Millions of people will have their DNA data put up for sale after major at-home testing company 23andMe filed for bankruptcy.
The company, which has tested more than 15m people’s genetic makeup using post-in saliva kits, including more than 250,000 in the UK, announced that it had entered US bankruptcy protection in an attempt to sell the company.
It said that data privacy would be an “important consideration” but added that it was seeking to “maximise the value of its assets”.
Privacy advocates have urged consumers to delete their 23andMe data as the company’s share price crash has raised concerns that the data could be sold off to data brokers or to target adverts.
The Data Protection Registrar needs to weigh in on that imo, because export of data, especially personal data, and use for different purposes is a change to use - which I think is tightly regulated.
It’s liquidity provision. Essentially the pension funds secure overnight borrowing on long dated gilts. They can do this without a mark to market (because it’s not a sale).
Essentially the issue is that pension funds were forced (thanks Gordon!) to buy UK government bonds. These will underpin their cash needs in 20-30 years as they begin to be repaid. However they can’t sell them today without a big write down. So they lend them overnight for cash which they can then redeploy elsewhere.
No 10 reports Starmer had a conversation with Trump about progress made in an 'economic prosperity deal ' last night
If Starmer does do a trade deal with US many will be furious, not least because it is likely to include eliminating the digital tax so much loved by the Lib Dems and make re- joining the EU a distant dream
Starmer is governing more as a Conservative PM than anywhere near a Labour one
It is virtually impossible to get a US-UK trade deal. What we can do is talk optimistically about it whenever a new President gets in, then everyone forgets about it for a few years. Does no harm.
The reality will be tariffs and if they are applied to Europe and not the UK because of our trading relationship with Trump
Ask the Canadians and Mexicans how well having a trade deal with Trump protects them.
The header says "All these projects would spur GDP growth" No, they will all result in a one-off increase in output. Economic growth requires continuing increases in output. The POPPY fund would itself also have to grow continuously. Do one-off jumps in output spur further growth? There's no evidence of that. But a one-off shift in technology which opens up a range of new opportunities can do that. However that is not in any government's powers.
Not if they eliminate a capacity ceiling - they permit ongoing growth that would otherwise be capped
I see Dow futures are up again after Trump hints at postponing some tariffs.
If he or at least some of his inner coterie are not insider trading and making a fortune from this volatility - volatility which they can control in a linear fashion with a single tweet or press comment - then I will be shocked.
It feels like the political equivalent of watching a cricket team bowling a predictable one no ball per over. Someone somewhere is getting rich on this.
Yahoo finance were also reporting last week he was looking to be ‘flexible’ on the tariff issue.
What was also interesting is retail investors have been piling into Tesla.
They have to be the greatest of fools - exactly what upside is with Tesla at the moment - they've scared a lot of possible customers away and the only things being offered as future growth markets don't actually exist.
No 10 reports Starmer had a conversation with Trump about progress made in an 'economic prosperity deal ' last night
If Starmer does do a trade deal with US many will be furious, not least because it is likely to include eliminating the digital tax so much loved by the Lib Dems and make re- joining the EU a distant dream
Starmer is governing more as a Conservative PM than anywhere near a Labour one
It is virtually impossible to get a US-UK trade deal. What we can do is talk optimistically about it whenever a new President gets in, then everyone forgets about it for a few years. Does no harm.
The reality will be tariffs and if they are applied to Europe and not the UK because of our trading relationship with Trump
Ask the Canadians and Mexicans how well having a trade deal with Trump protects them.
I will eat a pizza with pineapple on it if there’s a ratified UK/US trade deal.
I'll use my photo quota today for a close pass on the wrong side of the road. This was taken by a disabled friend taking her child to school on a tandem e-tricycle, in Derby. It's a tandem rather than side-by-side tricycle, but is just under 1m wide.
The taxi driving in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road is overtaking 100m+ of slow moving traffic to turn right. It's Uttoxeter Road in Derby.
Derbyshire Police declined to prosecute.
No video I'm afraid, since it vanished when she moved from Twitter to Bluesky.
“My daughter goes to one of the schools,” Kate told road.cc. “And there are no route options on quieter streets, or I’d use them!
“This bit of the road is really hairy because there’s a narrow paint cycle lane. Drivers think you should be in it, and think that as long as their wheels (and not their wing mirror) stay outside the paint, all is okay.
“The carriageway narrows as the road bends, effectively pulling drivers closer to the cycle lane. The infrastructure has been designed in a way that encourages loads of drivers to do really hazardous and frightening fast close passes.
“There are frequently vehicles parked in the cycle lane, too,” she continued. “Derby City Council have confirmed in writing that they allow all-day parking on double yellows, including in cycle lanes and on pavements, ‘for loading and unloading’. That gets exciting with poor sight lines and 40mph traffic.”
Yeah I think we paid to do the search, found nothing there, dug a hole, found a sewage pipe, told them about the pipe, and then paid them again to come and look at it, which they didn't do. The whole thing is a racket but what do you expect? This is how much of the private sector operates in this country - extortion.
I'd have quite a severe go at a company which charged me £700 to do something then didn't do it.
I think they claimed to have done it remotely. We never saw any evidence they'd done it. I've previously had Thames Water demanding I pay them a £20k water bill for the pub property next door so £700 seemed quite reasonable! They are total jokers.
They probably have a register with - "@OnlyLivingBoy - mark. Can be extorted easily.", in it.
Push back on the ludicrous shit like that, for the love of God.
I can't prove they didn't do the survey. And frankly, I don't care if they did the survey or not, they weren't doing it for my benefit. You may have the bandwidth to get into an exhausting legal dispute with a multi billion pound company but I certainly don't... and at the time I was paying £000s on an almost daily basis for building work so £700 was almost small change.
No, that's motorcyclists. Hitting a big pothole and coming off at 20mph when you're cycling is much less hazardous than hitting it at 50mph on a motorcycle and being flung into the scenery.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
Thames Water, alongside Woking BC and Spelthorne BC and arguably the United Kingdom, joins the club of organisations with debts which can never be repaid.
Allister Heath, when he was still sane, proposed every organisation over a particular size, both private and public, needed a Will to determine what should happen if it became insolvent.
We all know what will happen - the debt will be written off and if necessary Government will fund the operation to keep it going. Northern Rock and the events of 2008 showed many organisations, both private and public, they were literally too big and too important to be allowed to fail.
Safeguarding depositors money in effectively zombie banks and building societies set a precedent rightly or wrongly - the Government knew the social, political and economic consequences of a major bank failure would be unsupportable.
Equity needs to take a bath: that's what equity does.
Safeguarding cash deposits is a different thing, I'd suggest, and should be safeguarded to a £50k or £100k level or you risk systematic collapse when the chips are down.
Yeah I think we paid to do the search, found nothing there, dug a hole, found a sewage pipe, told them about the pipe, and then paid them again to come and look at it, which they didn't do. The whole thing is a racket but what do you expect? This is how much of the private sector operates in this country - extortion.
I'd have quite a severe go at a company which charged me £700 to do something then didn't do it.
