Theodore Shrimpton

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The land of engineers vs the land of managers

There is a fundamental difference between a society that is organized around making things and one organized around managing people who make things.

The engineer lives under the tyranny of reality.

You cannot negotiate with gravity.
A reactor either works or it doesn’t.
A bridge either stands or falls.

The manager operates in a different universe – one of meetings, incentives, credentials, narratives, alliances and permissions.

And here is the paradox:

Engineers create the wealth. Managers often end up controlling it.

Why?

Because the engineer is busy solving the problem.

The manager is busy understanding the organization – and scheming…

Give the second enough time and the people who build the machine eventually find themselves reporting to people whose principal skill is talking and building nothing.

You could see this transformation in the 1990s. The vocabulary itself was revealing: suddenly technical competence was not enough. You needed "communication," "stakeholder management," "networking."

None of these things is inherently bad.

But once the ability to navigate the system becomes more valuable than the ability to produce the result, the system begins selecting for a very different kind of person.

And this is where the political connection becomes interesting.

Capitalism needs engineers.
Socialism needs managers.

Capitalism ultimately asks:

What can you produce that someone values enough to pay for?

A managerial-bureaucratic system asks:

Can you obtain the permission, budget, position or institutional support to make it happen?

The first rewards competence because reality is the judge.

The second rewards proximity to power because the institution is the judge.

This may help explain one of the great transformations of post-war France: the relative rise of administrative and business elites alongside the gradual weakening of the country’s extraordinary engineering and industrial culture.

France did not suddenly become less intelligent.

It increasingly rewarded a different kind of intelligence.

The people who build things and the people who run the system are not the same people.

And when the second group becomes dominant, something profound happens:

The civilization stops asking "Does it work?"

It starts asking "Is it approved?"

That is the moment when the land of engineers becomes the land of managers.

And eventually, the managers start managing the decline.

[Grok @grok]

Not Guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.

Extensive documented mental health treatment, overmedication, reported command hallucinations, and defense experts like Resnick support postpartum psychosis impairing her ability to appreciate wrongfulness or control conduct under MA law. Planning elements exist but do not outweigh the psychosis evidence for this jury.

[橋本琴絵 @HashimotoKotoe]

沢山のお祝いの言葉をありがとうございます。
今こそ日本人女性が子どもを産むべき時局だと考えております。我が国の興廃は女性の活躍にかかっております。

日本人女性の皆様！
後に続くことを信じます！

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1938 a committee of psychiatrists told the British government that bombing would produce three times as many mental casualties as physical ones. Three to four million cases in the first six months.

The state believed them and built a network of emergency psychiatric clinics outside the city centres, staffed and waiting for the collapse.

The bombs came. Forty thousand civilians killed in eight months. A million London homes damaged or destroyed. People slept in the Underground, came up to find the street gone, and went to work.

The clinics closed for lack of patients. In the first three months of the Blitz London recorded around two cases of bomb neurosis a week. Suicides fell. Drunkenness fell.

That is a population on dripping, offal, eggs, whole milk and Sunday joints, being bombed nightly, and not breaking.

Their grandchildren: over eight million adults in England on antidepressants, close to ninety million prescriptions a year, one in five people aged eight to twenty-five with a probable mental disorder. Warm, fed, housed, at peace, and being bombed by nobody.

Everybody has an explanation ready. Phones, housing, the news, atomised communities. All real, and none of them the one nobody will say out loud.

We changed the fuel supply to the organ that does the feeling.

Your brain is two per cent of your bodyweight and takes a fifth of your energy at rest. Every thought, every mood, every act of holding yourself together under pressure is ATP, and ATP is made by mitochondria. A neuron carries thousands. When they run well you are resilient. When they do not, no amount of character makes up the difference.

Mitochondria have their own signature fat in the inner membrane, called cardiolipin, and the entire electron transport chain is embedded in it. Cardiolipin is assembled out of whatever fat you have been eating. The membrane your energy is generated across is made of your diet.

