In the news

france sending their equivalent of the SAS to marseilles to quell the troubles according to bbc radio this morning.
that'll help

No, the cap is driven by how many clinical placements are available. For example, with medical degrees universities would love to have more medical students and therefore make more money, but you can't just learn the theory, you need to practice on real people, and the NHS only has so much capacity for that.

That said, the cap was temporarily lifted in 2020/21 to accommodate the higher number of students meeting their university offers when the Covid changes to exams meant that more students got the grades to meet their offers.

Ultimately the cap is put in place by government and could be raised with more resources. But you'd need to deal with the cost of training, current university and clinical placement capacity, and up the number of clinically qualified academic staff who design and deliver courses.

The Medical Schools Council has estimated that the annual cost of increasing the number of medical students by 5,000 would be approximately £1 billion (laughs manically).

Good explanation, thanks

that'll help

It will if they have boats to blow up.

One innovative (to me, at least) strategy the trump administration used was deploying federal prison riot police against (peaceful) protestors. Not saying they’d work better in France, and it would probably feed into the acab feeling motivating the riots, but surely they’d have more anti-riot training than paras or commandos?

Must be about sending a message. Also, potentially crippling a member of an organisation known for finding and killing terrorists might make someone think twice before lobbing a Molotov.

How do riots typically end?

I remember listening to some sort of crowd control expert years ago talk about preventing riots.

Anyone got any good Ted talks or articles?

How do riots typically end?

Penalties.

In France? Looting of cheese and wine.

The London riots of 2011 were quelled by some heavy rain IIRC.

Literal cavalry charges against unarmed civilians also helped.

When there's nothing left to set fire to, most people go home

Seems like nothing changes since La Haine

We watched Les Miserables again last night, the Ladj Ly film, he was spot on too

Good luck with that in Marseille this time of year, I guess.

Ar brave boys:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/02/eighty-afghan-civilians-may-have-been-summarily-killed-by-sas-inquiry-told

Hard hitting.

Not directed at you, but I find it curious how the public retains the idea that UK professional soldiers = “our children”, as if teens were still being conscripted and sent to the trenches. They're adults who made a career choice, and in the case of the SAS guys above, they’re sure as hell full grown adults with the capacity to make and own their decisions. Infantilising them removes accountability, and usually serves the purposes of one specific political tendency.

professional soldiers = “our children” as if teens

Do they?

I mean isn't it just a turn of phrase, like saying 'boys', 'girls', 'mandem', etc. They're still someone's son/daughter, and is the average age is 30 or whatever, then dead ones are probably being outlived by their parents - to them they are still their children.

edit: average age for army is 30, but average age of death in Afghanistan was 22

Goes without saying I don't think we should be carrying out extrajudicial killings, and most definitely not on unarmed civilians. Just disagree with the point being made.

I find it curious how the public retains the idea that UK professional soldiers = “our children”

Yeah I don't think I've ever heard that. It's just Our Boys or Our Lads but I don't think that means collectively our kids or children

English is notoriously malleable and imprecise. I guess to some non-native speakers that can be frustrating. Saying you're planning a girls night out says absolutely nothing about the ages of those involved.

EDIT: Or maybe it does? They'd have to be old enough to drink.

I’m looking at the phrase from a critical discourse point of view. There’s a sentimental, familial attachment in the phrase ‘our boys/our lads’. We use it for our soldiers, but not the enemy’s. If the average age of KIAs is (tragic) 22 y/o, then the average soldier killed in combat was a young man, not a boy. Of course we feel sentimental and protective of our tribesmen and our tribe’s warriors, but I find it curious that the way our society approaches their death is slightly infantilising. Other societies, and indeed the military, might highlight their adulthood, but we paternalise them.

Or so it seems to me anyway, it was a Sunday rumination.

"Boys" or "Lads" as a banterish term for a group of men is just a thing in the English language and British culture. A senior citizens dominoes team might refer to themselves that way and they wouldn't be thinking of themselves as children. It can be a bit adolescent but no more than that. Nobody but you thinks it means we see professional soldiers as young children.

The adolescent romanticisation of war is definitely a thing in this and many cultures, but you're overdoing the connection here.

I thought it was a tongue in cheek reference to the right wingers' way of refering to British (English) soldiers. Quite often seen on St George flags etc.

Oh, gods. New Yorker has a damning, extensive report on the Titan Submersible failure (archive copy). The list of things they did wrong is insane. The point where Stockton Rush asked his Finance director if she'd like to become the chief submersible pilot isn't close to being the worst (she declined and then quit at the earliest opportunity).

The former chief pilot quit after they rejected his concerns over a goodly list of flaws:

Glue was coming away from the seams of ballast bags, and mounting bolts threatened to rupture them; both sealing faces had errant plunge holes and O-ring grooves that deviated from standard design parameters. The exostructure and electrical pods used different metals, which could result in galvanic corrosion when exposed to seawater. The thruster cables posed “snagging hazards”; the iridium satellite beacon, to transmit the submersible’s position after surfacing, was attached with zip ties. The flooring was highly flammable; the interior vinyl wrapping emitted “highly toxic gasses upon ignition.”

In a nutshell:

“You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

They disrupted a lot of other news.