sluggard

Twitter troll, hardening dipso
Proudly trans woman since 1999

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@Elwood_B__ @mattvanswol @TheCriticalDri2 London Ontario perhaps?

Pray tell, what horrors befell you in our fine capital?

Horrible traffic, excessive and heavy-handed automobile-related fines, pandemonium in the NHS, general decline, I’d all believe.

Worse crime than the new world? Naah mate

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@Elwood_B__ @mattvanswol @TheCriticalDri2 😂😂 hilariously inaccurate . I’m from london and it’s fine. Way safer than anywhere in the states. Some dodgy places for sure and best to be streetwise like any big city but don’t believe all the twitter hype

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@disclosetv Boo-boo

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@WeNeverStop88 @MrFamilyOffice @devininNYC English must not be your first language

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@JohnCleese AI surely

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@Alinavisooo Pretty sure that’s AI

[Richard Seiler @richardseiler]

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦

Jeremy Clarkson has never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he is

Brutally honest. No oil painting. A pot belly, a lifelong smoker, a drinker. Not exactly the modern alpha male or is he?

And somehow that is the whole point

I have watched him for most of my life
First as a motoring journalist who could make you want a car you would never own and never need
Then as something bigger
The loudest, funniest, most unfiltered mouthpiece the ordinary person ever had
A man who said the thing everyone was thinking while the rest of television tiptoed around it

From Top Gear he built something that should not have worked
Three middle aged men, The Stig, a track and a chemistry you cannot manufacture
James May the patient one
Richard Hammond the brave one
And Clarkson the force of nature dragging both of them into chaos and somehow back out again

When it all fell apart at the BBC he could have disappeared
The fracas was not his finest hour and he never pretended it was
He owned it, apologized and carried on
No reinvention, no groveling tour, no carefully managed comeback
He just kept being himself and let the work speak

The move to Amazon and The Grand Tour proved something I think a lot of people missed
The format was never the magic
The men were
You can take three friends out of a studio and drop them anywhere on earth and the loyalty between them travels with them

But it is Clarkson's Farm where the whole picture finally comes into focus

Here is a man with nothing left to prove walking into a field he barely understands and refusing to fake competence he does not have
He has run that farm at break even and then at an outright loss in full public view
No editing it into a success story
No pretending the numbers work when they do not
His farm manager hands him one brutal truth after another and he sits there and takes it

A whole season swallowed by drought even after he leaned into robotics and the most advanced farming money could buy
Technology was supposed to be the answer and the weather did not care
He showed that too
Most people would have cut it

And through all of it he has done something quietly remarkable
He has dragged the plight of the British farmer into the light
The paperwork, the council, the margins that vanish, the weather that ruins a year of work in a week
People who had never thought about where their food comes from suddenly cared because he made them care

And then there is the part nobody warned me about
Men who raise animals for meat and still love them
Who name them, worry about them, sit with them
Who treat them with respect and dignity right up to the moment they cannot keep them
And feel the full weight of sending them off

He does not hide that
He lets the camera sit in the discomfort of it
The grief of a man who knows the deal he made and still finds it hard

That is not weakness
That is honesty most people are far too afraid to show

We live in an age that rewards the polished, the curated, the carefully built personal brand
And here is a scruffy, swearing, chain smoking farmer who has done the opposite of all of it and won
He stayed exactly who he was while the world begged him to become a product

That is the whole secret
There is no act
There never was

And that is exactly why we keep watching

Praying for a full recovery mate, looking forward to another season of Clarkson's Farms!

[Silkie Carlo @silkiecarlo]

Also - don’t take this nonsense about age-estimating facial recognition as an alternative to IDs at face value.

First, in practice most young people will need to show ID. Face scans can’t tell if you’re a day under/over 16 - and will fail everyone who looks under 21 for caution

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@izakaminska Please spell it out for a tired numpty!

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@hridoyreh @jmkettle American reviews are not really respected by European consumers, but totally agree that it’s ridiculous to ban or in any way censor

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

I know everyone is suddenly "ADHD" but insights like this are really fascinating. Especially in terms of finance/market application.

You hear a lot about people with a gift for pattern recognition. But it's not just about that.

