Ahmed Hussain

@estwebber @mattzarb I've always felt that if you want to build a better world, a good place to start is by trying not to be an arsehole personally as you go about it.

Nokia could have invented the iPhone. Three years before Apple did, a Nokia engineer walked into a meeting in Finland with a working prototype: a touchscreen phone with full internet access. Management killed it. The device looked too expensive and too risky to sell. The same year, Nokia also rejected a proposal for an online app store. Apple would launch the same idea four years later. In 2007, Nokia controlled 40% of the world's mobile phone market and was worth more than $150 billion. By 2013, it had sold its phone business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion. The company that defined the cell phone became irrelevant in less time than it takes most kids to finish high school. In 2016, two professors from INSEAD and Aalto University spent years interviewing 76 Nokia executives, engineers, and consultants for a research paper. Their conclusion: nobody at the company could have an uncomfortable conversation. Senior leaders were described as "extremely temperamental." One consultant remembered then-CEO Jorma Ollila shouting at people "at the top of his lungs" in front of fifteen other vice presidents. Middle managers learned the rules fast. Bad news got you fired, so they stopped delivering it. The engineers knew Nokia's operating system could not compete with what Apple was building for the iPhone. One design team submitted 500 separate proposals to fix it between 2001 and 2009. Not a single one got approved. When a middle manager once suggested that a colleague push back against a top executive, the colleague refused. He "didn't have the courage; he had a family and small children." The top managers were also afraid, just of different things. They worried about looking weak to investors. So they publicly defended the old operating system while privately knowing it was dying. The middle managers heard the demand for optimism and supplied it. For four years, the people who knew the company was sinking could not get that message to the people who could do something about it. Researchers call this shoot-the-messenger culture. It shows up in cockpit recordings before plane crashes, in hospital records before preventable deaths, and in the investigations of the 2008 financial crisis. The cost of avoiding a difficult conversation is always paid later, with interest. Nokia's case is unusual because the math is so clean: the silence cost roughly $143 billion in market value and an entire company. The discomfort would have cost a few bad meetings.

@flying_rodent Jenrick is one of the absolute worst. He was a liberalish Tory not that long ago and has gone full BNP knowing exactly what he is doing. What a shit.

What decades of Very Real Concerns racism-wrangling has bought us, here. Best of luck winning over Yer Da now.

They teach you about how much evil Hitler was in the 20th century while leaving out how Germany wiped out more than 80% of Namibians before even WWI Germany only officially recognized it as a genocide in 2021, more than a century later, with no reparations and re-education

@Alonso_GD @mattzarb @ZackPolanski Hmm. Bit like the digital ID announcement - do you feel they're rushing stuff through now so starmer's successor will be given no choice.

.@ZackPolanski’s plan to freeze energy bills in June: £8.4bn. Labour politicians called it “catastrophic” saying he had “wrong answers on the economy”

Montagu Norman was the most powerful central banker of the early 20th century. In a 1924 speech to the United States Bankers Association, he said: “By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance.” 100 years later, people are still trapped in the same left-vs-right divide while the State keeps expanding.

@martinshawx @jemgilbert The spin, lobbying, and misdirection merchants have literally nothing to offer except spin, lobbying and misdirection. Faced with a problem - change the presentation and lie about what you're doing. No wonder they suck at actual government.

Not surprisingly after all that’s happened, Labour’s McSweeney wing has rebranded: ‘ThinkLabour has been created out of Labour Together - but this is much more than a new logo and a change of name. It is a new organisation, with new leadership, a renewed mission and a fundamentally different approach to what went before.’ Oh, come off it.

@jemgilbert They didn't think like this after the 2017 election - although chuka did graciously let it be known he was willing to serve again. Perhaps they just felt they'd be frozen out by the left and not get any of the baubles under Corbyn but they think Burnham more biddable.

It's honestly more surprising that it took this long for ambitious careerists with no personal convictions to realise that this is the way the wind was blowing. This is how history works. FDR was an opportunist, not a conviction socialist. Expect plenty more where this came from.

