Saving juries by abolishing juries. The absolute state of this.

This and this similar point (bsky.app/profile/jsph...) goes back to the flaw with the OBR in the first place - not assigning it to parliament to oversee. If it was a parliamentary body, it could just use their website & other operational support teams whilst still being independent of the government

And the head of the OBR has resigned. I see why some think it looks excessive, but it’s not. Publishing reports is what the OBR does! This was a failure of process at multiple levels, meaning they messed up the most important thing they do. It’s the 21st century: ”IT stuff” is boardroom stuff.

RIP Zipcar

Bit of a change of tune from Lammy re jury trials. I recall @barristersecret.bsky.social saying in their book that you should always choose a jury trial if possible, because the chances of injustice are much higher in the magistrates’ court.

These forecasts are so pointless (and almost always consistent with zero...) that this would frankly be an absolutely GOATed move by the Treasury. Somehow I suspect more luck than competence though...

Many people dismiss preservation concerns as if they live exclusively in the here and now. Chances are, though, every person on the planet has experienced/enjoyed something made/developed in the past. That awareness alone would be enough to grasp the importance of preservation.

I am trying not to be too mean-spirited about the people who apparently got genuinely excited at the idea that a party made up of "Jeremy Corbyn" and "some independents with real funky socially conservative views" could somehow be the future of the left but I am finding it hard!

I get that this Trump visit to the UK is a Big Deal, but is it really so much of a big deal that there is literally nothing else the BBC considers above-the-fold newsworthy?

one thing I love about London is that the food offering isn't just incredibly diverse but also often made by people you wouldn't expect, ie a Moroccan café I like is for some reason owned by a Vietnamese woman, and I'm currently having lunch at a Jamaican place run by south east Asians, what a joy

More seriously - the sheer speed with which those who decry "activist lawyers" shift towards using the courts themselves when they realise courts can be used illiberally too. Those who loudly decry courts and lawyers often only do so when they are losing the cases: it is not a principled objection.

every morning

It’s like a parade of morons

Strong 1520 Field of the Cloth of Gold vibes from this Trump-Putin meeting. Even has the “taking place in an exclave of one in close proximity to the other” aspect

Excellent @mattyglesias.bsky.social Substack today: slowboring.com/p/emotional-labor-was-about-paid-work

Michele was HOD while I was doing my PhD — a fantastic choice for Astronomer Royal

Just one more law, bro, trust me.

The problem with much of the centrist commentariat swinging behind the "Britain is broken" idea is not only that the right are weaponizing it to sell their xenophobic/racist narratives, it's also that despair itself has social consequence. Britain is great! It is also in need of public investment.

And they have the audacity to say they're "saving Wimbledon Park"...

We’re excited to join BlueSky as 🇬🇧 progressive foreign policy think tank. Please do give us a follow if you’re interested in foreign policy articles/briefings with a progressive lens. Foreign Policy experts on the centre left. And events where you can meet likeminded professionals in the space.

“qui locus tibi in legibus et in iudiciis esse potest, quae tu, quantum in te fuit, dominatu regio sustulisti? Ideone Tarquinius exactus … ut multis post saeculis a Antonio quod fas non est rex Romae constitueretur?” —Cicero’s Phillipics 2.87

I'm reading the report behind these headlines about glyphosate and it may be the most scientifically illiterate thing I've come across (although it's a close thing with the recent MAHA report). 1/n

Re India-Pakistan: this is standard behaviour: 01, 08, 13, 14, 16, 19. Terror attack in India results in a strike on Pakistan. Historically has been well contained & no reason yet to think this is any different. We will have to wait for concrete info re what targets were actually hit to know more

In an attempt to blog more, here’s a post explaining some of the reasoning behind my intentionally anachronistic website 22wlp.org/~gautampk/bl... Basically: if you want to keep the tech stack light, you’ve got to use HTML as it was originally intended. The limited use of CSS is purely aesthetic 😄

Had a letter published in the @financialtimes.com yday,written in response to a column last Monday that blames poor critical thinking on STEM education Raising divisions between arts and science only helps those who want to undermine all education. The problem is the commercialisation of academia 🧪

literally same

It's a real shame to realise the non-profit journals are emulating the model of for-profit journals rather than embracing their different (and much older!) role in science publishing. Also, unless funded by grant or endowment, open access is unethical and bad for science (sorry to be blunt) 🧪

Say hi to our publisher, fiction editor, and non-fiction editor @gautampk.com, @hilaryfloon.bsky.social and @anitamchandran.bsky.social. They were ringing in the new year together and raising a glass to the publication of Tamarind’s latest issue. Happy new year from team Tamarind!

