Another parable of UK industry – politicalbetting.com
Another parable of UK industry – politicalbetting.com
Recall the GLP1 obesity drugs which are generating tens of billions every year ?Meet the British scientists who was one of those who first elucidated the biochemistry underlying them.
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What an interesting header. Thank you, @Nigelb
If you are pro cash then you are pro wanting children to get hurt.
Decline of cash credited for drop in NHS surgery for children swallowing objects
Figures reveal 29% fall in operations in England to remove foreign bodies from children’s airways, noses and throats
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/28/decline-of-cash-credited-for-drop-in-nhs-surgery-for-children-swallowing-objects
Boom time for immigration lawyers as US and UK tighten restrictions
Legal firms on both sides of the Atlantic told the Financial Times that their practices were overwhelmed with enquiries after Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hardened policies https://on.ft.com/3KH6ELP
The whole system probably goes down with stock and food unavailable inside 48-72 hours with any major disruption. Leading to civil disorder.
There's no resilience since no-one grows, stores or cooks anything anymore. So we'd go hungry very quickly.
That's only local distribution and vans for the last 5-10 miles. The trouble is sourcing and managing all the stock and then achieving JITD to all the distribution centres.
I am at a loss to understand what Microsoft were thinking with this update. The computers I have tried with it on just don't work very well. Slow, badly laid out and not pleasant to look at.
If they're trying to Ratner their brand they're doing a very good job, but it seems stupid.
RefUK 27% (=)
LAB 20% (=)
CON 17% (=)
LDEM 16% (-1)
GRN 13% (+1)
https://x.com/MaxKendix/status/1977974187508600955
This is the problem in Britain, America, India, perhaps everywhere. People are following the rules, the unwritten social contract, that you go to school, study hard and behave well, go off to university and then get a graduate job. But increasingly, in whichever country, the graduate jobs are not there, owing variously to automation or recession or just wait-and-see.
And in a few months time, she will be shipped back to India and someone else will serve me fish and chips.
What wouldn’t work are local card payments and the stock control system, which would see the place empty in a couple of days.
In that scenario, you want to have cash.
Their home delivery servers *should* have at two different internet suppliers plus Starlink in the data centre, but getting the order data to the warehouses and then the delivery drivers could prove more problematic.
Supermarkets and department stores really should look at Starlink backups at retail and warehouse locations, that’s the sort of thing their IT teams will be working through as a result of yesterday’s outage.
Partly it's a problem of Permanews. In Ye Olden Times, 1980 say, most of us would never have even heard that there was a problem until it had been solved. Now, we expect instant continuous updates.
I’m back from a preview showing last night of “Mr Nobody Against Putin”, a fantastic documentary about the descent of Russia ever deeper into fascism and militarism. It was made by someone working at a school in a small and relatively remote Russian town, and he captured how all these instructions came from Moscow that the children must sing patriotic songs and be taught from a script about the evils of Ukraine and the West. Meanwhile, the school kids’ brothers are being conscripted, the school leavers face conscription. It’s a very personal film, a very touching film. They had to spirit the filmmaker out of Russia before they could release the film and he’s now been given asylum in Europe.
I say a preview, but we weren’t watching it very early, as the film is now up on iPlayer, as of this morning. It’s also broadcast on BBC4 this evening.
When they launched W10, the idea was that it would be basically the last Windows O/S, with everything afterwards just being updates.
W11 added little new apart from adverts, telemetry, and forcing Microsoft Account on everyone. It’s purely a commercial decision to get rid of W10, at the cost of hundreds of millions of computers.
W10 was still sold regularly only three years ago, this is the sort of thing that antitrust regulators should be all over.
But agreed, a systematic malware attack on the big 4’s supply chain / payment systems would be a national emergency. Hopefully they are better protected than M&S and JLR.
I would also roll out a strategic nutrition reserve. Public education to store long shelf life goods at home, and outsource the management of the rest to the supermarkets under government contract. Ideally we should get to a place where we could survive the embargo of food for 12-24 months. Quite a cheap insurance policy in the grand scheme of things.
You’re not their customer for OEM sales of W11 Home.
I had no idea the first ship with Flettner rotors was made 100 years ago.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dqznvxylqo
Teacher struck off after she had 'conversations about orgasms and sex toys' with pupils
Ms Kathryn Matthews has been banned from teaching
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/teacher-struck-after-conversations-orgasms-32670419.amp
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj076ynnlpgo
Stress doesn't imply guilt.
Say you're an innocent being framed for a crime and you're facing 10 years behind bars you're going to get stressed.
