think well

Lucy Powell claims Labour was invented to represent the interests of working people. Rubbish Labour was established to represent the interests of the working class. Powell knows this.

@JamesSurowiecki Do people really still buy Microsoft products? Really?

I really dislike subscriptions, which is why I know you can still buy a standalone copy of Microsoft Office.

In thee 2010s China cracked down on their big tech firms, breaking them apart and regulating them harshly. The U.S. coddled them with lax antitrust and tax rules. Can we finally admit the U.S. regulatory model has led to Chinese dominance?

@readswithravi Never plant bamboo. You will regret it.

Cultivate patience.

@artinsociety Genius level.

This sensitive study of an aged woman absorbed in her task was originally known as Rembrandt’s Mother Reading (1629), though the attribution is now disputed

If you smash trade unionism and sell the British economy to the City on the cheap, of course you create temporary prosperity for a few. But the impact of these policies on the many has to be measured over decades.

As usual, the change from 67 to 68 for the state pension will be ushered in without a whimper from the British public. In France they riot. In the UK we tug our forelock & smile ruefully. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…

In 'The Echo.' (1891) a young girl shouts into the Finnish midsummer night, and you feel her joy and wonder at discovering her voice ricocheting all around her. It's one of Ellen Thesleff's finest paintings yet her work wasn't shown at the Helsinki Ateneum until a century later.

The Chinese president stood on a stage in Shanghai and laid out China's entire AI playbook in one speech. It was his first-ever in-person appearance at the World AI Conference. I went through the whole thing and pulled out everything that matters. - he opened with his signature maxim that great changes unseen in a century are unfolding across the world. - he said AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of international cooperation. - he reaffirmed China's commitment to open source AI in the name of openness and shared benefit. - he warned against overstretching the concept of national security in AI, where one country puts its own security above everyone else's. - he said China opposes the emergence of new historical injustices in AI, one of the strongest-worded lines in the speech. - he pledged 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over the next five years, naming ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the SCO, and BRICS. - he committed to giving 30 countries access to a Chinese AI weather system that provides early disaster warnings. - a day before the speech, 29 countries signed the agreement creating a new World AI Cooperation Organization headquartered in Shanghai. strip away the politics and one thing stands out to me. he didn't pitch benchmarks or chatbots. he pitched AI as infrastructure, weather warnings for countries that lose thousands of lives to storms they never saw coming, and training programs for regions the AI boom has skipped. meanwhile most of the Western AI conversation revolves around which lab ships the next frontier model. I don't care who wins the race. I care whether the computing power reaches the people who need it. The full speech is below, and it's worth your time.

More pension scaremongering. When will they give in?🙄. The state pension & triple lock is a necessary and perfectly affordable government service. x.com/malcolm_reavel…

@malcolm_reavell They do the second in spades.

Markets are often treated as if they naturally maximise public benefit, but they can just as easily reward speculation, weak care, low wages and ecological destruction. pearlsandirritations.com/post/2026/07/m…

@malcolm_reavell and don’t forget Social Care (as in private profit)

Not “state intervention”, privatisation, deregulation, profit gouging, where the state regulation is now permission to price gouge. Eg; housing. Sell council houses, create a private property “market”, deregulate banks and finance industry, cause housing inflation.

@SheilaG17662835 @keswickbootco Via Herdus or Steel Brow? Some steep sections either way

Today's #Wainwrightwalk was Great Bourne and Starling Dodd via Floutern Pass, Ennerdale. S Dodd takes my lifetime #Wainwrights to 210. The rest will have to wait a while as they are all off Wasdale and its holiday time. This walk is mostly suitable for over 65s @keswickbootco

Chinese billionaire & venture capitalist Eric Li explains why China🇨🇳 is winning the competition against the US🇺🇸: ‘In America, you can change the party but you can’t change the policies. In China🇨🇳, you cannot change the party, but you can change the policies.’ ‘China is a vibrant market economy but it is not a capitalist economy. There’s no way a group of billionaires could control the politburo, as billionaires control US policymaking. So in China, you have a vibrant market economy, but capital does not rise above political authority.’

@PippaCrerar I would guess that your plan is to undermine him.

Do tune in for all the latest on Monday - a big day!

What most people already understand, even without the economic terminology, is that firms like BlackRock do not operate in a vacuum. Their business model depends on governments creating the legal, regulatory, and political conditions that make it possible. Through privatisation programmes and permissive regulation, governments allow essential infrastructure,water networks, ports, energy grids, data centres, and other public necessities,to be transferred into the hands of financial institutions. These assets are often purchased using vast amounts of borrowed money, at prices ordinary market participants cannot hope to match. Once the acquisition is complete, the debt is frequently loaded onto the acquired company itself. The government permits it, regulators oversee it, and the public is left to live with the consequences. The result is predictable: consumers repay that debt through higher water bills, rising energy prices, increased fees, and deteriorating service quality. Infrastructure that was once intended to serve the public becomes a vehicle for financial extraction. Wealth flows upward to investors and executives, while costs and risks are pushed onto households. When the model inevitably begins to fail, governments that enabled it step in to shield the system from collapse. Communities are left with neglected infrastructure, polluted rivers, and failing services. Thames Water's £14 billion debt burden and repeated sewage scandals stand as a warning of what happens when governments prioritise financial engineering over long-term public stewardship. The executives who loaded the company with debt have already received their bonuses. The investors have already taken their returns. Yet when the consequences can no longer be ignored, it is the taxpayer who is expected to absorb the losses. The pattern is not accidental. Government policy creates the opportunity, regulators permit the extraction, private investors collect the rewards, and the public inherits the risks. -Privatise the gains. -Socialise the losses. -Facilitate the process through government. That is the business model....

@ObserverUK @tmorrissyswan If you are hard up, go for Vin de Pays at the least. The only bruising by vin de France is based on low price - not depth of flavour, satisfaction, terroir. Large corporates are the main beneficiaries not small producers, obviously.

The rule-breaking French wines giving burgundy a bruising Any grape from any region can be found in bottles of Vin de France, which are cheaper and better suited to a changing climate than more prestigious labels, writes @tmorrissyswan bit.ly/3R2vYiV

Watchdog accused of ‘giving away’ billions of litres of spring water to foreign bottling giants Environment Agency faces criticism for allowing multimillion-pound overseas companies to extract huge volumes from England’s natural sources at low prices ✍️ @JonUngoedThomas bit.ly/4wNYi7D

@LauraCummingArt Laura, the painting of Gravelines in The Observer today shows a bend in the Aa estuary. This would was as it was in the C19. The estuary was canalised before that but the end of the canal section would have been nearer the town.

@heokk_team the flight is EZY 8410, due to leave one hour ago. Here is a photograph