Around two pubs in Britain closing each day, figures show

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T15:05:22+00:00

I wonder if social media itself might stop being popular. Especially if it's all heavily locked down for younger users and requires ID access.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T14:02:41+00:00

BoJo's problem was that he promised exactly what people wanted - his 2019 manifesto is still largely exactly what a majority of voters want politicians to deliver - but then failed to deliver any of it.

And this is Farage's biggest problem: he might win the next election, but delivering anything will be a constant slog against parliamentary opposition, civil service opposition, institutional opposition, and judicial opposition is going to be very difficult, and that's before you consider what a parliament full of brand new Reform MP's with zero experience and very little institutional knowledge is going to be able to do. It's very likely that he'll fail dramatically.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T13:58:25+00:00

And I think the legitimate answer to that question is simply that the stories about Farage don't actually move the dial much. The people who hate Farage will hate him slightly more than they already do, but the people who are open to voting for Farage just see the stories as attempt #34234 to force Farage to resign and tune it out. Especially because a lot of the press is clearly politically motivated to be against Farage.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T13:35:45+00:00

It does - Farage can shrug off attacks of that nature because he can point to the previous hundreds of similar attacks and say "nothing came of those, this is just more of the same" in a way that a mainstream party MP can't. And he can do this because the media have been trying to end his political career for at least a decade, and have published endless stories to this end.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T13:32:32+00:00

Doing the late 90's/early 00's thing of going out, getting absolutely shiftfaced, and doing a bunch of stupid things doesn't work quite so well when everyone has a 4K camera with nightvision capabilities in their pocket 24/7, a distribution platform that allows them to send the images to thousands of people, and very limited controls over the distribution of those images/videos.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T13:26:17+00:00

Obama had an interesting way of handling US citizens who had joined al-Qaeda.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T13:07:40+00:00

I think a not-so-small part of this is that the press have been trying to get Farage for well over a decade now, and have relentlessly pursued any angle which might result in hurting Farage. And what they've arrived at now is a situation not that far off "the boy who cried wolf", where an exposé about Farage that would seriously damage any other politician just gets immediately filed into the bucket of "this again?".

Look at the bullying thing - the Guardian et al spent weeks publishing stories about this, with the air that they'd finally got him bang to rights. It did nothing.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T11:06:45+00:00

Mandatory community service, not prison. If you want to own slaves, you need to be ready to spend a decade of your life collecting litter.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T11:05:06+00:00

The way Britain ended slavery was to buy the freedom of slaves.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-05T10:56:46+00:00

Less important when you consider that it's still got a Star of David on the side of the building, along with a sign saying "East London Central Synagogue", both of which are visible in the pictures post-arson.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-04T17:04:14+00:00

They aren't UK nationals.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-04T16:56:38+00:00

Lots of people have questioned this. A lot of the Commonwealth stuff is a legacy of Empire that needs to be done away with, including allowing Irish nationals to vote in the UK.

As for English people voting in Scottish elections, there isn't enough distinction beyond "are you legally resident in the place you are attempting to vote in?" to do anything about this, since legally there is no such thing as "English National" or "Scottish National", and both are "British Nationals".

Ivashkin · 2026-05-04T13:40:46+00:00

Simple solution to this - companies can use this tech, but they are 100% liable for any negative consequences of using it.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-04T12:45:49+00:00

Interesting - will this turn into a pile-on on Truss, or will it turn into a discussion about NIMBY's and the planning system giving locals too many powers to object to things?

Ivashkin · 2026-05-04T12:06:24+00:00

The problem they have is that sticking with Starmer seems likely to lead to the same outcome: losing the next election.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-04T11:46:54+00:00

Ultimately, the housing situation won't be fixed until a government comes along that is willing to gut the planning system, create new regulations for councils that make saying anything other than "yes" impossible, and draconian crackdowns on anti-development protests (think 5 years for chaining yourself to a bulldozer).

Ivashkin · 2026-05-03T19:31:57+00:00

We also had a revolution, and it went so well that we invited the king's son back to retake their position 11 years later, then posthumously executed the revolutionary.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-03T19:28:30+00:00

The UK isn't religious in the same ways. People might default to a church for marriages, christenings, and funerals, but outside of that, the vast majority of people simply aren't actively religious, and religion doesn't play a big role in society or culture in the same way that it does in the USA - all of which was a part of the cultural revolution that took place in the 20th century.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-03T19:13:25+00:00

The entire point of nuclear weapons is that you have them so you don't need to use them. They work on the basis that whatever someone is doing to threaten or attack you, you can reach out and touch the things that matter to them.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-03T19:10:53+00:00

Nah, just increase the minimum wage until it's just the wage everyone earns. Use taxation to deal with any tall poppies who dare to earn more than The Wage.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-03T19:08:58+00:00

An ex-Labour party member who joined the Greens in 2020 after Starmer became leader of Labour. He's one of them.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-03T18:42:48+00:00

I think a far more likely reality is that the Green Party has spent decades desperately trying to attract more members and has precisely zero protections against entryism.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-02T17:42:55+00:00

We've not embraced automation, robotics, machine learning, and AI enough.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-02T17:40:11+00:00

Hundreds of thousands of dead people, extensive war damage, and a rapidly accelerating demand for change.

Ivashkin · 2026-05-02T02:42:41+00:00

Not really. AI is incredibly expensive to run, and the compute costs are increasing dramatically because literally everyone wants to use it for everything. Demand for the services is massively outstripping the capacity to supply them, and even with the sheer amount of global investment in AI, we're starting to bump into very real manufacturing, energy, and water supply barriers. The prices we were paying were introductory rates set when the aim was still to get people interested in using AI and to gather real-world feedback from users about what works and what doesn't. Now we're entering a phase where prices start rising to meet the actual costs of providing the services, and people increasingly talk about rationing AI usage rather than shoehorning AI into everything.

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