Although is it apocryphal?
On Starmer it doesn’t matter particularly - it was a slightly awkward moment, which is why I focused on Meloni’s reaction (it feels a bit mean to laugh at someone having an awkward moment).
But if you want to be philosophical about it, Starmer behaved as if he was subservient to Trump. The British PM is not subservient to anyone (except the Monarch). Yes the US is much more powerful than us, but Starmer behaved in a manner unbecoming of his station.
He should have nodded and stayed in place rather than raised his hand and stepped forward.
But it will be forgotten by about 8.37 this morning
My highest university mark was for an essay explaining why polygraphs are literally worthless as lie detectors.
A calm liar looks innocent. A stressed innocent person looks guilty. The 'correct' rate of detection is the same as tossing a coin.
There are relatively small changes that could be made to encourage the biotech ecosystem in the UK, principally around strengthening the capital markets.
But at least we can be confident that Apple will fix it in the next couple of months.
https://x.com/neogoose_btw/status/1968757466570621251
(I have managed generally to avoid having Windows at work by working in tech firms with a sufficiently large population of militant Linux users to require IT to permit it.)
Yes, they make some baffling business decisions. But don't underestimate the complexity of what they do, even with standards.
She couldn’t find a role in her field. At best the next person with a degree in her field will be luckier?
I'll get my coat...
Why not just post it for all to read 🤷♂️
The purpose of a computer company isn't to make computers, it is to make profits.
Nothing shameful about that. It's how capitalism works, it generally generates good things as byproducts and if you knows of a better hole, go to it.
Which kind of links to the header. A deal that is not optimal for the nation (and there have been many of those over the years) but probably fits the risk-reward calculations of the scientists, university and buyer pretty well. I'm not sure if one can change that, or even if one should, really.
Anyone serving webpages as a download for storage needs to be put against a wall and shot.
But innovation isn’t enough. Going from innovation to market is hard. Innovators may look to larger markets (US, EU), particularly in areas where regulation is complex (which it needs to be in pharma).
Low-orbit satellite broadband is a game-changer for applications such as backup connections for critical infrastructure and large businesses. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to stick a dish on the roof, than to get a second fibre internet connection that doesn’t have a potential single point of failure with the primary.
The drug from Cambridge Antibody which I briefly mentioned in the header - Humira - came to market two decades ago.
The UK was again a pioneer of the monoclonal antibody technology behind it, and its practical development for medical use (with several Nobel prize winners in the field). Very little of the massive revenues generated ended up in the UK.
So nothing has changed in the last twenty years. Except that our Pharma industry has slipped down the world rankings.
We don't have anything like the kind of risk capital that's freely available in the US, that bridges the very large gap between a piece of brilliant science that might have big commercial value, and a multinational company commercialising it. The size of our domestic market compared to the US (or China, or the EU) also comes into it.
There's a couple of possible options. One is to be part of that bigger market (the EU), but that would also require the EU to be more dynamic. The other is to be something more like S Korea, Where government supports key sectors (not so much picking winners, as backing them to keep winning). At present, I think most UK government support to business goes to small businesses, and the return on that is not great, as it's more untargeted subsidy (eg small business rates relief) than risk capital..
Which has to be better for you than the farmed Scottish muck. May as well eat a bag of random chemicals.
New public company listings in London have also cratered.
In 2005, there were 190 IPOs on the London stock exchange; last year there were 19.
And a rum do, indeed
The UK market is simply too small to create the scale needed to compete on a global basis. The European single market was of course an attempt to counter that closer to home, but even then in many areas differences in language or other standards mean scalability is difficult.
Surely we all learned during the pandemic that keeping a cupboard full of canned food and a few extra rolls of toilet paper was a good idea, as things can get pretty crazy very quickly?
It's a risk appetite issue.
Then you give up, buy a Mac and never look back. And I write this as someone who was very negative about Apple for a long time.
👍🍾
So they combine it with their fibre connection - I’m ordinary operation they prioritise low latency, so nearly everything goes via fibre. If the land system goes out, barely miss a beat.
As for the data transfer issue, if you can go to a friend’s home and use their WiFi or go to a nearby Apple Store you can do the transfer there.
And Good Morning one and all!
Determine how many migrants we think is sustainable per month and create that many spaces, plus or minus some range.
Where there are more than that many qualifying applications, have agreed tie-break criteria. Highest salary, for example.
It could be sub-divided into sectors, e.g. university places, work visas etc.
Needs more thought. But the principle is that stable, sustainable migration levels are better for society than volatile and sometimes very high levels of migration.