I think they claimed to have done it remotely. We never saw any evidence they'd done it. I've previously had Thames Water demanding I pay them a £20k water bill for the pub property next door so £700 seemed quite reasonable! They are total jokers.
They probably have a register with - "@OnlyLivingBoy - mark. Can be extorted easily.", in it.
Push back on the ludicrous shit like that, for the love of God.
I can't prove they didn't do the survey. And frankly, I don't care if they did the survey or not, they weren't doing it for my benefit. You may have the bandwidth to get into an exhausting legal dispute with a multi billion pound company but I certainly don't... and at the time I was paying £000s on an almost daily basis for building work so £700 was almost small change.
No 10 reports Starmer had a conversation with Trump about progress made in an 'economic prosperity deal ' last night
If Starmer does do a trade deal with US many will be furious, not least because it is likely to include eliminating the digital tax so much loved by the Lib Dems and make re- joining the EU a distant dream
Starmer is governing more as a Conservative PM than anywhere near a Labour one
It is virtually impossible to get a US-UK trade deal. What we can do is talk optimistically about it whenever a new President gets in, then everyone forgets about it for a few years. Does no harm.
The reality will be tariffs and if they are applied to Europe and not the UK because of our trading relationship with Trump
Ask the Canadians and Mexicans how well having a trade deal with Trump protects them.
Indeed.
One of the things that is beginning to concern me now is the role of Powell and Mandelson, and their experience and conditioning of dealing with the Bush White House, which, awful as it was, did honour slightly more commitments.
From one point of view, their long transatlantic experience has probably been crucial to Starmer exercising an important mediating in between Zelensky and Trump.
On the other hand, and seen from another point of view, these are also people who were apparently very happy for Britain to play a clear butler-poodle role with Bush, leading to an Iraq involvement that was actually very damaging for our interests. If the same New Labour establishment are now beginning to make a decision to come down more clearly on the Trump side, rather than exercising their very considerable diplomatic experience, then we could be looking at Iraq all over again, but multiplied by a factor of a thousand, with democracy actually at stake.
Yeah I think we paid to do the search, found nothing there, dug a hole, found a sewage pipe, told them about the pipe, and then paid them again to come and look at it, which they didn't do. The whole thing is a racket but what do you expect? This is how much of the private sector operates in this country - extortion.
I'd have quite a severe go at a company which charged me £700 to do something then didn't do it.
I think they claimed to have done it remotely. We never saw any evidence they'd done it. I've previously had Thames Water demanding I pay them a £20k water bill for the pub property next door so £700 seemed quite reasonable! They are total jokers.
They probably have a register with - "@OnlyLivingBoy - mark. Can be extorted easily.", in it.
Push back on the ludicrous shit like that, for the love of God.
I can't prove they didn't do the survey. And frankly, I don't care if they did the survey or not, they weren't doing it for my benefit. You may have the bandwidth to get into an exhausting legal dispute with a multi billion pound company but I certainly don't... and at the time I was paying £000s on an almost daily basis for building work so £700 was almost small change.
humblebrag of the day
Soz.
They clearly didn't do the survey as they would have found the pipe. Surely you just didn't pay the invoice?
And most of the inactive are early retired or students - and for women, carers. It's not a bad idea to try and get more people into work, but it does feel like a bit of a red herring when it comes to economic performance. I would rank it as such:
Demographic profile - not as bad as people think
Inactivity rate - middling to good. Been roughly flat for decades.
Unemployment rate - very good
Hours worked per week - down about 4% over the last 25 years. Down a bit since COVID. Not sure how we compare internationally, but 31.8 hours for all workers doesn't seem too bad.
Productivity growth - flat since COVID. Very slow between 2008 and 2020.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that GDP per capita growth was decent after 2008. It's really just after COVID that things have flatlined.
I don't want to come across like another version of Scott, but that's also since we Brexited for real.
Being a simple soul I find Professor Idea's proposal attractive, as is any good idea for wealth creation and increasing prosperity.
To my ignorant mind a few issues of clarification arise;
1) Is there a difference between QE and printing money, and if so what is it?
2) All money represents in some way cost and benefit, and using it involves choices. As to the £500bn made available, the proposal doesn't tell me what it would have been spent on otherwise. What is the answer?
3) Why would anyone not charge interest when they can make a greater return by doing so?
4) If it works, why don't all states do it all the time and for ever and with ten times as much cash input?
5) In my experience so far, if an action looks as if it is inflationary, it always is. What reason have I got to feel differently about this one?
Basically this idea is just printing money. Everything else is meaningless accounting transfers.
A better way would be to use the £500bn to seed a sovereign wealth fund. A portion of that could be used to invest in infrastructure but it should be commercially returning investments. If the government wishes to subsidise a project it could add additional soft money to those validated by the sovereign fund but that should be an explicit political decision to invest taxpayers money.
Ideally you’d also put future NICs in there automatically so that, over time, a dividend could be paid to the state (and may be even pension funds).
Controversial suggestion. This already exists. It’s called the Crown Estates but could be expanded in size. The key is to make sure that it remains non political.
I see Dow futures are up again after Trump hints at postponing some tariffs.
If he or at least some of his inner coterie are not insider trading and making a fortune from this volatility - volatility which they can control in a linear fashion with a single tweet or press comment - then I will be shocked.
It feels like the political equivalent of watching a cricket team bowling a predictable one no ball per over. Someone somewhere is getting rich on this.
Yahoo finance were also reporting last week he was looking to be ‘flexible’ on the tariff issue.
What was also interesting is retail investors have been piling into Tesla.
They have to be the greatest of fools - exactly what upside is with Tesla at the moment - they've scared a lot of possible customers away and the only things being offered as future growth markets don't actually exist.
I guess the only upside is if Trump signs a presidential decree demanding that all federal gov vehicles must be replaced by Teslas.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
The BBC are reporting that conversations in Saudi Arabia are focussing on the "Black Sea ceasefire" (account from Moscow).
That looks to me to perhaps be more pandering to Russia's interest ... Ukraine has re-established it's grain exports under its own steam by making the Russian navy run away from most of the Black Sea, and using a route in the far west. There's little upside for Ukraine here.
I wonder if the Trump regime will also be applying pressure to Turkey to reopen the route into the Black Sea to warships during the ceasefire? That would be unpredictable. Russia could take ships in, but various countries have ships waiting for the Ukraine navy which are larger than can be delivered via the river route - such as minehunters from the UK.
How in the name of holy chuffing buggery do Thames Water not have a fixed asset register?
Fresh doubt has been cast over the race to find a white knight buyer for Thames Water as it struggles to provide details of its labyrinthine network of pipes, sewage works and reservoirs.
Thames Water has stepped up the hunt for new investors willing to pump in billions of pounds of emergency capital after the Court of Appeal approved a £3bn emergency debt bailout from its existing creditors.
However, prospective suitors fear the search will be held up by the company’s failure to keep an accurate record of the mountain of assets that it has accumulated over the decades.
Thames Water has just weeks to hammer out a deal or one of the country’s most vital utilities faces a prolonged hand-to-mouth existence in which lenders drip-feed the company enough money every month to pay its bills.
“The board has to advance to the due diligence quickly but this makes that much harder. How do you put a value on the company if you don’t know what it owns?” a source close to the talks said.