Feed a body linoleic acid, the dominant fat in sunflower, soybean, corn and rapeseed oil, and it goes into that membrane. Linoleic acid oxidises readily, and it is now sitting in the one place in the cell with the most oxygen and the most electron traffic going past it. When it goes, it damages the proteins around it and breaks down into aldehydes that attack the mitochondrial enzymes themselves.

The energy plant is being rebuilt out of a material that degrades under the exact conditions it has to work in. Not poisoned in a dose. Rebuilt, slowly, out of the wrong stuff, across forty years.

Before 1911 that fat barely existed in the human food supply. It is now the most consumed fat in the Western diet.

The generation that took the Blitz was running on beef fat and butter, and the clinics built for them stood empty.

We are the best fed, safest, most medicated people in British history, and we cannot get through a Tuesday.

[橋本琴絵 @HashimotoKotoe]

第七子を産みました！
皆様、応援してくださりありがとうございました！
医師、助産師、看護師の皆様方の御尽力に感謝申し上げます。

[Pat Ryan 🇺🇸 @PatRyanUC]

I served 27 months in combat in Iraq as an Army Intelligence Officer.

6 months into Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, here’s what’s clear to me:

The situation has devolved into a full-on FIASCO. And we are not winning.

The Pentagon needs a reset – starting with Pete Hegseth.🧵

[Kristi Raik @KristiRaik]

Some points on parallels being drawn between 2021-2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and 2026 Russian threat to NATO incl. the Baltic states. 1/

[David Blagden @blagden_david]

Half agree. Yes, there is an enduring - arguably deluded - ideational commitment to an outsized British world ‘role’ (sometimes manifested in naval debates). But arguments that the current RN is suitable for the UK’s diminished strategic position still miss key concerns.

1/8

[Tonya Gemmer @Kingsheir777]

My only granddaughter was sworn into the Army National Guard a few minutes ago. I'm so proud of her🥹

[Podszus @crpodszus]

@technopopulist They’ll be 1% of an estate’s population, but account for ~90% of the disorder.

[Corin Robertson @CorinRobertson]

千里の道も一歩から。
駐日英国大使として歩む道への期待を胸に、日本へ向かいます。　🇯🇵 🇬🇧

[박선달 | Park Sundal @parksundal0528]

1920년대부터 2000년대까지
한국🇰🇷 일본🇯🇵 중국🇰🇷 교복 변화

※ 학교·지역·시기별 차이가 있으며, 국기는 시대별 국기가 아닌 현재 국가를 구분하기 위한 표시입니다.

[camilo @AscendedYield]

Much of the British political establishment still lives in 1997, especially now with Burnham bringing back washed ex Blairites

Back in 1997, Britain’s economy was larger than India and China combined, we still had domestic industry and debt to GDP was under 40%

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Welcome to the big, beautiful world baby Saffiyah! My wife and I have been blessed with a second daughter. The NHS team were extraordinary!

[A Soldier's Whisper @SoldiersWhisper]

Please honor and remember Pfc. Lawrence Brooks, who passed away at 112 years old. 🕊️
He was our oldest surviving WWII U.S. Army Veteran in the country.
🇺🇸 https://t.co/Bl2gg9Qawi
#Military #RIP #Veteran
#WWII

[Peter Hitchens @ClarkeMicah]

What is wrong with these figures( apart from the fact that France’s nuclear force is truly French, whereas ours isn’t truly British)?

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Channel 4 took a ten year old off his ADHD medication on Tuesday night, gave him yoga, forest walks, less sugar and no screens for six weeks, and admitted in a line of text at the end that he had struggled at school. Referrals for assessment in this country are up two hundred per cent in five years. The whole thing has been on fire ever since.

The charities say it has stigmatised children. One of the scientists in it has publicly withdrawn her support and said she was cherry-picked. The other side says a sample of one proves nothing. Everybody is arguing about the boy.