My own experience is that intelligent but non-nerdy and busy friends were quite startled when I checked round them last week - one only just managed to get the free one year update.
I can't help wondering if this is going to be a major scandal from the point of view of IT security.
Anyway, have finished going through all our own computers for scrapping or updating or returning to work. Off to the shop this week to get my new desktop (the old one having done eight years and the monitor about 15 so not too upset). Which has reminded me of my Microsoft Surface Book PC (type 1) bought a decade ago. Because of my frustration when the battery failed in 2-3 years. Meh, except that the battery is glued in. Not user replaceable, without a very high risk of breaking the screen, motherboard and/or battery. Nowhere in Edinburgh would touch it. So an excellent bit of kit became so much junk. And I can't get the hard drive out of it either, for percussive memory erasure (aka my hammer). So I need to take it to the shop for the drive to be nuked and then scrapped (probably just making the rubble bounce, as Win 10 does have some sort of an erasure facility, which I used, but just to be sure ...).
Rather like the Northern Rock crisis showed our dependence on a viable banking system and the inherent risk to both economic and social order from a failure of that system, yesterday's Vodafone outage showed how dependent we are on Broadband and mobile phone coverage.
The confusion of when what you expect and rely on isn't there is at the heart of this - even something as obvious as a tube strike or engineering works confuses those who walk up in ignorance to the station and expect a train service to be running.
Perhaps because I'm of that generation whose formative experience was power cuts, three day weeks and frequent strikes, I react differently to younger souls who have become used to it all always being there.
Resilience isn't just an infrastructural concept - it's also personal. I try to have plans for all kinds of scenarios such asd what would I do if I locked myself out of Stodge Towers accidentally?
Contrary to some, my experience of the pandemic was the resilience provided by our network of corner shops here in East Ham who never ran out of anything and rarely closed. The supermarket panics were largely a function of the disruption of the JIT system and we've seen it at other times when a particular product is either short in supply or long in demand.
The other side is adaptability and ingenuity - one might argue the strength of a dynamic capitalist economy. The pandemic saw some firms redirect their business - we sourced meat, vegetables and milk (among other things) from companies who normally supplied restaurants and cafes but they switched to providing a service for domestic customers.
MY experience of this in the working environment was dealing with the Emergency Planning function at a local council - copies of all their protocols and procedures were on paper in fireproof safes for dealing with contingencies from plane crashes to nuclear war. The pandemic response illustrated some failings but mostly, I thought, local Government did very well co-ordinating with the NHS, Police and other groups via a Resilience Forum which had been set up to deal with civil contingencies.
“On Monday afternoon, for a short time, the Vodafone network had an issue affecting broadband, 4G and 5G services. This was triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of our vendor partners which has now been resolved, and the network has fully recovered. We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers.”
You should read Salmon Wars
A massive fcukup from their IT department, pleased I’m not their CIO this morning.
https://x.com/bushidotoken/status/1977750768611422528
https://x.com/cloudflareradar/status/1977750171199918572
Networks around the world need to talk to each other in order to do peering and determine which routes are the best ones for them to send their data, which is what BGP facilitates. The BGP is normally one of those things that works seamlessly in the background, but problems can occur due to issues such as a misconfiguration by a network provider, traffic hijacking and the failure of critical systems within an ISP.
We don’t currently know exactly what caused Vodafone to unpublish their routes from the BGP, although the operator did confirm to some other news media that it wasn’t related to a cyberattack. The most likely explanation seems to be a misconfiguration of some sort, but we’re speculating.
Vodafone don’t only provide consumer and normal business connectivity, they also have a wholesale / Ethernet side, and this is why some other ISPs reported disruption at the same time (interconnectivity was disrupted too).
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/10/vodafone-uk-suffering-major-outage-of-data-connectivity.html
Which amounts effectively to a tax on pensions - and UK growth prospects.
If you said “won’t take a job at the salary offered” or “won’t move to a rural GP practice” then that’s something practical.
If there are jobs available and there are people who want to do the jobs then where does the “can’t” come from?
Part of it is longevity matching, part of it regulation, a lot of it is deskilling (equity investors have found it very tough over the last 15 years so the senior guys aren’t really equity investors), part of it is international diversification etc
Intderesting if depressing study by Aviva on flood risk, with some surprises - e.g. East Bournemouth becoming a major future concern thanks to surface water runoff (it's not just high tides and engorged rivers). The linked report on the impact on Tenbury Wells is also interesting (and sad).
https://www.wired.com/story/satellites-are-leaking-the-worlds-secrets-calls-texts-military-and-corporate-data/