Nationalisation might be the only answer. The only way the private sector will want to get involved is at such a low price that a profit is guaranteed for asset stripping. A period of government ownership while the basics are restored – an asset register; proper waste management rather than waiting for a storm and chucking it all in the river while limits are suspended; investment in new facilities. Account for the asset on the government's books so it does not look like the money has disappeared.
Why do we need to nationalise a profitable business?
Because if we don't, they'll just play the same game for the next couple of decades.
It's a monopoly utility. If you can guarantee it will be adequately regulated in future, then fine. You'll also probably deserve the Nobel prize for economics.
Why should we care if they do? The holding company can go broke every week, and it doesn't matter so long as it's just the shareholders and lenders who take the hit...
It's not The trick is to extract the cash and then get out - as Macquarie did.
If you had a strict regulator throughout, then the problem might be minimised, but that has never happened in the last three and half decades.
Public ownership, with a private secure management contract, with performance clauses, might just work. It would avoid a fair amount of what's basically legalised theft. And the borrowing for investment would be at government borrowing rates.
Macquarie only got away with this because some combination of the lenders and new shareholders either did an appalling job of due diligence or made a conscious decision to bet on interest rates remaining low for eternity.
Arguably it was legalised theft, but between willing participants. Imagine I persuaded you to buy my car (book value £2k) for £10k. I'd be £8k better off, you'd be £8k worse off, but as long as the transaction was freely entered into and I'd been honest and upfront about the car's true condition, then it's neither theft nor fraud, just a classic case of a fool and his money going separate ways. This was exactly the same, just involving rather larger sums of money.
The fact that the underlying asset in this case was a utility should have no bearing on what should happen next.
Partners at the big accountancy firms are staying on into old age because that's a perk of highly-paid sitting down jobs, so there are few prospects for those lower down. Pull up the tailgate, Jack, I'm all right.
No, that's motorcyclists. Hitting a big pothole and coming off at 20mph when you're cycling is much less hazardous than hitting it at 50mph on a motorcycle and being flung into the scenery.
Reaction time too. You usually have enough time to swerve on the bicycle. Why you should always take the secondary position, so you don't get squeezed into them.
But there's likely to be an Audi (or a bus in Edinburgh) up your chuff to kill you in case you fall off because they did not leave themselves enough room to stop, or 13cm to the right in case you have to swerve, or another one up the chuff of the first one that doesn't have time to stop either, to make sure you get killed even if the first one does manage to go around.
Sigh.
Yes, the behaviour of drivers is incredibly frustrating and dangerous. I get tailgated on my scooter basically every time I go out, and I'm not exactly Captain Slow. One scooterist I know has rigged up a device that uses a tiny radar unit to detect tailgating cars and flashes a bright red 'YOU ARE TOO CLOSE' led sign. Apparently it does actually have a noticeable effect, which I didn't expect.
I'd just suggest using one of the bigger Pass Pixi signs. Drivers notice them.
They only cost about £10, so there's no real downside if it does not work.
Thames Water, alongside Woking BC and Spelthorne BC and arguably the United Kingdom, joins the club of organisations with debts which can never be repaid.
Allister Heath, when he was still sane, proposed every organisation over a particular size, both private and public, needed a Will to determine what should happen if it became insolvent.
We all know what will happen - the debt will be written off and if necessary Government will fund the operation to keep it going. Northern Rock and the events of 2008 showed many organisations, both private and public, they were literally too big and too important to be allowed to fail.
Safeguarding depositors money in effectively zombie banks and building societies set a precedent rightly or wrongly - the Government knew the social, political and economic consequences of a major bank failure would be unsupportable.
There are loads of places to place cash if you want to risk losing it all. Tesla shares for example. It is not unrealistic for there to be outfits where it can be placed and guaranteed to be secure, essentially as proxies for the Bank of England or holding notes and coins.
As the deposits are in a system overseen and heavily regulated by the state the rest follows in ineluctably.
Yeah I think we paid to do the search, found nothing there, dug a hole, found a sewage pipe, told them about the pipe, and then paid them again to come and look at it, which they didn't do. The whole thing is a racket but what do you expect? This is how much of the private sector operates in this country - extortion.
I'd have quite a severe go at a company which charged me £700 to do something then didn't do it.
I think they claimed to have done it remotely. We never saw any evidence they'd done it. I've previously had Thames Water demanding I pay them a £20k water bill for the pub property next door so £700 seemed quite reasonable! They are total jokers.
They probably have a register with - "@OnlyLivingBoy - mark. Can be extorted easily.", in it.
Push back on the ludicrous shit like that, for the love of God.
I can't prove they didn't do the survey. And frankly, I don't care if they did the survey or not, they weren't doing it for my benefit. You may have the bandwidth to get into an exhausting legal dispute with a multi billion pound company but I certainly don't... and at the time I was paying £000s on an almost daily basis for building work so £700 was almost small change.
humblebrag of the day
Soz.
They clearly didn't do the survey as they would have found the pipe. Surely you just didn't pay the invoice?
No the timing was - we pay for usual search, they say nothing there, we dig, find pipe, tell the about pipe, then they say we need to survey pipe before you can continue, give us £700. I give them £700 so we can continue building, and have no interest at all in whether the survey is done or not. They claim to have done the survey but at no point sought access to our property to do it. So was it done? Who knows. All my dealings with TW says they didn't. But I neither know nor care either way.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
How in the name of holy chuffing buggery do Thames Water not have a fixed asset register?
Fresh doubt has been cast over the race to find a white knight buyer for Thames Water as it struggles to provide details of its labyrinthine network of pipes, sewage works and reservoirs.
Thames Water has stepped up the hunt for new investors willing to pump in billions of pounds of emergency capital after the Court of Appeal approved a £3bn emergency debt bailout from its existing creditors.
However, prospective suitors fear the search will be held up by the company’s failure to keep an accurate record of the mountain of assets that it has accumulated over the decades.
Thames Water has just weeks to hammer out a deal or one of the country’s most vital utilities faces a prolonged hand-to-mouth existence in which lenders drip-feed the company enough money every month to pay its bills.
“The board has to advance to the due diligence quickly but this makes that much harder. How do you put a value on the company if you don’t know what it owns?” a source close to the talks said.
Nationalisation might be the only answer. The only way the private sector will want to get involved is at such a low price that a profit is guaranteed for asset stripping. A period of government ownership while the basics are restored – an asset register; proper waste management rather than waiting for a storm and chucking it all in the river while limits are suspended; investment in new facilities. Account for the asset on the government's books so it does not look like the money has disappeared.
Why do we need to nationalise a profitable business?
Because if we don't, they'll just play the same game for the next couple of decades.
It's a monopoly utility. If you can guarantee it will be adequately regulated in future, then fine. You'll also probably deserve the Nobel prize for economics.
Why should we care if they do? The holding company can go broke every week, and it doesn't matter so long as it's just the shareholders and lenders who take the hit...
It's not The trick is to extract the cash and then get out - as Macquarie did.
If you had a strict regulator throughout, then the problem might be minimised, but that has never happened in the last three and half decades.
