My not very clever take is that a lot of market participants are looking for an excuse to pull back without admitting that they’ve massively overdone it on AI and this is one such excuse.

This is probably a badly thought through idea (why does Qatar even need a base there?) but seeing all the Americans in the quotes going ‘WHAT? A FOREIGN AIR BASE ON AMERICAN SOIL?’ is very funny.

Choose your path

I'm sorry what?

I think this cuts two ways. I don't think 'following the news' in the sense of scrolling Bluesky or seeing endless news alerts on your phone that you click on and read one paragraph in helpful. That's my news diet now and I know less about what is going on than I did 15 years ago.

Of all the people to go after in Britain I don't think the Siddiqi dad off Gogglebox is the one. Also, the bloke is 80 and still working! Leave him alone!

If Mr Kipling had a social media account, he would have exceedingly good takes (I'm sorry)

On a slight tangent, this is something a non-sulking culture secretary would be trying to work out. What is ITV getting these days in return for all its public service stuff? Because In 5-10 years you could easily see an owner going ‘sod this’ and abandoning the license.

Nobody makes money doing commercial television news in the UK. Sky News existed for years to be the reasonable face of Murdoch journalism, it now exists as it was a competition concession when Comcast bought Sky. ITV/Ch 4/Ch 5 are PSB obligations.

Off to the dentist for the first time since COVID (I know…). Fully aware that my teeth are not great. Not looking forward to this.

The key question here is ‘would you have done it for the same amount of money you’d have made doing standup gigs in market towns for a week?’ If the answer is no, then shut up about changing attitudes.

Can we just get him set up at some airsoft venue and he can leave the rest of us alone?

got mixed up and said Garfield was obsessed with garlic bread instead of lasagna. Can’t go back to work.

The thing that irks most about the ‘I moved to Dubai and it’s so much nicer set‘ is they they’re generally people who have done really, really well out of Britain over the last 30-50 years. Nick Candy went to Epsom College and made millions in the 90s/00s property boom. He has not been hard done by!

I am so baffled as to where this take is even coming from or how someone who spent 40 years in the pension market would decide that the Conservative party of 2025 is the answer

Finally, a visa for me 😎

looking up the types of residence cards you can get in France for a piece and HONKING at this part of the drop-down list, from the official government website (!!) www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers...

Great.

This is much more a dig at British Airways than at AI in general (and this is a forum post from an informed outsider and not a company statement) but the fact a big company can roll out an AI that wrongly shuts down support cases and the way around it is to complain in 8 words or fewer is very 2025.

Similarly, Brexit, regardless of what you think of it, was always going to cause a rise in civil service headcount because it involved insourcing a bunch of things we'd subcontracted to EU. This is just a thing that is true and anyone saying things like this and not acknowledging it is unserious.

Let me get this straight. Having an app on my phone showing information the government already had about me is an unacceptable step to a 1984 papers please society but this is fine?

Maybe I still hold out too much faitg In people but this feels like a policy and framing ideally designed to drive away the people still planning to vote Tory while winning back nobody from Reform.

You see I think this is most of it but building a world that is basically perfectly designed to exacerbate ADHD symptoms and make it very, very difficult to focus and provides endless distractions is probably part of it too.

My favourite ridiculous example of this is the Manchester United credit card in Malaysia and Singapore (yes really) which used to give extra rewards only when they won now also gives rewards when they draw as people were churning due to lack of victories milelion.com/2025/07/17/h...

And this is why being on Twitter and even here can be bad, it’s not that you’ll fall for the Trumpian nonsense it’s that false tidbits make their way into your brain like this. The problem is that the ‘good’ sources you could’ve once gone to instead are all written by people with the same problem

"Euan Blair's Multiverse" sounds like something that would be on BBC3 at 11pm in 2006.

I get the temptation to go lolol at this and this isn’t to defend Starmer on this but it also points to our political and media ecosystem being fundament broken in ways that go far beyond him and could be about to lead us somewhere very dark.

This might be my breaking Point. I just… everything is a fucking game of Twitter dunks for the people who run the fucking world. What the hell is this?

This is incredible.

Things that are all true: 1) Nobody over the age of 12 should be doing a diss track. 2) Sympathy is a Knife was not a Taylor diss track but Charli XCX should be mocked for being a mid-30s woman whose entire personality is doing coke.

I think this might be the most FT columnist post to have ever been posted.

Manchester Jewish Museum is an incredible place that you should definitely make a point of visiting. Plus the café is excellent.

In a way, it’s not though. She’s done nothing for the past 2-3 years other than produce content: tours, records, movies, even going to NFL games, it’s ALL content. What is she experiencing that would give her stuff to say?

This is my constant boring retort when people praise how much cheaper it is to eat out in Hong Kong or Spain or wherever. Yes! But the reason prices are so high here is that we've chosen to increase minimum wages and therefore costs. I think that's good! But there are trade-offs.

Is it about them all being stuck on a broken TransPennine Express train at Huddersfield overnight and going slowly mad?

He's not the worst by far but Michal Deacon's total radicalisation (he's been at the Telegraph for a while but used to be pretty much normal and took the piss out of Brexiteers/Farage) is probably a good case study. Like... what does this even mean?

It's a small point but CBS is the BBC's news partner in the US (ABC had played this role for at least a decade previously) and they often use CBS correspondents for smaller US stories. Can that continue?

Policy to be retained until Porter gets those annoying jets out of YYZ or gets too big for us to think we can still wipe them out.

I really, really don't like this part of flying in North America. There's something unsettling about departing at 08:13. It's not as bad as them doing the departure boards in alphabetical order though!

We will look back on this stretch of time and realise that so many of our problems were caused by 27 year old product managers with terrible incentives who were in way over their head.

I think everyone in Britain should be given about £1.70 each. So we feel justice more clearly. We can spend it how we like. I’d go for a big Twix.

Farage is really, really thin skinned and bad at dealing with criticism. He gets tetchy very easily and people should make more of this.

The through line of everything is that a bunch of people in the US assume (right now correctly) that laws do not apply to them. This goes for ICE agents as much as it goes for tech giants.

Get ready for 2 days of chaos and then a climbdown explaining that we were idiots for ever thinking that 'any and all' included the UK or EU.

Thought this for a while. Weatherspoons has a perfectly reasonable price to quality ratio when it comes to food, as do highish end places (it obviously goes insane at the very top). It’s the Pizza Expresses, Zizis, Nandos and Ask Italians of the world where it’s totally broken.

Half marathon time was 01:53:35. Quite pleased with that! Now to undo all that good work with a burger and wine

Platonic ideal of a Michael Crick tribute, this. 1. Oddly chummy. 2. Inexplicably insulting. 3. Hackneyed reference. 4. Vaguely racist.

199 years and 364 days ago the first thing resembling a modern train left from here!