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Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
Nobody, including and perhaps least of all, the attendees has any fucking clue. It's make-it-up-as-go-along school of statecraft.@SkyNewsIs that a good thing? Is this a Z/T meeting or a meeting at which Z/T are among the participants?
BREAKING: France's president Emmanuel Macron and Finnish president Alexander Stubb are the latest European leaders to say they will attend Zelenskyy and Trump's meeting
It's probably a combination of FOMO from the European leaders, nobody wants to be the first lift sanctions on Russia but also they definitely don't want to be the last, and DJT enjoying summoning them across the Atlantic so he can be rude/incomprehensible to them.

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Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
It depends on how you describe young childrenThat is young people deliberately viewing porn. I think this particular concern was younger children whose parents have not engaged the child safety features offered on their phones or routers might accidentally stumble across porn somewhere other than on a porn site, or violence. I am surprised pb still allows links to footage of Russian tank crews being blown up.Good morningIt does stop young children accidentally viewing pornographic or violent images thoughYes, that is the paradox. Most (except perhaps a few free speech zealots) want to protect children from harmful content on the interwebs.Labour Party on X -Families in marginal seats, 69% of voters back age verification to access adult websites
"Nigel Farage would put women and girls at risk.
NIGEL FARAGE WANTS TO MAKE IT EASIER TO SHARE REVENGE PORN ONLINE"
I presume this is about the OSA, so the inference is that anyone who opposes the OSA wants to make it easier to share revenge porn
Who does the Labour Party think is stupid enough to believe this, even if only about Farage?
https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-britons-reacted-to-age-verification
Most experts are agreed that the OSA is stupid, counterproductive, easily worked around, dangerous and increases risks.
Nor is there any obvious connection with the three main cases thrown up by OSA's increasingly desperate defenders. Jimmy Savile assaulted girls in the flesh, not online. Peter Kyle's concern about the genuine risk of grooming in online forums has nothing to do with porn sites or age verification. And now revenge porn which was banned 10 years ago.
No it doesn't as I explained a few days ago
Our granddaughter (22) uses VPN as does most if not all of her peers, and our grandson (16) knows about vpn and he confirmed every child in his school to the very youngsest knows how to avoid age verification, not just with vpn but using fake facial id
It is naive to think young children cannot get round this - indeed their older brother and sisters will help them
We are living in an age where young people and children are very tec savvy
Very few parents allow very young children phones or internet access, and I doubt many under 10 have a phone but notwithstanding, the OSA will not prevent children accessing inappropriate web sites
Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
Surely Starmer will go to Washington tomorrow .It would be very strange, when even the likes of the Finnish president is going, but....
It would look very strange if he didn’t .
"Yesterday the New York Times reported that European leaders had been invited to DC, but the BBC understands that right now there’s no plan for Starmer to attend."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cev28rvzlv1t
Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
Surely there's something by Conrad Black?This Telegraph travel expert has a Spode detector on it:The travel expert seems to be a chatbot in front of the Telegraph's own travel articles, so if they've never covered His Majesty's Hotels...
- I would like to visit sites associated with oswald moseley's imprisonment
- We’re sorry, but we can’t answer your question at the moment. We’re always working to improve the Telegraph Travel Expert and hope to offer fuller responses in the future.
(Though tbf he was pardoned by President Chump in 2019.)
(Interestingly he only left the House of Lords on 9 July 2024, despite taking his Canadian Citizenship back in 2023 which should have had him barred. Sunak was so neglectful.


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Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
The sunshine was certainly a plus. We had beautiful uninterrupted views from the top of Goat Fell, although with a bit of haze in the distance we couldn't quite see Ireland or Fife!The mostly nice weather may have helped, sunny Scotland can melt the most doom laden, 'it's shite being Scottish' bulletin from BBC Scotland.Indeed, I would vote Labour still, but my admittedly superficial impression from my two week holiday was that Scotland seems in a good state. Maybe Westminster politicians have something to learn from that.Just back from two very pleasant weeks in the auld country. No doubt the SNP have presided over many failures (we experienced a little of the ferry issues firsthand) but at the same time my sense from all my interactions was of a country at ease with itself. Local facilities were largely well maintained, even the most isolated social housing estates seemed recently painted and there was a general hum of cheerfulness about the place. If I were a Scottish resident I'm not sure I'd be desperate to turf out the Nats.Fair play, I know that the SNP are not your preference by a long way.
Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
Well uk based traffic will be down by half - VPN traffic (if the VPN is any good) is going to look like it came from outside the UK..Where are we on the numbers?How the f**k does OSA make revenge porn harder? The victim knows who the guilty party is - and all sites have required content "creators" to provide details for decades...Labour Party on X -They tried this same line of attack with Sunak over being soft on paedos.
"Nigel Farage would put women and girls at risk.
NIGEL FARAGE WANTS TO MAKE IT EASIER TO SHARE REVENGE PORN ONLINE"
I presume this is about the OSA, so the inference is that anyone who opposes the OSA wants to make it easier to share revenge porn
Who does the Labour Party think is stupid enough to believe this, even if only about Farage?
The last I saw (may have been temporary) was that xhamster reported traffic down by half.