Public ownership, with a private secure management contract, with performance clauses, might just work. It would avoid a fair amount of what's basically legalised theft. And the borrowing for investment would be at government borrowing rates.
Macquarie only got away with this because some combination of the lenders and new shareholders either did an appalling job of due diligence or made a conscious decision to bet on interest rates remaining low for eternity.
Arguably it was legalised theft, but between willing participants. Imagine I persuaded you to buy my car (book value £2k) for £10k. I'd be £8k better off, you'd be £8k worse off, but as long as the transaction was freely entered into and I'd been honest and upfront about the car's true condition, then it's neither theft nor fraud, just a classic case of a fool and his money going separate ways. This was exactly the same, just involving rather larger sums of money.
The fact that the underlying asset in this case was a utility should have no bearing on what should happen next.
As the utility's customers are the ones who have already ended up funding some of the resulting deficit, it really does.
Such transactions engaged in by the monopoly of an essential public utility cannot be compared to your "freely entered in" deal. Thames's customers have no choice but to deal with them.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
It’s liquidity provision. Essentially the pension funds secure overnight borrowing on long dated gilts. They can do this without a mark to market (because it’s not a sale).
Essentially the issue is that pension funds were forced (thanks Gordon!) to buy UK government bonds. These will underpin their cash needs in 20-30 years as they begin to be repaid. However they can’t sell them today without a big write down. So they lend them overnight for cash which they can then redeploy elsewhere.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
I'll use my photo quota today for a close pass on the wrong side of the road. This was taken by a disabled friend taking her child to school on a tandem e-tricycle, in Derby. It's a tandem rather than side-by-side tricycle, but is just under 1m wide.
The taxi driving in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road is overtaking 100m+ of slow moving traffic to turn right. It's Uttoxeter Road in Derby.
Derbyshire Police declined to prosecute.
No video I'm afraid, since it vanished when she moved from Twitter to Bluesky.
“My daughter goes to one of the schools,” Kate told road.cc. “And there are no route options on quieter streets, or I’d use them!
“This bit of the road is really hairy because there’s a narrow paint cycle lane. Drivers think you should be in it, and think that as long as their wheels (and not their wing mirror) stay outside the paint, all is okay.
“The carriageway narrows as the road bends, effectively pulling drivers closer to the cycle lane. The infrastructure has been designed in a way that encourages loads of drivers to do really hazardous and frightening fast close passes.
“There are frequently vehicles parked in the cycle lane, too,” she continued. “Derby City Council have confirmed in writing that they allow all-day parking on double yellows, including in cycle lanes and on pavements, ‘for loading and unloading’. That gets exciting with poor sight lines and 40mph traffic.”
That’s somewhat close. That deserves further action IMHO. I do find when you have markings on the road to denote a cycle way drivers feel they can come closer to you as they see the white line as a limit.
What also really effs me off is cars parking in cycle lanes on roads.
One of the things that is beginning to concern me now is the role of Powell and Mandelson, and their experience and conditioning of dealing with the Bush White House, which, awful as it was, did honour slightly more commitments.
From one point of view, their long transatlantic experience has probably been crucial to Starmer exercising an important mediating in between Zelensky and Trump.
On the other hand, and seen from another point of view, these are also people who were apparently very happy for Britain to play a clear butler-poodle role with Bush, leading to an Iraq involvement that was actually very damaging for our interests. If the same New Labour establishment are now beginning to make a decision to come down more clearly on the Trump side, rather than exercising their very considerable diplomatic experience, then we could be looking at Iraq all over again, but multiplied by a factor of a thousand, with democracy actually at stake.
I'm getting increasingly annoyed by people who are meant to be experts saying that Trump is a dangerous fascist BUT don't worry the midterms will knock him back. If he is a dangerous fascist the midterms will likely increase his hold on power not loosen it.
Far too many people who ought to know better are still normalising what is happening in the US. I personally see no electoral route to defeating Trump/MAGA.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
You only have to walk around any British town centre mid-week to unearth how many people simply aren't working.
I thinknyou are taking a 1950s idea of work and projecting it into 2025.
Let me give you an example. I am a researcher. Most of my stuff is theoretical, but I do the odd empirical paper. My mode of working would be unrecognizable. Spend enormous time alone in front of a white board. Do naps and walk the dog, fiddle around in the garden mulling ideas over. Then time on long zoom converstions with coauthors followed by intense bursts of writing on my lap top in various public locations. All this leads up to submission. Put me in my office (where I do for meetings and work in the organization) my research pipeline would die. I couldn't have a single research idea there. My teaching is from September to January where I am in the auditorium.... the value I create is just not compatible with a factory or survellied office environment. So you could come across me in the middle of the day walking around with a far away look in my eye... that is me working 🤣🤣🤣
That's also true of some kinds of IT development work - it's about problem solving. Lots of thinking time vs typing.
Indeed. The Hollywood trope of IT developers banging away at a keyboard like some demonic typist is as idiotic at the one of mathematicians performing feats of mental arithmetic in a couple of seconds. Some of my most productive time tends to be while sitting on the toilet or walking in the walk, at which point I'll often realise that I'm taking the wrong approach to some issue and get it straight in my head what I should be doing.
I’m curious as to what “taking the wrong approach… while sitting on the toilet” is?!
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
You only have to walk around any British town centre mid-week to unearth how many people simply aren't working.
I thinknyou are taking a 1950s idea of work and projecting it into 2025.
Let me give you an example. I am a researcher. Most of my stuff is theoretical, but I do the odd empirical paper. My mode of working would be unrecognizable. Spend enormous time alone in front of a white board. Do naps and walk the dog, fiddle around in the garden mulling ideas over. Then time on long zoom converstions with coauthors followed by intense bursts of writing on my lap top in various public locations. All this leads up to submission. Put me in my office (where I do for meetings and work in the organization) my research pipeline would die. I couldn't have a single research idea there. My teaching is from September to January where I am in the auditorium.... the value I create is just not compatible with a factory or survellied office environment. So you could come across me in the middle of the day walking around with a far away look in my eye... that is me working 🤣🤣🤣
That's also true of some kinds of IT development work - it's about problem solving. Lots of thinking time vs typing.
Indeed. The Hollywood trope of IT developers banging away at a keyboard like some demonic typist is as idiotic at the one of mathematicians performing feats of mental arithmetic in a couple of seconds. Some of my most productive time tends to be while sitting on the toilet or walking in the walk, at which point I'll often realise that I'm taking the wrong approach to some issue and get it straight in my head what I should be doing.
I’m curious as to what “taking the wrong approach… while sitting on the toilet” is?!
I find I discover the best solutions by sleeping on it - at which point my brain has done it's filing, sorted out the order in which things need to be done and comes up with a simpler solution.
One of the things that is beginning to concern me now is the role of Powell and Mandelson, and their experience and conditioning of dealing with the Bush White House, which, awful as it was, did honour slightly more commitments.
From one point of view, their long transatlantic experience has probably been crucial to Starmer exercising an important mediating in between Zelensky and Trump.
