AS Performance

Privatisation going well is it

🚨 Fun Fact: Birmingham City Council has spent around £33 million dealing with the bin strike. The strike started because the council wanted to save £1.2m in staff costs. £33m… to save £1.2m. This is how badly our councils are run.

I agree with everything in this article. The cuts to particle, nuclear and astro physics research in the UK will be devastating, not only to the fields themselves but also to universities more widely and, in the longer term, to industry and therefore the economy as a whole. They were not thought through, there was little or no consultation, and I do not believe they have the support of parliament. The SI&T select committee has been ignored, indeed pretty much everyone who knows anything about the successful but delicate research ecosystem in the UK has been ignored.

I’m sick of this “we can’t feed the whole world we should be looking after our own” argument from the same people who want benefits slashed

Are we barking mad? Krill are essential food for penguins, seals, whales and albatross. Now, we've introduced two new species to the Antarctic food chain to compete with these creatures by catching krill to feed to our cats and dogs. qrillpet.com/product @NatGeo

Fabulous museum @bletchleypark - unbeatable!

No one bets $1.5 billion unless they are sure and have insider information. This isn’t the first time either. There should be an outcry in the USA about this. Also unnoticed by many, SEC Enforcement Division Director Margaret Ryan resigned last Monday after just over six months on the job, after clashing with her bosses over investigating Trump family trades.

If you want to understand why extreme wealth concentration is a failure, just look at the oligarchs it produces. Watching multibillionaires actively try to dismantle the societies that enriched them is the only argument you need against their influence

Meta Must Pay $375 Million Over Allegedly Enabling Child Exploitation go.forbes.com/UGqkiT

Today is the feast of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, 'Lady Day'. In England it was once the spring quarter-day, when contracts would begin and servants took new jobs, and until 1752 it was also the start of the New Year. A day for new beginnings, new life of many kinds.

The diplomat at the center of the Rothschild raid worked at the UN from 2006 to 2013. During that time, he sent UN Security Council briefings to Jeffrey Epstein. After leaving the UN, he went to work at Rothschild bank. The bank that was just raided.

After spending 16 months pretending she was investigated for a non crime hate incident, in order to sue for libel, she now has to fess up that she was actually investigated for the criminal offence of inciting racial hatred. Putting the Twitter in a Twitter.

Massive reality check. Tech oligarchs did not suddenly become conservative. Biden tried to regulate Amazon and Meta so they simply switched sides and bought Trump instead. It is not about ideology it is about raw capitalist control over the government.

Dorothy Thompson had a gift that made powerful men uneasy: she paid attention when others dismissed.... In 1931, when she interviewed Adolf Hitler, she didn’t walk away dazzled—she walked away alarmed. She described him as oddly unimpressive, almost forgettable. But beneath that, she recognized something far more dangerous: a man who could weaponize grievance, manipulate fear, and turn ordinary frustrations into something explosive. At a time when many foreign correspondents treated fascism as political theater—or worse, a passing phase—Thompson was already writing with urgency. She had spent years moving through post–World War I Europe, watching instability harden into extremism. She understood something others didn’t yet want to admit: this wasn’t chaos—it was momentum. From her post in Berlin, she wrote bluntly about the Nazi rise, refusing to sanitize what she was seeing. It didn’t take long for the regime to notice. In 1934, she became one of the first American journalists expelled from Nazi Germany. Not quietly reassigned. Expelled. Labeled a threat. Back in the United States, she didn’t retreat—she amplified. Her column, On the Record, reached millions. Her voice carried across radios into living rooms. And while much of the world debated whether Hitler could be “managed” or “contained,” Thompson kept saying the part people didn’t want to hear: this would not stay contained. She warned against appeasement when it was still politically convenient. She spoke with a clarity that made people uncomfortable, because clarity often does. And she did it as a woman in a profession that still expected her to soften, to defer, to step back. She didn’t. Dorothy Thompson wasn’t just reporting history as it unfolded—she was trying to interrupt it. Trying to force people to see what was already forming in plain sight. And for a time, she stood almost alone in saying it out loud. The tragedy isn’t that she was wrong. It’s that she was right—and the world hesitated anyway. © Women In World History #archaeohistories

#OnThisDay 1807 the Abolition of Slave Trade act gains Royal assent making trade of African slaves illegal in the Empire. In the decades that followed the Royal Navy captured over 1600 ships, freeing over 150,000 slaves. The cost was 2% of Government spending or half of RN budget

The insider trading scandal just got worse. It wasn't just oil. Someone also made a massive unexplained trade on the S&P 500 exactly 15 minutes before Trump's Iran war tweet. Hundreds of millions of dollars made in minutes. They knew exactly what he was going to say.

