And breathe – politicalbetting.com
And breathe – politicalbetting.com
Billy Big Balls blinks first, @realDonaldTrump gives it large until he gets it back in spades. pic.twitter.com/qFdkYHHTPB
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Billy Big Balls blinks first, @realDonaldTrump gives it large until he gets it back in spades. pic.twitter.com/qFdkYHHTPB
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Like a Trump reverse ferret.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r4957rq8ro
Just what the world of cricket needs.
Another T20 league.
This time Europe.
https://x.com/espncricinfo/status/2013800315985056124?s=61
COLLINS: Does it include the US having ownership of Greenland?
TRUMP: It's a long term deal. It's the ultimate long term deal
COLLINS: How long is it?
TRUMP: Infinite. There is no time limit. It's a deal that's forever.
Is it possible the 'deal' he was offered was the US can put as many bases as they want in Greenland and fuck all else?
Not that either of them is especially good news for the rest of us, and not that either of them allows us to treat Americans as reliable allies, but it would be useful to know which model they are following.
The ayatollahs are surely sowing the wind.
It’s his strategy.
It’s even in his book.
https://www.ft.com/content/349f7538-0cd1-4e98-a410-70fe94a4950b
He was talking bollocks to the brave people of Tehran.
And the correct response is to acquiesce. Right. This is the thing - he's been crass and aggressive before, sure, and bluffed and bullied, and because the USA is so powerful and the relationship worthwhile countries look the other way and move on.
This time he militarily threatened NATO allies, that is so far over the line. He's now said he won't do that, I guess, and very desperate people will say it was crude but ok because he never really meant it, but the very threat is such a deal breaker.
We very clearly saw that the vast majority of his political minions were going to go along with military action if he required it too, so the fact it did not happen does not excuse ignoring it by thinking it could never happen. Indeed. A confected outrage and necessity which he will now protray as a great achievement which required him to threaten invasion (and yes, very deliberately 'not ruling out' such an action is the same as threatening it), thus proving what a genius negotiator he is.
See it in the Telegraph soon.
But every piece if evidence we have is that if you push back, Trump sometimes caves.
If you kowtow, he just pushes further.
You're more of a businessman than I am. If you see a potential trading partner going though these occasional meltdowns, you're going to look pretty hard for someone less flaky to trade with- aren't you?
Bad news for America, Inc. Good news for any insider traders.
https://www.ft.com/content/73c80adc-776a-4738-950a-9c08ef08d759?accessToken=zwAAAZviUBwjkc9zyArcd2pHONOVCpwI7wjXWQ.MEQCIFTHKRdgVPvGOxDYQcYn9LUqGAnq656oZCnQ2FWJ-rvAAiAV3DEUN5MGJgOCO-avW3RdDdMhVINIb9VVe5hUNEa8dA&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareType=enterprise&shareId=f1e1d498-236a-465e-85e5-4df3034549a3
Seems to be the only thing he respects.
Speaker Mike Johnson, 2nd in line of succession to the presidency and blushing furiously from shame, claims to not know about Trump inviting Putin to his "Board of Peace." Either he's lying or incompetent.
https://x.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2014030723838091532
Doesn't even have the excuse of being senile.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/2026-will-see-canada-slash-immigration-targets-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-year-ahead/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMPe_e-WRMk
As I said in the previous thread. He is so volatile you don’t know what is going to happen next. You need reliable partners on both side.
@RadioFreeTom
·
50m
I will almost guarantee that there is no deal or framework for a deal; this is a walk-back. Congress should never have let it get this far, and the damage and humiliation can't be undone, but this is a good outcome (so far).
https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/2014065234206437872
I wonder if a factor is in this question: How many American young men's deaths would their mothers, and all the other mothers including Trump voters, think a reasonable sacrifice for the cowardly conquest of a peaceful and defenceless friendly ally and neighbour.
A number not unadjacent to Zero?
The idea Johnson has shame about it though is optimistic.
They've given him an allotment, haven't they?
