Mark Maksic

R's and cricket mad, mortality denier.

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

Ping-pong-brain here wrote an entry-level (entry into kindergarten, that is) pop psychology book about a diversity of ideas being better than groupthink. However, when it comes down to economics, he parrots neoliberal groupthink.

We face a monumental problem. The UK is a deindustrialised, financialised service economy. In the big private sectors such as hospitality, retail etc. over 50% of jobs are low-paid. 22% of private sector jobs across the board pay below the living wage. AI will replace 3 million of these jobs in the coming decade, and in businesses already utilising AI, entry-level job postings have dropped by 78% since 2022.

Financiers, professionals and techies are doing OK, but lower down the pecking order over 60% of people in poverty live in a working household. 26% outside of London live below the poverty line. Yet, many individuals led by mouthpieces like Syed still believe that individual entrepreneurs funded by private moneylenders will grow the economy and create the conditions for decent jobs.

Without a healthy public sector this country will descend further into a two-tier economy with a widening inequality gap. The political implications, which we are already seeing, are very dark.

[QPR FC @QPR]

Forza Fiorentina 🇮🇹

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

Rare “mutualistic feline behavior” has local college experts in a whirlwind.

A farmer said he first knew something was wrong when his barn cat stopped coming home for milk. The cat had followed the same routine for years, but suddenly he was hunting at strange hours and slipping into the same patch of woods over and over. When the farmer checked his trail cameras, he saw the reason. His cat was carrying mice to a thin, injured mountain lion that looked too weak to hunt on its own.

Wildlife officers were called, and the mountain lion was safely taken in for treatment. Local college animal behavior experts later weighed in, saying the footage was extremely unusual because the cat appeared to return repeatedly, keep a careful distance, and still leave food close enough for the mountain lion to eat. One professor said, “That kind of repeated behavior is hard to ignore. It makes you wonder how much animals notice when another animal is struggling.”

Do you think animals understand compassion more than we realize?

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

I think it's time to ask all think tanks who pays for them and who asked them to write these reports.

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

It’s not true what the grocer’s daughter said. This may be a shock, but there’s no such thing as “taxpayer money”. She lied. There’s only government money, and if government doesn’t spend enough money into the economy, taxpayers don’t have money to pay taxes. Or live on.🧵👇

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

I said in December 2023 that cancer water, sewage outflows, collapsing councils, and Brexit deregulation were all by design to install private governance. The EU cleaned our beaches and rivers over fifty years. Brexit undid the enforcement in four. Now PFAS from data centres is entering groundwater in areas with no regulatory framework to stop it, in zones explicitly designed for "regulatory experimentation," while the UK government refuses to sign international safety agreements. Know your enemy. The design is visible at the molecular level.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

We Are Living in the Dumbest Timeline

Donald Trump just posted a photo of a wind turbine next to birds and captioned it “Killing birds by the millions!”

He posted this without irony.

For every single bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel plants kill 2,118 birds. Coal alone kills roughly 7.9 million birds a year in the United States. Wind turbines? Between 140,000 and 328,000. That is not a defence of wind turbines.

We are living in genuinely, historically stupid times. Only rivalled, frankly, by the medieval peasants who blamed the Black Death on cats and promptly killed all the cats, which meant the rats multiplied, which meant more plague.

At least the peasants had the excuse of having no access to information whatsoever.

Trump has the internet. He chose this.

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

Taken by Thomas Nugent while on a flight from Bristol to Prague in 2010, this photo shows a Roman road running (bottom to top) across the land in Wiltshire, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

This is the Fosse Way that linked Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter) and Lindum Colonia (Lincoln). It was built in the 1st Century AD and stretches almost 230 miles. Today, its route is still used by roads and lanes.

In the lower right corner is Manor House Golf Club, and the M4 motorway runs left to right.

© International Man of History

#drthehistories

[Paul Scholes @misterp55]

@RobertMPayne1 To expand on that Robert I think the century’s long goal of the economy has been unending growth, on a finite planet, without any concept of an “enough” or care about the damage done or who ends up benefitting.

[Prof. Carl Sagan @ProfCarlSagan]

"We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces."

[Keith Burge @carryonkeith]

Important analysis as we approach the 30th anniversary of the invention of cricket.

[Mark Maksic @markmqpr]

@umlungu @carryonkeith Apologies for my dimwittedness, but the caption does say "All Time".

[Peter Sinclair @PeterWSinclair]

@stokdog Patrick Moore is a fraud. Solar has a better energy ROI than fossil fuels
https://t.co/zNpiv0IYdm

[Mark Maksic @markmqpr]

With the best will in the world, I can't accept this as anything other than trolling or an exercise in (poor)mental gymnastics.

[… @TG2872]

Nottingham Forest didn’t win an elite competition and we all need to stop pretending they did, the European Cup wasn’t even that big then, Malmo in the final! This should never be compared to modern day UCL run.

[Aprajita Nafs Nefes 🦋 Ancient Believer @aprajitanefes]

Listen carefully. This is not speculation.

Elon Musk, Mustafa Suleyman from Microsoft, and Dario Amodei from Anthropic are not giving opinions. They are ANNOUNCING THE END OF THE WORLD AS MOST PEOPLE KNOW IT.

What they are openly saying is this:

Within the next 12 TO 18 MONTHS, AI will completely take over most white-collar jobs. Coding, law, accounting, finance, writing, design, analysis, customer service almost everything that educated people do to earn a living will be done better and cheaper by AI.

This is not “some jobs will be lost.”
This is MASS HUMAN OBSOLESCENCE.

Millions of people are about to wake up one day and discover that their skills, their degrees, their experience… are suddenly worthless. There will be no jobs for them. Not fewer jobs. NO JOBS.

The harsher truth nobody wants to hear:

The elite class has already accepted that they no longer need most human beings to run the economy. Once AI and robots can do the work, the average person becomes an expensive liability. They are openly preparing for a future where the majority of humans have no economic value whatsoever.

This is why you’re hearing them talk about Universal Basic Income. It’s not charity, it’s a leash. A way to feed and control a population that has been made economically useless.

People are still making reels, scrolling, showing off, and living in total delusion while the ground beneath their feet is being destroyed. They have no idea that their entire way of life is about to be erased in the next 1 to 2 years.

This is not “technological change.”
This is the deliberate replacement of human beings in the economic system.

The machine doesn’t need you anymore.

And the people who control the machine just told you that in plain English.

[🇧🇪 @Z9Priv_]

De Bruyne created 40+ big chances and still couldn’t break the record…

[Loftus IQ @LoftusIQ]

New Substack post just dropped: The Long Game

All about that word ‘progress’ #QPR

https://t.co/4rWgyBS9Wc

[Mark Maksic @markmqpr]

@LoftusIQ Balanced and thought provoking.

Really good piece

[healthbot @thehealthb0t]

An American goes to the ER for high blood pressure. He’s there less than TWO hours. No surgery. No scans. The bill comes back at $41,297 — even AFTER he’s paid his FULL out-of-pocket max. This isn’t healthcare — it’s extortion

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

The best thing is, they'll never forget it 👍