OffSide Book Reviews

Ex Bookshop now just a Twitter voice for books, Spain and beautiful links.

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

An understatement?

[Navalism @NavalismHQ]

"I have this theory that 99% of work that you do is useless. You still have to do it because it's iterating your way to the 1% that is useful. But, in an ideal world, if you are omniscient, you would just cut to the 1%."

@naval

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

@bammybae_ Not sure. I suspect years ago their clientele were from local factories and businesses that would normally close around 4 or 5pm, and after that everyone went home or to the pub.

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

If they don't do this within the next 48 hours, then no point, we've missed our chance

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

Given we can't be sure about this plague outbreak, why not stop all unnecessary flights for a couple of days, so we can ascertain the risks?

[Annie Jacobsen @AnnieJacobsen]

Kazakhstan introduces quarantine controls at border crossing points w/ Russia to thwart pneumonic plague threat.

Which is how you mitigate contagion. Reduce the risk of spread.
https://t.co/RmNZmgOqUC

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

@MetroUK October. mmm

[Cookerwatch @cookerwatch]

Looks like the plague is back. Anti vaxxers here is your chance. Don’t back down. Do not comply. Do not mask. Do not vaccinate. Gather amongst yourselves. Just please don’t go near anyone else who decides to comply with health directives. You do you. Let’s see who wins.

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

Given we can't be sure about this plague outbreak, why not stop all unnecessary flights for a couple of days, so we can ascertain the risks?

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

@matthewdmarsden Plague.

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

Seems I called that right?

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

A few months ago we had a "suspected terrorist incident" in St Leonards. Roads closed for days. Turned out to be just some guy storing cleaning containers. Not certain yet we have seen a terrorist act at Fairford.

[Florence Lox 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @floboflo]

I ordered a few barrels of cheap diesel from some bloke on Facebook a week ago and it still hasn’t arrived!
What on earth is keeping them?!

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

A few months ago we had a "suspected terrorist incident" in St Leonards. Roads closed for days. Turned out to be just some guy storing cleaning containers. Not certain yet we have seen a terrorist act at Fairford.

[Florence Lox 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @floboflo]

Yesterday in St Pancras no one was pulled by the hair or twatted with a walking stick or had their boat stabbed with a knife.
Neither were there domestic abusers throwing stuff at the police.
No ferries were blocked, no criminals hit in the balls with a brick, no Gregg’s were looted, no one asked for buildings to be set on fire for all they care.
Why? Because the left love their country and know how to behave.

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

What more to say?

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

Some interesting insights into retail business here

[foley (follard) @follard]

Every American has driven past a strip mall with three mattress stores on the same block, empty parking lots at all of them, and assumed it had to be a front for money laundering. The stores exposed zero inventory on the floor, one employee sitting on a display bed scrolling their phone, and seemingly no customers at any hour of the day.

They are not laundering money. In fact, they are printing it.

A mattress that retails for $2,000 to $3,000 costs roughly $250 to $350 to manufacture. That is a 75% to 85% gross margin on every unit sold. No food spoilage, no shrinkage, and a simple supply chain. A mattress sits on the showroom floor for months and never depreciates in the eyes of the consumer.

A typical mattress store leases 3,500 square feet of strip mall space at $8,000 to $10,000 per month. The store needs one floor employee working on draw plus commission. There is no kitchen, no back of the house team, and no perishable inventory to manage. Total operating overhead is remarkably low relative to the margin and profit of every sale.

Because the margin per unit is so high, a mattress store breaks even selling 15 to 18 mattresses per month, which is only one mattress every other day. Every sale beyond that threshold drops almost entirely to the bottom line.

The parking lot does not need to be full. The store does not need foot traffic. A single couple walking in on a Saturday afternoon and financing a $2,800 king mattress represents more gross profit than most restaurants generate on the best dinner service of the week.

Private equity figured this out years ago and went on an acquisition spree. Mattress Firm acquired Sleepy's and Mattress Giant, rolling up thousands of locations across the country. Their strategy was not about selling more mattresses, it was about controlling lease covenants in retail corridors.

When Mattress Firm signed a lease in a strip mall, they negotiated exclusivity clauses preventing the landlord from leasing adjacent space to competing mattress retailers or direct to consumer mattress brands trying to open showrooms. By saturating a market with locations; they locked online first competitors out of physical retail entirely. A brand like Casper or Purple could not get a storefront on the same corridor because the lease covenants already prohibited it.

The stores looked redundant and unnecessary were actually defensive real estate positions. Three Mattress Firm locations within two miles of each other was not poor planning and instead a deliberate strategy to control the retail corridors and prevent competition from establishing a physical presence.

Mattress Firm filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018. They emerged 60 days later after shedding 700 underperforming leases. The bankruptcy was a portfolio optimization exercise. They kept the highest performing locations with the strongest lease economics and walked away from the rest.

A company does not enter and exit bankruptcy in 60 days unless the underlying business model is healthy and the only problem was an oversized real estate footprint that needed pruning.

The mattress store with the empty parking lot and the single employee is one of the highest margin per square foot retail concepts in the country, and the real estate strategy behind the roll up was never about the mattresses at all.

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

What they do to asylum seekers is ALWAYS a blueprint for how they want to treat the poor & vulnerable among us.

