Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Most Latin American countries voted to condemn Putin's invasion at the UN even if most South Asian and many African and Middle Eastern nations did not.
Japan and South Korea also condemned it even if China and North Korea did not
African views might change as resulting global food shortage push up prices.
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
So the government is only allowed to work on its top priority?
It shouldn't be working on stuff that is pointless.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Well, that's one reason why you have a bunch of different ministers with different portfolios.
If (obviously big if) selling off C4 is a good thing to do then it's not obvious to me what else a Culture Minister would have to do that would be more important.
In Dorries' case I'd think that's obvious. Resignation.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
Their pitch appears to be what cost of living crisis / look at all the towns fund money (you haven't had yet) / anyone successful is doing well so if you're not its your fault / we need to let energy bills go up so hat they can go down in future / SQUIRREL / beware cock-wielding woke "women" trying to molest your wives and daughters.
Not entirely unfair precis. Their only chance is if they double-down on Levelling-Up and give themselves some momentum and a positive reason for their new working-class voters to stick with them. It will need Boris to exert himself and overrule the fiscal hawks. Need to show they are on the side of "ordinary people" which is what BJ is actually quite good at, even if he enrages the intelligentsia.
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
I would encourage people to care about wars everywhere, but it's obviously the case that people will care more about things that are closer to them.
I have a cousin who lives in Hong Kong. My grandmother was born in Ternopil. My brother-in-law worked in Ukraine a few years ago. I have no such connections to Venezuela, Ethiopia or Myanmar.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
Correction of a silly error in my post below - Channel 4's News and Current Affairs budget is actually the protected proportion of £660 million under the public service remit, much larger than channels like 5's news budget, but not £660 million itself !
Still 12% higher than she got in the 2017 runoff, even on that poll
It is frightening that so many people in a sophisticated educated country could vote for the far right, but then plenty of people here voted for Faragist parties (to their shame).
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Drunk driver's fallacy. People can do more than one thing at once. Large organisations can do thousands of different things at once. It is Nadine's time being taken up by this not Ben Wallace's.
Firstly I mentioned domestic issues not defence.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
First Light Fusion seems to have cracked it, if they can scale it then we may have our first commercial fusion power process within 10 years. The first big step has been achieved which is incredible. If this works out we need to ensure the company stays in UK hands, even if it means a golden share taken by the government to prevent a foreign buy out and IP transfer.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
Yep, have witnessed several Americans, of left and right political leanings, not understand global energy prices over the past few weeks.
They think that if the US becomes totally self-sufficient in energy, then they will be insulated from the global markets and their producers definitely won’t sell to the highest bidder.
Yes, there’s the inflexibility of transport that saw the oil price briefly go negative a couple of years ago, but that small friction doesn’t distort the market as much as commentators would like to think it does.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
Their pitch appears to be what cost of living crisis / look at all the towns fund money (you haven't had yet) / anyone successful is doing well so if you're not its your fault / we need to let energy bills go up so hat they can go down in future / SQUIRREL / beware cock-wielding woke "women" trying to molest your wives and daughters.
Not entirely unfair precis. Their only chance is if they double-down on Levelling-Up and give themselves some momentum and a positive reason for their new working-class voters to stick with them. It will need Boris to exert himself and overrule the fiscal hawks. Need to show they are on the side of "ordinary people" which is what BJ is actually quite good at, even if he enrages the intelligentsia.
I'd agree with that. Except that "ordinary people" seem to be pretty pissed off that while they were behaving well and following government rules during lockdown, Boris was partying. That may have somewhat blown his appeal to quite a few (not all, of course) "ordinary people". The damage may well fade, of course.
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
Channel4, or whichever incarnation it is of it - All4, etc, has the most extraordinary (and currently free, albeit with ads) back catalogue of mini-series. I'm sure there will be a plan by a private owner further to monetise that beyond ad revenue. Or perhaps the ad revenue is very healthy.
There was a time when it was very healthy and, as part of the provisions of the terrible broadcasting act, they ended up giving a chunk to ITV.
I wonder just how much of the channel 4 back catalogue is their property and able to be exploited by them or any new owner and quite how they would exploit it. Sell it to streaming services like Netflix perhaps.
Looking through their portfolio on all4 makes me feel a little sad as, It’s a Sin aside, there’s really little of any merit there from recent times.
Oh I don't know - yes there are plenty that would have a smaller audience but looking down the 277 "Box Sets" there are some cracking series in there (This is England, Shameless, Queer as Folk, Skins, etc).