Have I achieved peak late 00s desktop perfection? Quite possibly. Not quite #retrocomputing, but still hits the nostalgia AND fairly good to get work done on, not least bc you can't idly surf the Internet (Intel Core i7 950, ATI Radeon HD 5850, triple booting Win XP 32 bit Win 7 64 bit, & OpenBSD.)

Social interactions are good, actually. Someone tell the Silicon Valley bros.

Re-reading this absolute classic from @londonreview.bsky.social this lunch time. The picture Hersh paints is so vivid, genuinely like reading a Le Carré novel www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

Shaping up to be a fantastic issue (even if we do say so ourselves), good for anyone interested in science and literature!

@wdjames.bsky.social’s new book arrived, just in time for this evening’s Fabian Society event on the future of NATO — will see how much I can get through before then!

In case there was any doubt: the reason there's nothing anyone can do about this is that there's no right to private prosecutions in the US (at Fed level). Total reliance on the executive to carry out prosecutions undermines the independence of the justice system, at least in respect of criminal law

New blogpost: deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/11/why-...

Reading this excerpt of Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and wondering about the confusion, fear and frustration that scientific writing and concepts can evoke, especially when we are in situations of distress and uncertainty. Wondering at how we can bridge the so called ‘expertise gap’… 1/2

Watched Anora on Tuesday, btw. It mostly just left me wondering if any of the Palme d’Or judges have played GTA. One hand it was very much a filmmaker’s film, which explains the high praise. On the other, though, it was like a weird pastiche of GTA IV

🚜 Tenant farmers are the backbone of food security, yet their future is at risk. Short leases, low returns, & a broken supply chain make it nearly impossible to sustain. We need to support them writes @oscarwoofs.bsky.social #FoodSecurity #SupportFarmers eastangliabylines.co.uk/farming/tena...

Is FPTP good, actually? labourfortheconstitution.org.uk organised a panel on Weds, discussing the merits of representative democracy and easily kicking *out* Govts. Our view: FPTP is still the best system for the job Highlights here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XRL..., full video on the YT channel

Sad day. RIP absolute legend & MP for Hull East 1970-2010. Remember going to a dinner in Hull where he was guest speaker once; he told us all the story of how the Kyoto Protocol was only agreed at the 11th hr because the hotel threatened to kick them all out to make way for a wedding the next day!

did someone stop believing in the servers? 😭

yes, make america NORMAL. do not trim grey flannel BUSINESS suits with yellow PIPING because that's historically a SPORTING DETAIL

"Since Britain is less divided than America, we should take seriously the challenges of how to keep it that way." Our @sundersays.bsky.social for @easterneye.bsky.social on what the UK can learn from the US election result. www.easterneye.biz/britain-and-...

How is your "No"vember going? I have said yes to four paper reviews, one book review, one paper response, one grant review, and two promotion reviews. 🙃

I feel like the change in tense here (is going -> has gone) is both intentional and substantially changes the meaning of what Musk to make it even more nonsensical

In case anyone wants to see what the raw, unfiltered global Bluesky feed looks like, check out firesky.tv It's extremely cool (to me at least)

The exodus from X/Twitter has finally started, but maybe Twitter should have died a long time ago? Our new research published today shows how political abuse on X is a global, widespread, and cross-partisan phenomenon. Out now in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Key results🧵

This reminded me of this 2017 paper from Unruh &al which argued that the naive approach to relating Ev and Λ was fundamentally flawed due to the unstable nature of the QFT vacuum… will have to dig back into this! 🔭🧪 journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...

Pretty much since the end of the Corn Laws our food security has been tied to stability in Europe and keeping the sea lanes open in case of famine/war on the Continent. It’s all about the Channel, Gibraltar, Suez, and Ukraine, same as for the last 175 years