I'd just like to place on record that #NoDealBrexit is just about the worst *political* idea I've ever heard. In the 1000% unlikely event I was advising the PM, I would be extremely strongly against.

It's the classic Weak Man's Strong Man decision, like Steve McClaren dropping David Beckham. Sugar rush of the call, then all your problems get much worse.
It supercharges your opponents, allows Labour all the political landscape, is a *vast* gift to the SNP, revives the Lib Dems - all at a stroke.
The public don't want No Deal. You just won an election promising to make it all go away. You're under attack for your competence on Covid. The last thing you need is loads more blame.
You need to move on, convince middle of the road voters who have peeled away. You need to talk infrastructure, jobs, Covid recovery, climate change, hospitals.
No-one cares about arbitration mechanisms and customs forms. They just want to get it done. Get Brexit done.
Balls this up today, you could be bundled out of office within a couple of years after an ERM-style debacle on the borders, on supermarket shelves, in Northern Ireland.
...While Sunak and then Starmer have to face the Q of how to build the hard border with Scotland, and where in England and Wales to base Trident.
Do the deal. /END

More from Brexit

A further thread on the EU/UK musicians/visa for paid work issue (the issue is paid work: travelling to sing or play at eg a charity event for free can be done without a visa).


The position that we now have now (no relevant provisions under the TCA) is complicated. For EU musicians visiting the UK see


In essence the UK permits foreign (including EU) nationals to stay up to 30 days to carry out paid engagements, but they must (a) prove they are a professional musician and (b) be invited by an established UK business.

Either condition could be tricky for a young musician starting out and wanting to play gigs. And 30 days isn’t long enough for a part in a show with a run.

Longer stays require a T5 visa - which generally requires you to be in a shortage occupation (play an instrument not played in the UK?) or to have an established international reputation.
A not-so-little thread on how post-Brexit work permit regulations will apply in Scottish football and why it’s, broadly, not a good thing...

1) Work permit calculations are based on the points formula from this site -
https://t.co/sjqx8Df7Zg

As things stand, while this article deals with England, the system applies to Scotland also.

The goal is 15 points and the article shows various ways to get there. Essentially, play regularly internationally or in a top 5 league and you’re in. But read the article because it’s a bit trickier than that.

2) There are elements of this I’d dispute. For example, here’s the banding of leagues and, lower down, it’s an absolute mess - Denmark (ranked 14 in coefficient table) and Serbia (16) banded lower than Croatia (20), Greece (18) and Czechs (19)? It’s wholly random.


I get the point that leagues should be banded, but there doesn’t seem to have been loads of sense applied to how these things are actually banded, rather they’ve just shoved a bunch of leagues together and hoped for the best.

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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".
https://t.co/6cRR2B3jBE
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.

https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d


Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.


...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.


Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.