Thom Scott-Phillips

There are red cards in rugby too and they have the same approach as above: let play go and review at stoppage. I don’t see the harm giving the red card potentially a few minutes after the offence

Generally, football has modelled its approach to tech too much on cricket (which is all discrete moments and matter of fact decisions) and not enough on rugby (which is flowing and with many grey areas)

Rugby has the same challenge and has much the better approach. Let play go, if they score the ref initiates any checks he wants to make. Tech people play the best angles on big screen, ref decides with his on pitch team. No artificial lines, make a visual decision on field

But I think the VAR problems are solvable: follow the rugby example

Ref is always in control, he (and his on field team) chooses whether to use the tech, and they make decisions based on replays shown on big screens. That will catch any glaring mistakes, which is what we care about

I agree many complaints misunderstand the purpose of offside. It’s not to stop goal hanging, it’s to shape the field of play

Did baby boomers eat all the pies? John Lanchester on the truth about the generation gap It’s a grim time to be in your 20s, no doubt, but don’t blame it all on older people: being chopped up into ever smaller rivalries only serves the market

"Hitchhiking has completely gone away... [yet] today people get in strangers’ cars all the time, but the transaction is mediated through a San Francisco-based company with a market value of $150bn. Does that mean things have improved, or got worse?"

www.theguardian.com/inequality/2...

Since citations are often used to measure, many researchers think of them in terms of micro-credit rather than epistemic back-up

Hence it’s common to get reviews saying: you haven’t cited these papers, with no accompanying explanation of why these papers would change or improve the argumentation

Are we falling out of love with nonfiction? In the early 2020s, readers flocked to books to explain political turbulence. But is the world now too grim to read about – and are podcasters taking the place of authors?

my view on this is that publishers should stop it with the 80k wordcount obsession, so many contemporary non-fic books are obviously 40-50k pieces of work stretched to the extent that they become very boring to read - just let people write cheaper, shorter books! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

Evolang people:

"Protolanguage" fell out of a favour at some point in the past 15 or so years; seems to me that far fewer people use it now than before. Why do you think this was? And is the term useful?

Many academic papers are best read as funding’s way of creating new funding

Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”

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They missed a chance to echo the famous joke about who Sun readers want to run the country

Anyway, my go to football podcasts are Libero and Stadio and I am happy with these descriptions!

I think Stephen’s point is that “pro Farage but willing to switch to Starmer if he apes Reform’s language” is not a real person

Not only would this be better in terms of representation, it would also provide a good avenue for using the strategic resource of UK citizens abroad

Your point is reflected in the fact that there is no dedicated constituency for overseas voters. The MP where you last lived in the UK is not the right person to be representing overseas voters.

There should be a handful of MPs whose constituency is UK citizens in a particular part of the world

There has always been a centre-right bloc within the LDs. Indeed it was when that bloc had the leadership that the LDs became part of govt (2010-15). The modal LD member is centre-left on economics, but not all are

LDs are social liberals first and foremost. This is not the same as Green leftism

It’s true. If your papers get accepted and your career progresses, you will come to sincerely believe in the methods used. Only a minority of people will allow theory and argument to trump this experience

I've been experimenting a bit with chatGPT. There is huge and growing gap between its performance on:
- established topics where there is consensus and lots written
- topics that are contested or original

I know that, given how the tech works, this gap is expected. But still, its size is remarkable

Was ever thus, wasn’t it?

(Farage sometimes speaks with an economically left vibe, but that’s because he’s a skilled communicator who knows his audience. Underneath that the actual agenda was always ersatz Thatcher plus borders, no?)

“Live in the age of”? There have been gurus throughout history. Indeed, this paper was partly motivated by the anthropological observation that gurus are a robust cross cultural phenomenon. Influencers are just a modern variant

I agree

I just think if you’re 20-something, facing current job and housing markets, and being asked, do you want to sign onto this claim, it’s fair enough that the answer is yes

It would be tragic indeed

I just think the blame for this lies w govts, not students approached by law firms saying, “sign here and if we win you get £5k”

Afaik law firms are approaching students on a no win no fee basis

bsky.app/profile/did:...

There remains a lot of ambiguity and confusion over what sort of institutions govt wants unis to be. These sort of situations are downstream of that. I’m very disappointed Labour don’t seem to have it as a priority to provide some clarity

I assume if unis had openly and pro actively offered that option that would change the legal situation now

Presumably they didn’t do this because they feared the income loss

Fair point, but I think this is where the shop metaphor breaks down. There was no way to leave and go find somewhere serving steak

To be clear, I don’t like commodification of uni either. But equally I don’t blame students for approaching it the way govts have encouraged them to

The students ordered steak pie and paid for it in advance, and then events intervened such that no steak was available. The cooks did all they could but ultimately only had chicken, which costs less and isn’t as tasty

What can I say? My feelings are that I have empathy for both the faculty and the students, and I don't feel any contradiction about that