Sam Appleton

Delighted that the good folks @CGPE_Sussex have published my paper on the #WorldBank in their working paper series! m.sussex.ac.uk/cgpe/research/…

@UKHospKate @andyverity As a veteran of many such jobs, don’t get too starry eyed: they were shit, highly exploitative, terribly paid, and very very low productivity. Aim higher.

This is shocking - and it is letting down a generation. Meaningful work is a social and moral imperative and govt could tackle this by reversing the cut in the NIC threshold which has decimated first jobs. When we faced a similar crisis post financial crash Gordon Brown exempted under 21s from NICs and hospitality generated 1 in 3 new jobs for them. The Covid VAT cut also protected these jobs

@_night_brain__ @metpoliceuk My thought is you should stop tasting the urinals, and also consider not being a grass

LEO LEO LEO

"Workers of every country have their Strait of Hormuz"

I’m becoming obsessed with Tonda Eckert lore

Naughty

Everything about this is beautiful

@Smithy_MFC84 He doesn’t have thoughts Ian. He just does, like a dumb animal.

Penny for this pricks thoughts..

@Tom_Gann You did.

If we filmed lots of clubs I can see an argument for booting us out, though still think that’s pretty harsh, but reversing the real result and letting Boro through is ludicrous.

An absolute fucking joke. theguardian.com/football/2026/…

Up, and I cannot stress this enough, the Boro!

@danamalt In all honesty, I think we are/were in the same form as during the 7 game winless streak. We couldn’t beat Southampton, and it’s not just because they cheated. They deserve punishment but we don’t deserve playoff final. Kick Southampton out, send Hull up.

@krishgm Still doesn’t fully humanise him, which is kind of incredible.

The story about his dog…

COBRA-time?

Wow

It is not just trying to rebrand itself. France is actively in search of new colonies. This is not speculation or Pan-Africanist conspiracy theory. Two years ago, Macron presented a plan to his own parliament explicitly identifying anglophone and lusophone African countries as France’s new strategic frontier, the next territory to be brought into the orbit of French influence now that francophone Africa has had the dignity to show it the door. The methodology might be different because we are not 1946. The vocabulary will be partnership, investment, security cooperation, cultural exchange. But the result will be identical because the logic has never changed. So to our “anglophone and lusophone” brothers and sisters across the continent, congratulations on your new status as France’s next strategic frontier. That status earned our countries labelled as “francophone” 7 places out of the top 10 poorest countries in Africa. It really pays to speak fluent “comment allez vous?”.

SEASON FOR AGES… What’s missing? Castore. Edwards. Rangers friendly. Donny Thumping. Azaz Exit. Best Start Ever. Riverside 35yrs. Snake. New Crest. Hellberg. WBA Winner. Sitters. Whittaker Goals. 217 Days Top Two. Hackney POTY. Top Performances. Going 1st at Sheff Utd. QPR Away. Missed Opps at Home. Winless in 7. Squad Depth. 80pts. WeShallBe. SpyGate. Riverside Flares…TONIGHT?

@Boro @Smithy_MFC84 Love you too Massimo! I still haven’t recovered.

"I want to say hello to everyone because I will never forget you." 🥹 Massimo Maccarone's message ahead of Saturday 🇮🇹

Today is David Graeber day: “The Labour Party under Starmer will abandon its core idealism & principles and it won’t even gain tactical advantage. It will be a party which gives no one a reason to vote for it, and no one will, in fact, vote for it.” (April 2020)

A lot of the responses to this image have used it to argue that China had the technology to explore the world, chose not to, and thereby missed the great age of European expansion through cultural sclerosis or bureaucratic timidity. The argument has the comparative outcome right, but the structural picture it implies is wrong, and the actual story is more interesting than Twitter's little morality play would suggest. Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch admiral of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, who between 1405 and 1433 (the original poster say "14th century", which is wrong) led seven enormous diplomatic-tributary expeditions across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and the East African coast. The voyages involved fleets of over 250 ships and 27,000 personnel, with the largest treasure ships running probably 200 to 250 feet long, several times larger than anything contemporary Europe was building. The purpose wasn't commercial. The voyages were prestige projects designed to enroll foreign rulers in the Ming tribute system, with the Chinese state distributing more wealth in gifts than it received back. They projected the Yongle Emperor's status as the cosmic center of a world order that extended to the African coast, and they were one element in his broader program of grand imperial assertion that included the construction of Beijing as the new capital and the campaigns against the Mongols. After Zheng He's death on his seventh voyage, the program was discontinued. The largest treasure ships were broken up, the shipyards were closed, and the technical knowledge of building vessels at that scale was lost within a generation. The standard explanation for this is that Confucian officials, suspicious of foreign contact and hostile to the eunuchs running the program, persuaded the emperor to abandon it. The actual reasoning, though, was less ideological. The voyages cost enormous sums and did not produce an economic return commensurate with their cost. The empire's strategic threat lay overland on the Mongolian steppe, where naval power was useless, and the post-Yongle state was already running deficits the agricultural tax base could not sustain. The bureaucracy that argued against the voyages was making a budgetary case rather than a cultural one. The Tumu Crisis of 1449, in which the emperor was personally captured by Mongols at a battle the Ming should have won, vindicated the people who had argued that the empire's military attention needed to be on the steppe. The deeper question is why the Ming did not subsequently develop a global navy and colonize the world the way the European states would. The answer is structural rather than cultural. The European maritime expansion was driven by Ottoman closure of land routes to Asia, by the search for precious metals to fund European debt, by Christian missionary imperatives, and above all by competitive pressure among rival European states forced to match each other's overseas capabilities. None of these conditions obtained in the Chinese case. China already had access to the goods Europeans were crossing the oceans for. It had no debt crisis overseas gold could solve. It had no missionary religion. And it had no rival of comparable resources whose maritime expansion would have forced China to respond. For the Ming to have undertaken European-style colonization would have been the strategic equivalent of Rome at its height pivoting to Atlantic exploration. The technology was available but the incentives were not. The framing that China was sclerotic for not colonizing the world treats European maritime imperialism as the default trajectory any healthy civilization would have taken. The reverse framing is at least as defensible: European colonization was the response of small, capital-poor, militarily-pressured peripheral states under specific competitive and ideological conditions, with consequences the responding states themselves often could not predict or control. China's continental imperial form, sustained for two thousand years across multiple dynasties, is the historical norm. European maritime imperialism is the historical anomaly. The Ming made a defensible decision to remain the historical norm.

@SuellaBraverman @reformparty_uk International students aren’t eligible for loans. You began your political career with lies and bribery at university - seems you haven’t changed your spots.

Too many universities are selling immigration, not education. Last year, about 250,000 foreign students took up taxpayer-funded student loans to pay for their courses in the UK, worth £4bn. This is not fair. A @reformparty_uk government will make sure that the British taxpayer is not paying for foreign students. Let’s put British students first.