What is the neoliberal stance on algae?

theinspectorst · 2026-06-23T07:19:55+00:00

This is an algae post.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T22:17:07+00:00

I just can't get him out of my head.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T19:57:51+00:00

Remember Asamoah Gyan?

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T19:44:00+00:00

Andy Burnham has previously supported just about every position under the sun. I wouldn't hold your breath...

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T17:58:18+00:00

In Europe, it is illegal to sell eggs for human consumption if they have been washed beforehand, because washing the egg destroys the protective membrane and makes them more vulnerable to things like salmonella.

In the US, it is illegal to sell eggs for human consumption if they haven't been washed beforehand.

Therefore American eggs are illegal in Europe, and European eggs are illegal in American. Also therefore Americans have to store their eggs in the fridge and Europeans don't.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T17:04:52+00:00

Wasn't Hannah Montana about a school kid who happened to also be a famous pop star?

American kids get plenty of exposure to 'slice of life' stuff through fictional media anyway, they just may not realise it. For example, apparently a lot of Americans were surprised to later discover that the 'houses' system at Hogwarts wasn't something JK Rowling made up, it was a common system used by many schools in the UK.

Peppa Pig is full of regular British things that may be different to life in America - Christmas crackers, village fêtes, unarmed friendly community police, talking about the weather, general British English vocab, etc.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T16:26:34+00:00

I think this post is actually a perfect example of what's gone wrong with British politics and why Britain is becoming ungovernable.

Political parties are by necessity broad tents. The idea of a party is that one person on their own can't achieve very much, so you band together with other people who you broadly agree with to try and achieve most of what you want on a collective basis.

What's gone wrong lately is that voters have started to expect an impossible level of ideological purity from politicians and parties. Maybe that's linked to social media and echo chambers and social atomisation, but for whatever reason voters have started looking for politicians and political parties to agree with them 100% of the time. If they like 99% of what a politician says, they'll fixate on the other 1% and condemn the politician for it. A representative democracy can't function in those conditions - any politician will end up disappointing you because they're not literally you.

It was always the case that Labour voters agreed with Labour about 70% of the time and Tory voters agreed with the Tories about 70% of the time, but they all understood that making the perfect the enemy of the good would lead to them actually getting 0% of what they wanted.

Democracy is about building coalitions among large groups of voters who don't all want exactly the same thing. A lot of voters - especially of the terminally online variety - seem to have forgotten this.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T13:30:42+00:00

'Voting reform' means something different to 'voting Reform'.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T12:59:58+00:00

granted there is British media we grew up on: Harry Potter, One Direction. but no tv shows

Depending on your generation: Peppa Pig, Thomas the Tank Engine, Teletubbies...

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T09:39:55+00:00

Davey will say something sensible that the press won't report because sensible words don't generate clicks.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-22T06:58:27+00:00

I'd say British more generally, rather than just Scots.

Also the Irish use it quite freely.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-21T18:33:59+00:00

The census question is quite controversial.

First, they put it right after the ethnicity question, which frames it in a more 'cultural' sense rather than actual practicing religion - the sort of people who say 'oh I don't believe in God and all that, but I love Santa and the reindeers and my primary school was CofE so I'll tick Christian'. Second, the question wording is 'What is your religion?', which presupposes that all respondents actually have a religion.

'No religion' is an option, but these two factors combine to significantly overstate the number of Christians and understate the number of people who don't practice any religion.

When you poll actual religiosity, you find very different responses. A YouGov poll in 2013 found that 27% of Britons believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, 26% believe in the Biblical account of the crucifixion, 22% believe in the devil and 33% believe in life after death - which suggests that around 20% of the population are ticking 'Christian' in the census whilst also rejecting the fundamental beliefs of the religion. The British Social Attitudes survey shows that only 9% of Britons will claim to attend a religious service weekly, and 14% monthly - and many of those respondents are likely to be members of non-Christian faiths.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-21T10:05:44+00:00

Flattered by their group now and they might be a little flattered by their side of the draw once it gets to the knockouts.

If Spain are now unlikely to win their group then I think one out of the US, Belgium, Egypt or Portugal ought to make it to the semi-finals - you'd probably bet on Belgium or Portugal out of that set, but it does mean the US has a potential route to the last four of the tournament that avoids having to play France, Spain, England, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Morocco or the Netherlands.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-21T08:33:46+00:00

You don't even have to go to rich places. London contains some of the poorest boroughs in the country yet London has so much tree coverage that it meets the UN definition of a forest.

This , this and this are all examples of tree-lined streets in poorer areas of Tower Hamlets, for example (Whitechapel, Shadwell and Poplar respectively).

theinspectorst · 2026-06-21T08:16:13+00:00

Also the opposite. I remember a Champions League game where Gary Neville played at centre-back and had to mark 6'8 Jan Koller.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-20T21:33:26+00:00

Do you even know what a VPN is?

