Shona MacLeod

Viewing the world from 58.2094° N, 6.3849° W

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

In first, California city overwhelmingly votes to permanently ban datacenters.

Concerns about negative environmental effects, public health, increasing utility prices, proximity to homes.

Data centres don't generate many jobs.

Will Britons follow suit?
https://t.co/oMV7dZfVhk

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Robert Gros made £27m selling useless gowns via the VIP PPE Lane, of course he never paid back a penny, he bought 2 mansions instead.

RT and see if we can make him as famous as Michelle Mone.

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

I'll tell you what's 'unsustainable', and it's not state pensions, NHS funding or disability benefits. It's a society in which the majority works longer hours for lower wages so the 1% becomes richer still.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

It's been 23 days since Ben Habib said a foreign based crypto billionaire gave Boris Johnson £1m

Why haven't any of our journalists asked him about getting money from a foreign based billionaire while complaining about foreign interference in our democracy?

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

The real scandal of the Mandelson files is the way he profited from and promoted Palantir and imposed a US UK tech and Pharma deal says Nick Dearden of Global Justice Now who are taking the government to court over the UK US Pharma deal

📽️ @financialeyes Ranjan Balakumaran

[Carl Vernon @RealCarlVernon]

Hosepipe ban.
Eat less meat and dairy.
Cancel your holiday.
Cycle don’t drive.
Stop burning wood.

Two words: Data centres.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Libraries: free.
AI: subscription.

Libraries: written by humans with expertise.
AI: trained on whatever was on the internet.

Libraries: staffed by professionals.
AI: confidently wrong.

Go to the library.

[Sonny @rawespresso]

Around 1 in 3 UK adults under 35 have nothing meaningful saved at all.

Not £100, not £500 — nothing.

These aren't the unemployed or the very young. They're people in their late twenties and early thirties, on graduate or post-graduate salaries, who've spent everything that's come in for 5-10 years.

A car repair, a job loss, a boiler failure, a 6-week gap between contracts — any of those events tips them into credit card debt or asking family for help. There's no financial buffer between them and real trouble.

The UK government calls this 'rising prosperity.' The honest description is 'an entire generation that's been priced out of saving in the first place.'

Two things mostly fix this: cutting fixed costs hard for 18 months, and learning a skill that pushes the salary up faster than the cost of living. Most people do neither, because both are uncomfortable.

[Amber Woods @AmberWoods100]

History is slipping from the minds of Americans.

The French Revolution did not begin with a guillotine.

It began when regular people couldn’t afford bread to feed their children while the elite continued living as though nothing was wrong.

History suggests that societies become unstable when suffering is concentrated.

[Imogen @Imogenlemon02]

So Farage ran away from parliament after he was shamed by the PM.

Where did he run away to? To Oswald's in Mayfair, a private members club.

When will people wake up. He doesn’t represent you. He doesn’t understand you. He’s not like you. He’s using you.
https://t.co/pMJw5uKCYv

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed.

Here's what happened:

He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.

These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees.

Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him.

A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it).

The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth.

But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress.

With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not.

And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her.

The threat does all the work.

By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress.

Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch.

If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place.

Here's the full story: https://t.co/mJzrvzhxGR

[SophieSpring97 @SophieP25397]

If Keir Starmer, Ed Davey or Zack Polanski or even Badenoch took a £5million bung or used the language Farage has twice..

They would be GONE. The media alone would have hounded them out of their job within a week.

There's your two tiers alright.

And it is the media.

[No Farmers, No Food @NoFarmsNoFoods]

Governments tell us to cut eating red meat to ‘save the planet’ while they ram through hundreds of massive data centres that consume vast amounts of energy and water…

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

Elon Musk is set to be the world's first trillionaire next week after SpaceX goes public.

The fact that the world can have a trillionaire while 800 million people live in EXTREME poverty is a sign of a completely rigged system.

Radical redistribution of wealth now.

[Peter Stefanovic @PeterStefanovi2]

Nigel Farage registered ‘absent’ from the last 77 votes in Parliament

Official Parliamentary figures reveal that Reform leader Nigel Farage hasn't bothered to vote for anything in the last 11 weeks...

https://t.co/fsxzTKkL4Z

[Callum Lyon @CallumLyon]

A house that was £500-£600 a month rent a few years ago is now at least £1,000-£1,200.

Same flat. Same walls. Same postcode.

Double the price in barely six years.

Wages didn't double.

Food prices didn't go down.

Energy bills are still ridiculous.

And nobody in charge seems to have a serious answer for any of it.

We're just expected to work harder, do more overtime and cancel Netflix like that's somehow going to fix a housing crisis and the cost of living.

[Mark Tilbury @marktilbury]

Insurance is basically a scam that everyone falls for...

Every single month, you pay for protection.

But the second you try to use it, everyone panics and says don't do that, your rates will go up.

That fear isn't an accident.

It's by design, allowing them to collect billions in premiums for a service they never actually provide.

So remember to use your insurance. Otherwise, you just donate your money every single month.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

When they announce a summer hosepipe ban on us plebs and blame it on climate change, spare a thought for all the huge AI data centres that will continue to guzzle 5 million gallons of water per day - the equivalent of the daily water consumption of a town with 50,000 residents.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

THE MAN WHO TRIED TO SAVE 134,000 CARERS GOT SACKED FOR HIS TROUBLE

Enrico La Rocca spent 27 years working for the Department for Work and Pensions (@DWP). From 2018 he kept raising the alarm internally: the Carer's Allowance system was broken, data alerts were being ignored, and unpaid carers were quietly racking up thousands of pounds in overpayment debts they had no idea about.

DWP's own 2019 internal audit found that two thirds of earnings-related Carer's Allowance overpayments over £2,500 could have been stopped earlier, had DWP simply acted on the data-matching alerts already sitting in its own systems. The alerts were there. The staff were not. Nobody did anything.

La Rocca pushed harder. Concerned by media reports of carers having their cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service despite DWP's failure to address these systemic problems, he contacted the CPS to request that the National Audit Office report, already in the public domain, be shared with the court to ensure a just outcome. That act of basic human decency, asking for a public document to be used in court, became the justification DWP used to sack him.

Despite assurances from DWP permanent secretary Sir Peter Schofield that La Rocca would be protected, he was dismissed in 2020 and reinstated in 2021 only after parliamentary intervention. Ministers then had to intervene again when his managers tried to block him from giving evidence to the independent Sayce review.

The problems he flagged never went away. As of early 2023, DWP was chasing more than 134,000 unpaid carers to recover over £250 million in overpayment debt, with nearly 12,000 cases involving debts between £5,000 and £20,000. Some carers had their inheritances seized. Some faced prosecution. All of this while DWP called them "unsung heroes" in press statements.

The government-commissioned Sayce review later acknowledged La Rocca's contribution directly, noting it was not easy to raise issues in a large institution and that he deserved thanks for persisting across time.

A junior civil servant with no power, no platform, and 27 years of service spent seven years trying to protect some of the most vulnerable people in the country. The department thanked him by sacking him, blocking him from giving evidence, and then quietly accepting the conclusions he had been trying to force on them since 2018.

That is what whistleblowing looks like in the real world. Not a dramatic Senate hearing. Not a Netflix documentary. A man in Preston repeatedly telling the truth to people who did not want to hear it.

Sources:
@TheCanaryUK @BBCNews @VoxPolitical @guardian