Marianne Heaslip

Yeah, sure, new books are great, but do you ever read old books? Have you ever read 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O’Brien?

Yeah, sure, new books are great, but do you ever read old books?

Have you ever read 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O’Brien?

It's a brilliantly absurd story of a village police force and a brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle.

drbslibrary.com/thirdpoliceman

Back-to-back win hopes for Workington Finches after fundraiser Workington Finches have had to raise money for travel and accommodation to the cup final on Saturday.

Yeah, in West Cumbria the clubs aren't posh either - this is my home club, where I played as a kid (as did Mark Cueto, briefly): www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

As an aside, this mindset is often described as "lean" because you skip the "waste" of low fidelity work.

Buddy, no. Low fidelity is not the waste. Work in low fidelity is what prevents the high detail work from being waste. Lean is when cheap-as-free sketches are all you need to avoid that waste.

Glorious!

They also don't seem to get that though a lot of these people live in cities, many have parents in the small towns they came from.

Shouldn't assume the parents are bigots - they don't tend to hate their mixed race grandkids, or the husbands of their sons.

It's not the 90s anymore.

It's time to act Ask your MP to help change the law today.

🚨 The House of Lords have STILL not passed abortion decriminalisation AND many are trying to repeal telemedicine that allows patients to end a pregnancy at home in peace and privacy. Please use this BPAS link to email, I promise it takes seconds!

Please share 🙏 bpas-campaigns.org/time-to-act/...

(Latter was forced to resign from the tax office when she got married - cause the civil service at the time didn't employ married women).

My grandmothers both worked too, equally mixed : one as a seamstress in a kids clothes factory and then her own business she set up with a friend after she got laid off, the other in the tax office and then as a bookkeeper for a local lemonade company.

One was a crane driver at a steel foundry (which was shut down by Thatcher), then a painter at a bus/train factory.

The other was an English teacher (also taught evening classes in maths to miners), then headteacher, then trades union official and Labour county councillor.

Gas prices jumped again this morning and are on track to double - a stark reminder of our exposure to fossil fuel volatility.

The real solution isn’t more drilling, but moving away from combustion: electrify, use renewable power, and boost energy efficiency.

Musk’s fossil data centres are undoing Tesla’s climate benefit I know you already know the data centres built to power the generative AI software running on X are intensely harmful and wildly polluting, often in breach of rules and regulations. You may not kno…

It's a simple way of putting it, but I hope the fact that one group of data centres powering one shitty, evil chatbot for one crappy little social media site undoing most or all of Tesla's entire global climate benefits puts in perspective how WILDLY bloated genAI is as software

10 Years After Berta Cáceres’ Murder, Why Is Honduras Still So Dangerous for Environmental Activists? Despite some prosecutions, the criminal masterminds behind the Indigenous leader's murder remain at large, while illegal land grabs, international finance and attacks against defenders continues with ...

By me: Today marks 10 years since the assassination of Indigenous environmentalist Berta Cáceres, a rare leader whose death marked a before and after for many including me. Despite some justice, the extractive economic model and its criminal modus operandi continues apace.

drilled.media/news/berta

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.

This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.

Please spread the word.

🧵 1/4

Same here.

And it definitely didn't help when we weren't allowed to play outside in the rain at infants school in the weeks after Chernobyl happened.

And I'm in that % of the population with no driveway, but also have no car - and no desire to have one. Would just be an expensive waste, whether EV or ICE.

I live just off a major bus route and walking/cycling distance from pretty much anything I might need, including several train stations.

The problems in areas like this, which have vastly benefitted from immigration over a hundred years or more, are not the immigrants. It's the austerity in local government and the lack of investment in basic public infrastructure. That's a political choice, not the fault of immigrants.

Hello from a very mixed neighborhood in inner city Liverpool - where without immigration over the last few decades Lodge Lane would be missing many of its shops and cafes, various community initiatives would not have happened, and there would be fewer people to staff pharmacies and health centres.

As ever, I don't imagine myself representative of anyone but me. But if I'd had a vote in Gorton I'd have agonised, then done whatever felt most likely to stop Goodwin. After Starmer and Mahmoud's responses I now feel quite motivated to vote *against* Labour?

I bloody hope she loses.

But to help it along, I'll be writing to my Labour MP.

From direct experience - they believe gobshites who bang on about Labour having betrayed them, when in actual fact that person last voted Labour decades ago, if ever.

(In small towns where people actually know folk this is obvious - but there is also research data that shows this).

A reminder of what some of these asylum policies are:

- giving refugees only 2.5 years of leave, meaning the Home Office has to review their status every 30 months
- quadrupling the time to settlement from 5 years to 20 years
- no automatic way to be reunited with close family members

I know they have a large majority, so have a big buffer and flexibility, but it seems like the Labour leadership might be having some trouble counting.

Have they forgotten we live in a parliamentary system? They can piss off some MPs some of the time, but not most MPs most of the time.

New meta-analysis of 26 published studies concludes that AVs will lead people to use cars a lot more — which would thicken congestion and worsen pollution (even if AVs are electric).

"AV deployment is anticipated to lead to an overall increase in Vehicle Miles Traveled."

doi.org/10.1016/j.tb...

Sharing this paper because it seems pretty relevant this morning: politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

Part of the issue is maybe that local environmental types that I know - who heard her speak on it and went to public meetings about it all etc, so already had an opinion on her performance and commitment to that agenda - were not that taken with her.

Climate coverage is shrinking. We're expanding it. Announcing a new weekly video podcast!

the epidemic of men launching podcasts about nothing has gotten out of control

to combat this I am launching a podcast WITH A WOMAN (veteran climate journalist Tracy Wholf) to talk about stuff that actually matters (the planet being destroyed by the worst people alive)

Find subscribe links here:

just quite maddening that Osborne's legacy is currently "hey that guy who helped the Tories get back into power then was chancellor for a while until Brexit, and now he has 300 jobs lol" and not "look, everything the light touches was fucked up by George Osborne in some way between 2010 and 2016"

shotgun not me but think there's scope here for a proper, lengthy, meaty feature looking at every single policy area in Britain that's currently fucked specifically because of a decision George Osborne took, reckon you could make it an actual mag cover, his fingerprints are everywhere

Yeah, my experience working for a small cooperative built environment design and research consultancy was that payment was often late and the amount of work expected for the fee was often unreasonable.

I think there is definitely a different power relationship for small suppliers.