New: The number of days where extreme heat makes it too dangerously hot to walk the dog, sweep the porch and engage in other ordinary pursuits has doubled since 1950. Older people experience a month a year when heat prevents them from routine activities. Free link.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
And so we write to brilliant postgraduate students from Sudan, withdrawing the offers and scholarships they won in open competition with the best in the world. A sad day for the University of Oxford.
I'm sick to death of fighting the cookie wars, but there is no reason on Earth for my browsing habits to be shared with 100s of companies, and claiming there is "legitimate interest" is out and out BS.
Please tell me this is not real? Please tell me it’s an AI fake? It’s too horrendous to comprehend. While he jokes, the region is in chaos, economies upended, lives lost, and enhanced threat of terrorism worldwide, esp against Americans.
Ken White posted this over a year ago, I think about this often.
Sizewell C is predicted to cost £38 billion.
For the same amount of money, you could install solar panels, heat pumps and batteries in 3 million homes.
That would generate energy locally, rather than put massive strains on an already overloaded grid.
Makes you think.
The Chilcot Checklist, for how to optimally plan and execute military operations in light of learning from the Iraq War. It states: The Chilcot Checklist 1 VISION: why do we care? What does this mean for British interests? What are the risks of acting or doing nothing, including in the longer term? What is different now? 2 ANALYSIS: what IS happeNINg NOw? What are your sources of ground truth/evidence? Have assumptions been exposed to analytical tools or external challenge? 3 SCENarIOS: what might happen next? Have you looked at a range of options, and scenarios and consequences that could flow from these? 4 OptIONS: what should we do? Have you designed your options collaboratively, built in challenge and presented Ministers with clear information on risks, opportunities and costs? 5 LegaL ImpLICatIONS: how do we eNSure actION IS lawful? What is the wider legal context? Are Ministers aware of any legal risks? What are the policy implications? How will you ensure that any international legal basis remains sound if circumstances change? 6 POLICY AND Strategy: what does suCCeSS LOOk LIke? Does a clear strategy, and a feasible course of action that will meet policy objectives, exist? Is the approach supported by analysis? 7 reSOurCE: what do we need to deLIVer? What are the resource implications of your options? 8 PLANNING AND DOING: how should we do it? Have you planned for a range of possible contingencies? Who is accountable and responsible for what? 9 POLICY perfOrmaNCE: how wILL you mONItor performaNCe? How will you measure and evaluate success/failure? 10 EVALuatION: IS the pOLICy workINg? When and how will you review this policy? Has the context changed? Have UK objectives/interests changed? Do you need to change direction?
Way beyond military strategy & operations this checklist makes sense
Like any critical situation though the emotional urge maybe to think it’s a unique crisis & you should throw out the rules, my learning from Critical Care in health is that in crises you lean into what you’ve learnt not panic away
Pretty serious allegation here. "Witnesses told the BBC that the Israeli soldiers had arrived disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hezbollah's Islamic Health Organization."
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Reminds me of the annual review of a certain army officer in the UK
“Any soldier who follows this officer will do so only out of curiosity”
Just fascinating to see Blair, a man whose reputation was ruined by the Iraq war, advocate joining a war that is exponentially stupider and more chaotic. How is it possible to learn nothing from the worst mistake of your life?
I think you could go so far as to say they soiled themselves.
Start of the story: It has been twenty-five years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans? No doubt many of our subscribers remember reading papers whose authors were the first individuals ever to obtain the results they described. But as metahumans began to dom-nate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language. Without DNT humans could not fully grasp prior developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings.
In 2000, Ted Chiag published a short story in Nature that started like this.
It’s been on my mind a lot these days.
Definitely recommend it and Chiang’s science fiction if you don’t know it already.
A sickening society is clear in these statistics
So why is it not in the news?
Powerful wake-up call from @chakrabortty.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
So it now appears based on many media reports that we bombed a girls elementary school and killed 175 people, and right after that Hegseth was beating his chest in a press conference saying we weren’t going to worry about “stupid rules of engagement” anymore.
Last week, UK lobbying regulator closed investigation into ex Tory MP Ben Howlett
We offered Howlett money to work for a fake Chinese investor. He introduced us to a dozen Labour MPs
Regulator didn't even speak to us. Our system is broken
New, by me: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/we-paid-an...
"Make it shitty!"
Thank you, Norway 🇳🇴
See also: SAAS.
According to the trailer, he's done all that - and has decided that India is on the verge of something big.
Meme of machines sparing humans who spoke politely to AI.
I always speak politely to AI as there is a non-zero chance that this will be a situation in the future:
If I was @zackpolanski.bsky.social, I would be pointing out to the BBC that whatever model they use to justify giving Farage & his boot-lickers season tickets for every BBC show under the sun must surely now treat Green Party politicians in exactly the same way. Might even be one for the lawyers...
excellent
It's a common refrain for ministers to note Nigel Farage's absence from the Commons, but the stats do seem to back it up. So far this year he has spoken five times and voted seven times. As a very rough, smaller-party comparison, Ellie Chowns of the Greens has spoken 46 times and voted 24 times.
The New York Times U.S. and Israel Attack Iran LIVE Updates What to Know Photos Ma Casts Doubt Iran Says Dozens Are Killed in Strike on School No Responsibility The New York Times U.S. and Israel Attack Iran LIVE Updates 4m ago What to Know Photo Stated as Fact 9 Killed in Israeli City Near Jerusalem After Iranian Missile Strike Actor Named
Politics of semantics 😏
I did a degree in Scandinavian languages and spent 30 years of my adult life fighting against the tide and saying it the proper way before finally conceding defeat - just as IKEA itself started to use the Swedish pronunciation here.
What can you even say? These people deserve their inevitable humiliation and the nation deserves journalists with more self-respect.
As the laid off Middle East News Editor, I concur. Management eliminated the positions of every single staff correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East.
Daily Mail headline: IRAN WAR: DAY FOUR U.S. lambasts 'hand-wringing, pearl-clutching' Starmer as Kemi says he's 'scared' of his own voters
The Sun: INACTION THIS DAY PM wont hit Iran back Rift grows with US Prez
Have we woken up in America? The deeply unpatriotic Daily Mail and Sun seem to now be supporting a menace of a foreign leader over our own govt and national security. They are really only loyal to their own vested interests. Which are a direct threat to our own. The routine betrayal is sickening.
Radical parties of the right and left in top two slots. Legacy parties getting only a third of the vote between them.
A whole new world.
The UK government is ineffective and the PM is unpopular. But there are loads of bills and laws being made all the time, many hugely consequential, that no one is talking about let alone scrutinising because political journalism is court intrigue based.
As a Danish person who came of age during the ramping up of anti-migrant politics and Islamophobia and then moved to the UK, I find this so baffling. The UK is hardly perfect, but it is so much better at integration than so many other countries - why is that not a source of pride?