Harry Enten: “Wanna know how poorly Trump buying Greenland polls? Worse than the Epstein files. Seriously, Trump's net approval rating on any attempt to buy Greenland (-40 pts) is lower than his net approval on the Epstein files (-38 pts). Greenland is arguably Trump's worst polling issue.”
https://bsky.app/profile/joncooper-us.bsky.social/post/3mcxj4lcjzc26
This is not 12D chess. A madman just went crazy and because he's a big cheese he was humoured by the World.
Doing the second requires almost superhuman quantities of sangfoid, as well as the wisdom to choose correctly between the two paths.
(It's why it's a good thing that nobody went full-on Love, Actually on the Donald, however cathartic it would have been for all of us.)
It is very much backed by them and childrens mental health charities
And there’s no other options to investigate and try first?
I suspect it's a bit like lockdowns. Great for some and a nightmare of loneliness for others.
If parents are OK with their kids having social media, with restrictions they determine, then that should be allowed.
Any state regulations are far less likely to work than parental ones and will be easily by-passed, just like the VPN farce.
Let parents be the parents, not the government.
Wrong footing government and showing you are leading on the popular agenda from opposition, and actually achieving things… by doing away with investigations and any consideration of inherent vice, without bothering with pilots schemes, without observing what happens in Australia as time passes, just diving straight in based on seeing something on morning television and told is hugely popular in voodoo polls, is exactly THE WRONG WAY to show you are ready again for power.
Do you see my point?
The problems caused in society by social media are as much about over 16s as under 16s. But I'm pretty sure that nobody would dare interfere with an adult Englishman's God-given right to doomscroll through a load of nonsense made up by evil robots that is sending them gradually mad.
Just leaving that idea out there for the USA..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz0pnekxpn8o?app-referrer=deep-link
The malign influence social media has on children can't be overstated. The simplest and best measure is to get rid. The idea that social media networks don't already know the age of everyone on their platform even without verification is ridiculous and they use that information to serve awful negative spiral content to children and teenagers to keep them scrolling and monetised with ad clicks.
Child suicide, child anxiety, adhd and many other preventable behavioural disorders are all linked to social media usage and even children who are merely social media adjacent (a kid with a parent that is a heavy user or had an older sibling that is a heavy user despite not having any accounts themselves) also see adverse outcomes.
Call it illiberal but I don't see any solutions coming from anywhere else. I'd ban tiktok, YouTube shorts, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat for under 16s overnight. The damage these big tech companies are doing to kids is irreparable and we need to act now.
In a decade the narrative will be shocked that we ever allowed kids to have unrestricted access to social media for so long.
Social media is this generation's smoking and it needs to be banned just the same as smoking was for children and properly policed.
We (me, wife, three kids 16-11) are hoping to go from Manchester to Austria for a summer holiday. Would you:
- overnight ferry from Hull to Rotterdam then drive with overnight stop in Germany (probably cheapest,can pack as much stuff as we want, but would take up two days travelling there and two days travelling back. If si, where would you stay?
- fly then hire a car (surprisingly expenaive even with Easyjet but only two and a half hours to our destination from Munich)
- train to Brussels then Brussels-Salzburg sleeper (I'd always wanted to travel that way but some reports are discouraging)
- something else?
A lot of this is being pushed by people who object to social media altogether, but the genie is out of the bottle and kids are going to grow up and enter a world with social media whether you like it or not.
The only question is whether they enter it with parental regulations and support, or via circumventing the regulations or without any phasing in.
So where some children will have better quality of life, better quality education and self learning, other children will be deprived this, so I liken it to those parents who banned Rock n Roll in the house, believing they were doing good. Banning Rock n Roll was actual bizarre, bad parenting.
And the real kicker here is the actual problem - predatory and addictive algorithms - problem applies to everyone, all ages, not just children. Where is the actual policy needed?
It's actually not very difficult to implement, you put it on the social media companies. £100k fine per under 16 that is allowed an account. The social media companies have the data already and for edge cases they can use the same ID matching services as banks do.
I just don't think you really understand how little parents can do against the combined weight of $5tn of market capitalisation. Parents have a water pistol but the whole house is on fire.
It was fantastic and the kids loved it
And the added advantage of a boot full of gear
Andrew Neil
@afneil
The usual Trump sycophants and know-nothings are all piling in claiming he’s a genius, this is the art of the deal in action, he played hardball to get a better Greenland deal than was otherwise available. It’s all nonsense.
