"English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in international reading, maths and science tests, new data suggests, with Scotland and Wales falling further behind."
Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
It seems to me, without digging further into the data, that England sucked, but Wales and Scotland (along with rest of the OEDC) sucked harder. Meaning, they fell in grades, but rose in the ranking, since the decline was less steep.
However, perhaps Gove’s reforms in placing emphasis on STEM-subjects and reading finally start to have an effect.
"The school curriculum in England is the responsibility of the Westminster Government. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for setting their own curriculum policies."
Agreed; I mentioned Elon because the post made the reference quite explicit by saying "trillionaires", probably given the context Bezos or Gates would've been better examples though.
There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.
In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:
“Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”
A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.
That's the only good answer of the thread. ArianeGroup is mainly the SLBM program of France and after that a way to maintain european know-how in rocket building and for nearly 20 years was the main space launch company in the world before Space-X. All those companies success and failures (be that Space-X or ArianeGroup) are linked to their political environment and how much money can be spent on their launch market. Space-X could use the technique of launching many and fail as much because they had the contracts to do it and years of tangential R&D by Nasa. The ecosystem explains everything and the relative intelligence of american or european engineers nearly nothing.
SpaceX launched three times and would have failed if their fourth launch hadn’t worked. They certainly never had the money to launch many times and fail.
Perhaps this “jobs program” could be seen as preserving industrial capacity? With military contractors, for example, it’s apparently a problem when they’re used to build a stockpile and then they shut down because there are no more orders.
"Border controls aren’t supposed to exist between EU member states – that’s the promise of the 1985 Schengen treaty. Yet today, travelers routinely face checks when crossing borders within the [European] union"
> leaving insular academic institutions to self-police
I'm not convinced that academic institutions are actually self-policing, it may not even be correct to assume they each act as one coherent entity. There are a lot of incentives in play which may not be obvious from the outside.
<apologies for yet another anecdote from way back when>
Many decades ago during my PhD I was in working in a chemistry lab when a colleague had an accident which caused a minor explosion, big enough to blow both of the glass side panes completely out of his fume hood.
With hindsight he was extremely lucky to have only minor injuries, he was peppered with tiny cuts from the flying glass and temporarily deaf from the bang.
I called for an ambulance, which seemed like a reasonable response.
The first prof on the scene (not our prof though!) came in and immediately asked "who phoned for the emergency services?", so I said it was me. He then gave me a bit of a telling-off, ending with him saying "and now the press will find out!" before he stormed off.
I remember thinking "wtf?! my colleague has just blown up our lab, and your top concern is that it will be in the newspapers"...
Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message.
I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.
My completely unsubstantiated impression is that it was the govt putting out a feeler on whether it should use the alert system more frequently (and afaik it was relatively unpopular)
You could still be brought before a jury to determine if you knowingly provided the wrong PIN (and thus knowingly gave false testimony) or not. Records of you intentionally setting two very similar PINs and discussing any such plan could be used to convince a jury that it was malicious.
> You're going to have a hard time convincing the judge that you "accidentally" gave the wrong pin in this case
Counter-example: muscle memory.
My OH has - more than once - attempted to tell me her PIN code. On more than one occasion two of the digits have been transposed. Happily I know that it's the middle two digets that get transposed... :)
yes, and it would be up to the jury/court to judge if you made a mistake or if you intended to give the wipe pin. Not different from you shooting someone saying you thought the gun was a fake gun. They will evaluate and decide if they believe you are lying or telling the truth.
> It seems like you're going around tech forums arguing with the democratic decision and fear-mongering about how legitimate projects will be removed next.
If we're going to argue that a platform is free to make decisions, aren't its [ex-]users also free to make decisions, too?
Yes obviously, and they've already said that. What they're pointing out is that people are being petulant whiners about it. If we can all agree that Codeberg is free to make its decisions, and a decision has been made that you don't like, then just choose another provider. Going around slandering Codeberg is being a petulant whiner.
I think one of the issues is that people who already have repositories there have to migrate them, migrate the issues, existing pull requests, community, etc. For larger projects this can be quite a large time sink.
I think it would have been more palatable to people if the terms said something like "Additionally, for repositories after July 24, the following additional requirements apply:".
Appreciate this stuff gets political very quickly, but I'm curious what did England do that Scotland and Wales did not do (or vice versa)?
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