On 25th March 1807 (219 years ago today): The Slave Trade Act received royal assent from King George III, banning the British Empire’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade (effective 1st May 1807). This was a pivotal moment in history. The road to 1807 was long and hard-fought. For nearly 20 years, abolitionists; led in Parliament by William Wilberforce and supported outside by campaigners like Thomas Clarkson, gathered evidence of the trade’s brutality, organised mass petitions; gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures (pre phone/internet era), and repeatedly introduced bills. Early attempts failed (e.g., Wilberforce’s 1791 motion lost by 163–88), but public outrage, slave revolts in the Caribbean, and shifting economic and moral arguments eventually secured cross-party support. The 1807 Act passed the Commons and Lords overwhelmingly and became law on 25th March. Britain became the first major power to outlaw the trade and then actively suppress it worldwide. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron (established 1808–1810) patrolled the African coast for decades, capturing around 1,600 slave ships and freeing approximately 150,000 Africans by 1860. The operation cost the lives of roughly 2,000 British sailors and an estimated £40 million at the time (equivalent to around £2 billion today), described by some historians as the most expensive humanitarian intervention of the modern era up to that point. Britain also used diplomacy and naval pressure to force treaties on other nations, accelerating the trade’s decline. Though slavery continued in some British colonies until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which received royal assent on 28th August 1833 and took effect from 1st August 1834. Full emancipation across most colonies came on 1st August 1838 (with the final phase in 1840 in some cases). The 1833 Act compensated slave-owners via a government loan that British taxpayers finally paid off in 2015. Contemporary calls for reparations from Britain frequently overlook (or downplay) the enormous moral, political, naval, and financial price Britain paid to end its own involvement and then suppress the trade internationally; efforts that helped bring the transatlantic slave trade to an end. At the same time, modern slavery persists on a shocking scale: the 2023 Global Slavery Index estimates 50 million people living in modern slavery today (28 million in forced labour, 22 million in forced marriage), with the highest prevalence in countries such as North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, and large absolute numbers in India, China, and elsewhere. Britain today ranks among nations with the strongest government responses to modern slavery. History is rarely simple. Despite the involvement in Slavery, Britain led the abolition of it at considerable cost... The fight against all forms of human exploitation did not end in 1807 or 1838; it continues.

Those wheels you’re looking at are 0.75 millimeters thick. That’s half the thickness of a US dime. Each one was carved from a single block of aluminum, and NASA sent six of them to Mars knowing they’d eventually shred. Curiosity was built for a 2-year mission. It landed in August 2012, and by December that year NASA had already extended the mission indefinitely. Thirteen years and 35.5 kilometers later, the rover is still going, but the wheels started cracking just 14 months in. The damage came faster than anyone at JPL predicted. Sharp embedded rocks were punching straight through the skin between the treads. So NASA assembled a Wheel Wear Tiger Team (a crisis problem-solving tradition that goes back to Apollo 13) and got to work. In 2017, they uploaded a traction control algorithm from Earth that adjusts each wheel’s speed in real time based on the terrain, reducing force on the front wheels by 20%. They rerouted the rover to softer ground and started driving backward when possible, because pulling wheels over rocks produces less force than pushing them into rocks. The wildest part: if enough treads snap off, Curiosity is designed to find a sharp rock on Mars and use it to deliberately rip out the damaged inner section of its own wheel. JPL tested this on a replica rover and found Curiosity can keep driving on just the outer third. They predict this won’t be needed until around 2034. Every 1,000 meters, the rover pulls over and uses the camera on its robotic arm to photograph its own wheels so engineers on Earth can count every crack. Each wheel also has tiny holes that spell “JPL” in Morse code, which Curiosity uses to measure distance by photographing its own tracks in the dirt. These photos directly changed the next rover. When NASA built Perseverance, engineers 3D-printed about 70 different tread designs before landing on 48 curved treads instead of Curiosity’s 24, with thicker skin. They tested the new wheels over 60 kilometers and got zero damage by Curiosity’s original failure definition. “A boring graph with no data on it,” as one JPL engineer put it. A $2.5 billion machine doing self-surgery with rocks on another planet because the mission outlasted its design by 6x.

Hard to know which is more shocking - the apocalyptic warnings of the potential collapse of our food supply in the UK or the shameful fact that governments have tried to cover it up. Their complacency is off the scale …

OpenAI just exited the video generation business entirely. App dead. API dead. No video inside ChatGPT. Disney’s $1 billion deal, signed four months ago, is dead. Read that again. This isn’t a consolidation into the super app. Altman told staff Tuesday that OpenAI is winding down all products using video models. Disney’s own statement says they respect OpenAI’s decision to “exit the video generation business.” The Sora research team is being redirected to robotics. The reason is sitting right there in the competitive data. Anthropic hit $19 billion in annualized revenue by early 2026 selling text and code. No video generation. No image generation. No consumer social app. No Disney deal. One product surface: chat, code, computer use, all in one place. OpenAI looked at where every dollar of market growth was coming from and saw the answer: coding and enterprise. So now they’re copying the model. ChatGPT, Codex, and the browser merge into one app. Instant Checkout killed today too. Every consumer experiment is getting cut. What remains is the Anthropic playbook: one app, code and chat, enterprise and developer focus. The Sora numbers explain the urgency. Total consumer revenue across iOS and Android since September: $1.4 million. Peak month was $540,000. Every video generation burned GPU compute that could have been running inference for ChatGPT or Codex instead. OpenAI’s own head of Sora announced generation limits because chips couldn’t keep up. At $14 billion in projected 2026 losses, every GPU matters. Google just inherited the AI video market by default. Nano Banana already lives inside Gemini. No standalone app to manage, no separate brand to support. Among the majors, they’re the only ones left. Runway, Kling, Minimax, Luma, and the other independents are still shipping, but none of them have Google’s distribution. Disney put $1 billion in stock warrants on a product that lasted six months. The deal was announced in December. Characters from Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars were supposed to be generating fan videos on Sora by now. Instead, Disney is writing a polite press statement about “respecting OpenAI’s decision” while its legal team unwinds a deal that never produced a single licensed video. Four months from billion-dollar partnership to obituary. That’s how fast the AI product landscape reprices when the unit economics don’t work.