Linkage

My first budget day as a trader was in 2009. There was still a Labour government back then and Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown were adamant it was time to tax bankers’ bonuses. I was a banker but a very poor, very young one. Around that time I slept on a broken mattress and used a little plastic hose from Argos to take showers while sitting in the bath.

I was worried. But I turned round to Billy, and Billy wasn’t worried. He was laughing. He was leaning back, pointing at me, and laughing. He stood up and grabbed me hard by the shoulders. “Don’t worry, Gal. They’ll never tax us,” he said.

Organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and protest groups such as Palestine Action are among those that could be affected by the non-statutory move to block groups from funding or accessing venues if they are regarded as promoting an ideology that undermines “British values”. The plan was reported by the Observer last year.

A minister said on Tuesday that he would not be happy if, for example, gender-critical feminists were labelled as extremists by a change of government policy.

The trade minister Greg Hands told Times Radio that the prime minister had talked about taking on extremism and the government needed to work on definitions.

“The communities secretary, Michael Gove, is doing that right now. More work is being done. But obviously we need to target real extremism and not just a difference of views, honestly held views about these things,” he added.

A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something — where they’re basically seen as empty receptacles to be filled with facts or skills — tends to be much less effective than some variant of student-centered learning that involves inquiry or discovery, in which students play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves and with one another.

[…]

Now put yourself in the place of one of those hard-liners who want teachers to remain the center of gravity in the classroom, disgorging information. How might you circle the wagons despite all the research that undercuts your position? Even more audaciously, how could you try to get away with saying DI is “evidence-based” or supported by the “science of learning” — a favorite rhetorical gambit of traditionalists?

To the rescue comes an idea called cognitive load theory (CLT). This concept, primarily associated with an Australian educational psychologist named John Sweller, basically holds that trying to figure things out for yourself uses up so much working memory that too little is left to move whatever has been learned into long-term memory. It’s therefore more efficient for the teacher just to show students problems that have already been worked out correctly or provide them with “process sheets” that list step-by-step instructions for producing the right answer. (Imagine Jack Nicholson as the cognitive load theorist, hollering at students, “Inquiry? Your brain can’t handle inquiry!”)

Today, the FTC and Department of Justice took action to fight algorithmic collusion in the residential housing market. The agencies filed a joint legal brief explaining that price fixing through an algorithm is still price fixing. The brief highlights key aspects of competition law important for businesses in every industry: (1) you can’t use an algorithm to evade the law banning price-fixing agreements, and (2) an agreement to use shared pricing recommendations, lists, calculations, or algorithms can still be unlawful even where co-conspirators retain some pricing discretion or cheat on the agreement.

The agencies’ work in this space is especially important given rising residential housing rental prices. Rent is up nearly 20% since 2020, with the largest increases concentrated on lower- and middle-tier apartments rented by lower-income consumers. About half of renters now pay more than 30% of their income in rent and utilities, and rising shelter costs were responsible for over two-thirds of January inflation.

Meanwhile, landlords increasingly use algorithms to determine their prices, with landlords reportedly using software like “RENTMaximizer” and similar products to determine rents for tens of millions of apartments across the country.

We the undersigned, being Jewish, wish to support and join a complaint against the Metropolitan Police, for their racist and anti-Semitic assumption that all Britain’s Jews support Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.

We further believe that the decision of the Metropolitan, Police to delay the starting time of the March Against Genocide in Gaza on 17 Feb. 24 from 12.00 to 1.30 pm ‘to accommodate an event at a synagogue along the route’ is lslamophobic, based as it is on the assumption that the large numbers of Muslims taking part pose a threat to Jews worshipping in congregations nearby.

I can't help thinking that the author's desire to see "a sustainable Cloud" is misguided. What does "the Cloud" do? What's it for? Why do we need it?

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat.

