Cole Hine 🏳️‍🌈

Autistic agender communist; railways & public transport enthusiast; he/she/they

@[email protected]

[Dawood Safi @Da_Wood_]

There is one BIG problem with this version of the story.

It reaches the sentence “Mullah Omar disagreed” and conveniently stops there.

But that is exactly where the story becomes much more INTERESTING.

Mullah Mohammad Omar’s response was far more nuanced than simply saying: No, Bin Laden is my guest and I will never hand him over.

What followed was a clash over evidence, sovereignty, religion, dignity and, ultimately, whether Afghanistan would bend the knee.

A thread.

[Gareth Dennis @GarethDennis]

This is a railway access point. There are more than 35,000 of them in Britain, each one enabling inspection, maintenance, repair and, sometimes, emergency response.

Since 2020 though, a potentially fatal flaw has been creeping across the network, and it needs to be reversed.

[Cole Hine 🏳️‍🌈 @Cole_Hine]

@GarethDennis There's also a good article on why W3W shouldn't be used for safety critical applications here - https://t.co/r0xqs55MBR

[Markos Mom @Markos_mom]

The Station Nightclub fire happened in 2003. No smartphones. No Instagram.

100 people still died because they stood watching the flames, thinking it was part of the show.

I've retrofitted fire safety for some of the largest property portfolios in the UK post-grenfell.

You are confusing stupidity with biology, physics, and catastrophic design failures.

Here is the actual science of what you are watching:

1. When the music keeps playing and staff don't panic, the human brain overrides flight instincts to fit the threat into a normal context. This is called normalcy bias. These kids froze to process conflicting social cues, not to post for likes. They were likely already filming. They were also likely drunk.

2. We explicitly design buildings to account for this hesitation (pre-movement time). Fire safety codes assume people will wait before running. In a compliant building, you can assume up to a minute or two before egress commences. Sprinklers and detection systems are designed specifically to buy that time.

3. The reason the time buffer didn't exist here is the material. That ceiling is polyurethane foam. It doesn't burn linearly; it hits flashover (1,100°F) in under 90 seconds. It's essentially solid gasoline. The room would have exploded for all intents and purposes. Way before anyone could reasonably evacuate.

4. We calculate exit widths based on how many people can physically pass through a door per minute (flow rate) versus how fast a fire spreads. With foam fires, the available safe egress time drops to almost zero. Even if they had reacted instantly, the crowd density would have choked the exits before the room cleared.

5. In any normal building fire, especially one that starts off small, you expect a responsible adult to put it out, or sprinklers to do the same. When there's a pan fire in a restaurant, you don't run out in case the entire building suddenly explodes. No reasonable person should have expected this unless they were the owner and knew how the building was designed.

Those poor teenagers likely passed out from smoke inhalation soon after this video. If they didn't, they would have been caught in a catastrophic explosion as they crammed into the single tiny exit.

They didn't die because of Instagram.

They died because the physics of the fire moved faster than human bodies can physically squeeze through a door, and a catastrophic disregard of safe design principles meant they never stood a chance.

[diamond geezer @diamondgeezer]

The UK's 12 busiest railway stations (according to data just released)

[Joanna Hardy-Susskind @Joanna__Hardy]

The Ministry of Justice getting convicted of a crime under the Single Justice Procedure has absolutely finished me off. Immaculate. 10/10. No notes.

[Chris Littlewood @chrislittlewoo8]

Digital ID for every adult is not progress. It is the end of a free society dressed up as convenience.

I am a cyber security specialist. This is my take.

They are selling it as a fix for illegal migration. That is bollocks.

We spend hundreds of billions a year on cyber security and yet the volume of breaches is breaking records. The threat is growing faster than the spend.

Digital ID will not stop boats. It will not stop trafficking gangs. It will not fix a broken border.

Criminals will work around it.

Honest citizens will pay the price.

It builds giant data banks that track where you go, what you buy, what you read and who you speak to.

It links your identity to every checkpoint in daily life.

One breach and your life is exposed.

Look at Jaguar Land Rover and the airports in recent weeks. Now imagine that at national scale on an ID system tied to everything you need to live your daily life.

Here is the risk that ministers will not admit.

