Speak to any hard-bitten older farmer around me in Somerset, or anywhere in Britain, and they will tell you that they grew up among fields teeming with corncrakes, grass snakes, hares, hedges full of yellowhammers and other songbirds, car windscreens splattered with bugs after the shortest summer drive, nearly all now gone. 98% of wildflowers, gone. Huge shoals of herring, cod, and other fish in the sea, a distant memory. Across almost every indicator, the losses during just one human lifetime have been catastrophic. The data is all there, as are the anecdotes. Britain is among the most nature-depleted countries on earth.

Presidential advisor Serhiy Beskrestnov confirms Elon Musk's SpaceX is deliberately crippling Ukrainian Starlink terminals: "I can confirm that tonight SpaceX has implemented a speed limit on Starlink terminals while in motion. The limit currently applies to the StarShield “military package” and is set at 100 mph. Our defense forces were not given notice of this limit, and this has resulted in the disruption of a number of missions. It is clear that this action cannot be a coincidence and is related to the current political situation."

‘Shocking and sobering’: UK bird populations fall to lowest level on record Nearly half of species are in decline, with farmland birds and seabirds the worst hit, conservation bodies say 🐦 theguardian.com/environment/…

Eight years after Denmark merged 239 councils into 66, places that lost their town hall had 26% fewer children and 35% lower house prices. In 2027 Denmark folded 271 municipalities into 98, merging 239 of them into 66 larger ones. The basic idea (which makes every finance ministry happy), is that bigger councils spread fixed costs over more people, they cut duplicated jobs and deliver the same services via economies of scale. Earlier Danish research backed that up, finding administrative costs per head fell after the mergers. But each new municipality kept only one town hall. Every other former council lost its administrative heart, and a bunch of economists wanted to know what happened to the places left behind. They used Danish registry data covering every resident and every firm from 1996 to 2015, mapped onto 8,530 small neighbourhoods of at least 150 households each. They then compared the 2,187 neighbourhoods whose municipality lost its town hall with neighbourhoods in municipalities the reform left untouched. Because the untouched ones skew urban (Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense), the authors built a weighted blend of them that tracked the losing areas closely before 2007, so the comparison is like for like. The first domino is obvious. Neighbourhoods that lost their town hall shed about three full-time admin staff each, roughly a third of what they had, and the drop never reversed. Then the losses spread to services nobody had voted to cut. School staffing fell by 17% on average across the nine years after the reform, and public-sector jobs overall by 21%. Private-sector jobs followed, down 16%, as the local economy lost the steady trade that a council and its staff bring. People responded the way you'd expect. Each affected neighbourhood lost about three more working-age residents than it gained every year, around 0.7% of its population. The number of children fell 13%, which tells you young families were among the first to go. Those who stayed travelled 10% further to work, and their wages rose by just 1%, barely compensating for the extra time on the road. House prices fell 15% on average. By 2015 the gap had widened. Against comparable untouched areas, public employment was down 38%, school staffing 36%, private jobs 24%, children 26% and house prices 35%. The results hold when the comparison group changes. Comparing losing municipalities with neighbours that kept their town hall, or with the second-largest partner in the same merger, still shows clear damage, and so does using the number of council seats to predict which places lost out. The geography is uneven tho. Neighbourhoods near Denmark's four biggest cities saw residents drift into those cities. Further out, people moved to whichever town had kept the town hall, and those winners added public-sector jobs. So a reform meant partly to slow urbanisation ended up feeding big cities in some places and building up regional hubs in others. link to full article: doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbaf038

A lot of people in AI world come from a Bayesian intellectual tradition. As a result they tend to be very good model-based thinkers. Yet I often find that while they hedge and use probabilities, they rarely question their own modelling in the first place. This great paper shows that Bayesian updating can only move belief around within the hypotheses you start with - so no amount of hedging will actually tell you you're wrong about the initial assumptions/world model. arxiv.org/abs/1006.3868

I’ve always believed the pursuit of safe AI is stronger when people bring different perspectives and experiences to the table. The biggest blind spots tend to show up when everyone starts thinking the same way.