My Stateside friend swears the Irish are calm people. Then I watched a man describe his afternoon for forty minutes and call a flooded kitchen "grand," and I understood I had walked into a nation of unbreakable warriors. The pub was the size of a small front room, and it held the whole town. A pipe had burst at the farm. The water reached the man's knees. He told it like a legend, every detail, the dog, the neighbor, the bucket that betrayed him, and at the end he shrugged and said, "Ah, it's grand." Grand. I leaned to the woman beside me and whispered that this man's stoicism in disaster was the finest discipline I had seen abroad. She blinked at me. "Sure, that's just Tuesday," she said. Just Tuesday. So the flood was nothing, an ordinary trial endured without complaint, and I had badly underestimated these people. I resolved to match them. When the barman asked how my evening was going, I gave him the full account, my journey, my confusion, my growing respect, a speech worthy of the occasion. He listened to all of it, nodding, then set down a pint. "Grand," he said. "Will you have another?" Will you have another. I had poured out my heart and been answered with a single word and a refill. I thought I had failed to move him. So I tried harder, telling the next story longer, reaching for the weight that would finally earn a reaction bigger than grand. An old farmer at the bar finally put a hand on my arm, kind about it. "Lad," he said, "grand is the highest word we have. You're doing great. Now breathe." Grand is the highest word we have. The whole code turned over in my head. Their calm was not armor against suffering. It was a way of holding the day lightly, of refusing to let a burst pipe or a long winter become bigger than a good story told warm in a small room. They were not enduring the night. They were enjoying it, at length, on purpose. I stopped performing my feelings and just let the talk wash around me, a hundred sentences going nowhere good and arriving anyway. Three hours passed. Nothing happened. It was, and I mean this with all my honor, grand.

Ireland is being made to shrink its dairy herd, with healthy in-calf cows going to slaughter early, to satisfy a nitrogen figure set in Brussels. Start with how cruel the timing is. Barely a decade ago, when the EU scrapped its milk quotas in 2015, Ireland told its farmers to do the opposite. Expand. Grow the herd. Build the new parlour. The government's own strategy pushed dairy hard for export growth, and thousands of families borrowed heavily and did exactly as they were asked. Now the same establishment that cheered them bigger is ordering them smaller. The instrument is a rule that sounds technical and harmless. The EU caps the nitrogen that livestock manure may spread on the land. Ireland's grass-fed dairy farms, among the most efficient and lowest-carbon on earth, held a hard-won allowance to graze a little heavier. After a water-quality review, that allowance was cut, from 250 kilos of nitrogen a hectare down to 220, across great swathes of the country from 2024, and it has stayed under threat ever since, its conditions tightening at every review. To drop under the new line, a farmer has three doors. Find more land, ship his slurry away, or get rid of cows. Land is scarce and the squeeze itself sent rents soaring, so for many the only door left is the herd. The Irish Farmers Association reckoned an extra sixty nine thousand acres would be needed nationally just to stand still. One senator, a farmer himself, warned that up to forty one thousand cows, a great many of them pregnant, could be sent to slaughter to comply, and called it an animal welfare catastrophe in the making. Sit with that. Healthy, productive, in-calf cows, on some of the greenest grass in Europe, culled early because a stocking number on a form moved by thirty kilos. The very cows the nation was begging the farmer to buy ten years ago. This is what modern environmental policy looks like at the sharp end. A good cow loaded onto a lorry she never needed to be on, on a wet Tuesday in County Cork, to shift a figure in a spreadsheet.

The road to hell is upholstered with good intentions. "any sofa with fire-safety labels in Britain or Ireland is the most toxic in the world" thetimes.com/article/69d2f0a… @thetimes

Sometimes?

Kobbie Mainoo is open to leaving Manchester United. Head coach Ruben Amorim seems to prefer other midfielders, and the England international has entered the final 24 months of his Old Trafford contract. The issue is where Mainoo goes, as there do not appear to be many options ahead of this market closing. More from @David_Ornstein in today's DealSheet: nytimes.com/athletic/6573666…

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cnbc.com/2025/04/03/warren-b… If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting. If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you. Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it

rte.ie/news/regional/2024/12… "It is the first time that the Cork South-West constituency has seen all three incumbents get re-elected, while it is also the first time in over 50 years that a Fianna Fáil TD has managed to keep their seat there."

Gavin O'Callaghan rte.ie/news/authors/1410577-… via @rte Hi @rtenews & Gavin, I respectfully suggest you do a cursory search to establish the history of candidates returned, *before* making grand opening statements. The same 3 candidates were returned from 1982 until 2002.

Paris Saint-Germain will start paying the €60m release clause of Manuel Ugarte to Sporting next year, in summer 2024 — payment will be made in five years. 🔴🔵 #PSG Ugarte will be unveiled today as PSG player on five year deal.

A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles With Math nytimes.com/2024/07/23/techn…

Great Wild Atlantic Marathon *Walk* A nice 7-8 hour walk.

credit card myth. "Ultimately, if you want to boost your credit score over time and avoid pricey interest charges, don’t fall for the myth that carrying a balance will help. You should aim to pay your balance off in full and on time, when possible." cnbc.com/id/107409119?&view=…

“With this report, the porridge was just about right,” said Dan North, senior economist at Allianz Trade. “What would you like at this point the cycle?" U.S. job growth totaled 175,000 in April while unemployment rose to 3.9% cnbc.com/2024/05/03/jobs-rep…

move closer to the mean or average value of the population, regardless of the values of the independent variables. In regression analysis, the goal is to model and quantify the relationship between one or more independent variables and a dependent variable,

which later became shortened to simply "regression." The term "mediocrity" in this context refers to the average or mean value of a population. Therefore, the term "regression" in statistics refers to the phenomenon where the values of a dependent variable tend to