Last week, the Tasmanian Greens announced they’ll move for an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the AI data centres going up across the north of the state. I think this is a very good idea.…

While everyone’s attention is polarized by anything involving the peace negotiations between Iran and the US, negotiations that, to be fair, have been more like a “these are my requests, take it or…

For me, the best book critiquing the “nudge” agenda is Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage. As he writes from within the field, Sugden engages with the most technical arguments while avoiding…

Good riddance to the red Boris Johnson. A man incapable of telling the truth, who lied his way to the top all so he could arm, enable, and provide diplomatic and legal cover for a genocide. Beholden…

A leaked dataset from 4vps[.]su shows a hosting environment where proxy networks, criminal infrastructure, and targeted attack activity coexist without requiring any shared political alignment. The…

Two hundred fifty years ago — give or take a couple months, since it had to be sent by sail and not e-mail — a bunch of uppity colonials provided a convenient checklist of objections to their…

Here's one: The point of the story ... is not that uniforms are a magical performance-enhancing catch-all. It’s that they’re objective correlatives for a broader sense of excellence and camaraderie…

from Dean Baker Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar payday from the IPO of SpaceX has hugely amplified the public’s focus on extreme wealth inequality. Musk’s economic and political power is certainly…

New York’s socialist mayor, Zorhan Mamdani, has announced a sweeping plan to expropriate vast swathes of New York’s residential properties and transfer them to his political allies in the…

There is a documented enforcement gap in Conditional Access policies that apply to “all resources” but have an exclusion for at least one resource. What is not documented, is that this gap is much…

Now and again, I run across a news article or psychological question that is so big that it bleeds out of straight statistics and requires a thorough understanding of the research methodology that…

UK has had a spurt of prime ministerial turnover in the past decade or so, but it's by no means unprecedented. I download data from Wikipedia and try several ways to visualise that turnover.

Big Tech bad. We probably agree that much since we are here in Bear. Big Tech US-based (at least mostly). US not privacy friendly. US ran by absolutely insane unit of a person. Need to run from US.…

These are additional resources for a talk delivered at the annual conference 'On History and Literature' held in Calcutta in July 2025.

On this vast subject of the climate, you will regularly find here and there, especially in social media feeds, people with superb ideas—sometimes well-developed (especially on Mastodon which allows…

A Colorado consumer who parked in an LAZ lot in Denver is suing that company (and others associated with enforcing parking lot rules at that facility) over a billing dispute. [See complaint.] In the…

A reflection on generative AI, authoritarian politics, and why democratic culture depends on friction, participation, and shared responsibility.

By most non-political assessments, the 21 June National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), which is the entry point for a course in medicine, went off more or less without incident. Sure, some…

I studied every political system humans ever created. I hated all of them. So I made my own. I have a political studies background. I've read the ideologies, the manifestos, the promises. Capitalism…

Caltrain is working on their level boarding roadmap. If their recent work on grade separations is anything to go by, the capture of the agency by the layers of consultants belonging to the transit…

With Keir Starmer expected to fall on his sword shortly, here is my take on the conundrum facing Andy Burnham, indeed any and every British PM. The true nature of Britain’s ‘special relationship’…

There are certain sentences that sound harmless until you happen to live in Vancouver in June 2026. "The World Cup is in town." "Canada Day is next week". "There is a big event downtown." "The trains…

Anthropic got what they deserved Stupid ideas by Anthropic: Be the arbiters of justice and virtue, piss off DoD Deal with the BIGGEST problem in LLMs - validity and hallucinations - by making…

A distinguished historian gallantly tried to rescue Article the First from absurdity. The post How a distinguished historian tried to salvage the would-be first amendment appeared first on…

A little shy of five years ago, I wrote one of my last guest columns for the Georgia Straight, Vancouver’s progressive weekly of record. It was entitled “The Rise of […]

NYC Seattle LA DC Some of America's largest cities are embracing Democratic Socialists as their Mayors. Cities on both the East and West coast are electing leaders from the DSA. Mamdani is absolutely…

I don’t support social media bans. The UK government announced one this week and the response has been broadly positive. But that’s because people see a THINK OF THE CHILDREN headline and then don’t…

There is no more one-sentence-fits-all opening in literature than Dickens's "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and this is a review of a lot of the winning and…

So I thought now that I do a little politics on the site by covering government issues that impact knives, I would wade into another controversial topic—parenting. I have two boys, one is 15 and the…

In the run-up to the recent Makerfield by-election, I saw comments to the effect that Andy Burnham couldn’t be the ‘man of the people’ he claimed to be, because he had been educated at Fitzwilliam…

The UK government wants to ban social media for under-16s. The goal is reasonable, but there are more effective alternatives that don't require sacrificing privacy and anonymity for the rest of the…

Today is Father's Day! The World The Iran crisis has been resolved! Sort of. The US and Iran signed some kind of interim deal that kicks the question of nuclear disarmament down the road of further…