Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 05/10/2026We had some of their trains (as I suspect, did a lot of their ex-imperial possessions). I don’t think I’ve ever heard a good thing about them… 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 05/10/2026The UK’s miniature loading gauge makes it seem like it’d have always been a bad place to build trains tbf. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Obviously you could look at a bunch of other cases; Looking at one country will never give you a final answer, and I said “reasonable“ not “strong“ or “very strong”. But neither you nor Bret provided a single case! There is no evidence presented in favour of this argument, nor even a suggested test 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Yes. If the theory that humanities students (or graduates) make better citizens doesn’t hold true in the case of Germany in the pre war period, then that is, by itself, reasonable evidence against the theory. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026so compare them to engineering students. Ultimately, the problem here is that you’re defending a positive argument by nitpicking people pointing to weak evidence against it, when no evidence has been presented in favour of it. 010
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026And even if I grant you both of those, you’d definitely want some kind of explanation why your theory that the study of the humanities imparts civil virtu didn’t affect those in Germany in the 30s (And why this time is different) 110
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026If the sample is of all humanities students the n you’d have the kernel of a point, but A) your argument is still unfalsifiable B) the population isn’t the population of the country, it’s all humanities students ever 120
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Basic knowledge of statistics? like, firstly “all of the humanities students in Germany” are not a sample when trying to study investigate whether ongoing university humanities education reduced your chance of becoming a nazi. It’s the population. And second 50-60k would be a huge sample. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Maybe they didn’t! I haven’t done the research to check and am accepting the comment of the earlier poster. But for the argument that the humanities make better citizens to be meaningful, it has to be able to make falsifiable predictions, and this seems like a pretty easy one. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026I don’t think this would be a sample at all? It would be the population of humanities students, and if they had higher rates of membership of anti-democratic groups, then that is reasonable evidence against the humanities making better citizens. 220
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026This seems like too vague to be testable; Is the expectation that the rate of e.g. membership or support of extremist parties should be correlated with the proportion of students who attended third level and did at least one humanities course? One credit year of humanities courses? 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026But if the claim is that education in the humanities makes you better at self governmen, then you’d expect the rate of nazism *amongst humanities students* to be lower, no? 110
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 27/09/2026The UK and Ireland both have similar frameworks for the national rail network, and both are stupidly expensive (albeit neither includes new projects). 010
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 24/09/2026I don’t think an Irish government could survive a switch of foreign policy from unanimity to QMV. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026I didn’t say “hate” and I didn’t say “some Irish people”. Irish elite opinion has dramatically changed toward the UK, and I think you’re mistaking politeness for support. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026I think you are dramatically underestimating the distrust and anger towards the UK that Brexit generated amongst Irish elite opinion. I don’t think a referendum is going to swing it. Perhaps a referendum would swing the UK opposition parties to a position which would do it. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Nothing there mentions rejoining. it mentions supporting things that a Eurocentric prime minister who had explicitly ruled out rejoining did. And Ireland would be super supportive of closer links, or even of rejoin *once we were sure the UK polity was settled in favour of it*. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026The UK has not been on a sixty year journey toward consensus on joining, and if you think that we’d be allowing the UK back in without multi party consensus on it, you’re cracked. Ireland would veto, because leave was so painful for us, never mind the rest of Europe. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026there’s a bunch of capacity in planning, but you need to go through all the difficult nimby areas of both Scotland and northern England. 120
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 20/09/2026If we had the political buy in to build a monorail, we’d have the political buy in to build a regular raised metro… 001
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026The highlanders probably do have a case for complaining about colonialism. Awkwardly though quite a lot of it would be about colonialism by lowlanders 040
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Mistral is increasingly also going for domain specific models, because they’re falling and further behind the frontier labs. 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026But we’ve done nothing we weren’t planning to do anyway. Projects that would make a difference, like the iron oxide batteries in Donegal, are now years waiting for planning, and we’re still focusing on solar on middle class people’s roofs. 010
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026the thing that makes me most angry about current government is how they’ve squandered the time since the start of the idiocy in Iran. We should have been prioritising covering the roof of every large state or semi state building with solar, and throwing money at any wind or batteries with planning 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026The fact that they came back with essentially the same thing is either weak evidence against this, or strong evidence that the UK regulatory system is not fit for purpose. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Did Sinn Féin really put the Ulster Banner on top of that document? 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Would be happy if Ireland could get EU construction costs tbh… 020
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026It’s okay, they’re just copying the Welsh - Gwynedd did it first. 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Average price of a share of the S&P also doesn’t mean anything? A change in frequency of stock splits would do the same thing without changing anything about the distribution of wealth. 0290
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 07/09/2026West cad is just a signalling control system - have IÉ given up on buying a TMS? 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 07/09/2026I think the trucks and tractors put them significantly above lads with assault conviction; Very easy for an escalation spiral to get out of hand and for a truck to end up driving at Gardaí 130
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 06/09/2026The PSNI have been trying this for years, and yet they still have to get the water cannon out again and again. 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Ireland suspended (parts of) its constitution in 1939 to deal with the republic threat. Still suspended (and perhaps it should no longer be). Moderately useful against militant republicanism, cause of rare horrendous breaches of justice. Not really a silver bullet for or against democracy. 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 30/08/2026But they’re not an alternative to renewables now, and they realistically might not be 20 years from now. The potential rewards are high enough to make them a good bet, but a good bet is not a sure thing. 010
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 30/08/2026Building the required east/west high voltage links is also a bit of a planning nightmare (again, not that a nuclear plant would be better). The whole nuclear lobby drives me spare, because there *are* good arguments to repeal the ban and start work on the framework we’d need for SMRs. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 30/08/2026I think this falls down because a lot of the turbines that could manage wind speeds on our west coast are not really at the off the shelf design point. That said “we’re too slow to build renewables so we should build nuclear“ is a novel take. Does he think that people won’t object to nuclear? 110
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 25/08/2026And at the bottom of this, ”an acre of vegetables makes less than an acre of cows” is the obvious explanation for vegetables being replaced with cows. No need for any complex conspiracy by big dairy, just people doing the thing that makes sense for their lives 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 25/08/2026It takes an enormous amount of work to do methodical, well sourced explanation, and the bullshit merchants of this world can publish a dozen articles in that time. It also takes more effort to evaluate an article like that, and most people aren’t bothered doing that. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 18/08/2026There was a controversy here in *2008* because of a documentary about a (still living!) poet who was going to Nepal to sleep with teenagers. Lots of the literati sided with him, and in the end we decided to keep his work on school final exams… 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026It’s a lovely project, but it’s a pilot of 48 panels due to run to 2028 (and only a year or so old - so the ~50m of track probably hasn’t needed tamped or ballast cleaning yet); Probably literally decades from a solution that we could reasonably deploy at scale on Irish railways. 110
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026Train lines are very much not spaces you can easily fit solar to - there’s quite a lot of equipment both between the rails and between the tracks, and the railway also needs access to clean and replace the ballast regularly. 100
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026 that’d require us to have some prison spaces of course, which Jim doesn’t seem interested in… 140
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026The most recent group apparently included a lad with a very recent arrest for hitting a motorcyclist in a stolen truck; All Jim has to do is make it easier to deny bail for people arrested for dangerous driving in stolen vehicles. 140
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 15/08/2026He also called in Carter Ruck when THE tried to report the story; No local newspaper was ever going up against them. 000
Cian @cianb.bsky.social · 15/08/2026Oxbridge professor is a fraud an obvious fabulist seems like legitimately national news? Maybe not National front page news, but the nature of modern news media is that what goes on the front page is largely decided by clicks… 100
