1. UK university fees going up (but not by enough to make the system work)
For those of you not in the UK, the British system of university funding is a weird mash-mash of different stuff, cobbled together from the mistakes made by successive governments. When I was young, the government effectively paid all tuition fees, and students who qualified could get a grant to go. It was a system which worked, but wouldn’t work if the university sector expanded to give more access to students.
Over time, to finance expansion, governments introduced loans rather than grants, and then tuition fees paid for by students through the same loan system. It allowed the numbers of students to rise, but tuition fees were never allowed to rise even as costs to universities rose – because, of course, that would have meant students (particularly from poorer backgrounds) taking a look at the tens of thousands of pounds of debt and concluding it wasn’t worthwhile.
All this, plus moves to restrict foreign students (who pay larger fees) have left the universities in dire financial straights. What’s compounded that is they have been allowed to recruit as many students as they can, with no cap. This sounds like a good idea in theory – improving access to education – but in practice it’s just meant more students at “the best” universities (they’re not) and mid-tier places falling to bits.
So the incoming government is raising fees by 3.1%, which is both not enough to help universities and enough to make students – who already often work long hours in jobs while trying to study – unhappy. The whole system essentially needs taking apart and rebuilding from scratch with an eye to improving academic standards and focusing on making a degree worthwhile. But that won’t happen with our timid mouse of a government.
2. Platforms create billionaires
Wendy Grossman’s column this week covers a lot of interesting ground, but one line which really stood out was this: “platforms either start with or create billionaire owners”. And she’s absolutely right. It sounds obvious, and it’s almost certainly not unique, but platforms are capital – they are the “means of production” of a huge amount of content and value for both advertisers and the people that use them.
And in a capitalist society, capital has primacy. It’s more than simply owning a market place – which is what Apple does with the App Store – it’s owning the means of production itself.
3. Pesky EU and its laws making Apple Intelligence impossible… oh
Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April. Which of course means that there were technical means to comply with the law all along – Apple simply chose not to engage with regulators to work them out in time to launch the same product everywhere.
4. Why Cory Doctorow is not on Bluesky
Short version: Cory very sensibly never wants to be caught on a platform where he can’t take his following with him if it turns to crap. Fool me once, etc. While Bluesky has made some strides towards the kind of federation where you can move from one server to another, it’s really got finished the work which lets you move your following. And that’s a big problem, because it’s how you end up trapped on platforms like Twitter.
5. ”My mom died at the end of June this year”
Gut-punching way to start a blog post and doubly so when it’s also about the US presidential election. Me and John Gruber often spar, but I genuinely love the guy and he can write.
6. ”An aspiring fascist”
I promised myself I wasn’t going to write much/anything about the US election, but the other piece that’s well worth reading is Tom Nichols at the Atlantic (paywalled, but you can circumvent it easily enough). As Tom says, democracy will not fall overnight, but that is no reason to be complacent. As he says, “if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents”.
7. iPhone reboot panic
Isn’t it odd how often that features designed to stop thieves from accessing and reselling your phone while also protecting your data also stop cops doing something they claim is fine because they’re “the good guys”?
8. How one engineer beat restrictions on computers
Back in the early 80s, computers were not as globally available as they are now. In fact in some places – such as Eastern Europe – there were limits on who could own one, who could use one, and who could build them. So what should someone do? Build it yourself, of course, and in a way that’s actually very, very cool.
9. Some good news on the roads
Electric vehicles accounted for nearly a third of new car registrations in the UK in October 2024. Petrol cars formed only just over half of the total.
10. Compost in the sky
Of course the mega rich don’t think any of this will apply to them, which is why they continue to use private planes as if they were taxis. Proof, of course, that pigs can fly.