@ComfySipper@PaulSkallas I mean in fairness - in this dimension it’s really the US which is the outlier. @ByrneHobart writes very eloquently about the bizarreness of the American 30 year mortgage product
@emollick Semi related - HHGTTG was also basically a travelog written by a highly educated 1980s British man suffering culture shock in California. He saw the future because it was already there.
@hekwoys Pudding == dessert. Yorkshire pudding and black pudding are different from pudding in the same way that West Virginia is different from Virginia.
@bolkonsky35@james1071@peter_sarris No just Oxbridge is bigger (Ivy League + MIT) - America perfected higher education around 1910 and leapfrogged Europe
@chrisgolds The Elizabeth line has loads more luggage space than I can fill. Unless you enjoy the ceremony of lifting your luggage off a high rack, it’s perfect.
@sasuke___420@sdamico The thing about surface spreading was that it was just incorrect. At some point we didn’t know. I don’t think an abundance of caution destroyed trust - it was speaking dishonestly when things changed that did it.
Offhand —
* Vacillation on masks, with abundant motivated reasoning in every case.
* Promulgation of made-up thresholds with no evidentiary basis (e.g. 6 feet).
* Authoritarian delight in nanny state intrusiveness (policing the beach and such).
* 180 on many issues around BLM.
* Lack of effective response from science funding bodies.
* Denial of aerosolized transmission.
* Changing of trial readouts so that they’d occur after the election. (Confirmed to me by senior OWS officials.)
* Crazy criteria for vaccine distribution.
* Adamant insistence on vaccine efficacy beyond what was supported by data.
* Almost complete lack of follow-through on OWS (on pan-variant vaccines).
I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that stick out.
@robkhenderson A friend works at a posh London club. One of the members caused a scandal when a guest of his asked someone what their job was. The vulgarity!