People with ADHD are basically professional signal hunters. Their brains can't help but seek out anomalies within the usual patterns. If you're seeking good arbitrage ops, you need ADHD brains in your team.

Of course, the downside is that they are very impulsive and generally rubbish at communicating their complex thoughts in a linear way. That's why, in my experience, they tend to bond with other ADHD brains that understand them or, alternatively, those on the autistic spectrum.

The latter tend to find them exasperating, of course. But also quietly fascinating, because they can break them out of their own narrow silos. Moreover, they can apply their superior linear processing power to an ADHD hunch in ways that anchor them to cold hard data. They can also deliver and complete the projects ADHDs abandon out of boredom mid-way. The best collabs are often between these two types of brains.

https://t.co/BLc1m3Ls8q

[Joe Michalczuk @joemichalczuk]

A shower screen shattered all over my wife this week.

Over the next 72 hours, the NHS got almost everything wrong.

A cautionary tale of a system that is broken (with the usual caveat that everyone working in it is doing their best) 👇

I called an ambulance.

All good at first: “It’s on its way.”
Ten minutes later: “Actually, there are no ambulances for hours - can you get her to hospital?”

So I loaded my bleeding wife into the car, along with the kids and the dog, and drove to A&E.

Ten hours later, she came home - having given up after not even being offered a plaster.

The next morning, we called our GP: “Any chance she could see a nurse?”
“No - as the ambulance referred her to hospital, we can’t see her.”

So I went to the pharmacy and bought a first aid kit.

Because apparently that’s where we are now - me and a pack of plasters, in one of the richest countries in the world.

This morning, still in pain, still untreated, and with a ballooning foot, we went to an urgent treatment centre.

At first, smooth. She was seen in under two hours. X-ray done.
“Nasty cut, but nothing broken.”

Relief.

Two hours later, the phone rang.

It was the hospital.

“Sorry - we got that completely wrong. Your foot is broken and the wound needs antibiotics.”

If it wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable.

And the truth is - anyone who uses the system has a story like this.

We need to stop clinging to an idealised version of the NHS and have a grown-up conversation about how to fix it.

Free healthcare for all should remain a principle - but pretending the current model works isn’t helping anyone.

Almost every other developed country combines public healthcare with some level of private provision - and all deliver better outcomes as a result.

Yet in the UK, even suggesting that tends to get shut down before the conversation starts.

That’s not protecting the NHS. It’s protecting a cult.

We don’t need ideology. We need honesty about what works.

We need a brilliant NHS in practice for all of us - not one we’re told to revere while it quietly crumbles, and where anyone who speaks up is dismissed or discredited.

When are we going to get serious about the things that actually matter - and have the difficult national conversations needed to fix them?

We don’t need to abandon the NHS.
We need to be honest about fixing it.

We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders.
We have to be better.
We need to vote for real change.

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

Lieutenant John Chard, who famously commanded the British forces at the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879...

At 31 years old, with eleven years of military service and not a single day of combat behind him, John Chard assumed command of 150 men — thirty of them hospital patients — and held a fortified station against 4,000 Zulu warriors.

He had spent his career as a Royal Engineer. Bermuda, 1870. Malta, 1874. Constructing fortifications. Improving sea defences. He was a lieutenant assigned to repair a pontoon bridge at the Rorke's Drift mission station when, on the morning of 22 January 1879, news arrived from Isandlwana: over 1,300 British soldiers had been killed. And 4,000 Zulu warriors were crossing the valley.

Chard was the senior officer present — not by merit, by the date of his commission, three years earlier than his counterpart's. Command fell to him by technicality.

He ordered them not to retreat. A garrison of 150, moving through open ground with carts of hospital patients, would be run down. He directed the rapid construction of a defensive perimeter from mealie bags and biscuit boxes. When the hospital was breached and set on fire, he ordered an inner redoubt built from biscuit tins to save those still inside. For ten to twelve hours, he held that line. The Zulus attacked in mass waves, hand to hand. Seventeen of his men died. Four hundred of theirs did not leave the station alive.

