Simon Parker

She's the moment for sure. Just ask this London bobbie from the 1950s what he thinks of that saucy lump of toxic gases.

I think this is fine but if you're hoping for cognitive diversity there's a high chance the fast stream will beat it out of people. The key to shifting culture is having lower SEB people come into the system in much larger numbers, and also at higher levels.

Bevan, incidentally, was an absolute pain in the arse who used his remarkable verbal facility to insult his colleagues and rouse rabbles. We should stop portraying him as a holy innocent just because we love the NHS. I blame Michael Foot.

The 1945 Labour government was much more interested in introducing political control of the economy than it was in public services. The NHS only became its signature achievement once 'physical controls' gave way to Keynesian demand management.

I'm trying to think of irritating history takes to share. Think I've got one. The NHS in its current form was a mistake. It is only centralised because the doctors refused to work for local government. Bevan came to regret this, and so should we.

My favourite counterfactual history is the 60s but no Vietnam. The US might have become a very different place.

The thing that would make it a no-brainer for me is e-books. I know Amazon does a Kindle that takes notes, but it sounds more like a big e-reader than a functioning tablet.

I would also be interested in this.

Now pondering the question: what if Philby hadn't run? Obviously complicated by the fact that MI6 probably wanted him to go.

In Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma the title character is comatose from the mid-80s to mid-90s. A key difference she notices is that the food got a lot better.

No. It does not.

Ooh I love Orkney. We spent two very long holidays on South Ronaldsay during the pandemic. It was a real haven. Can't imagine how you're doing without a car though?

Entirely possible this is just coincidence. Yarvin doesn't have a monopoly on the Meiji. But equally possible this is another example of the remarkable transmission of far right nuttery into mainstream politics.

An English Meiji: sketch of a royal coup "Under the rule of mere habitual obedience, revolution is just a coordination problem."

Discovered Neil O'Brien wanging on about the Meiji restoration. It seemed familiar as an idea... because I'd read it before on Curtis Yarvin's blog.

graymirror.substack.com/p/an-english...

I'm going to agree just because this is such a fun idea... but I'm willing to bet that the state knew who the sixth or seventh man was and covered it up (as they tried with Blunt).

Britain is not a broken society The country has serious problems but the right’s vision of it has become hysterical

Exactly. Britain isn't plunging towards disaster. The only reason it might is if we believe ridiculous grifters saying that it is. www.ft.com/content/c34f...

Bit French.

Age verification for my Bsky messages?

Seriously?

Real age verification has never been tried.

It's such a predictable outcome that the civil service must already have considered it. VPNs have lots of legitimate uses and I'm struggling to imagine how you'd let businesses use them but ban households. Are we going to license them?

I'm not asking for a debate on the rights and wrongs of gender politics or covid/BLM btw - it's specifically about whether those are the most credible reasons for vaccine hesitancy.

I'm struggling with correlation/causality here. For instance we know that black communities were the most vaccine hesitant in the UK during covid. I am unclear why - of all the possible reasons for this - we think the black population might be particularly sensitive to trans issues?

Rawls in the Streets, Nietzsche in the Sheets.

Or at the very least confronted it. People should *never* speak a language other than English to one another, including (perhaps especially?) foreigners.

And don't get me started on the Lidl I once visited in Morpeth.

I went into Sainsburys in Rhyl. Three staff were speaking another language to each other.

I loudly enunciated 'my good fellows, what is this revolting foreign babble?'

They responded 'English' in what I realised was a Welsh accent, and asked me to leave.

We must confront this. I have photos.

The graph that shows Manchester's economy is taking off for real Our economics analyst James Gilmour has some good news

Really important piece on Greater Manchester. Basically, it worked. The city's productivity is rising. Pinning down exactly why is hard, but given the whole thrust of GM's economic policy for nearly decades has been about devolution... manchestermill.co.uk/andrew-mcphi...

Subnational governments account for nearly 40% of public investment and more than a quarter of public spending across OECD countries. They are critical actors in delivering public services and addressing long-term structural challenges, including ageing, climate adaptation.
cepr.org/voxeu/column...

Network effects exist precisely because there is a lot of value in having lots of buyers and sellers on the same platform. Enshittification simply describes how those platforms evolve to become a form of monopoly, and thereby extract rent.

Twitter is an interesting case study because I think Dorsey didn't really want to enshittify the platform. Musk seems to have done so enthusiastically, if not profitably.