Maik Zumstrull

Data point for anyone interested: Private flu vaccine £25, private COVID vaccine £75, just walked in, short wait. (Prices and procedure may be different at your pharmacy.) Not a big deal and probably worth the trip if you want to prepare for winter.

“The problem is that most governments are by now infused with big-tech aligned employees, contractors and consultants. These people aren’t necessarily corrupt, but if you’ve delivered services for 25 years based on Microsoft platforms, it becomes very tricky to think about anything else”

this is not a problem you can fix with calm, reasoned debate. you can't even fix it by improving people's lives with policy. there is no clear, proven, non-violent solution to this issue. finding one is the most significant problem of our age.

The wild thing is that the owners are pretty much intentionally burning it to the ground because they've somehow convinced themselves that "make 1000% or higher profit margins and everyone loves you for doing it" is a shitty business model and they can do better.

Pretty brutal for anyone who still thinks mealy-mouthed centrism and "compromise" with the far right is the answer to anything.

I quite like “runs at least twice per hour until at least midnight” as a baseline definition of a real transit line. It's a useful level of service, not an unreasonable demand for more budget constrained systems, and excludes nonsense once-a-day vanity lines.

People want real risks taken seriously, but aren't worried about obviously made up fake risks. We pretend this is a mystery.

I'm so tired of people saying things without thinking about what the words coming out of their mouth mean!

As we are processing the disastrous Saxony-Anhalt election result, we're being flooded by people explaining why everyone voted like that. And I wrote earlier that the explanations tend to be wildly disparate, and can't all be true: berthub.eu/articles/pos...

2) and 3) are intimately linked, in that the BBC (the organisation that really matters in the modern environment) treats 'claims by rival parties' as the operating frame for how it covers everything. The failure from Labour and the Conservatives to say 'this stuff is bad' is really, really bad.

I have been a 1Password customer since 2006! My whole family is on it! I have moved multiple enterprises to it! Let me just tell you how stoked I am to move 20 years of shit because these people insist on being fascist assholes

Google: “Hey, you wanna use Gemini?” Me: “No.” “But we put it in everything!” “I noticed, and I hate it.” “What if it had a paid endorsement from one of the creepiest people you know?” “… … Were you bonked on the head or something?”

“Need to check your bag for drugs” My guy, if someone wants to get blasted at an @originstorypodcast.bsky.social live recording just let them. They sound cool.

Very funny case of economist brain; his argument is, basically: But if you ban this, people can't do it anymore! Surely an unintended side effect of the policy? Here's the thing though: they banned it because they don't want people doing it. That's the policy.

“people who want ever-lengthening sentences in the harshest possible conditions are the fantasists, since they leave us all with only two options - return prisoners to society as dangerous as before, or keep them inside for ever. “ www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

More broadly, the defining character of our era is "person who chose 'Contrarian' as a career but is traumatised by people disagreeing with them"

This may be too hard to implement because you'd need to keep track of all views, but a @bsky.app feature I would love is “Hide self-reposts of posts I've already seen”. Some of y'all are spammy.

“Huge row” is, of course, used in the usual British press sense: “One guy cares, and we made him up.” ☀️

Because “You should pay a living wage, but it's okay to be racist about it” is just not a position anyone holds? Obviously?

A pet peeve of mine about the "entitled" language is that big tech aggressively advertised these perks when hiring, and IMO workers are in the most literal sense of the word entitled to things they were expressly promised when recruited.

Real commu…uh, neoliberalism has never been tried.

A big part of this is hoping the airline will have them removed so they can join the “Help, help, I'm being oppressed” fundraising circus.

Me: Bluesky time! Give me your hottest takes. Bluesky: 0% VAT on energy should be means tested. Me: Ouch no that's a little too spicy 🥵

The weird entitlement of British expats is never not funny. What do you mean I don't get the "people who live in Britain" rate just because I don't live in Britain?!

“There are 20% of the electorate you absolutely cannot flip, ever, no matter what you do and about 70% on their knees begging for anyone at all to make them a credible offer. Which group do you want to target? Keep in mind more votes is better.” How does everyone keep failing this test?

Here’s hoping - we won’t survive this year without more TF subscribers however. Spread the word

Thread. If Johnson was actively trying to be the wrongest anyone's ever been about history, philosophy, ethics, and politics, I'd call it a good effort.

Same for EU really. Never be afraid to tell companies they can't do crimes. It's fine.

Reverse a 50-year project to systematically dismantle Britain in half a term? Gonna go with “probably not”, but best of luck!

Anyway I see the same thing happening in the Climate Doom people. There's this very visceral and convincing version of the world that they had envisioned that would require some very painful moral choices to adapt to, and it turns out "batteries + solar" are basically able to fix the problem.

His answer is, basically, “I don't even know how to spell self-respect.”

Watching everyone figure out that the correct answer was “No, we're not doing that, you clown” was honestly quite beautiful. They all got there.

I will be so annoyed if he pulls an Aunt Theresa. We don't have *time* for that! Starmer has frittered away two whole years!

Yes, and, for crying out loud, move it out of a converted flat in an old town house! We have invented the office building! The Kanzleramt may not be pretty, but at least it's a workplace.