In fact, it’s TACO in action, a Trump surrender, a victory for European NATO for refusing to be cowed/bludgeoned.
You will find there is nothing in the framework agreement re Greenland/Arctic region that hasn’t been available to USA/Trump for weeks, months, years.
https://x.com/afneil/status/2014082458573066329
Smoking and communication are not the same thing whatsoever.
There are things where society has concluded "you know, it's probably not that good for us, but it's not the end of the world and we'll accept that we can't stop them for everyone." Alcohol is in that category, and tobacco has historically been as well. (Rishi's law to gradually increase the age when you could buy cigarettes died with the election, but was resurrected by the Starmer government and is currently pootling around the Lords.)
Is social media only a bit harmful like that, or is it more like classified drugs; so harmful that we shouldn't let adults near them either? I think I'm inclined to the latter. In part because the engineering that has gone into them is so ruthless and precise. And I would love to know what those tech megabrains were thinking of getting involved. It's a job, sure, and the instructions to be evil came from above. But "I was only obeying orders" doesn't particularly wash.
One of my children and his wife is in a constant battle with their children over the time on line and also their peer pressure to keep in 24/7 touch including often overnight
The Rhine and Mosel have lots of pretty small towns, and if the kids are interested in cars the Nurburgring is a brilliant stopover, as a spectator. Those German petrol heads don't mess around.
But even without it the great victory will be claimed.
We did the NightJet from Vienna to Amsterdam in November the new trains are great and rather comfortable (i.e. I slept through the night).
But then I thought. Well it's a behaviour. And it's a stretch to describe it as ordered.
So I didn't.
What this legislation needs paired with is an extensive and high-quality public information campaign making it clear what is supposed to be normal and appropriate behaviour. That seems seriously lacking at the moment for some reason - particularly changes to things like the Highway Code. There's more to governance than passing laws.
Being on YouTube 24/7 or messaging using What's App. They aren't social media.
I doubt many parents will be looking at their own habits either.
It's do as I say not as I do.
You'd be surprised at how much "advancement" in social media algorithms is driven by a clever data scientist wanting to solve the problem they've been handed. They don't really see the context, it's just some OKR like "increase the number of scrolls/swipes by 10% YoY" and then they deploy whatever strategies they can to achieve it. It's never framed as "make sure kids spend an extra 30 minutes per day scrolling" for the reason you touch on, they'd probably say no.
I turned down a job with Meta a couple of years ago because I have them in the same category as tobacco companies, and similarly they pay a premium. They offered me $550k for a director role so it was tempting but ultimately being able to sleep at night was more important.
@nytimes.com
, Trump's U-turn followed a NATO meeting where top military officers discussed a compromise in which Denmark would give the US sovereignty over small pockets of Greenlandic to build military bases, similar to the British scheme in Cyprus.
Any food, or dieting, can be harmful to excess.
Exercise can be harmful if taken to excess.
Communication is not automatically harmful. It can be very beneficial and is linked, in moderation, to lower stress and lower mental health problems.
Yes, some people get harms from social media. A great many people do not, and get a great deal in benefit from it too.
Education, not elimination, is needed.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-time-does-not-increase-teenagers-mental-health-problems-study?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Then there is the liberalism argument. There's lots of harmful things we permit adults to do. That argument is a lot weaker for children, where the government bans all manner of things until they are an adult (or close).
What we should do is starting taxing social media, of the sort that is highly addictive, like we do alcohol or tobacco. And make the harm being addicted to them well known. Like alcohol, use in moderation if at all.
If it is too hard to define what social media is, then simply write a list of apps into law and update as needed.
There is a big problem here, as MaxPB eloquently describes, but pinning it down is really difficult. I do think the Australians have got the balance just about right (you're allowed simple messaging like whatsapp) but I can understand why people have reservations.
My daughter has a phone with restrictions, including the restriction that I can see what apps she is using, that to install an app requires my consent (and we have consented to TikTok which she uses on rules my wife set). I can see how long she has spent on each app and set restrictions of time limits and time eg overnight or school hours where the device is locked.
Poor behaviour can result in the device being locked as a punishment too.