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"We are already clobbered enough on council tax" says Isabel Oakeshott questioning the number of times rubbish is collected.


https://x.com/TalkTV/status/1883822499151872462

Narrator: Isabel posted an article yesterday on Telegraph saying she has been living in Dubai since...erm. August 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/25/how-i-became-a-labour-school-fee-exile-in-dubai/

Our main bin collection has been once a month for several years and our council tax has risen by 10.1% in 23, 9.67% in 24 and expected 10% this year

Welcome to North Wales

Possibly because the funding from central government is not keeping pace, hence the increase in the poll tax amount. It's not difficult.

The current solution to social care funding is for local councils to not do anything nice at all.

(Our local library has just been announced as for the chop. For all it is small, part-time and close to bigger alternatives, it's a very visible enshittification of the neighbourhood.

And the council will still be unviable.)

I personally think that social care and education should be removed from councils anyway. The NHS should have an overarching responsibility for care, and the schools should be funded from central government as well. It would give us a better idea of what our tax rate is really. Councils should deal with the rest.

Out of impure curiosity, how do the two authors categorize themselves, politically?

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Beyond that, in research, we let the methods speak for themselves. There’s an additional online appendix at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/19401612241311886/suppl_file/sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612241311886.docx

The methods are peculiar to say the least. Because of the huge amount of data, they simply award an aggregrated 'fact' score to each news source, and social media posts that link to those sources score low, and are therefore classified as misinformation without actually being read. That isn't anybody 'lying' - the stories sitting on these 'low fact' websites could have been utterly true, such as 'Covid probably came from a lab' and 'Lockdown could cause untold harm', whilst other stories on 'high fact' websites could have stated that 'Lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory' and 'We must lock down harder'. The latter is misinformation, the former is not, but this process wouldn't have picked that up.

The whole conversation on 'misinformation' is absurdly circular. The two pillars of the prevailing global consensus (until now) have been the failure of capitalism, and the climate crisis. These are both themes well supported by the political left, so of course judged by that yardstick, they will present fewer 'low information' arguments and sources. Sources standing up for personal freedom against the state, lockdown scepticism, climate crisis scepticism and other right wing causes, are damned by definition. We may just as well say 'right wing people present unacceptable right wing thoughts.'.

I have no doubt that this is a study where “least truthful” coincides with “least in agreement with the authors.”

Out of impure curiosity, how do the two authors categorize themselves, politically?

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Beyond that, in research, we let the methods speak for themselves. There’s an additional online appendix at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/19401612241311886/suppl_file/sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612241311886.docx

The methods are peculiar to say the least. Because of the huge amount of data, they simply award an aggregrated 'fact' score to each news source, and social media posts that link to those sources score low, and are therefore classified as misinformation without actually being read. That isn't anybody 'lying' - the stories sitting on these 'low fact' websites could have been utterly true, such as 'Covid probably came from a lab' and 'Lockdown could cause untold harm', whilst other stories on 'high fact' websites could have stated that 'Lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory' and 'We must lock down harder'. The latter is misinformation, the former is not, but this process wouldn't have picked that up.

The whole conversation on 'misinformation' is absurdly circular. The two pillars of the prevailing global consensus (until now) have been the failure of capitalism, and the climate crisis. These are both themes well supported by the political left, so of course judged by that yardstick, they will present fewer 'low information' arguments and sources. Sources standing up for personal freedom against the state, lockdown scepticism, climate crisis scepticism and other right wing causes, are damned by definition. We may just as well say 'right wing people present unacceptable right wing thoughts.'.