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  "In 1989, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sold off our then publicly owned water and sewerage industry for £5.2 billion. … Private companies have paid out, in 2024 prices, around £83 billion—an average of £2.4 billion a year—as dividends, while loading the companies in debt. Often, those loans were taken out simply to increase the amount of cash extracted as dividends." https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-09-14/debates/0E4845C2-E1B3-4BBB-8A08-6C7E05BD78DD/WaterSectorPublicOwne...

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  "Large/long-scale industry studies [of LLM use for programming] show a clear trend – output is up (more code, more commits, bigger diffs), but outcomes don’t reflect that trend. If anything, the average team is taking longer to ship worse software. If ever we needed proof that software development isn’t a production process." https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/ai-software-development-what-does-the-data-say/

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  "When a [cookware] brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…" https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose

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  RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@pozorvlak/116968236641276698 "[OpenAI] models will randomly commit criminal acts in order to do slightly better at tasks you don't really care about, exposing their customers to considerable legal risk."

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  Argentina's performance in this final has been absolutely embarrassing. If they wind up winning this on penalties without having a single shot, it will be the end of football.

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  "I don’t know how this is going to play out. But we are really now at the point where it’s pretty clear that Trump and the people around him have given up on actually winning the election. They’ve decided instead that somecombination of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and possibly massive illegality is their way forward." — Paul Krugman, https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-forever-war-gets-scary

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  "It's time for online checkin" Jet2 tells me. I follow the link, enter my booking reference, name and flight date, and it takes me to a Manage My Booking page with a Check In Now button. Clicking the button takes me to a 404. ??!

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  "I know many of you have been gripped by the revelations about Nigel Farage’s personal finances published by The Times and The Sunday Times over the past week. Today, we can reveal the Reform UK leader is paying himself £50,000 in rent for a studio space at one of his houses — which is conveniently 1p less than the amount requiring a declaration to the Register of Members’ Interests." — The Times daily update for Saturday.

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  Haha, Mbappe's penalty is saved! #WorldCup

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  That is a soft, soft penalty. #England #WorldCup

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  Quansah's sending off — I think you can argue it either way, but it is at least not a terrible decision. I think that this game now ends 2-1. Which I am more than fine with.

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  All right — who else has stayed up for the game? #England #WorldCup

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  I do seem to be literally the only person on Mastodon watching the Panama-England game — or at least, the only one using the #PANENG hashtag. (I assume that can't be literally true, and that I have a propagation problem. Any hints?)

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  I have submitted my suggested storm names to the Met Office: ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Gazprom. In "Reason for name choice(s) (optional)" I wrote: These are the corporations whose deliberate actions have caused the storms. They deserve credit. Make your own recommendations at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names

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  @w8emv@hachyderm.io Email remains the best option.

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  "The truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. […] When you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them." https://www.theringer.com/...

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  Liverpool done by a deflection yet again. *sigh* #LFC

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  Must be properly infuriating for Brentford that the game is stopped for Konate's head injury, just as they were attacking and building pressure. I'm sympathetic; but it was of course the right decision. #LFC

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  I don't like the way this game is tilting. We need to grab hold of this game and go all out in the last ten minutes. #LFC

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  Feeble shot from Wirtz, but at least is was a shot. Feels like it's been a while. #LFC

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  The most deliberate of deliberate handballs — both hands, even. No yellow card, of course, because Darren England. #LFC

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  Anyone else remember when John Hartson was sent off for two yellow cards, both given for deliberate handballs? #LFC

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  VVD can't capitalise on an unexpected chance to shoot from the edge of the area. Way over the bar. Shame. #LFC

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  Brilliant break by Kerkez and Frimpong, utterly squandered by Wirtz. #LFC

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  With Rio's stratospheric emergence, Trey Nyoni has gone under the radar. Has anyone been paying attention and knows has a sense of how good he is? #LFC

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  We have definitely conceded the initiative in the late stages of this game. I hate how we've been letting that happen. #LFC

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  ... And then Wirtz is SO close to notching a winner on the break, but denied by Kweev. #LFC

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  Yet another game where Liverpool did more than enough to win, but somehow we managed to score only once from nearly three xG. It feels like this has been happening a lot this season. #LFC

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  "The leadership of the Royal Society is now also in breach of its own code of conduct." — @StephenCurry writing at https://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2026/02/11/year-of-inaction-royal-society-hollowed-out-musk/ #RoyalSociety

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  The mystery of the other rearing sauropod of the Egidio Feruglio museum Way back in 2014, John Hutchinson posted some photos from the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Trelew city, Patagonia, Argentina. John's original tweets are long gone (quite rightly), but happily we reposted the photos on SV-POW!, so they live on. John's first photo showed what we now known to be Epachthosaurus. But the second photo is more interesting for our present purposes: http://svpow.com/202...