As always, the cruelty is the point:

Christian nationalism has provide little in terms of tangible benefits for the the group from which it draws its support, while seeking to erode the rights and status of almost everyone else. The losers under Christian nationalism will be the targets of White reactionary politics. Again, from Perry:

"Religious, racial, and sexual minorities lose as their very existence (not to mention their cultural and political influence) is publicly demonized and perhaps in some cases curtailed. Working class White Americans (even the Christian ones) exchange the possibility of a better economic future for the false promise that some mythical Christian heritage and values will be preserved."

Second, there are some areas where Trump has delivered, such as on abortion access, that provide guidance to what he will do in a second term. Judges appointed by Trump are primed to present to SCOTUS cases that allow them to push the boundaries of Christian nationalist values. More such judges, more cases, offered to a SCOTUS supermajority that no longer feels the need to find a middle ground on these issues.

Third, Trump’s approach to governance will be more sophisticated in a second term. He has a blueprint for governing that bears the imprint of supporters who are open about the goal of imposing Christian nationalist values. This includes familiar areas such as immigration, and education. Trump lawyers committed to a Christian nationalist agenda will operate in concert with their judicial brethren. The Alabama IVF decision rested on an 1872 law. Trump allies plan to leverage the 1873 Comstock Act to prevent the distribution of abortion medication. The1872 Alabama law was about civil lawsuits for wrongful death of children, and the Comstock Act is about the shipping of obscene materials. But sufficiently motivated Christian nationalist lawyers are happy to explain how each law prohibits the use of technologies that would not be invented for a century.

Aside from the less pleasant aesthetics of American stadiums’ surroundings, car parks are surprisingly costly. “In Australia, each parking space in high-density locations is worth about $100,000”, says urban planner David Mepham, who recently published the book Rethinking Parking. “Yet a lot of that parking is not very well used, if it’s used at all.”

In Melbourne, an estimated 25-41% of parking in apartment blocks in the inner city — which developers are often mandated by law to build — stand vacant. Such unused parking costs Australians more than $6 billion.

For public projects, the cost can be even higher. The Victorian government recently announced a new car park for Frankston station, which will cost approximately $174,000 per space. That money could buy a lot of extra bus services or bike infrastructure, so people wouldn’t need to drive there. But as the Morrison years taught us, politicians still go to great lengths to cut the ribbons on new car parks.

It's hard to overstate Hardin’s impact on modern environmentalism. His views are taught across ecology, economics, political science and environmental studies. His essay remains an academic blockbuster, with almost 40,000 citations. It still gets republished in prominent environmental anthologies.

But here are some inconvenient truths: Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.

And he promoted an idea he called “lifeboat ethics”: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water.

To create a just and vibrant climate future, we need to instead cast Hardin and his flawed metaphor overboard.

I have so much to say about this. Practically nobody agrees with me on such things these days, but as a mission statement, "make Doctor Who like Doctor Who" seems eminently sensible. Keep it special.

Our purging of silliness from the show wasn't just political correctness. It made the stories much better. The Doctor's ''sonic screwdriver'', for example, was magical baggage we had to lose. A pen-sized gizmo that could blast through tempered steel, translate Azurian into English, and fend off the Karturi by generating an impenetrable neutron dome might be just the ticket in real life, but in fiction was a sure-fire story-killer. We didn't want our audience shouting out from behind the sofa ''where's the sonic screwdriver?'' whenever peril threatened.

We wanted a strong narrative line, and we relished the way our storylines could arc over four episodes, bristling with cliffhangers. All of which seems to be missing from the current season. Perhaps it's fear of a short audience attention span that has contracted the stories to single or double episodes. To compensate, we get snappy dialogue and a couple of cracking lead actors who do a lot of running around.

If a quarter of a century ago the first two laws of Doctor Who were ''Science'' and ``Story'', then the third was ''Keep It Special''. It might be a super sight gag, or a spooky spine tingle, but if it had shades of Benny Hill, or The Prisoner, out it went.