The Victoria Cross citation was published in the London Gazette on 2 May 1879. Queen Victoria invited him to Balmoral in October of that year and presented him with a gold signet ring. Historical analysis of the defence, conducted across the following century, concluded uniformly that his specific engineering decisions — the perimeter, the inner redoubt — were the reasons the garrison survived.

The institution had a different conclusion.

In the months following Rorke's Drift, those above him privately characterised Chard as a dull, heavy man scarcely able to perform routine work. They placed eleven Victoria Crosses at Rorke's Drift alongside political calculations they resented, and Chard absorbed the consequence. He was quietly assigned to Cyprus. Then Singapore. Then Perth, Scotland. He held these posts for eighteen years. He did not see combat again.

He accepted each posting without recorded complaint.

He continued to serve as a Royal Engineer — doing the work he was given in the garrisons he was sent to. In January 1893, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. On 8 January 1897, he was promoted to Colonel. Ten months later, on 1 November 1897, he died of cancer of the tongue at the age of forty-nine.

Every subsequent military analysis of the defence of Rorke's Drift has confirmed the same conclusion: his decisions — made in the first minutes of command, without experience, without preparation, on the basis of engineering logic applied to desperate necessity — are the reason 133 men came home. Military historians have, in the decades since, systematically dismantled the characterisation that followed him through the last eighteen years of his career.

© Reddit

#drthehistories

[sluggard @pineappletitgut]

@zriboua @DrewPavlou What’s this ‘artist’s’ name? Seems pretty derivative self-pitying lameness to me

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the most controversial speech *against* Western Civilization at Harvard in 1978.

As a survivor of the Russian Gulags, they expected him to praise the West. Instead, he made a jarring accusation:

The West is a dying civilization. If it doesn't change its ways, it is doomed to collapse.

In fact, he said this has been the case for 500 years, when the West made a crucial mistake:

"How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility?

...the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance…

I refer to humanism — the proclaimed autonomy of man from any higher force above him."

Solzhenitsyn said humanism made man autonomous from God, Truth, and objective morality.

If all morality is subjective, then man has nothing to live nor die for. Naturally, he loses his courage, embraces materialism, and grows effeminate to modern evils.

So, what is the solution?

A return to belief in a transcendental morality under God:

"If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual…

The fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it."

All cultures live, or die, based on their respect of the True, Good, and Beautiful.

To save the West, Solzhenitsyn says start with beautifying your soul, for that is both how you live well, and begin to make civilization itself beautiful again.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption.

That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time.

Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.”

The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs.

That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone.

But the education system still runs on its logic.

A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait.

Neither is being served. Both are being processed.

Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.”

AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student.

One at a time. Every time.

It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle.

It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done.

A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture.

The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does.

No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill.

Because the math doesn’t work.

AI doesn’t have that constraint.

Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.”

The brain isn’t broken. The format is.

Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes.

That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem.

Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.”

Four years. Six figures of debt.

And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you.

The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance.

Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.”

The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you.

Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace.

The question isn’t whether the old model survives.

It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.

[RAW EGG NATIONALIST @Babygravy9]

One of my favourite interviews with Sly. He's actually a tremendously articulate, thoughtful man, and he always has been. This is exactly the kind of masculine filmmaking we could do with today.

[RŌNIN @ronin21btc]

What an incredible English gentleman.

He stood up to shake hands at the age of 90.

[Tom Harris 🇬🇧 @MrTCHarris]

I'd forgotten about this event, where Laurie Penny got her arse deservedly handed to her after she made an unprovoked personal attack on David Starkey. I expect it was about this time that she started suffering from PTSD.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Sadio Mane, a Senegalese soccer star, earns approximately $10.2 million annually. He gave the world a rude awakenng after some fans were flabbergasted when they saw him carrying a cracked iPhone 11. His response was awesome:

"Why would I want ten Ferraris, 20 diamond watches, and two jet planes? I starved, I worked in the fields, played brefoot, and I didn't go to school. Now I can help people. I prefer to build schools and give poor people food or clothing. I have built schools and a stadium, provide clothes, shoes, and food for people in extreme poverty. In addition, I give 70 euros per month to all people from a very poor Senegalese region in order to contribute to their family economy. I do not need to display luxury cars, luxury homes, trips, and even planes. I prefer that my people receive some of what life has given me.