On the other hand, and seen from another point of view, these are also people who were apparently very happy for Britain to play a clear butler-poodle role with Bush, leading to an Iraq involvement that was actually very damaging for our interests. If the same New Labour establishment are now beginning to make a decision to come down more clearly on the Trump side, rather than exercising their very considerable diplomatic experience, then we could be looking at Iraq all over again, but multiplied by a factor of a thousand, with democracy actually at stake.
I'm getting increasingly annoyed by people who are meant to be experts saying that Trump is a dangerous fascist BUT don't worry the midterms will knock him back. If he is a dangerous fascist the midterms will likely increase his hold on power not loosen it.
Far too many people who ought to know better are still normalising what is happening in the US. I personally see no electoral route to defeating Trump/MAGA.
I think the midterms are likely the last chance. More difficult to fix than the presidential - and less time to arrange it.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
BREAKING: Judge Boasberg rejects Trump administration call to rescind his restraining order, saying the Venezuelans marked for deportation under the Alien Enemies Act are likely to win — because they are entitled to individual hearings/due process
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
You only have to walk around any British town centre mid-week to unearth how many people simply aren't working.
I thinknyou are taking a 1950s idea of work and projecting it into 2025.
Let me give you an example. I am a researcher. Most of my stuff is theoretical, but I do the odd empirical paper. My mode of working would be unrecognizable. Spend enormous time alone in front of a white board. Do naps and walk the dog, fiddle around in the garden mulling ideas over. Then time on long zoom converstions with coauthors followed by intense bursts of writing on my lap top in various public locations. All this leads up to submission. Put me in my office (where I do for meetings and work in the organization) my research pipeline would die. I couldn't have a single research idea there. My teaching is from September to January where I am in the auditorium.... the value I create is just not compatible with a factory or survellied office environment. So you could come across me in the middle of the day walking around with a far away look in my eye... that is me working 🤣🤣🤣
That's also true of some kinds of IT development work - it's about problem solving. Lots of thinking time vs typing.
Indeed. The Hollywood trope of IT developers banging away at a keyboard like some demonic typist is as idiotic at the one of mathematicians performing feats of mental arithmetic in a couple of seconds. Some of my most productive time tends to be while sitting on the toilet or walking in the walk, at which point I'll often realise that I'm taking the wrong approach to some issue and get it straight in my head what I should be doing.
I’m curious as to what “taking the wrong approach… while sitting on the toilet” is?!
I find I discover the best solutions by sleeping on it - at which point my brain has done it's filing, sorted out the order in which things need to be done and comes up with a simpler solution.
A a student, I once solved a problem by waking up face down on a linoleum floor. The pattern.... "Of course, the answer for solving this type of maze is a modified Tree Search!"
A a student, I once solved a problem by waking up face down on a linoleum floor. The pattern.... "Of course, the answer for solving this type of maze is a modified Tree Search!"
A a student, I once solved a problem by waking up face down on a linoleum floor. The pattern.... "Of course, the answer for solving this type of maze is a modified Tree Search!"
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
Partners at the big accountancy firms are staying on into old age because that's a perk of highly-paid sitting down jobs, so there are few prospects for those lower down. Pull up the tailgate, Jack, I'm all right.
I think all big 4 firms require (ie financially incentivise) equity partner retirement at 55 so I’m not sure the ladder pull up by geriatric partners is the issue, or at least not a new one.
I just want to point out that 3 minutes ago as my car crested a hill on the Uruguayan coast out of Punta del Este, en route to lunch at the 73rd best restaurant in Latin America, the whole of the mighty Montoya beach sequence came into view, glittering in the warm lovely sun, and AT THAT MOMENT my Bluetooth iPhone decided to play “Deep and Wide” by Castillos de Arena
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
Partners at the big accountancy firms are staying on into old age because that's a perk of highly-paid sitting down jobs, so there are few prospects for those lower down. Pull up the tailgate, Jack, I'm all right.
I think all big 4 firms require (ie financially incentivise) equity partner retirement at 55 so I’m not sure the ladder pull up by geriatric partners is the issue, or at least not a new one.
I've seen this many times in various fields - the thinking from the top is that they should keep cutting everything for those below them, because Loyalty To The Firm will keep everyone working hard.
Partners at the big accountancy firms are staying on into old age because that's a perk of highly-paid sitting down jobs, so there are few prospects for those lower down. Pull up the tailgate, Jack, I'm all right.
I think all big 4 firms require (ie financially incentivise) equity partner retirement at 55 so I’m not sure the ladder pull up by geriatric partners is the issue, or at least not a new one.
I've seen this many times in various fields - the thinking from the top is that they should keep cutting everything for those below them, because Loyalty To The Firm will keep everyone working hard.
Then they wonder why retention has collapsed.
Retention rates in the big firms seem similar now to a decade or 2 decades ago.
The business model faces major challenges though. There is simply less growth and margin in most professional services (or financial services) than before the financial crisis. The one exception seems to be law firms: while UK partner profits and employee pay in the big 4 have been almost flat for over a decade the magic circle continue to rake it in and hike up their starting salaries. Until AI bites.
The odd thing about Uruguayan viticulture is that the climate should by rights be too warm and humid for the grape varieties they grow there. It’s very different from SW France where Tannat comes from, and vastly different from Albariño homeland in Galicia.
More like South East USA - coastal South Carolina or Georgia. Though not dissimilar to Imereti or Adjara in Western (republic of) Georgia.
The closest viticultural parallel I can think of is another Bordeaux variety, Semillon, famously grown in the very humid Hunter Valley in NSW.
Brad Karp’s Email To Paul Weiss About Its Deal With The Trump Administration Here’s what Paul Weiss chair Brad Karp sent to his colleagues on Sunday afternoon.
https://davidlat.substack.com/p/brad-karp-firmwide-email-to-paul-weiss-about-the-trump-administration-deal ...Only several days ago, our firm faced an existential crisis. The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm. It brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people, and our clients. In particular, it threatened our clients with the loss of their government contracts, and the loss of access to the government, if they continued to use the firm as their lawyers. And in an obvious effort to target all of you as well as the firm, it raised the specter that the government would not hire our employees.
We were hopeful that the legal industry would rally to our side, even though it had not done so in response to executive orders targeting other firms. We had tried to persuade other firms to come out in public support of Covington and Perkins Coie. And we waited for firms to support us in the wake of the President’s executive order targeting Paul, Weiss. Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.
We initially prepared to challenge the executive order in court, and a team of Paul, Weiss attorneys prepared a lawsuit in the finest traditions of the firm. But it became clear that, even if we were successful in initially enjoining the executive order in litigation, it would not solve the fundamental problem, which was that clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the Administration. We could prevent the executive order from taking effect, but we couldn’t erase it. Clients had told us that they were not going to be able to stay with us, even though they wanted to. It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the Administration...
"There was some anger.. in Canada.. at Britain’s failure to condemn Trump’s threats against a Commonwealth country. “The king is proud to align himself with a despot for … a dangled trade agreement.". “A bold response from us in Canada would be to cut our ties with the monarchy.”"
I know I am going to hate myself for saying this, but I agree with Trump (shudders).
The eyes are terrible.
But then, maybe his are too...
Compared to how the raddled old fucker looks IRL, it's quite flattering.
