The Pub-Liking Universal Friend

Douglas Adams: In my book I invented the Electric Monk as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Electric Monk from classic sci-fi novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Truly pathetic, absolutely Trump levels of baseless whinging from a position of power (which pretty much sums up modern China and its apologists from a cultural perspective, brillant though much of its tech is) www.bbc.com/news/article...

I don't love the way that I remember (both from visiting and reading about it in the papers) when these ancient neolithic escalators were installed

Really torn on whether to book a birthday dinner or a Male Birthday dinner

1. Lose election 2. Assume Trump will steal election for him 3. Trump is flailing around and failing to steal his own election 4. Oh shit oh fuck

WHO WOULD WIN objectively best living conditions in human history VS. "i have to see transgenders on twitter :("

i think. like ok if i ever fucked up so bad my eighth grade teacher posted up on a street corner to literally picket my behavior. i mean i would simply kill myself like that’s all there is to it

One of the reasons why I‘m really happy Olivia Chow won re-election by a big margin is this time (and last time) she explicitly ran on raising taxes to plug the city’s financial crisis. Really good precedent that fantasyland slopulism wasn’t rewarded for once.

Everybody in the replies is rightfully pointing to algebra and so on but also an Arab scientist won the Nobel Prize one year ago.

idk man, I'm Arab and I do a lot of posts, surely that's got to count for something

Hadn't really been paying much attention to the Toronto mayoralty (unsurprisingly), but slightly surprised to discover that the pasty right wing anti-transit guy is called Brad Bradford rather than, as I had previously assumed, Brad Ford from the dynasty of pasty right-wing anti-transit guys

Nominative determinism strikes again!

To be fair I'm not convinced that RFK does understand what numbers are

The New Racism is just as serious in its potential impact as the old, but it is far, far, far, FAR more stupid. 'The calibre of racist has gone sharply downhill' sounds like it should be the start of a joke, but it is also: just demonstrably true!

A new survey of 1,000 American adults found that the strongest supporters of transgender sports bans are not the people who admire women most: they are the people who hold the most hostile views about women. www.helenwebberley.com/news/transge...

One of my crank theories is that the insanely deep liquidity in the private markets is one of the reasons that governance standards has slipped so much in public markets.

i don't think it's that crazy it's a lot harder to use public money to build a complicated interconnected grid of rail infrastructure than it is to use private money to build a bunch of big warehouses. like i don't think it's great only one of those is possible but what i do not think it is is crazy

Am somewhat charmed by the implicit suggestion that, in 1939, we could have turned round to the Nazis and said listen here chaps, why don't you just accept not being in power anymore, and we'll slice Germany up into 4 divided between the UK, US, France and the USSR. Sound like a deal

a weird set of people who only exist online are people who celebrate the defeat of global fascism in every other country and are then horrified and appalled at the idea that they should also be expected to vote for their domestic opponent of global fascism if some of their stances are Problematic

The truest thing JD Vance has said in a long, long time.

The Hard Hat Riot is the single most important and consequential independently organized labor action in post-Gilded Age American history but the entire left-of-center has deliberately chosen to completely forget it because of how utterly embarrassing it is to us

*ANTHROPIC FILES PUBLICLY FOR US IPO www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

I don't think this is at all a good investment at the price it will go for (not investment advice etc), but the last couple of quarters of revenue and positive non-training cashflow have now been both sustained and independently verified. Will be interested to see EdZ's cope

Obviously VCS are literal Vogons; the things that really get me here are 1) real companies who will be brand damaged by this bullshit don't put a "don't embarrass us" clause into their contracts 2) what on earth captured bullshit is the Independent Appeals Service www.theguardian.com/money/2026/o...

Good sign for Gina Hinojosa

I love the cost info in this NHS poster but hate the way it's themed like a bar chart

Lula's victory is one for the Catholics!

Trying to imagine the absolute unhinging from all sides of British politics if Keir Starmer had kissed a trans lady on election night and fundamentally being unable to get past the incongruity of Keir Starmer doing a human bodily thing

Genuinely I don't know that it comes across to people who haven't been here to watch how almost unbelievable this was, just people taking something that looked impossible and dragging it kicking and screaming all the way to inevitability.

Conjecture: Brazil are crap at football now because all the effort that used to go into that goes into this

I definitely think that in addition to the obvious inspirations, later Ankh Morpork owes a debt to Japan

Again, Japan is fucking class, who’d have thunk it? Normalise reforming planning laws so you can have a ten story building that has a post office, a tourist information centre, a barbers, a brothel, a manga cafe, the headquarters of a Doomsday Cult, and a craft beer place on each successive floor.

This is so good. While Livingstone's relentless will and ability to push transit investment was hugely important both for London and for the broader UK devolution project, I think Khan has still been London's most transformative mayor

I absolutely love the photos in this. www.londoncentric.media/p/oxford-str...

If you replace "Fabians" and "globalists" with "Jews" (which is kind of what they mean anyway), this is exactly the same argument as Oswald Mosley's "Peace Fascism"

Here's an idea for editors, let's do a little roleplay. Writer: "I have a contrarian take!" Editor: "Is it fucking stupid?" Writer: "Well yes, but it bucks the consensus. No one else is saying it." Editor: "Is that because the consensus is correct?" Writer: "... yes but... " <hang up>