Yes that makes a lot of sense. Make it increasingly difficult not to go green, through the tax system, rather than directly paying them to go green.

Having just returned from playing the piano for the morning Easter service, something tells me I shouldn’t be laughing at this.

But I can’t help it 😂

Watership Down.

Bright Eyes, shining like fire… Art Garfunkel will now be in your head for the rest of the day 😂

On which subject, I (here in Cymru, not part of the Palantir NHS England problem) received a letter in the post this week asking if I wanted to take part in a large survey for the NHS, which would involve giving a blood sample for analysis. The address given was in England, and so I’m guessing it’s a joint project with NHS Cymru and England.

I have to say that I am not intending to reply to the letter because of Palantir; it feels horribly like a data gathering exercise funded by them.

Does anyone else know about this?

Beavers? They’ve only just been reintroduced! Don’t tell me they’re already in trouble? 😯

Great. But there’s still something fundamentally wrong with public money going to support private companies in this way. I fear this sends the message “don’t go green until the government throws you a load of money to incentivise it”. By all means, support the infrastructure (and take the income from it for the public purse), but make the shareholders pay for going green. Or just nationalise if they don’t want to.

Aldi House Blend whole beans are surprisingly good.

Lidl Italian Blend is also good for when I want a change.

Data are plural, as my PhD supervisor always used to say.

It still feels wrong to me when it’s used in the singular, especially in formal communication.

If only we’d thought of doing something like that before 🤔

That’s exactly my criteria too. Bonus for the app being available natively on platforms such as Sailfish or Ubuntu phone.

I feel the orange man-baby’s manhood has just been insulted.

It would be interesting to see a revised version of that, especially in the light of Gorton and Denton.

It’s difficult to imagine any worse owner than the outgoing one. Hopefully it will step back from the fascist brink now, though Springer are hardly likely to be progressive.

Not for him, no. But it’s deeply concerning that this should have been allowed to happen. How many attacks never make the news, because the victim is not so infamous? And might some of these have been wrongly convicted?

They’re still owned by PepsiCo, so that’ll be a no from me for Walkers.

Whilst this particular article is new, the story has been out now from other sources for a while. And it looks like the US has shot itself in the foot here, because that’s been cited as at least part of the motivation for the EU looking to become independent in banking and technology from the US.

Well, good. It should have happened a long time ago; better still the situation should never have been allowed to arise.

Shame about all the tracking cookies on that site, and turning them off involves going down a very long list. That’s not compliant with European cookie laws as I understand it - opting out is supposed to be a simple “I don’t want cookies”. (And their “legitimate interest” to track me is of no interest to me).

Mais … le chat! 😺

And I just happened to notice today that Gentoo are moving that way.

This is the point; you’re completely right. If every time a country makes a mistake they are shunned by those around them then those who are trying to disrupt progressive politics are succeeding. Johnson was elected by far fewer than 50% of the population; indeed in that election (2019) progressive parties won 52.8% of the vote, and under any decent election system we would then have had a progressive coalition. At the very worst we’d have still been within the single market and customs union, and in all probability they would have been a confirmatory referendum (which would have doubtless left us within the European Union).

However it was over 50% of voters that voted for tRump, and they knew what they were getting. So I fear the US has gone beyond a threshold.