www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/hiri... The academic economy is broken. It's awful that ECRs can't get postdocs. It's also awful that people later in their careers are being made redundant, often with kids to support. There isn't much point in pointing out the horror of just one side of this.
But if the end most voters want is actually a functioning NHS, better quality of life, etc, then the means is *more* immigration, and reducing it will continue to cause voters of all stripes to loathe them. It's a massive political gamble that they don't even seem to have realised is a gamble.
It's more than just culture though. To will the end you have to will the means. Labour's gamble is that for many voters reduced immigration *is* the end, and have retooled politics and public resources to achieve that end. On this view, people will trade services and quality of life for immigration.
“In this immersive autoethnographic project I researched the ‘charmless man’ effect in a by-election context …”
I would say money can’t buy these kinds of experiences, but unfortunately quite a lot of money bought these experiences.
(3) The lady who took a cage full of birds into the carriage, placed it in the aisle, and kept talking to them as “my babies”.
(4) When the conductor *completely independently* came up to said caged birds and talked to them as “my babies”
People of Bluesky, it’s time to vote on my strangest train experiences of the past month. Is it
(1) Taking 5 hours to do a 2 hour journey, and then teaching for five hours immediately afterwards?
(2) The very stoned man singing “The Drugs Don’t Work” at the top of his voice in a silent carriage?
Well your paper helped me to rethink a point I’d got a bit stuck on, so thanks!
This context does not allow for the nuance and personal interface that require conventions to be sustained, and gives powerful incentives to ignore conventions anyway. Political success will follow those who have new/social media skills. Appeal to precedent is almost the antithesis of this.
Mass media and social media politics has undermined one core audience for political behaviour - fellow politicians ("good chaps!") - and created lots of new ones. Especially in the context of social media, politicians have to engage with and appeal directly to voters.
Really interesting article addressing a puzzling problem: why are constitutional conventions decaying in Westminster-style constitutions?
I think there's something in the idea that populism is relevant here, but I would link it to something like Bernard Manin's idea of audience democracy.
yes: the medium term risk is not that AI will perform better than humans in most fields, but that it will take over huge chunks of activity anyway mainly because it looks cheaper (until they increase the subs). The result will be an output of mediocre dross across the economy *and* mass unemployment
Is it more comforting to think that the HO just made this policy up on the hoof, or that it did actual plan this and is genuinely this bad at both policy and comms? I’m not sure.
www.theguardian.com/politics/202... Delighted to see some pushback against this, but as I have noted here in recent days, this in fact affects any dual passport holder where the other country has different name rules to the UK.
Main lesson from this is to never, ever, allow HO to hold your documents unless there is absolutely no alternative.
(Mess was eventually sorted by someone senior deciding they couldn't bear me ringing about it any more, I think, but an utter chore for everyone involved.)
Tried to renew son's UK passport a couple of years ago, UK Passport Office insisted on seeing his Irish passport per a new policy. Irish policy is that passports only record a first middle name => names on the UK and Irish passports did not technically match. Cue weeks of administrative limbo.
HO's reach always exceeds its grasp, and it seems to have gone off on one about dual citizens in recent years.
Also once saw Boyzone on the plane from Dublin to Birmingham. First class was still a thing and Ronan Keating was sitting in it, and the rest of them were in the back somewhere.
I once unintentionally followed Thom Yorke around the camping supply shops of Oxford (or perhaps he was following me) because we were both shopping for sleeping bags.
I suspect the problem here is that, on some fundamental level, Starmer has a classic lawyer's distaste for the craft of politics. From this perspective, *everything* in the realm of pure politics looks like a moral compromise. And so he relies on others, and/or completely loses his ethical moorings.
It’s a very petty thing, but I am finding myself enraged by the current vogue for film trailers with rising faux-profound string theme crescendos at the end. If as a group we could agree on a ban, I’d be grateful.
Am broadly against directly elected mayors, largely because of the bad effects mayoral politics has on national politics in other countries, but it's hard not to conclude that something quite dramatic needs to change about the way Dublin is run.
Barring fundamental domestic change in the US, probably at constitutional level, it isn’t fixable at all. The most benign president imaginable could be elected in three years, and still every international agreement repaired would be subject to the whim of 50 voters in Iowa four years later.
It's *always* the lawyers, or the judges, or fraudsters, or middle class privilege, or medics charging too much, and so on and on.
It's *never* "the big insurers are ripping everyone off. Let's set up a not-for-profit and see what happens."
Episode n in an infinite series of governments doing everything to try to bring down the cost of insurance in one of the most expensive insurance markets in the world, other than actually addressing the cost of insurance in one of the most expensive insurance markets in the world.
If you don’t start buying more tulips the whole tulip economy is at risk, frets prominent tulip merchant who insist on pointlessly including a tulip with every purchase
Completely unironically, this would be a great way of squaring some cultural circles on both sides
Someone called Gary wants a drone
A selection of wishes, including what may be “a big boots Latina” and “for my family not to die”
“I wish to have my kids back”
Unexpected “all human life is here” profundity from the cardboard “holiday wishes” tree-shaped board at a suburban Dublin Starbucks. Best of the season to everyone, and look after yourselves folks.
Part of the very special - and now all too rare - genre of true-believer Brexit commentary which sees the benefits as intangibles that will accrue over centuries, but simultaneously tangibles that would already have made everyone a millionaire if only politicians had believed hard enough.