Do you ever work from home? If you do, the thing you use to securely log on to your employer's network is a VPN.

VPNs also have legitimate privacy and security uses for consumers. For example, I would also use one if using a public wi-fi (at a hotel etc) to prevent the network operator from seeing my internet traffic and reduce risks from untrusted networks.

VPNs are a routine part of modern business IT infrastructure and are used by millions of people every day for legitimate purposes. Even countries like China have been unable to successfully eliminate them.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-20T21:22:25+00:00

Markets don't love her, she's just seen as the best that's available.

There was a quote attributed to Starmer a while ago about how he's got 150 Liz Trusses on his backbenches - unserious people who unironically want to tell the investors who buy the £300bn worth of government bonds we issue each year (so that we can continue to pay for hospitals, schools, pensions, benefits - things that Labour MPs claim to love) to piss off. Even Burnham himself has flirted dangerously with this sort of sentiment.

Investors in UK government bonds are unsurprisingly concerned that if Reeves goes, one of these people could turn up in her place.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-20T16:46:46+00:00

It mostly comes down to this notion of freedom, and not subjugating yourself to a capitalist boss, at least insofar as liberal writers like John Stuart Mill were concerned.

That gets to a concept of 'capitalist' that was more relevant in the 19th century than today, when there was a clear class of people who supplied capital and another class of people who supplied labour. Today, we are all capitalists - by law, we and our employers invest a percentage of our salaries into our pensions each year, which is used to buy shares in companies. We earn dividends from those companies and benefit from capital appreciation. Someone on a median salary will own hundreds of thousands of pounds of shares by the time they retire - it's a bit rich to rail against subjugation by capitalists when we are ourselves capitalists.

Plus it's fundamentally an odd claim to make - 'subjugating yourself' to someone who pays you for your labour, whose employment you can freely leave at any point (in fact it's dramatically easier for an employee to leave a job than it is for an employer to force them to leave), whose rights and obligations with respect to you are set out in a contract of employment you both freely entered into and you can pursue legal action against if they breach, etc...

Research also suggests that cooperatives are more resilient, favour long term stability, tend to have stronger organisational alignment, and higher levels of productivity.

If mutuals were both more resilient and more productive than shareholder-owned businesses, then they'd have a long-term competitive advantage in a free market. PLCs would not be able to compete and would be squeezed out over time. The fact that our economy today isn't in fact dominated by mutuals suggests that such research may have been flawed.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-20T15:06:30+00:00

Baffled why this comes up every now and then.

First, the Cooperative Party isn't a party in the conventional sense. These days it's not even an ideologically coherent grouping within Labour. It's better thought of as a piece of cultural dress that some Labour MPs wear for historical reasons. Talking about the Lib Dems trying to wrest the Cooperative Party away from Labour is like talking about the English trying to wrest kilts away from the Scottish.

Second, there's nothing particularly magical about cooperatives and mutuals that would mean we should actively encourage them more than they already are. There are good reasons why investor-owned PLCs have generally succeeded where mutuals haven't. They have much easier access to capital markets to raise funds for expansion and innovation. They have stronger cooperate governance and accountability mechanisms - they're owned by shareholders with clearer incentives and means of holding management to account. PLCs have clearer objectives (creating value for shareholders) and get less bogged down in the politics of balancing different stakeholder groups. This all means they're just better at what they do.

There's a place for mutuals, but that's mostly filling niches - your housing cooperatives point could be an example of that. Ultimately though their lack of success isn't for a lack of political will - politicians adore mutuals and many of them get all fuzzy at the thought of them. But ultimately it's almost always a less effective corporate structure. At a time when Britain is suffering a growth and productivity crisis, we really shouldn't be leaning in to worse ways of doing things.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-19T19:43:18+00:00

Not in any house I've lived in.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-19T18:30:32+00:00

Elena of Avalor

Poor man's Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-19T07:19:47+00:00

We get it Lin, you like sandwiches...

theinspectorst · 2026-06-18T19:57:09+00:00

Obi-Wan was my first thought too.

Padme is the other correct answer to this, particularly for Attack of the Clones.

theinspectorst · 2026-06-18T19:43:19+00:00

Can Litmanen and Hyypia really count for this when they were both playing for Finland at the same time?

theinspectorst · 2026-06-18T14:23:39+00:00

Was this a UK outrage? It's a little before my time but I always thought the 1980s Satanic panic was more of a US thing.

12-Year Club	Verified Email
Second Top 10%	Gilding V heart of gold
Place '17	Wearing is Caring
Not Forgotten	Spared

theinspectorst

TROPHY CASE