Alan Rew

@alanrew

UK-based retired software developer. Art, Photography, Science, Music, Economics, Politics, Geology, Physics, Chemistry, Earth Science, Architecture, Archaeology I can't send/receive DMs here. Signal: alan.285

5585 Siguiendo4538 Seguidores19.713 Publicaciones

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Alan Rew@alanrew· 20d

Auto-generated headline, indistinguishable from Allister Heath ones.

Allister Heath
Why Andy Burnham is the final, fatal symptom of Britain's moral collapse
[parody headline, generated by website
https://stirring-fox-7e1fab.netlify.app/

Alan Rew@alanrew· 23d

Includes this interpretation of the Mahmood appointment, which sounds very plausible. Don't abandon hope yet.

The Mahmood re-appointment is obviously terrible. It is a big loud warning sign flashing above this project. But the most realistic interpretation is not that Burnham will pursue the ‘fuck-liberals’ agenda. That runs contrary to nearly everything we know about him. It is that he thinks Mahmood has become talismanic of Labour’s reliability on immigration to more socially conservative voters and must therefore be retained, but that her proposals should be softened and moderated.

Alan Rew@alanrew· 23d

Amusingly, this is still on the FT front page. For the FT, it appears that Ed M as Chancellor would signal the end of the world. It campaigned for Mahmood as the alternative.

"The Burnham era begins: Mahmood set for chancellor"

Alan Rew@alanrew· 29d

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jul 13

Map showing location of UAE proposed new port, outside Strait of Hormuz:

map showing proposed location of new UAE port, on UAE east coast, which would remove the need for using the Strait of Hormuz to reach their current port on their west coast.

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jul 11

Note: this really is a parody, generated by a website.

Allister Heath:

Count Binface is the ultimate weapon of the Britain-hating metropolitan elite

[PARODY WEBSITE]

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jul 4

This statement appears to be in denial about the actual situation in the US. "each generation has pushed us a little closer to its ideals" - so that's how you ended up with Trump? "celebrating the country we have" - the one with Trump as dictator-in-chief?

Dave Cavellv
I still believe America can be what we dream it to be. Not because we’re blind to its flaws, but because each generation has pushed us a little closer to its ideals.
Here’s to celebrating the country we have & working toward the country we need.

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jul 2

Allister Heath:
The Left's disastrous Andy Burnham experiment will plunge us into a new Dark Age
[parody]

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jun 26

This is the key point, but it's not just the PLP that don't support the performative hostility, it's rafts of voters who've abandoned Labour because of this ridiculous stance from Starmer's government. Burnham has to put a stop to this nonsense.

“This is Labour’s reset moment when we can consign to the past some of the appalling language used by politicians to describe refugees: ‘invaders’, ‘an island of strangers’, ‘tearing our country apart’. We can’t reset by bringing with us policies that many in the PLP do not support"

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jun 22

Take the reforms to indefinite leave to remain. These plans make it almost impossible to integrate immigrants into the community. They exclude people who are here legally, in many cases for well over a decade.

Ignore the moral element. Who does that actually help? What problem does it solve? Which issue is it supposed to address? None. But then that was not the function. The function was to appeal to Reform voters. Decades from now, someone will be suffering as a result of these changes and no-one will really remember why they were even introduced or what the purpose was.

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jun 19

Makes me think of this meme

Winnie the Poo meme, looking bored "With James" but looking smug "With Cat Sitter"

Alan Rew@alanrew· Jun 3

Boosting this important point from Stephen's very good piece, with alt text added.

There is a reasonable debate to be had about how suspects are treated. But we should be clear that the issue here wasn't that the Hampshire police decided that an accusation of racism was more serious than a stabbing. It was that, faced with two people giving a false account of what had happened and one person telling the truth, they sided with two over one. As a result they treated the victim as a suspect, and in England, being treated as a suspect by the police meant he was treated in ways that made his last moments worse. Whatever we think should be done differently has to start by grappling with that truth.

Alan Rew@alanrew· May 25

Philosophical cartoon in Private Eye

Two anthromorphised trees on a forest. One is wearing a watch-like device on its wrist/branch. The other tree, meant to be younger one says
"It's a wrist alarm, Grandad, in case you fall and nobody is there to hear you"

Alan Rew@alanrew· May 21

Extract from article. Text in ALT.

"OpenAI used a new reasoning model (not yet released) to help identify a counterexample that disproved a conjecture from discrete geometry first proposed by Paul Erdos 80 years ago. The model was tuned for so-called chain-of-thought reasoning where the model endlessly “thinks out loud” about whatever it is trying to solve, an approach that lets you approximate something like memory and dynamic computation using LLMs, which are otherwise static and feed-forward. Professional mathematicians identified the counterexample from within a long transcript of the model’s reasoning, and then extracted the key parts and rewrote it as a more succinct proof in a more standard style."

Alan Rew@alanrew· May 21

Very good, detailed piece about how UK governments have failed to be honest with voters about the need for immigration. Text in ALT.

"This is the migration doom loop. The government responds to political pressure by promising to reduce numbers. The easiest reductions come from routes that are economically useful and administratively controllable: students, skilled workers, dependants, care workers. The fiscal and labour market costs then show up elsewhere, in weaker public services, lower tax revenues and more pressure on universities and care"

Alan Rew@alanrew· May 12

Stark example of FPTP distortion in recent local elections, from this article

"And in Sutton, the results are stark. The Liberal Democrats have taken almost all the seats on the Council with a minority share of the vote.

[pie chart showing Lib Dems got almost all the seats in Sutton]

These are very different political stories, but they point to the same problem: First Past the Post distorts election results no matter which party benefits. Ultimately, the voting system is just failing to deliver for the voters."

Alan Rew@alanrew· May 6

Obvious

A model of the "Trojan rabbit" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A crude wooden rabbit on wheels.

Alan Rew@alanrew· May 3

I had to do this...

"Surrender to heat-pump tumble dryers is the greatest betrayal of our times"
Allister Heath
[fake headline]

Alan Rew@alanrew· Apr 26

The lineup scene from The Usual Suspects.

Alan Rew@alanrew· Apr 22

Still worth noting that the UK overall tax burden is smaller than in many other countries. Looks like a headline talking about a relative, rather than absolute, change to make it look worse & hence more click-worthy?