Iain

@discobanana.bsky.social

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Drinker of tea. Devourer of biscuits.

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Iain

Library funding is almost always justified through patron numbers. The more people a library serves, the more funding it gets. So even if you don't regularly use a public library, get a library card. It costs you nothing and helps everyone in your community.

today is my NINETEEN YEAR anniversary working at my local library In honor of that, I ask you to get a card to your local public library today! If you ALREADY have a card to your local public library, check out their digital resources! Their summer programs! And yeah, they have books too.

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Iain

My one and only comment on the election results: next time every expert in the country warns us that Tory economic policy will be disastrous and ruin the country within a decade, maybe let’s not let them do it for 14 years anyway before going “oh wow, they were right”

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Iain

Him and his brother have always been absolute bell-ends. The first Glastonbury I went to - in 1990 - was in support of CND. Don't give me that "it's all gone woke" crap you muppet.

Noel Gallagher says Glastonbury is ‘a bit woke now’ and criticises political musicians

Noel Gallagher says Glastonbury is ‘a bit woke now’ and criticises political musicianswww.theguardian.com Former Oasis guitarist describes festival, which has long championed political causes, as ‘kind of preachy and a bit virtue-signalling’

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Iain

Reply to

Ian Betteridge

AR Moxon posted a good bit about this the other day: “meet me in the middle,” the far right says. You take a step towards them. They take a step to the right. “Meet me in the middle,” they say…

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Iain

Reply to

Carl Nyberg

Remembering that this is a new record low turnout. A trend started by Blair in 1997, setting the previous post-1918 record low in 2001. They don't want us to vote and have long discouraged it. UKIP exploited the yawning chasm and the left needs to work out how to pull off the pro-social equivalent.

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Iain

1870-71: Franco-Prussian War, 433K dead 1914-1918: WWI, 17.6M dead, including 116K Americans 1939-1945: WWII, 54M dead in Europe, including 277K Americans 1949: NATO founded 1949- : No big interstate war in Europe (until Ukraine, which isn't in NATO) 2024: "NATO's dumb. What's it do for us anyway?"

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Iain

It's a truism in US poll analysis that even if a generic Democrat polls well against Trump, there's no such thing as a generic Democrat and every actually existing candidate comes with baggage. But in the UK they somehow found the world's most generic Labour PM candidate and absolutely cleaned up.

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Iain

the other thing is that people have no sense of how much space cars and so they imagine that a road full of cars must be a lot of people when it very often is not. a well-used bike lane transports like twice as many people during a given time as does a road

I've become convinced that one of the biggest obstacles to better road design in commercial areas is well-off business owners who drive their BMW to work every day and find it impossible to imagine a customer who uses any other mode of conveyance to arrive at the shop.

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Iain

- Labour's vote spread was way more efficient than under Corbyn. Brilliant groundgame - Tory vote was cannibilized by Reform - soft tories stayed at home, unlike with Corbyn - Labour will need to win back the votes lost due to terrible trans and gaza policies ALL THESE THINGS CAN BE TRUE AT ONCE

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Iain

Reply to

John Bull

This will be doubly awkward as the number of NOMINATIONS required for a candidate to make the Tory Leadership ballot ISN'T a percentage. It's a fixed number. 100 MPs. I'm sure it sounded reasonable at the time. Good luck getting 100 Tory MPs to agree on something when there are only 121 of them.

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Iain

So to confirm, now we have near-final numbers: Every time 19 Tory MPs get a bit grumpy this parliament and stick their letters into the 1922 Committee... ...it'll automatically trigger a leadership contest.

Worth remembering, for the next five years, that the Tory party rules ASSUME they'll have a large number of sitting MPs. e.g. to automatically start a leadership context only 15% of tory MPs have to put in letters. 15% of 130ish seats is... not a lot.

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Iain

UK’s five-minute transition period goes by without Tory effort to reverse election results.

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Iain

Sinn Féin now Northern Ireland's largest party in the UK Parliament.

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Iain

It will never cease to amaze me how little business owners understand how their customers reach their business

"The roadway once carried between four and six lanes for motor vehicles, despite 88 percent of people in the area traveling on foot and squeezing into 30 percent of the space." And now Adams wants to give it back to cars?

Mayor Adams May Nix Sidewalk Expansions on Bustling Eighth Ave. - Streetsblog New York Citynyc.streetsblog.org Mayor Eric Adams cast doubt on years of city efforts to give pedestrians more space to walk on overcrowded Eighth Avenue.

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Iain

we’re in danger

NEWS --> Mark Robinson, the MAGA extremist GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, appeared to endorse political violence against unnamed foes in a recent speech. "Some folks need killing!" he shouted. "It's a matter of necessity!" Video and story here: newrepublic.com/article/1834...

MAGA Gov Candidate’s Ugly, Hateful Rant: “Some Folks Need Killing!”newrepublic.com Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, has a long history of incendiary comments. But he may have topped himself this time.

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Iain

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Iain

"Establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. ... Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing" – Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/o...

Pluralistic: Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’t (21 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorowpluralistic.net

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Iain

Reply to

Faine Greenwood

Oh, it already is. Same thing happened with "Blockchain." Lots of people were talking about "how do we integrate with the blockchain?" And then I'd ask, "for what?" Nobody seemed to have a good answer for that.

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Iain

very much the words of a man who has never once worried, not for a moment, that he would be outside the law

More anti-democratic thoughts from 2018 the NYT allowed this writer to exclude from his current piece. Delivered with an air of detached irony, as if he miiight be joking or exaggerating. But is he?

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Iain

The ultimate tragedy of Born In The USA is not only was it co-opted by dummies who embraced it because they didn’t catch any words past the title but that it has no barrier for entry for singers. No peaks, no valleys. It starts in the middle & stays there. Happy Birthday is more challenging.

"Please don't vote, anyone still interested in a half-functioning democracy. Thankyoo!"

ah what a helpful op-ed to toss into the mix new york times www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/o...

Opinion | Why I Don’t Votewww.nytimes.com If casting a ballot is merely expressive, then the same is true of not casting one.

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Iain

If you’ve never seen Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the World War II internment camps and the Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned there, today is a good day to see them and to commit to making sure this never happens again. anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothe...

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Iain

Wow, real banana republic stuff. I'm glad our presidents can launder money and associate criminally without worrying about this kind of thing.

Reports: Brazil police have indicted Jair Bolsonaro for money laundering and criminal association

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Iain

There is a 7 foot tall guy behind Rishi Sunak who likely ran for office just to be able to hold a printed out L behind him during his concession speech.

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Iain

This might be more impactful on the election than anything Biden said tonight

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Iain

the conservative theory of law in one headline

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Iain

surged 48%. for a mass plagiarism tool that tells you to eat rocks and glue.

Google says its greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of the data centers that underpin its AI efforts (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Iain

David Simon is GOAT.

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Iain

Flashing back to my fav interview I ever conducted with Giuliani: www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giulian... It was getting crazy enough that I was like… I have to pause this to patch in our national security reporter to start asking questions. It was all clearly on the record. He called the next day…

NEW: Rudy Giuliani has been disbarred in New York www.nycourts.gov/courts/ad1/c...

Rudy: Only ‘50/50’ Chance I Worked With a ‘Russian Spy’ to Dig Dirt on Bidens and Ukrainewww.thedailybeast.com In a wild interview, Giuliani defended his years-long mission to torpedo the Bidens by exposing their alleged misdeeds in Ukraine. And he doesn’t care who supplied the ammunition.

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Iain