the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

philanthropy has always been a figleaf to help capitalism appear less amoral, all the way back to andrew carnegie et al, but i'd struggle to name any unambiguous good which has come from it - like, i'm sure the amount this event raised for charity is absolutely dwarfed by the amount which could be raised for the treasury if the attendees and their businesses paid their fair share of tax, and stuff like the gates foundation's devotion to improving education is predicated on beneficiaries agreeing to enact bill and melinda gates' preferences for how teaching is done

This is true - the actual motives are likely to be varied (PR value, guilt, tax dodging, religion, genuine altriusm, ego, influence etc), but I suspect what unites a lot of them is devotion of a kind of privatised goodwill - individuals rather than governments deciding which good causes are allowed to benefit.

i actually suspect being "host" mainly involves being parachuted onto the dais for a bad keynote then tootling off to the next envelope-opening

I watched Michael McIntyre memorably alienate the audience and die on his arse at an awards ceremony once and he looked like he was hating every minute of it, so I suspect this is probably true. Everything about this particular example though screams the fact that everyone (including the woman who ran the hostess agency) knew exactly what was going to go down and their were structures in place to prevent anyone talking about it. As for Walliams, from a brightly lit stage you can't always see what's going on in a darker hall but even if he did he would have been incentivised to keep quiet like everyone else.

i'd like to state for the record that i'm absolutely certain that, once his hosting duties were complete, david walliams at no point waded into the crowd to sexually harass the hostesses like a horny octopus with a taste for human flesh

xp to a.lowe -- yes i think it's worth noting that this scuzzy interzone is NOT a new invention in british politics, esp.local politics: cf also our friends in the north

xp to matt: one of the key things private-public partnerships has imported into public works projects is a commercial-secrets block on public oversight (it's why i'm pleased at the FT's scornful attitude to the NDAs in this parrticular story, tho more business-directed NDAs won't be such a pushover)

non-xp: octopuses are good not bad

actually you're right i fucking love octopuses and i should not have defamed them thusly

Madison Marriage is being interviewed on WS r/n.

(mods can we have an i love octopuses board for mark and me pls)

Very intelligent creature - the octopus that is, not the average City of London business yahoo.

(mods can we have an i love octopuses board for tom d, mark and me pls)

I bought my wife a book about the interior life of octopuses at the weekend, key finds are a) they can recognise individual human faces and b) their potential for petulance and spite is quite astonishing.

my favourite octopus fact: they can and do change colour way more wildly and vividly than chameleons, yet they see in black and white

also acc.their DNA they are aliens

other minds by peter godfrey-smith, or soul of an octopus by sy montgomery? both great reads xp

would love to hang out with an octopus for a while - they can apparently be just as friendly as they can be shitheads

i admire octopuses for all the reasons stated above but am also suitably cautious of them for all the reasons stated above

(xp) https://evolutionnews.org/2015/08/the_octopus_gen/

also i think there was an episode of River Monsters where they ate children or something idk

It was 'Soul of an Octopus' and it's right at the top of my reading list right now.

they have heartbreakingly short lifespans for such intelligent creatures tho, as anyone who remembers paul the world-cup-result-predicting octopus, who died a couple of months after the 2010 world cup, will attest

yeah it was sy montgomery's 2011 article which got me interested in octopuses (and stopped me eating calamari): https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/

lol at how evolution so-called news merely dodges the from-another-planet theory via "no one thinks that" -- iirc i think that therefore it's science's job to prove me wrong with science i'm waiting

(xp) Paul was the real trailblazer though, I feel.

octopuses and mushrooms are both alien intelligences iirc

Blue Planet II brought the definitive octo-smarts mindblowage.

srsly

I bought my wife a book about the interior life of octopuses at the weekend, key finds are a) they can recognise individual human faces and b) their potential for petulance and spite is quite astonishing.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, January 24, 2018 2:31 PM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Which book was it?

Octopuses obv best creature ever

I am terrified of octopuses and squids, they make me feel really nervous, they seem smart and capable of scary damage and the whole alien-DNA thing is something I don't want to think about

octopuses are v good boys, squid can fuck off and die imo

Happy to eat all the squid.

also i think there was an episode of River Monsters where they ate children or something idk

i'm not saying the kids deserved to be eaten by octopuses, i'm just saying can we be sure they didn't deserve to be eaten by octopuses

river monsters has def introduced me to some cthulhoid nightmares i'd much rather have remained in blissful ignorance about ybh

meanwhile back at the scuzzface:

From the Independent on Sunday, 24 Jan 2010. "Tucked into the girls". No one gave a toss, apparently. pic.twitter.com/u0Kxq8m77i

— India Knight (@indiaknight) January 24, 2018

eurgh

also 'coat-hanger tycoon' is a thing apparently

interesting that harvey goldsmith is named as being there in 2010 after his pearl-clutching response to this year's event in the ft piece

felix salmon: https://causeandeffect.fm/regrettable-1822371840

coathangin's too good for 'em.

you don't even wanna know how much they overcharge octopuses for those things

I watched this doc about huge apocalyptic blooms of jellyfish consuming all life in their path, fucking hideous alien bastards they are. I thought all life is ultimately og extra terrestrial apart from Frank Field tho.

They’re all just sorry they got caught and normally they can be found clutching something mauvish that ain’t pearls.

Again: David Walliams is a sleazy tosser.

That Amia Srinivisan LRB review of those Octopus books from last year was fucking banging, going straight to order that book before I forget again

thread has taken a delightful turn from spineless cowards to spineless heroes

i for one welcome our new octopoid overlords

also 'coat-hanger tycoon' is a thing apparently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQChiYxsdcU

I’d highly recommmend Stung! by Lisa-Ann Gershwin if you want to know more about jellyfish and how they are going to take over the world.

for the purposes of siphoning off this thread's good content in a fun-hating way:
D'AWWWWCTOPUS: post yr images of adorable octopuses here (no squid allowed)

surprise secondary market in charity auction prizes:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-24/boe-says-presidents-club-prize-was-an-unauthorized-re-auction

i guess this isn't the right detail to complain about at this point but the hostesses were paid £150, an effing paltry amount.

“The bank has a clear policy on the charities with which it is associated and this does not include the Presidents Club“, as of .5 milliseconds before the issueing of this statement.

Camilla Long seeking out the Hopkins market

I'd be pretty depressed if I were the FT and a report on some idiotic tits gala was the all-time most-read piece

— Camilla Long (@camillalong) January 24, 2018

Presidents Club disbanding now.

She does understand that the rest of the FT is behind a paywall, right?

She's trying to make the case that this is a nothing story, that everybody knew about it, it was just some hands on hips lets be cool, that this won't change anything, it's just clickbait -- basically like it's 2010 and feigning not caring about anything is still a good look.

Comparing it to the Spearmint Rhino is particularly dishonest given it's pretty obvious that a lot of the women involved here had absolutely no idea what they were letting themselves in for.

largely i think she's positioning herself for contrarian talking-head roles on this and similar topics