Chris P Bacon

Old before my time and general pain in the arse. Enjoy a good moan. Expert in running marathons without adequate training. South Korea and Taiwan bore.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

This is the final aesthetic form of the managerial internationalist order and it is sad that Singapore Airlines has finally succumbed to it. It is truly grotesque.

Welcome to millennial grey or as I prefer to call it, the globohomo aesthetic. It signals the triumph of the neutral, the scalable, and what Marc Augé called "the non-place."

These are spaces designed to erase the friction of being somewhere specific and it has now found its full expression in the airline's newly unveiled cabin interiors.

The whole point of this soulless minimalism is to make the transition between places feel effortless, to optimize for global movement, and the result is the smoothing away of rooted cultures, traditions and visual particularities.

You also see this design now in airports, hotels, new apartment builds and AirBnBs. They employ the same materials, the same restrained color palette, the same soft-touch surfaces, and the same implication of competence. You are everywhere but nowhere at once.

The passenger is not meant to feel the particular hospitality or visual culture of Singapore. Who was this designed for? The bean counter? The management consultant? The flagship cabin has become merely a container for productivity and rest rather than an experience with its own local character and heritage.

This is tragic beyond belief because Singapore Airlines still flies the most distinctive cabin crew uniform in commercial aviation: the sarong kebaya designed by Pierre Balmain, unchanged since 1968, its batik detailing a living fragment of Peranakan culture tied to a specific place and history.

Every other airline has updated or abandoned its uniforms for mass production or modern fashion cycles. Singapore Airlines refrained.

Yet for whatever schizo reason, they've decided to yeet their identity everywhere else that matters. The airline that once treated its visual identity as a point of pride has chosen the path of least resistance. The earthy tones are gone. The leather, the wood trim and the art - all gone. Just safe cool grey interiors that are dreary, corporate and characterless.

You legit can't tell if you're in a Silicon Valley headquarters or a German automaker's concept vehicle or in the waiting room of a medical clinic.

Welcome to the internationally interchangeable visual language, which I suppose is par for the course for what Singapore has become - competent, sure, but risk averse, and increasingly unsure of who it is or worse. It's just a well-run node in the global network.

[Tim CB @balmer_tim]

You don't have to understand anything about this to know it will be disastrous - just that it is being promoted by Bell is enough. If you do know anything about this you still know it will be disastrous.

[max tempers @maxtempers]

What bothers me so much about this, even more than the immediate, ruinous impact on the rental sector, is what it does to civil society. If you design a system that encourages people to take the piss, people who’d never otherwise have thought to do so will also have to start doing so or risk feeling like mugs. You already see this in the benefits system, where even genuine claimants are encouraged to lie and exaggerate.

And this habit, once formed, doesn’t just limit itself to interactions with faceless institutions. It spills over into all dealings in the public sphere, and an underlying level of suspicion builds up between strangers. Forebodes a very bleak future as people revert to informal institutions and additional costs are layered into every transaction as “fair play” can no longer be relied on.

[Steve Loftus @LoftusSteve]

Jesus. MPs are now trying regulate football chants.

[Eleanor Rofe @eleanorrofe]

An incompetent state outsources one of its major responsibilities to 'charities'.

If the concept of 'charity' had not been distorted from 'doing good for others' into 'tax-reliefed activism' it would still be an awful idea.

But in our current environment, this is giving the kids the keys to the sweet shop - and then giving them a box of matches and some kerosene, just for good measure.

[Christopher Snowdon @cjsnowdon]

Too many men spend wartime mucking around on the frontline when they should be reading bedtime stories.

[Graeme Archer @graemearcher]

What's happening now is almost worse than what happens in full-on recessions. In those, businesses close because no-one has money to spend; everyone "draws in their horns" from real or anticipated fear. Now, businesses that have lots of custom are closing because, even with that custom, they *cannot afford the taxes the govt imposes for their right to operate*. We've lost so many shops and restaurants in the south-west because of this - especially restaurants, whose utility bills and NI costs are made obscenely high *by the policy choices of the govt*.

[max tempers @maxtempers]

We need to have a National Conversation on the constitutional role Martin Lewis now serves. Perhaps the @instituteforgov should add him to their government organograms.

[Chris P Bacon @ballsmonkey99]

@FarleighRichard Never understood why Paphitis strained away to snap a bit off it in order to make some point about safety. Yes, a fully grown man can break a kids bag!

[David Lawrence @d_1awrence]

Back in 2010, the minimum wage was £12,064 and the 'higher earner' band started at £43,875.

You only paid 40% tax once you were earning 3.6x the minimum wage.

There was clear incentive to progress, learn and aspire for more.

As things stand, you now start paying 40% tax once you earn £50,270 which is just 1.83x the minimum wage.

If it was the same multiple as 2010, the 'higher earning' band would be £98,841 and everyone below this amount would be paying 20%.

Someone on £98,841 is effectively losing out on £9714.20 net per year if the bandings had simply moved in line with previous multiples relative to minimum wage.

