davidrvetter.bsky.social
Climate journo; Forbes Senior Contributor; Consultant. Host of the Climate Futures webcast from the University of Oxford. Tips/leads: vitruvius.09 on Signal.
https://climatelaundry.substack.com/
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If they have achieved what they wanted, which seems to be the case, I don't think they could regard this as a failure.
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Firing up a GoFundMe to get Richard a kettle
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It's me, the guy who drives along Charing Cross Road for pleasure.
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That quote from Alexandra Legendre is simply maddening. As if anyone in Paris or in any big city has ever or could ever drive "for pleasure", in any version of reality. Just completely delusional.
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And yes I am annoyed that I presented media as singular rather than plural.
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To say this form of journalism is anachronistic is putting it mildly. It's a completely unconvincing attempt to impose a comforting, old world plaster facade over a burning husk.
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Again, it's desperately important to emphasize that not one of these people has the remotest interest in budget savings. Something that the Very Serious New York Times is wholly incapable of relating.
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I wonder where this person thinks resilience comes from. This sounds like Thoughts & Prayers Policymaking.
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Politicians calling to undermine British health and society in order to bolster defence are, then, directly demanding to weaken the critical strength and human capital of the country. To coin a phrase from Private Eye: "my son, that's like fucking for chastity."
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The social and health reforms enacted as a response to the Beverage Report led in turn to the foundation of a British post-war golden age of social mobility, prosperity, innovation and cultural invention. The period right-wing politicians now point to as being an era to revere and recapture.
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Nye Bevan, meanwhile, viewed the role of the NHS as being more psychological than physical. He saw it as a tool to alleviate fear.
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This was and is simply PR: the planners were being far more pragmatic. They realised that a complete reformation of the nation's health and social conditions were prerequisites both for a strong economy and for standing up to future threats to the nation.
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William Beveridge pitched his report, magnanimously, as a gift to the grubby common people. It's often presented by media today as a kind of well-meant, if condescending, attempt to "give something back" to a citizenry that was sacrificing so much. www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/gui...
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The 1942 Beveridge Report was commissioned by the wartime coalition government as a response to military authorities discovering that the average health of the British recruit was abysmal.
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My father wrote entire books on this topic. In The Public Health and the NHS, I think now out of print, he traced the founding of the NHS as a response to the earlier discovery in WWI, and then in WW2, that British citizens were completely debilitated by poor health and terrible living conditions.
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This is one reason why democracies invest more in healthcare than dictatorships.
www.ifo.de/en/press-rel...
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Historians and scholars have rather consistently pointed out that public health is a necessary condition for democracy. This point is made by scholars such as Timothy Snyder, who note that without health, our ability to invest time and energy into any cause is greatly diminished.
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Ultra-low-information professionals being those that have had a minimum of 10% information displaced by corn ethanol.
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Hahaha
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People right about now will be wondering what Dan Caine's tattoos look like.
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I've always felt cricket was kind of doom-coded.
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I see astonishingly little acknowledgement of this.
And, not for nothing, though from a purely personal, anecdotal perspective, whenever I've dabbled with AI it has _felt_ like it is causing instantaneous harm to my own cognitive capacity. Which is alarming enough for me not to use it.
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*To clarify, I've heard bad arguments, such as "VCs might make money out of it"
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I've not yet heard a good argument for SBSP.
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Object permanence? Political correctness gone mad.
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It's a one-two punch of narrative formation. It seems this has disabled the ability of otherwise rational people to recognise events for what they are and act accordingly. But as I say, it's just a thesis.
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On the one hand we've got a broadcast and print media pontificating toothlessly on "what might Mr Musk mean by this? he's so mysterious" (he's not); while on the other you have a whole generation of political actors who've been trained to view the world through the distortion of Twitter (now X).
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[Scottish politician who saw Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute and leading a troupe of graduate white supremacists to ransack the US Treasury] we have much to learn from this man
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Thank you!
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See, I knew I wasn't the only person who watched Darren Aronofsky's π and at the end said to myself "aww that looks nice"
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If only that were the case. But of course the economy is nowhere near as important to the far-right as is the ideological requirement to punish specific out-groups - in this case, the poor.
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The endorphin rush I got from laughing at that headline was immense though, so it's impossible to say whether it's worth $100b or not.