Prepaid cards that limit how you can spend your money are a humiliating constraint on liberty. Asylum seekers have known it, the system is a stigmatising disaster.

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

Einstein never said "Compound Interest is the eighth wonder of the world." But it has the ring of truth to it.

[Callum Lyon @CallumLyon]

I still can't believe school never taught us anything about mortgages, credit scores, savings, taxes, or how politics actually impacts our lives. No proper lessons on budgeting, rent, interest, or how to avoid drowning in debt once you reach adulthood. But somehow we had time to learn cursive handwriting, complicated algebra we've never used since, the cells of a leaf, Venn diagrams, and how to set magnesium on fire with a Bunsen burner. Funny how school prepared us for exams, but barely prepared us for real life.

[OffSide Book Reviews @OffSideBooks]

@floboflo Are you talking about the X-patriots?

[Paddy Power @paddypower]

BREAKING: Man City have been found guilty on all charges relating to breaches of Premier League financial regulations. As a result, Everton have been deducted 10 points.

[Callum Lyon @CallumLyon]

Bank: "We need proof that you can afford 800 a month for a mortgage"

Me: Okay, here's 5 years of rent at 1200 a month. Never missed a payment.

Bank: "That's not good enough. You're outgoings show you won't have 800 spare a month"

Me: That's probably because I pay my landlord 1200 a month.

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

🚨 A quarter of a million views and 14K likes for this divisive and typically misleading framing from Reform UK Leader, Nigel Farage.

Farage claims Level 2 and 3 plumbing courses are free for “illegal migrants” while young Britons pay thousands, and that Reform would “ban migrants from handouts.” The underlying complaint he’s amplifying is real. The framing around it isn’t.

The scheme he’s referring to is the Adult Skills Fund (ASF). Under it, asylum seekers can access full funding for approved qualifications on the relevant funded lists, including plumbing, once they have lived in the UK for six months or longer while their claim is being decided, or in a small number of other specified circumstances involving refused claims under appeal or local authority care.

That’s a genuine entitlement, and it’s what fuelled a viral complaint from a 27-year-old British trainee last week who said he faced £4,000 to £6,000 to complete his Level 2 and 3 plumbing qualifications.

But “asylum seeker” is not the category Farage names. The ASF rules explicitly list who is excluded from funding, and that list includes anyone here “without authority or lawful status.” A pending asylum claim is, by definition, a lawful basis to remain while that claim is decided, whatever the route by which someone arrived.

Someone with no claim, no permission, and no lawful basis to be here doesn’t qualify under this scheme at all.

Farage’s tweet folds the first group into the second. The rules he’s complaining about draw exactly the line he’s erasing.

His tweet also implies young Britons get nothing while migrants get everything. That’s not what the funding rules say either.

Learners aged 19 to 23 who haven’t already achieved a full Level 2 or Level 3 qualification are entitled to full funding for their first one, regardless of employment status. That’s a nationality-neutral entitlement, not something reserved for migrants.

The 27-year-old whose case went viral falls outside it not because of who he is, but because he already holds a Level 1 qualification and is past the 19-23 window, both age and prior-attainment conditions, not immigration ones.

Another factor complicates the “Brits pay, migrants don’t” framing further: income.

Anyone unemployed, employed or self-employed and earning below £26,800 a year, on a qualification that sits on the relevant funded lists, is fully funded for courses up to and including Level 2, and the Level 3 Free Courses for Jobs offer, regardless of age. That’s the national threshold rising from £25,750 in August 2026; devolved areas such as London can set their own figure. It’s based on individual earnings, not household income.

Whether the trainee at the centre of this story was actually shut out of free funding depends on details his post didn’t include: his income; whether his specific college and qualification code were on the funded list; and whether anyone assessed his eligibility properly.

It’s possible he genuinely fell through a gap. It’s also possible the barrier was a provider quoting commercial fees, or poor signposting, rather than a rule that treats him worse than an asylum seeker.

Either way, his case demonstrates something less tidy than Farage’s tweet claims: three separate entitlements (age, income, immigration status) sit side by side, and a British 27-year-old could plausibly qualify under one of them without a college ever mentioning it.

None of this erases a real and worth-discussing problem: funding rules complicated enough that people can wrongly assume they’re excluded, and a system where genuine unfairness can exist without needing an “illegal migrant” strawman to make the point. But that’s a more technical story than the one Farage is telling.

His version needs the asylum seeker recast as an illegal migrant, and the British complainant recast as representative of “young Britons” generally, when the actual explanation for his situation may sit in age brackets, income thresholds and course-list technicalities that have nothing to do with immigration status.

Reform’s proposed fix, “ban migrants from handouts”, targets a group the existing rules already largely exclude.

The people this scheme funds are asylum seekers who’ve waited six months for a decision they didn’t control the timing of. Removing them from a scheme they access lawfully wouldn’t touch the actual barrier facing the British trainee in the original post, which runs through age thresholds, income tests and funded-qualification lists that have nothing to do with immigration status.

Of course, none of this really matters to most Reform UK supporters or GB News viewers, because, like the MAGA base that supports Trump, they don’t really care about facts, context, nuance or reality when it comes to defending their Dear Leader making misleading claims or offering scapegoats.

Farage is a disgrace.