This is one of the reasons why the middle class is being eroded and why there's a cost of living crisis in the UK.

[Iain Martin @iainmartin1]

This is because @KMbappe dared to joke (mildly) about Mao - a dictator whose polices caused an estimated 35-45 million deaths.

[Tim CB @balmer_tim]

Two certainties - People will get rich from this pledge. The number of rough sleepers will not significantly change.

[WasAcop @WasAcop]

Car crash interview. £874 million to get about 4,000 people off the street.

That’s £190,000 each. Buy them a house.

Instead it’s contracts, outreach teams and councils deciding where the cash goes.

Rough sleeping rose under Burnham in Manchester. Now we’re nationalising the failure.

[Eleanor Rofe @eleanorrofe]

There’s a thing called “cocktail eyes” - when you’re talking to someone and they’re already scanning the room for someone more important.

A lot of our politicians have cocktail eyes about the job itself. And we're the ones they're ignoring.

Local councillors who bang on about Palestine are treating their actual role (bins, hedges, planning, antisocial behaviour - the local good) as beneath them. National politicians who treat e.g. Net Zero as a chance to be “world leaders” are doing the same thing at a bigger scale: chasing status and smugness instead of the national good (energy abundance and security).

In both cases they need to put their eyes back in the room and focus on the people they are meant to serve. As Collingwood says, that alone would radically alter our country.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

One of the smartest things a young person could do is get a remote civil servant job while starting a business.

These jobs are totally made up. There’s no real work to be done. Lots of meetings about the latest nonsensical initiative. Basically log into MS Teams, listen to your boss drone on about the 17 new safety protocols to observe while sitting at your desk. You don’t have to have your camera on or engage - just say that it triggers your anxiety.

Literally no chance of getting fired. More people die in the civil service each year than get fired.

Meanwhile you can be pre-launch in your startup. Conducting research, getting customers to engage, building your waitlist. All the while you’ll be getting paid and accumulating a pension.

There are very few genuine passive income opportunities available but government jobs are a real thing.

Be smart kids, get a remote government job. Do the work in 30mins a day. Sit through the pointless meetings. Get paid. Then launch your startup.

[Filipp Piatov @fpiatov]

Brutaler Leitartikel im konservativen Le Figaro. Eine Abrechnung mit Frankreichs politischem System und seiner Elite.

„Eine Justiz, die gegenüber Straftätern nachsichtig ist, gegenüber anständigen Bürgern aber unerbittlich. Das unbegreifliche Privileg dieser linksextremen Milizen, die ungestraft zerstören, Brände legen und töten. Eine unkontrollierte Einwanderung, bei der sich ein Teil der Einwanderer gegen das Land auflehnt, das sie aufgenommen hat. (…) Eine politische Klasse – die verschiedenen Spielarten des Sozialismus, die uns seit fünfzehn Jahren regieren –, die sich Leichtfertigkeit, Blindheit, wenn nicht sogar wohlwollende Duldung vorwerfen lassen muss.
Die Ermahnungen Emmanuel Macrons an eine Polizei, die seiner Ansicht nach nicht genügend „Empathie“ gegenüber jenen zeigt, die sie mit Schrauben, Pflastersteinen oder Feuerwerksmörsern angreifen, werden als unauslöschlicher Makel in Erinnerung bleiben. (…)
Wenn die extreme Linke, Straftäter und Plünderer Frankreich innerhalb weniger Stunden völlig auf den Kopf stellen können, dann liegt das vor allem daran, dass eine von sich selbst berauschte technokratische Monarchie systematisch sämtliche moralischen, sicherheitsbezogenen, kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Schutzmechanismen eingeebnet hat, die eine Gesellschaft zusammenhalten. Die nützlichen Idioten Jean-Luc Mélenchons tragen nicht nur die Kufiya, sondern auch die Krawatte.“

[Burnside @BurnsideWasTosh]

When I set my business up 10 years ago today Employers NI was 13.8%, Corporation Tax was 20% falling to 19% in Apr 2017. The tax free dividend allowance was £5,000, the top rate of tax on dividends was 38.1%. You could sell your business and make the first £10 million of gains at a rate of 10%.

By every single metric setting up a business in this country has become less attractive. Before you get to the mechanism actually trying to do anything as bold as opening a bank account working a 5 day week etc...

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

This is great. Just what we need. Add another screen to your life. In case the screen in your pocket or the one on your wrist or the various screens already stationed around your home aren't enough -- lest you go more than 15 seconds without interacting with a screen, or being within 5 feet of one -- you can get the Apple HomeView. Really important innovation here. It doesn't do anything that the 20 other screens you already own don't do, but still. Very cool.

[John Rentoul @JohnRentoul]

Astonishing that tags are not fitted before release from prison

[Gully Foyle @TerraOrBust]

NEW

The Conservatives have just committed to:

🔵 Create a new removals force
🔵 Remove *all* illegal arrivals, foreign criminals and those *already here*
🔵 Deport 150,000 people a year
🔵 Lower threshold for criminal deportation
🔵 Ban asylum for all illegal arrivals