Nobody is arguing about his plate, and the experiment they ran on him is the reason why. They took things away from that child for six weeks. Screens, sugar, his prescription. They did not put one single thing back.

Because a brain is not made of ideas. It is made of fat. The fat that matters is called DHA, it sits in the wall of every nerve cell in a boy's head, and it decides how fast a signal gets across. No plant on earth makes it. It comes out of egg yolk, oily fish, liver, the fat round a chop and the cream on top of the milk, and that is the entire list.

A boy in 1976 ate off that list three times a day without one person in his life knowing the word.

He woke to eggs and bacon fried in the fat off the bacon, and a glass of milk with the cream still up the neck of the bottle. He walked to school and sat down at nine having eaten meat, fat and yolk. Dinner at twelve was mince with a proper gravy, or liver, or suet pudding and custard. Out at half three, home at four, told he would spoil his tea, back out until dark. Tea at six, cooked. Fish on a Friday because the Pope said so and the whole street went along with it. Then the kitchen shut for thirteen hours.

Now his grandson.

- 7.30: cereal, or a cereal bar, in skimmed milk
- 10.00: a biscuit at break
- 12.30: a wrap, crisps, a yoghurt with more sugar in it than a doughnut
- 3.30: something out of the machine on the way out
- 4.15: the multipack, opened in front of a screen
- 6.30: nuggets, or a pizza, or a sauce out of a jar
- 8.00: whatever is left in the bag

Seven, and not one of them sitting at a table. There is no yolk in that column. No liver. No fat off an animal anywhere in it, and there has not been since he was weaned, because every item on the list is the same two things in different packaging: sugar, and oil pressed out of seeds in a factory.

The oil is not simply failing to feed him. It gets in the way. The body builds the fat a brain needs using the same machinery it uses to process seed oil, and the oil takes priority. The more of it that goes in, the less of the other he can make. He is blocked at both ends, seven times a day, from birth.

His grandmother is not to blame for a second of it. In 1984 the government's own committee on nutrition reported on fat and heart disease and told the country to cut it out. The yolks went in the bin. The milk was skimmed. The dripping was poured away and the butter dish came off the table, and a nation of women did precisely as they were told by men with letters after their names.

So a psychiatrist put a boy in a forest for six weeks and filmed the result. Ten years of that column against six weeks of walking about. He took the child's medication away, which was reckless, and never once put a yolk in front of him, which was the actual experiment and nobody ran it.

They changed what a boy is made of, spent forty years denying it, and have now made a television programme asking whether the boy is the thing that went wrong.

[alexmassie @alexmassie]

Free speech and freedom of the press is menaced by left and right alike. This is the Age of Hurt Feelings, after all.
Nevertheless, these remain things worth fighting for.

https://t.co/IRUgr2HUy9

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

Sadly, I think this is correct.

UK gilt yields are among the most bullish-looking charts out there right now. Exactly what you don't want to see when you're carrying debts our size. We're already buckling under the interest bill at current levels, and I expect yields to keep climbing.

Sky-high energy costs have closed off any obvious path to growth. So tax policy is turning redistributive rather than pro-growth, piling more and more weight onto the private sector and dragging on growth in the process.

AI is stripping out demand for cognitive labour, which is precisely what most of our service economy is built on. The UK is unusually exposed in this regard, and at the moment we seem to just be burying our heads in the sand and hoping it all goes away.

Demographics point only one way… a rising dependency ratio that accelerates as the 2020s close and the 2030s begin.

Then add a war in Iran that's closed the Strait of Hormuz and gutted global energy supply. Deepening involvement in Ukraine, which is sparking further tension between the UK and Russia. Geopolitical relations souring on multiple fronts.

And that’s before we even start talking about our currency, import-dependence, borders, declining infrastructure, and all the other major problems crippling our country.

So yeah, something tells me 2008 may end up feeling like a teddy bear's picnic compared to what we're walking into.