ahead of the closest competitor (which is the Green party) doesn't sound too bad in this day and age.

It's the best review I've read in ages and *felt something* reading it, but I also can't help thinking that this is also just nostalgia talking over. I don't think this is the way kids who are into those things use computers today ("screenshots of cool fonts" when they are 1 click away any time?)

Also there have been a lot of "modular no nonsense repairable phone" projects. You remember at least three without googling. They have all failed because people don't actually want them in numbers allowing owners to sustain the company. (interestingly, similar laptop projects are viable and exist!)

Muzzling these beasts in public was not enough, they continue to maul and kill kids in their own homes.

“I lost my job after harassing a complete stranger in the street because he’s Jewish”

Public consultations should be simply abolished in most areas. The public has its avenue of input which is elections. Allowing a small minority of overly committed people to drive policy is not democratic! Hold a referendum if something is really important, otherwise just do your job.

Watching yet another high profile US Dem politician calling to abolish taxes for anyone but "billionaries".

'The UK’s defence attaché to the UAE, Andrew “Sandy” Sandilands'

🌬️⚡

Conservative 18-24 vote 1974: 24% 1979: 42% 1983: 42% 1987: 37% 1992: 35% 1997: 27% 2001: 27% 2005: 28% 2010: 30% Rightwing 18-24 vote for Cons & Reform 2024: 13% www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-br...

The best thing about this is that of the three headline speakers about young people "moving to the right", at least two of them recently lost an election to the Green Party.

I don't think this specifically is the reasoning, that group of Americans never hesitates to criticise the US - if anything, its evils are even exaggerated ("Hitler was learning from Jim Crow"). But unloading on another country doesn't warrant a "what are you doing to stop and ease that" back, so.

(it's also worth noting that a lot of this is constantly reinforced On Here by Americans who obviously want to distract from their own country's very present misadventures/political idiocy; it suits them for us to be uniquely bad and actually be the root of all evil in the world)

Left wing English exceptionalism - "we're so much worse than everyone else!" (except the US and Israel)

"Look at this graph and try to guess when immigration used to be the top concern of both the public and the media, make no mistakes"

I remember when Ukraine hit a Russian strategic early warning radar, there was an eruption of "no no no it's critical defence infrastructure, a nuclear war is now imminent, surrender immediately" articles and posts.

Blow for Rachel Reeves as the Chancellor Gets Brutal Reality Check

your outie is well-respected by equities traders

£5 - Swan (breaking someone's arm) £10 - Geronimo the Alpaca £20 - American Bully XL £50 - AI-drawn red squirrel (tm)

Fantastic news! Cancer death rates in the UK have fallen to a historic new low. “For cervical cancer, there has been a 75% drop in death rates since the 1970s, with the NHS cervical screening programme credited as having a big impact.” news.sky.com/story/cancer...

Politically, not directly helping energy bill payers seems suicidal. But medium term, protecting bill payers just lets energy price shock permeate across the economy like Japanese knotweed. And a lot of people can actually do quite a lot to cut their energy use temporarily.