Benjamin Hume

It seems to me

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Starship achieved orbit on its first attempt and successfully delivered Starlink V3 satellites to space for the first time → https://t.co/LwJ4g6dNZ3

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Liftoff of Starship's first orbital flight

[Sovey @SoveyX]

What really happened after the State Dinner.
The lost Xi camera roll has been found.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This is the future we shall bring into being

[Tesla @Tesla]

The future has arrived in Austin

[Jazz Memes @JazzMemes]

“The WIFI password is on the back of the router”

The back of the router:

[Geoff Norcott @GeoffNorcott]

First day of the stag-do after claiming you’re gonna ‘pace yourself’

[Wokerati Marty @WokeratiMarty]

An American interviewer asked Count Binface where he stands on the British political spectrum. 👇

[san @saneord]

"we have sandboxed the agent"

the agent:

[Nick, 30 @an0n_Nic]

How do I cancel my subscription to the state?

[Genma_Jp @nymbusjp]

https://t.co/4ilpGvVsvG

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Pollyanna Burnham has absolutely no idea what's about to happen to him. He has a head full of bad ideas that weren't tried by any of his recent predecessors, not because his predecessors were smarter than him, but because they were rapidly disabused before getting down to business. Burnham, though, thinks that bad ideas will become good ideas if he's the one implementing them. For Burnham, the normal laws of political reality do not apply. There are hard lessons for him behind the door of Number Ten, waiting like starved crocodiles for their hapless prey.

While this is going to be endlessly entertaining and wholly predictable for us politicos, it is not without consequence. This is the gear shift that pushes the "just about managing" into the "not managing" bracket. This is the turn that pushes businesses and households irrecoverably into the red and upends what people have been struggling to maintain. This is the narcissistic clueless meddling that puts the country into a death spiral. The anger will be palpable.

By that, I don't necessarily mean the sort of riots triggered by the tone-deaf and ineffably useless Starmer. That cannot be ruled out, of course, but this is the inflection point where the normally reserved, who just prefer to get on with their lives, are dragged into the wake turbulence against their will. It's the bill hike that obliterates the last of their disposable income. It's the last of the small pleasures that make the drudgery of making ends meet bearable denied - when there's no longer any reward for taking the punishment - and there's no end in sight.

This is when Burnham's entire psychological construct begins to dissolve. The world as he understands it is one where if you're nice, with good intentions, then you are liked - and the only reason you could dislike such a person is if you yourself are not nice. Starmer was better equipped to be hated because he had no empathy, and public sentiment of any kind had no bearing on his demeanour. Burnham, on the other hand, wants and needs to be liked. This is often a fatal flaw in politicians.

What makes Burnham especially dangerous is that he will pull at any and all levers in search of doing the nice thing, in order to be liked, oblivious to the second order consequences, and will be shocked, surprised and horrified to learn that his every action has the opposite of intended effect on public morale. He will not understand why. He is not capable of understanding why, even if it is explained to him in the most gentle terms by a compassionate softly-spoken primary school teacher.

Unlike, Starmer, though, he won't go into the bunker to hide. He will take it to mean that people just haven't gotten to know him yet, and need to see more of him so they can understand that he's a nice guy and on your side. And when it doesn't work, he will blame the interface layer. If we don't get it, it just means something is lost in translation. That's when nice turns nasty.

This is the hole he will keep digging, the scab he simply won't stop picking until the sore becomes an open wound. WHY WON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW NICE I AM?? They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Burnham, though, does not plan to build a road. He intends to drill directly to Hell with industrial tunnelling machines. There is no force of magic that can make socialism work.

Crucially, what Burnham doesn't understand, is that the Labour party has become the party of the status quo for a reason. There is nowhere else for the left to go. Tony Blair, for all his many faults, was smart enough to understand certain economic laws of gravity. He shitcanned socialism because he knew that you can't hope to help people if the state is broke. He rebuilt the state as a managerialist welfare dispensary.

That might have been a viable avenue for 1997. But "sharing the proceeds of growth" is contingent on actual growth, which is no longer possible in a hyper-regulated, high tax moribund economy. Blairism is as dead as socialism. The bottom line is that there is no left wing solution to what ails us.

Burnham, though, believes enough time has passed for us to have forgotten, so that we'll mistake old ideas for new ideas. A lot of people probably will fall for it again, but it doesn't take very long to relearn the lessons. The Finding Out stage happens faster each time. On that basis, Burnham is not a man who will make it to the next election intact. He doesn't have much to work with. He has no mandate, no fiscal headroom, limited political capital, and absolutely no talent. A man promoted to captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. The only way for Burnham is down, down and down.

[🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo]

it is genuinely psychotic that we dug up literal primordial dirt, scrubbed it down to an impossible 99.9999999999% molecular perfection that violates the very laws of physics, handed it over to techno-wizard necromancers to stretch into flawless geometric god-cylinders, blasted it with invisible uv death-rays to carve ten quadrillion microscopic cyber-sigils into its flesh, trapped actual lightning inside of it, and somehow birthed an omniscent eldritch deity capable of simulating the universe and thinking faster than a billion human civilizations combined.

and our grand, supreme purpose for this enslaved lightning-god?

sending "per my last email, please see attached" to a guy named gary.

[Greg Cello @gregcello]

https://t.co/rTGNoSu6Ek

[Naval @naval]

Science is not a process, a credential, or an institution.

It is the unflinching pursuit of truth, carried out by the few, co-opted by the many.

[Genma_Jp @nymbusjp]

https://t.co/1BP1LOu6Vc

[Robotaxi @robotaxi]

Golden era

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

This account does proper work and more people should read it.

Greens and Green-curious, this one's for you. Not a gotcha, not a conversion pitch. Just the maths your own side has to answer to before any of the rest of it matters.

£4.8 trillion. £78k a head. That's the starting position of every policy conversation in this country, whether anyone on the platform admits it or not. You can tax, you can borrow, you can print. Tax has a ceiling the Laffer curve already found. Borrowing runs into a gilt market that's been telling us for two years it's done subsidising us. Printing debases the currency your wages and your rent are denominated in, which hits the people you claim to care about first and hardest.

None of that is right-wing. It's just immutable arithmetic. MMT describes the plumbing fine, it just doesn't repeal the consequences and its suggestions to print more money only exacerbates the existing inequality - that you rightly call out as a problem. It is a problem. We agree.

I'm not asking you to forgive the Tories. I'm not asking you to love Labour. I'm asking whether the people asking for your vote now have actually sat down with the gilt curve and worked out how their programme survives contact with it.

If the answer is just vibes, then you're a protest vote, and a protest vote in this fiscal environment is a luxury the country can't afford.

Thirty years of being let down. You're right to be angry. So are we. That's the bridge. Perhaps we can still walk across it.

[Avi @AviFelman]

Once again this graph has a hold on me