Well, quite. The blotchy fake tan, the stupid hairpiece, the flabby and disgusting figure... and then there is the character of the man: an utterly vile human troll with no redeeming vice or virtue, the ignoramuses ignoramus, the traitor´s traitor, the assholes asshole.
The Yanks voted for this piece of shit. The fall of America is happening fast. For the rest of the planet, that day can hardly come soon enough.
I know I am going to hate myself for saying this, but I agree with Trump (shudders).
The eyes are terrible.
But then, maybe his are too...
Compared to how the raddled old fucker looks IRL, it's quite flattering.
Well, quite. The blotchy fake tan, the stupid hairpiece, the flabby and disgusting figure... and then there is the character of the man: an utterly vile human troll with no redeeming vice or virtue, the ignoramuses ignoramus, the traitor´s traitor, the assholes asshole.
The Yanks voted for this piece of shit. The fall of America is happening fast. For the rest of the planet, that day can hardly come soon enough.
"The fall of American can hardly come soon enough" is exactly what they think in the Kremlin. Be careful what you wish for.
"There was some anger.. in Canada.. at Britain’s failure to condemn Trump’s threats against a Commonwealth country. “The king is proud to align himself with a despot for … a dangled trade agreement.". “A bold response from us in Canada would be to cut our ties with the monarchy.”"
The odd thing about Uruguayan viticulture is that the climate should by rights be too warm and humid for the grape varieties they grow there. It’s very different from SW France where Tannat comes from, and vastly different from Albariño homeland in Galicia.
More like South East USA - coastal South Carolina or Georgia. Though not dissimilar to Imereti or Adjara in Western (republic of) Georgia.
The closest viticultural parallel I can think of is another Bordeaux variety, Semillon, famously grown in the very humid Hunter Valley in NSW.
Yes! I did a great wine pairing session with the viticulturist at Pizzorno winery (great Tannat) and he explained exactly that. High humidity, sometimes late terrible frosts, oceanic winds, intense sun in high summer, it can be a struggle. Apparently this restaurant has one of the best cellars in Uruguay so I shall be a demanding customer
I am now cruising past the flamingos and sea lions of the Laguna Garzón listening to Steely Dan’s “Aja” in the mellow sun. This is why I don’t like Mondays
Everyone in pb must buy a house on this coast. Between Punta and Jose ignacio. It might be the most aesthetically pleasing coast in the world - almost every house is done in this same “barefoot Bauhaus” aesthetic - simple clean flat roofed Frank Loyd wright ish lines. All made of raw local granite, dark wood, huge windows, fine steel - gardens of pampas grass, cacti, succulents, which fade imperceptibly into the dunes and then to the crashing sea
I dunno how they’ve imposed this architectural harmony. Is it a law? Luck? Some mad feudal rule? It’s like the most pleasing Cotswold village, but on the seaside in Uruguay and all new and it goes on for mile after mile, gazing at the whales
Every Sunday we can meet and have langoustines for lunch at Huella in Jose
Succeeding by giving Russia exactly what they want. I guess that's why no one else did it for the last 40 years. What a c***.
You know what's really depressing?
Trump behaves like a sh1t because he is a sh1t, and makes no bones about it. What you see is what you get and if you have chosen it (as the American people did), serves you right.
Vance is not a fool, by any means. He also claims, with the zeal of a convert, the great intellectual and moral tradition of Roman Catholic Christianity.
But he still acts like a sh1t in service of a sh1t. And ignores important bits of Catholicism like "taking what the Pope says seriously."
Succeeding by giving Russia exactly what they want. I guess that's why no one else did it for the last 40 years. What a c***.
You know what's really depressing?
Trump behaves like a sh1t because he is a sh1t, and makes no bones about it. What you see is what you get and if you have chosen it (as the American people did), serves you right.
Vance is not a fool, by any means. He also claims, with the zeal of a convert, the great intellectual and moral tradition of Roman Catholic Christianity.
But he still acts like a sh1t in service of a sh1t. And ignores important bits of Catholicism like "taking what the Pope says seriously."
Pope Francis has said in an interview that Ukraine should have what he called the courage of the "white flag" and negotiate an end to the war with Russia that followed Moscow's full-scale invasion two years ago and that has killed tens of thousands.
I know I am going to hate myself for saying this, but I agree with Trump (shudders).
The eyes are terrible.
But then, maybe his are too...
Compared to how the raddled old fucker looks IRL, it's quite flattering.
Well, quite. The blotchy fake tan, the stupid hairpiece, the flabby and disgusting figure... and then there is the character of the man: an utterly vile human troll with no redeeming vice or virtue, the ignoramuses ignoramus, the traitor´s traitor, the assholes asshole.
The Yanks voted for this piece of shit. The fall of America is happening fast. For the rest of the planet, that day can hardly come soon enough.
"The fall of American can hardly come soon enough" is exactly what they think in the Kremlin. Be careful what you wish for.
How did you miss the fact that they're now the best of pals??
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The only possible rationale for sending Vance's wife to Greenland so soon after his incendiary comments is to provoke a reaction from the local population and authorities. The United States is clearly looking to create a casus belli for some form of action.
Succeeding by giving Russia exactly what they want. I guess that's why no one else did it for the last 40 years. What a c***.
You know what's really depressing?
Trump behaves like a sh1t because he is a sh1t, and makes no bones about it. What you see is what you get and if you have chosen it (as the American people did), serves you right.
Vance is not a fool, by any means. He also claims, with the zeal of a convert, the great intellectual and moral tradition of Roman Catholic Christianity.
But he still acts like a sh1t in service of a sh1t. And ignores important bits of Catholicism like "taking what the Pope says seriously."
Pope Francis has said in an interview that Ukraine should have what he called the courage of the "white flag" and negotiate an end to the war with Russia that followed Moscow's full-scale invasion two years ago and that has killed tens of thousands.
No false flag these days for williamglenn, anyway.
Under all the fake salt of the earth Lancashire bullshit, Hoyle seems as vain and self rewarding as his recent predecessors.
The portraits of the Speaker are a tradition that goes back nearly a century and a half, so I would put that part down to the institution rather than the man (and also I would be reluctant to break that kind of tradition as I think they're worthwhile in themselves, so I'm happy to pay my fraction of a penny towards it). The portrait was done in 2023, by the way.
Under all the fake salt of the earth Lancashire bullshit, Hoyle seems as vain and self rewarding as his recent predecessors.
Who is this JuneSlater17 person? She was retweeting Howard Cox earlier.
On this one, according to the Telegraph story she is channelling:
1 - Much of it was planned before his time. 2 - Prime mover, Leader of the House JR Mogg Esq. 3 - The speaker lives in "The Speakers Residence". "The Speakers House" is a far bigger thing of about 25k square feet (my number for the area), which includes functions rooms available for rent and so on. June 17 obfuscates this. Probably not as extreme as the Archbishop's Flat vs Lambeth Palace, but still very different. 4 - When he moved in, the current Speaker stopped greater expenditure on letting him live elsewhere whilst work was being done. 5 - The Telegraph gives no detailed account of the alleged costs they identified, but it does include things like £90k for removal of asbestos, which is hardly scandalous.