Ransomware seeded through a supplier or an insider:

It lies quiet for months.
It rolls through the backups.
On trigger day the register and the recovery sets are both encrypted.

Payments fail. Health and benefits stall. Borders slow. Citizens are frozen out until a ransom is paid or the state rebuilds from scratch.

Centralise identity and you centralise failure.

Do not fall for the pitch.
Function creep is certain.
It starts as login.

It becomes access to money, travel, speech and public services.

It turns rights into permissions controlled by the state and its contractors.

It creates a single point of failure for criminals, insiders and hostile states to target.

It will punish the elderly, the poor and anyone who is not always online.

It will centralise risk and outsource blame.

It will not stop fraud.

It will not stop illegal migration.

It will build the machinery for a social credit system by stealth.

If ministers cared about the border, they would enforce current laws, resource patrols and processing, close loopholes and remove those with no right to stay.

You do not need a national ID to do any of that.

We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason.

Britain does not need a central register to prove age or status.

Yes to privacy first proofs. No to a database state.

[The Secret Barrister 🦋 @BarristerSecret]

To understand the context of Leveson’s call for restricting jury trial, look at the terms of reference.

Govt wouldn’t let him recommend increased funding.

Akin to demanding a solution to starvation that doesn’t include food.

And the recommendation being to chop off body parts.

[Madoc Cairns @MadocCairns]

Ahead of the expected proscription of Palestine Action - the first time a protest group has been legally redefined as terrorist - I went through the Hansard of the 2000 Act they're being banned under. Turns out MPs were assured the law wouldn't be applied this way. Thread 🧵🔽

[Fahad Ansari 🇵🇸 (Stop the Gaza genocide) @fahadansari]

Yesterday, my firm @riverwaylaw filed an application to the Home Secretary @YvetteCooperMP on behalf of Hamas for its removal from the list of proscribed organisations. The public reaction over the past 24 hours demonstrates a great degree of misunderstanding and ignorance of the law surrounding proscription. A short thread to clarify some of those matters.

[Gareth Dennis @GarethDennis]

Measures against haulage companies aren't hard enough... Put this on HGV drivers and we'll never see bridge strikes reduce. Put a few haulage companies out of business and there might be some change.

[Gareth Corfield @GazTheJourno]

If I've read this baffling description right, you can be fined for being in the front 1st class compartment on a Thameslink train between St Pancras and Blackfriars - even where getting an identical train 2 mins earlier or later and doing the same thing would not get you fined.

[Gareth Corfield @GazTheJourno]

If you sit in first class at the front with a standard class ticket, you get fined. If you sit in first class at the back, you don't. Baffling if you're not a regular who's in-the-know.

A Telegraph story about this is coming.

[Gareth Dennis @GarethDennis]

The AI overview on @Google is an abomination and the longer it stays in place the more destroyed the internet will be.

Because this answer is complete historical gibberish:

[Gareth Dennis @GarethDennis]

Let's post some receipts, for the benefit of anyone attempting to defend @LordPeterHendy, @SYSTRA_UKIRL and @NetworkRail's actions in some way. Because I have a folder of this stuff.

[Michael C @MikeWillSee]

Wanted to let the dust settle and gather my thoughts before compiling a response to this but this is... BAD!

@LordPeterHendy has abused his senior position by blackmailing one of NR's contractors to fire a well-respected employee who repeated PUBLICLY AVAILABLE information... 🧵

[Gareth Dennis @GarethDennis]

In May this year, @LordPeterHendy pressured my now-former employer @SYSTRA_UKIRL to sack me by threatening them.

Why did he do this? Because I'd highlighted safety and accessibility issues at Euston station. He is unfit for office and should resign.
https://t.co/d7evLefdJz

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

There is literally no need at all for Labour to deliver a painful budget in October. There is a massive capacity to increase taxes on wealth. If Labour wanted to borrow they could. And there are people who want good work.

[The Man in Seat 61 @seatsixtyone]

We now have a universal workaround for LNER fares.
For travel London <> all stations Newcastle-Edinburgh inclusive, DO NOT book to/from London:
1. Book to/from Finsbury Park
2. In the search results, click 'Filters' then 'Route options'. Under 'Go via ' enter Kings Cross.