BRFR Cake Stop 'breaking news' miscellany

[First Aspect]

I did think PP was inferring that the amount of debt carried by a company is immaterial to how it acts, in a post about how that company will change as a result. But if it was a very very narrow point about it's value then jolly good, you are quite right about the corriis effect.

Good point about emotees, btw. One of the first levers PE ever pulls is to drive down the wage bill. Aerospace is heavily unionised so this could get spicy.

 

[briantrumpet]

Re Arday, the Good Law Project has picked the wrong angle. Sure, a lot of the pile-on was driven by a racist (Nathan Cofnas) targeting a black academic (there are white ones too who deserve equal – or more – scrutiny), but it seems pretty certain that Arday was appointed despite false claims and questionable credentials (which Cambridge also failed to scrutinise, so are culpable), and that he's not the figurehead he made out to be.

RE Nathan Cofnas: https://emeraldbook.org/news/aug-0626-2/

The investigation was initiated by Nathan Cofnas—a researcher who was fired from Cambridge for writing that Black people would be underrepresented under meritocracy and who has openly described himself as a "race realist." His history of provocative writing about race and intelligence led many to view his campaign against Arday as a racially motivated attack on a high-profile Black scholar who championed diversity.

While the factual evidence Cofnas uncovered—the plagiarized sentences, the fabricated data, the false CV claims—is undeniable, the selective and obsessive nature of the scrutiny raises uncomfortable questions. Arday's defenders, including thousands of academics and several British MPs, have argued that a white professor with similar errors would not have faced the same relentless campaign. The academic establishment, eager to protect its reputation, ultimately abandoned Arday, leaving many to wonder whether the system was more interested in punishing a Black success story than in pursuing truth.