Under all the fake salt of the earth Lancashire bullshit, Hoyle seems as vain and self rewarding as his recent predecessors.
Who is this JuneSlater17 person? She was retweeting Howard Cox earlier.
On this one, according to the Telegraph story she is channelling:
1 - Much of it was planned before his time. 2 - Prime mover, Leader of the House JR Mogg Esq. 3 - The speaker lives in "the Speakers Residence". "The Speakers House" is a far bigger thing of about 25k square feet (my number for the area), which includes functions rooms available for rent and so on. June 17 obfuscates this. 4 - When he moved in, the current Speaker stopped greater expenditure on letting him live elsewhere whilst work was being done. 5 - The Telegraph gives no detailed account of the alleged costs they identified, but it does include things like £90k for removal of asbestos, which is hardly scandalous.
Brexiteer and WASPI by the look of it. A quick skim makes it look like she is rather of the "any money not spent on me is a disgraceful waste" tendency.
@danwaterfield So what I’ve learned from adolescence’ reception is that to stop assisted dying we need to make a heartfelt 6 episode series about someone with a disability being pushed to euthanasia by the state.
Along with all the rest of us Witkoft and Tucker think Starmer is a "sheer w*****".
Tucker laughing his c**k off at Starmer's "posturing, posing and too simplistic" army of the willing. Tucker thinks the notion that Putin wants to march through the s***hole that is mainland Europe is laughable, and he's laughing.
New: Trump names his personal lawyer Alina Habba the interim US Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Habba previously represented Trump in the New York civil cases where he was ordered to pay $450m for inflating his net worth and $83m for defaming E Jean Carroll
Comments
Essentially the issue is that pension funds were forced (thanks Gordon!) to buy UK government bonds. These will underpin their cash needs in 20-30 years as they begin to be repaid. However they can’t sell them today without a big write down. So they lend them overnight for cash which they can then redeploy elsewhere.
That’s how confident I am.
The taxi driving in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road is overtaking 100m+ of slow moving traffic to turn right. It's Uttoxeter Road in Derby.
Derbyshire Police declined to prosecute.
No video I'm afraid, since it vanished when she moved from Twitter to Bluesky.
“My daughter goes to one of the schools,” Kate told road.cc. “And there are no route options on quieter streets, or I’d use them!
“This bit of the road is really hairy because there’s a narrow paint cycle lane. Drivers think you should be in it, and think that as long as their wheels (and not their wing mirror) stay outside the paint, all is okay.
“The carriageway narrows as the road bends, effectively pulling drivers closer to the cycle lane. The infrastructure has been designed in a way that encourages loads of drivers to do really hazardous and frightening fast close passes.
“There are frequently vehicles parked in the cycle lane, too,” she continued. “Derby City Council have confirmed in writing that they allow all-day parking on double yellows, including in cycle lanes and on pavements, ‘for loading and unloading’. That gets exciting with poor sight lines and 40mph traffic.”
https://cdn.road.cc/sites/default/files/styles/main_width/public/taxi-driver-close-passes-oncoming-cyclist-while-overtaking-queue-traffic-wrong-lane-credit-kate-ball.png
Safeguarding cash deposits is a different thing, I'd suggest, and should be safeguarded to a £50k or £100k level or you risk systematic collapse when the chips are down.
Honestly our kids and grandkids will read about this time and be shocked that adults existed.
https://x.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1903971737793937551
One of the things that is beginning to concern me now is the role of Powell and Mandelson, and their experience
and conditioning of dealing with the Bush White House, which, awful as it was, did honour slightly more commitments.
From one point of view, their long transatlantic experience has probably been crucial to Starmer exercising an important mediating in between Zelensky and Trump.
On the other hand, and seen from another point of view, these are also people who were apparently very happy for Britain to play a clear butler-poodle role with Bush, leading to an Iraq involvement that was actually very damaging for our interests. If the same New Labour establishment are now beginning to make a decision to come down more clearly on the Trump side, rather than exercising their very considerable diplomatic experience, then we could be looking at Iraq all over again, but multiplied by a factor of a thousand, with democracy actually at stake.
A better way would be to use the £500bn to seed a sovereign wealth fund. A portion of that could be used to invest in infrastructure but it should be commercially returning investments. If the government wishes to subsidise a project it could add additional soft money to those validated by the sovereign fund but that should be an explicit political decision to invest taxpayers money.
Ideally you’d also put future NICs in there automatically so that, over time, a dividend could be paid to the state (and may be even pension funds).
Controversial suggestion. This already exists. It’s called the Crown Estates but could be expanded in size. The key is to make sure that it remains non political.
I know, ridiculous, would never ever happen.
That looks to me to perhaps be more pandering to Russia's interest ... Ukraine has re-established it's grain exports under its own steam by making the Russian navy run away from most of the Black Sea, and using a route in the far west. There's little upside for Ukraine here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq6y3my01ndt
I wonder if the Trump regime will also be applying pressure to Turkey to reopen the route into the Black Sea to warships during the ceasefire? That would be unpredictable. Russia could take ships in, but various countries have ships waiting for the Ukraine navy which are larger than can be delivered via the river route - such as minehunters from the UK.
Arguably it was legalised theft, but between willing participants. Imagine I persuaded you to buy my car (book value £2k) for £10k. I'd be £8k better off, you'd be £8k worse off, but as long as the transaction was freely entered into and I'd been honest and upfront about the car's true condition, then it's neither theft nor fraud, just a classic case of a fool and his money going separate ways. This was exactly the same, just involving rather larger sums of money.
The fact that the underlying asset in this case was a utility should have no bearing on what should happen next.
Perks are ‘rubbish’ and the path to partnership is near-impossible at the City’s ‘millionaire factories’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/24/party-over-for-britain-million-pound-beancounters/ (£££)
Partners at the big accountancy firms are staying on into old age because that's a perk of highly-paid sitting down jobs, so there are few prospects for those lower down. Pull up the tailgate, Jack, I'm all right.
Re-establishing Russian freedom of navigation there would merely aid their continuing war effort.
They only cost about £10, so there's no real downside if it does not work.
As the deposits are in a system overseen and heavily regulated by the state the rest follows in ineluctably.
President claims Sarah Boardman ‘must have lost her talent as she got older’, despite previous artwork of Barack Obama and George W. Bush
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/03/24/trump-accuses-british-artist-sarah-boardman-worst-portrait/ (£££)
‘No, no, they’re quite friendly.’
Such transactions engaged in by the monopoly of an essential public utility cannot be compared to your "freely entered in" deal.
Thames's customers have no choice but to deal with them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3w1jj0jzl2o
If they’re black, fight back, if they’re brown, lie down, if they’re white say good night.
Global Arms Exports - The Trends, Winners & Losers in 2024 & the Outlook for 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snoh2H77Ouw
What also really effs me off is cars parking in cycle lanes on roads.
Market rises in anticipation.
https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1904167134818713636?s=61
Far too many people who ought to know better are still normalising what is happening in the US. I personally see no electoral route to defeating Trump/MAGA.
So no.