Britain gets lots of hard things right, and lots of easy things wrong. A country of world leading biotech research while outsourcing companies charge local authorities £120,000 to create a zebra crossing (actually true).

@AydinDikerdem @jemgilbert @meadwaj I guess it's to try and get Burnham to crash and burn on their terms. Find it very difficult to believe they are doing something straightforward and sincere in a desire for broad-church debate. It would go against everything they've been doing for ten (thirty?) years.

@jemgilbert @meadwaj To paraphrase Ralph Miliband, the great adventure continues

Not gonna lie, did not see that coming

@mehdirhasan Even without photographic evidence, there's just the bald stats. Youngish men do not drop dead at the rate they have been doing in Israeli prisons for no reason.

As much as people might want to dispute or challenge the claims of ‘dog rape’ there’s simply no denying the torture that goes on against Palestinians inside of Israeli prisons. It’s been documented by the UN & every major human rights group, including Israeli human rights groups.

@BareLeft So in 2008, as the fiance sector was at serious risk of drowning in its own shit, the only thing big enough to save it was governments. Now, mysteriously, government is too small and powerless to be able to stand up to finance.

Organised Capital is far too comfortable making threats against democratically elected leaders and Governments.

@jemgilbert You'd think, in a meaningfully functional democracy, that a sane and informed person would be able to give an instant "that's clearly bollocks" to such a theory.

@arghmed I honestly don't know.

A Labour PM cannot survive every single affiliated union saying he has to go. Even Starmer’s MI5 handlers must realise that.

I urge UK journalists/politicians to read Nangle before alarmist incantations about power of bond investors ' greatest compliment the bond market can give a chancellor aiming for economic rejuvenation is a mild sell-off' @AndyBurnhamGM @ZackPolanski

Right before you fall asleep, your hands and feet get warmer. That warming is the real trigger that switches your brain into sleep mode. A 1999 Nature paper tested it against melatonin, core body temperature, heart rate, and how sleepy people felt. The hand and foot warming won. The drawing in the tweet works on this exact trigger. The pose has a name in Japan: Mōkan Undō, or "capillary exercise." Katsuzō Nishi designed it in 1927. He was the chief technical engineer on the Tokyo subway, Japan's first. It became one of six daily exercises in his system, still done in Japan today. You lie on your back, point your arms and legs straight up, and shake them for thirty seconds. While the limbs are up, gravity drains the blood from them. When you lower them, the blood floods back into your hands and feet, warming them in seconds. Your brain reads that warming as a green light to sleep. The shaking activates a separate reflex, the kind most mammals use after a scare. Dogs and rabbits shake themselves off after a fright for the same reason. Dr. David Berceli, a trauma therapist, built a whole method around it, with certified instructors now in 40 countries. The shaking flips your nervous system out of "I'm wired" mode and into "I'm safe to sleep" mode. Nishi got the biology wrong. He believed capillaries, the tiny blood vessels at the ends of your veins, did the pumping. William Harvey, an English doctor, had shown the heart did the work, three centuries earlier, in 1628. The exercise still works, for entirely different reasons than Nishi thought. The drained limbs come back warm. The body reads that as a sleep cue, and the shaking calms the nervous system on top of it. A drawing on X with millions of views just rediscovered a 100-year-old Japanese sleep exercise. A subway engineer designed it first, decades before sleep scientists figured out why it would work.

@flying_rodent Ouch

Obviously. You wouldn’t expect Emu to start a bold new solo project after Rod Hull fell off that roof, would you?

@bingle_colin @sheffielduni George Porter (my dad did his PhD art Sheffield under him).

Sadly, Chemistry may well be for the chop @sheffielduni too soon. It's not like it's produced any important alumni or anything 🤔

I know there’s a lot going on with the Labour Party, but it is all in the bounds of democratic politics. This however, paid collusion between the leaders of two political parties in the run up to election, if true, is a scandal of staggering propositions

This has been going on for 80 years, and heavily documented. The NYTimes finally scraped together enough integrity to publish something.