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Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
I notice stories that the UK will allow the Chinese robo-taxi firms to test here, the US banned them. Absolute madness. We have the likes of Wayve who are making good progress, we should be backing them.And China will probably destroy the financial business models of every US player.Railways had large up front costs - but once the line was built (bankrupting the builders) someone could come along and make a profit from running trains on the line.From the World Wide Web:There is an irony here in that the LLM models that Leon loves are seriously unprofitable and show little chance of every becoming profitable...But surely those on the top floor are insulated from the fire.Leon told us AI is coming for our jobs, and now the Telegraph has launched its AI travel adviser:-I won’t talk about the tech - I believe I’m still not allowed - but I will talk about the economic implications
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-expert/
Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
The NYT has a piercing essay on the crash in tech/coding/computer science jobs for graduates. You can guess why. The industry is burning on the ground floor, the fire will spread to the rest of the building
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The great jobs shakedown is beginning
So according to you we are entering a dystopian world where only the Captains of industry can make a living. Everyone else has been replaced by machines.
If only the top two or three percent remain earning, we won't even need baristas and burger flippers for the hoi poloi, as no one will be able to afford burgers and coffee.
“In the early railway age, probably the majority of companies went bust. Britain’s “railway mania” of the 1830s and 40s saw promoters raising fortunes on wild promises. Building railways was hugely expensive, competition was cutthroat, and traffic forecasts were often pure fantasy. Many branch lines to obscure towns never paid their way, and some companies paid dividends out of capital until the money ran out.
The survivors - like the Liverpool & Manchester Railway - thrived, but dozens of smaller lines collapsed or were absorbed by stronger rivals. The same chaos unfolded in America, where the panic of 1837 sent early railroads into bankruptcy with alarming regularity. Railways changed the world, but the business was as risky and volatile as a gold rush.”
The current problem with AI is that the costs are 3 fold
1) creating the models (very expensive).
2) the running costs of paying customers (someone has just found a cursor user who used $50,000 of compute costs for their $200 subscription). Now that's a worst case scenario but it's incredibly common to discover high usage users are using more than they pay.
3) marketing is about giving limited acceess for free - so a lot people aren't paying anything and a struggling to find reasons to spend money on it
End result is few people can justify the actual costs of their usage - so there is a very limited upside for potential customers.
I've seen a number of expert people who think LLM is probably a $50bn industry (at best) and not the multiple trillion pounds others think it is...
Finally MS are desperately trying to work out a business model that isn't per user or consumption base as that is essential for them to make a profit from this technology and it's proving far harder than they thought (per user isn't selling even at $20 a user per month)..
Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
This was a total BS article in the FT. It was based upon an internet tracking service who admitted half way down the article, we don't know if people use VPNs and if they do, and are accessing adult sites, it won't show up in our numbers.Where are we on the numbers?How the f**k does OSA make revenge porn harder? The victim knows who the guilty party is - and all sites have required content "creators" to provide details for decades...Labour Party on X -They tried this same line of attack with Sunak over being soft on paedos.
"Nigel Farage would put women and girls at risk.
NIGEL FARAGE WANTS TO MAKE IT EASIER TO SHARE REVENGE PORN ONLINE"
I presume this is about the OSA, so the inference is that anyone who opposes the OSA wants to make it easier to share revenge porn
Who does the Labour Party think is stupid enough to believe this, even if only about Farage?
The last I saw (may have been temporary) was that xhamster reported traffic down by half.
Re: 44% of the public are liars, in fact 59% of them are liars once you add Don't Knows
But @kinabalu has informed me that the government has decent intentions and “wouldn’t do this, trust me”. So there’s no problem there.Not sure you really understand protests. It's about sticking two fingers up at the government; doing what they ask and causing as little disruption as possible is exactly what an authoritarian government would want you to do. It was mad listening to Stewart and Campbell tip toe round the issue on their podcast lest they get arrested too - do you really want to live in a UK like that?What made them want to show support specifically for the proscribed terrorist group, rather than simply supporting international action in Palestine?Three so far, though many more could be charged later. If they are not charged then the government looks ridiculous, and if they are charged even more so. We have a couple of elderly terrorists in my church congregation now.How many of the hundreds arrested last weekend actually got charged with anything in the first place?Juries sometimes make mistakes.And sometimes juries aquit to prevent an injustice. I don't know this particular case, but it will be popcorn time when Palestine Action come before a jury.
It is better we have juries that sometimes make mistakes, than we don't have juries at all.
So they want a Senatus consultum ultimum? What could possibly go wrong?
Re: Thistle do nicely, a 16% return in 9 months? – politicalbetting.com
When Raul Moat was having his little rampage, all those years back, I overheard a conversation on the train (District line - heading in the direction of Westminster)Its more of Labour thrashing around in regards to the OSA looking for a narrative that it does really save the kids.How the f**k does OSA make revenge porn harder? The victim knows who the guilty party is - and all sites have required content "creators" to provide details for decades...Labour Party on X -They tried this same line of attack with Sunak over being soft on paedos.
"Nigel Farage would put women and girls at risk.
NIGEL FARAGE WANTS TO MAKE IT EASIER TO SHARE REVENGE PORN ONLINE"
I presume this is about the OSA, so the inference is that anyone who opposes the OSA wants to make it easier to share revenge porn
Who does the Labour Party think is stupid enough to believe this, even if only about Farage?
A lady was on the phone, broadcasting here conversation to the whole carriage.
“Tell the minister, that unfortunately, it looks like the gun was illegally acquired, so we can’t use that for our gun control agenda.” - not to the word, but exact enough.
On the OSA - They’ll be trawling for a tragedy