Obs. SF. Ref. - "How to Serve Man"
I find I discover the best solutions by sleeping on it - at which point my brain has done it's filing, sorted out the order in which things need to be done and comes up with a simpler solution.
More difficult to fix than the presidential - and less time to arrange it.
Or,,as JNT famously said, has the memory cheated ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Winston_Churchill_(Sutherland)
BREAKING: Judge Boasberg rejects Trump administration call to rescind his restraining order, saying the Venezuelans marked for deportation under the Alien Enemies Act are likely to win — because they are entitled to individual hearings/due process
Art imitates life.....
Imagine
https://youtu.be/m1WmGJuQbbg
https://nuvomagazine.com/daily-edit/why-garzon-uruguay-is-the-worlds-best-under-the-radar-foodie-destination
https://x.com/UshaVanceNews/status/1903841040718500107
'When you last photographed me you made me look so beatiful. What's happened to you?'
He replied 'I'm sorry. I was much younger then'
Then they wonder why retention has collapsed.
https://x.com/juneslater17/status/1903928297555210743?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Under all the fake salt of the earth Lancashire bullshit, Hoyle seems as vain and self rewarding as his recent predecessors.
The business model faces major challenges though. There is simply less growth and margin in most professional services (or financial services) than before the financial crisis. The one exception seems to be law firms: while UK partner profits and employee pay in the big 4 have been almost flat for over a decade the magic circle continue to rake it in and hike up their starting salaries. Until AI bites.
But then, maybe his are too...
More like South East USA - coastal South Carolina or Georgia. Though not dissimilar to Imereti or Adjara in Western (republic of) Georgia.
The closest viticultural parallel I can think of is another Bordeaux variety, Semillon, famously grown in the very humid Hunter Valley in NSW.
Brad Karp’s Email To Paul Weiss About Its Deal With The Trump Administration
Here’s what Paul Weiss chair Brad Karp sent to his colleagues on Sunday afternoon.
https://davidlat.substack.com/p/brad-karp-firmwide-email-to-paul-weiss-about-the-trump-administration-deal
...Only several days ago, our firm faced an existential crisis. The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm. It brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people, and our clients. In particular, it threatened our clients with the loss of their government contracts, and the loss of access to the government, if they continued to use the firm as their lawyers. And in an obvious effort to target all of you as well as the firm, it raised the specter that the government would not hire our employees.
We were hopeful that the legal industry would rally to our side, even though it had not done so in response to executive orders targeting other firms. We had tried to persuade other firms to come out in public support of Covington and Perkins Coie. And we waited for firms to support us in the wake of the President’s executive order targeting Paul, Weiss. Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.
We initially prepared to challenge the executive order in court, and a team of Paul, Weiss attorneys prepared a lawsuit in the finest traditions of the firm. But it became clear that, even if we were successful in initially enjoining the executive order in litigation, it would not solve the fundamental problem, which was that clients perceived our firm as being persona non grata with the Administration. We could prevent the executive order from taking effect, but we couldn’t erase it. Clients had told us that they were not going to be able to stay with us, even though they wanted to. It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the Administration...
“A bold response from us in Canada would be to cut our ties with the monarchy.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/24/canada-donald-trump-north-america-relationship#:~:text=There was some,with the monarchy.”
The Yanks voted for this piece of shit. The fall of America is happening fast. For the rest of the planet, that day can hardly come soon enough.
See his second paragraph.
Steve Witkoff is a great guy doing an incredible job. The people sniping at him are mad that he is succeeding where they failed for 40 years.
Turns out a lot of diplomacy boils down to a simple skill: don’t be an idiot.
https://x.com/JDVance/status/1904160507952529616
I am now cruising past the flamingos and sea lions of the Laguna Garzón listening to Steely Dan’s “Aja” in the mellow sun. This is why I don’t like Mondays
If the Hungarian prime minister wants to go it alone, he’s very welcome to, diplomats say.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-new-unanimity-viktor-orban-hungary-ukraine-diplomats-summit/
https://x.com/RodKahx/status/1903873381713211428
I dunno how they’ve imposed this architectural harmony. Is it a law? Luck? Some mad feudal rule? It’s like the most pleasing Cotswold village, but on the seaside in Uruguay and all new and it goes on for mile after mile, gazing at the whales
Every Sunday we can meet and have langoustines for lunch at Huella in Jose
https://www.theworlds50best.com/discovery/Establishments/Uruguay/José-Ignacio/Parador-La-Huella.html
I had a really great tiramisu with the last of my Albariño
Trump behaves like a sh1t because he is a sh1t, and makes no bones about it. What you see is what you get and if you have chosen it (as the American people did), serves you right.
Vance is not a fool, by any means. He also claims, with the zeal of a convert, the great intellectual and moral tradition of Roman Catholic Christianity.
But he still acts like a sh1t in service of a sh1t. And ignores important bits of Catholicism like "taking what the Pope says seriously."
Ugh. Just ugh.
Pope Francis has said in an interview that Ukraine should have what he called the courage of the "white flag" and negotiate an end to the war with Russia that followed Moscow's full-scale invasion two years ago and that has killed tens of thousands.
In it she says that guys will "fuck a bag of warm pudding between two couch cushions" but she wrote it a year before anybody had heard of Vance...
On this one, according to the Telegraph story she is channelling:
1 - Much of it was planned before his time.
2 - Prime mover, Leader of the House JR Mogg Esq.
3 - The speaker lives in "The Speakers Residence". "The Speakers House" is a far bigger thing of about 25k square feet (my number for the area), which includes functions rooms available for rent and so on. June 17 obfuscates this. Probably not as extreme as the Archbishop's Flat vs Lambeth Palace, but still very different.
4 - When he moved in, the current Speaker stopped greater expenditure on letting him live elsewhere whilst work was being done.
5 - The Telegraph gives no detailed account of the alleged costs they identified, but it does include things like £90k for removal of asbestos, which is hardly scandalous.
I think JuneSlater17 is overegging her pudding. This is her on Tommy Robinson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWv9AsW1ho4
Telegraph story:
https://archive.is/20231027191902/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/27/lindsay-hoyle-oversaw-seven-million-speakers-house-refurb/
https://www.audleyvillages.co.uk/retirement-villages/st-elphins-park
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFqqloLxDQo
https://x.com/danwaterfield/status/1904187809528733895
@danwaterfield
So what I’ve learned from adolescence’ reception is that to stop assisted dying we need to make a heartfelt 6 episode series about someone with a disability being pushed to euthanasia by the state.
Out for a good time
Can't wait to tell you all
What it's like up there
And they called it paradise
I don't know why...
Tucker laughing his c**k off at Starmer's "posturing, posing and too simplistic" army of the willing. Tucker thinks the notion that Putin wants to march through the s***hole that is mainland Europe is laughable, and he's laughing.
https://youtu.be/O6OQbIV5TTs?si=Osy0NOu2wxesxJfC
It seems @williamglenn was right all along.
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/
@hugolowell.bsky.social
New: Trump names his personal lawyer Alina Habba the interim US Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Habba previously represented Trump in the New York civil cases where he was ordered to pay $450m for inflating his net worth and $83m for defaming E Jean Carroll