Gareth Thomas

Howdy folks - my first post on here, and feeling like the new boy in school - not sure where to go, or what to do!

The BBC needs to provide an explanation for this.

This looks like abuse of public funds A Vice-Chancellor earning over £500,000 claims expenses for his wife’s travel, including a “philanthropic engagement” in New York and a “spouse programme” in Switzerland How is this acceptable? Is it not fraud? www.thetimes.com/uk/education...

Left: President Trump insults Norway calling it a sh*thouse country Right: Visit Norway, the tourism board, trolls President Trump, displaying some of their best toilets on their Instagram 😅

If you're a chief executive on a telephone number salary, at least have the grace not to complain about the taxes the fund the benefits your workers have to claim because you refuse to pay them enough to live on

I’m so proud of the work done by my brilliant Suffolk Law Centre colleagues to assist people from the Roma community in accessing legal advice & enforcing their rights, and very grateful to the Bell Foundation for funding the project.

Occasionally the juxtaposition of posts on my timeline is just 👨‍🍳😘

The goal of the project is simple: to level the playing field for Roma people so they can access public services and enforce their rights. (7/7)

Suffolk Law Centre and URV also recently convened a conference for Hate Crime Awareness Week @nationalhcaw.bsky.social (6/7)

The partnership has delivered real results, from challenging the disproportionate impact of school absence fines, to overturning a DWP decision that had wrongly stopped disability benefit payments to a disabled young Roma woman. (5/7)

The project runs a weekly clinic in partnership with Union Romani Voice (URV), a Roma-led organisation whose community advocates have been central to building trust and reaching people the Law Centre could not otherwise reach. (4/7)

With funding from the @thebellfoundation.bsky.social, Suffolk Law Centre is in the third year of a project designed to make legal services more accessible to the Roma community. (3/7)

For some, this is compounded by language and literacy barriers that can make official letters and systems difficult to navigate. (2/7)

Community spotlight 🔦 Suffolk is home to one of the UK’s largest Roma populations, many of whom face significant barriers in accessing legal advice and enforcing their rights. (1/7)

I’m so proud of the work done by my brilliant Suffolk Law Centre colleagues to assist people from the Roma community in accessing legal advice & enforcing their rights, and very grateful to the Bell Foundation for funding the project.

💯The case for democracy is not that voters are always right, or wise, or good. It's that they can correct their mistakes. That's why it's so dangerous to have billionaires controlling the media or regulating the flow of information. It shuts down the immune system of democracy.

Gusting winds of Storm Boelo still causing trouble in NE Suffolk. One of our ash trees fell victim an hour ago. Luckily it fell onto the field and not into the pond, or on someone’s head 😬 Now, where’s my chainsaw…

V E R Y W I N D Y

"If university bots graded bots, you would no longer have a university. You’d have a tomb, an academic mausoleum in which digital phantoms murmured emptily" theconversation.com/friday-essay...

Someone needs to commission this.

None of these was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Elon Musk was. Odd, that.

Sounds like an outcome many academics would wilingly endure 🤔

Either they knew exactly what these risks were but declined to outline them, and deflected, or they didn’t, (highly unlikely) in which case they are implausibly incompetent. Why is it suddenly the greater population’s job to enable 2FA and stock up on potable water, for their corporate negligence?

Three weeks ago AI founders were all over the press making vague but portentous comments about the existential risks and power of their models. This week their models are part of a widespread security failure around critical systems such as your bank account..a more immediate and serious risk 1/

New boiler. New pipes. New attitude. Burning through the earth's natural resources like Daniel Day-Lewis in that film. As Elvis feared hunger, I now fear being cold. House is uncomfortably hot but am only turning the thermostat up. I drink your milkshake!

Eight days now with no heating or hot water. I have acclimatised. I am post-warmth. I am a penguin. I am a Geordie on a Friday night in February. I am one of those footballers who performatively wears short sleeves in the winter. Wim Hof? Shackleton? Mr Freeze? I've shit 'em!

Gunta Stölzl, Wall hanging "Slit Tapestry Red/Green" 1927, the artist ran the pioneering weaving workshop at the progressive German design school, the Bauhaus #womensart #BauhausWomen

Here’s one for the archaeologists and agricultural historians! We dug up this item y’day, buried deep at the edge of our C16th Suffolk farmstead. It’s 18” long, forged iron, heavily corroded. Our landscapers have never seen anything like it. Any thoughts? (Flint for stability!)

Here’s one for the archaeologists and agricultural historians! We dug up this item y’day, buried deep at the edge of our C16th Suffolk farmstead. It’s 18” long, forged iron, heavily corroded. Our landscapers have never seen anything like it. Any thoughts? (Flint for stability!)

Ann Jennings, the headmistress of Pantglas Junior School, receiving a petition from concerned parents in 1964 about the potential danger of the tips above the school. The headmistress took the petition to Merthyr Council but the parents' fears were ignored. #Aberfan

It is of course outrageous that, 60 years after the Aberfan disaster, so many dangerous tips remain. The people in these blighted communities have been failed by successive governments in Westminster and in Cardiff.

Be mindful of idioms… and also of idiots

If you've not heard this previously, listen. It captures the horror of what happened 60 years ago today in Aberfan and eloquently reflects on how the community had to face their grief and the enormous tragedy in public, and above ground. www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-w... "But Aberfan is different..."

Today, people across the world remember one of the greatest tragedies in Welsh history - the 1966 Aberfan disaster - which left a small mining village robbed of an entire generation

My Wee Yellow Beastie sailed through its MOT again. And people say Fiats are unreliable 🤷‍♂️

Amen to this. Use AI for tedious things that don’t matter. Its role should be to free us from drudgery, not replace us in tasks that enrich our lives, or are important to us.

I think they should do a commercial where a guy is about to tell his kids a bedtime story and then his boss calls on the phone and is like "I need that report NOW, I'm meeting with the VP tomorrow" and the guy pushes an AI button and it says "third quartprer report sent!" and tells his kid a story

eBay users! Don't ignore today's email, even though it looks like a boring standard update to the User Privacy Notice. They want to use your data to train AI models. If you click the link over the words "the right to object", it takes you to a page with a toggle button letting you opt out.

Debbie Reynolds’ feet were bleeding so badly after a long day shooting a tap-dance scene for Singin’ in the Rain with notorious perfectionist Gene Kelly that she had to be carried to her dressing room.

This is the kind of impact that advice services all across the country are making. But too often, they do so with inadequate resources. To ensure advice organisations can meet growing demand, the government must invest in the advice sector and its workforce. #AdviceSaves (3/3)

Law Centres are essential local services. They help people understand their rights, access the support they are entitled to and resolve problems before they become crises. Earlier this year, @policyinpractice.bsky.social presented hard evidence of a Law Centre’s impact. (2/3)

#AdviceWeek is here! We're joining @adviceuk.bsky.social to celebrate the impact of advice services and the people who deliver them. (1/3)

(This, incidentally, is why democratic states should not wire companies like Palantir into essential services. The problem is not the "values" of their owners. It's the coercive power it gives those owners over states to which they are openly hostile, and whose authority they do not acknowledge).

When the tech-bros and their allies attack "the establishment" or "the elite", what they mean is "any site of power - including the democratic state - that might restrict their own actions". The alternative is not "freedom"; it is power for themselves to make decisions otherwise made by the state.