this is probably my favorite tiktok of all time and I finally got around to showing it to my dad the other day and now he comes home every day and tells me about all the places he saw crumbling concrete and says "guess they didn't add enough chinchilla flakes"
A living room with a glass ceiling overlooks lush greenery, featuring a stone accent wall and comfortable gray seating. Numerous potted plants fill the space, creating an indoor-outdoor feel.
Find more inspiration at tenniswood.co.uk
The Villa des Orangers, luxury five star hotel is located in the heart of Marrakech and is a true haven of peace. Everything has been carefully chosen to make your stay relaxing and sophisticated: an elegant decoration, delicious cuisine with Mediterranean and Moroccan flavours, a large garden and lush courtyards, three swimming pools, a traditional Moroccan Hammam, massage rooms, beauty salon, fitness, an open bar to enjoy a mint tea with Moroccan pastries during the day.
Utagawa Hiroshige II, b. Suzuki Chinpei aka 鈴木鎮平 aka 二代目 歌川広重 aka Hiroshige II (Japanese, 1826-1869, b. Edo (Tokyo), Japan, d. Yokohama, Japan) - Horses, a New Publication (Shimpan uma Zukushi), c. 1847-1848, Woodblock Print: Ink, Color on Paper
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
If you weren't paying close attention, you might think that the most grotesque and indefensible aspect of Keir Starmer's Labour government turning over NHS patient records to the American military contractor Palantir is that Palantir are Trumpist war-criminals, "founded to kill communists":
And that is indeed grotesque and indefensible, and should have been grounds for Starmer being forced to resign as PM long before it became apparent that he stuffed his government with Epstein's enablers and chums:
But it's actually much worse than that! It's not just that Labour hand over Britain's crown jewels to rapacious international criminals who are deeply embedded in a regime that has directly threatened the sovereignty of the UK. They also passed up a proven, advanced, open, safe, British alternative: the OpenSAFELY initiative, developed by Ben Goldacre and his team at Jesus College Oxford:
https://www.opensafely.org/
OpenSAFELY is the latest iteration of Goldacre's Trusted Research Environment (TRE), arguably the most successful patient record research tool ever conceived. It's built atop a special server that can send queries to each NHS trust, without ever directly accessing any patient data. Researchers formulate a research question – say, an inquiry into the demographics of the comorbidities of a given disease – and publish it using a modified MySQL syntax on a public git server. Other researchers peer-review the query, assessing it for rigour, and then the TRE farms that query out to each NHS trust, then aggregates all the responses and publishes it, either immediately or after a set period.
This is a fully privacy-preserving, extremely low-cost, rapid way for researchers to run queries against the full load of NHS patient records, and holy shit does it ever work. By coincidence, it went online just prior to the pandemic, and it enabled an absolute string of blockbuster papers on covid, dozens of them, including several in leading journals like Nature:
This led HMG to commission Goldacre to produce a report on the use of TREs as the permanent, principal way for medical researchers to mine NHS data (disclosure: I was interviewed for this report):
This is a near-miraculous system: an ultra-effective, ultra-cost-effective, Made-in-Britain, open, transparent, privacy-preserving, rigorous way to produce medical research insights at scale, which could be perfected in the UK and then exported to the world, getting better every time a new partner signs on and helps shoulder the work of maintaining and improving the free/open source software that powers it.
OpenSAFELY was the obvious contender for NHS research. But it wasn't the only one: in the other corner was Palantir, a shady American company best known for helping cops and spies victimise people on the basis of dodgy statistics. Palantir blitzed Westminster with expensive PR and lobbying, and embarked on a strategy to "hoover up" every small NHS contractor until Palantir was the last company standing. Palantir UK boss Louis Moseley called it "Buying our way in":
It worked. First, Palantir got £60m worth of no-bid contracts during the acute phase of the pandemic, and then it bootstrapped that into a £330m contract to handle all the NHS England data:
It was a huge win for corruption over excellence and corporate surveillance over privacy. At the same time, it was a terrible blow to UK technological sovereignty, and long-term trust in the NHS.
But that's not where it ended. Palantir continued its wildly profitable, highly public programme of collaborating with fascists – especially Trump's ICE kill/snatch-squads – further trashing its reputation around the world. It's now got so bad that the British Medical Association (BMA) – a union representing more than 200,000 UK doctors – has told its members that they should not use the Palantir products that the NHS has forced onto their practices:
https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168/rr-2
In response, an anonymous Palantir spokesperson told The Register that Britons should trust its software because the company is also working with British police forces:
The BMA is a very powerful, militant union, and it has already run successful campaigns against Starmer's government that forced Labour to shore up its support for the NHS. The fact that there's a better, cheaper, more effective, technologically sovereign tool that HMG has already recognised only bolsters the union's case for jettisoning Palantir's products altogether.
The image shows a stone trough with water flowing into it from a curved metal pipe. The trough is situated in a garden setting, next to a wooden wall and surrounded by greenery.
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