They are good series but most of these are over a decade old.
I think plenty of their back catalogue could find an outlet. Some of it has been shown on GOLD and other channels
Improbably, my current package doesn't give me Gold. Which is a pity, because I wanted to give Newark, Newark a go. Gold actually has a good line in low-key but very satisfying comedies it produces itself (I think?). Sandylands was the sort of comedy which in previous decades would have attracted a small but devoted following. And the various murder mysteries starring Johnny Vegas and Sian Gibson were very good old-fashioned telly.
There is so much telly nowadays that a lot of good stuff which might attract a following gets a bit lost.
Several channels in that group make or co produce their own original content. Dave and Alibi do as well.
A few years back GOLD was just Men Behaving Badly, Only Fools and One Foot in the grave. It’s come a long way.
They brought back Red Dwarf and remade three missing Dads Army episodes too.
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Sadly true. My local butcher was on the national news last night (cost of living story I think). That is what I remember this morning and I am embarrassed that is the case, but as you say - human nature.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I'm sorry, what impact do you think those access tracks really have on anything? AIUI the objections people have to grouse moors are rarely to do with the fact that there are access tracks. Are you just slaying a straw man here?
Channel 4 will be sold off and destroyed, just as BT was for a long time
Are you suggesting that BT was good before it was "destroyed"? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Oh for the days of waiting three months for a phone line to be installed, and the expection that you’d better be damn grateful they deigned to provide you service in the first place.
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Drunk driver's fallacy. People can do more than one thing at once. Large organisations can do thousands of different things at once. It is Nadine's time being taken up by this not Ben Wallace's.
Firstly I mentioned domestic issues not defence.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
Surely a large part of the benefit of privatisation is precisely that it is not a long term priority, and by getting rid of it, the Government/DCMS will have more time to spend on things that actually do matter?
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Drunk driver's fallacy. People can do more than one thing at once. Large organisations can do thousands of different things at once. It is Nadine's time being taken up by this not Ben Wallace's.
Firstly I mentioned domestic issues not defence.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
Surely a large part of the benefit of privatisation is precisely that it is not a long term priority, and by getting rid of it, the Government/DCMS will have more time to spend on things that actually do matter?
The government isn't really spending any time on it at the moment, though. The commercial - not the public service - part of its intended structure is fully working.
For the other part of its intended structure to be fully working again, too, all this or any other future government would need to do is restore the funding link from ITV - again, not too difficult by reference to the original laws and its charter, but simply the opposite political direction from this one.
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Drunk driver's fallacy. People can do more than one thing at once. Large organisations can do thousands of different things at once. It is Nadine's time being taken up by this not Ben Wallace's.
Firstly I mentioned domestic issues not defence.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
It's just housekeeping innit? The "mischief" rule is a rule for the construction of statutes so not really relevant I would have thought.
Also, thanks for that earlier link on aneutronic fusion earlier @JosiasJessop, I'm still yet to be convinced this can be made to work at scale without side reactions which will release neutrons, gamma rays and x-rays. The energy barrier to reach ignition for the ¹H+¹¹B reaction seems insanely high too, though I can see why they picked it as it has the lowest potential for side reactions and plasma quenching with energy absorption by those side reactions.
It also brings me back to mega projects like ITER which now feel completely outdated, by the time it's built smaller fusion startups may already have achieved a net energy gain because they can move quickly and aren't bogged down in the politics of which country gets to do what etc...
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
First Light Fusion seems to have cracked it, if they can scale it then we may have our first commercial fusion power process within 10 years. The first big step has been achieved which is incredible. If this works out we need to ensure the company stays in UK hands, even if it means a golden share taken by the government to prevent a foreign buy out and IP transfer.
I hope you are right but how many times have we heard 10 years for fusion? Finger's crossed because it would be huge.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
The more energy we produce ourselves to supply our consumers the more that will lower their energy costs.
While globally the more countries use fracking and shale and alternative renewable energy supplies etc and don't rely on Russian oil and gas while the Russian war with Ukraine is going on the more that will reduce global energy prices too.
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Drunk driver's fallacy. People can do more than one thing at once. Large organisations can do thousands of different things at once. It is Nadine's time being taken up by this not Ben Wallace's.
Firstly I mentioned domestic issues not defence.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
Surely a large part of the benefit of privatisation is precisely that it is not a long term priority, and by getting rid of it, the Government/DCMS will have more time to spend on things that actually do matter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I'm sorry, what impact do you think those access tracks really have on anything? AIUI the objections people have to grouse moors are rarely to do with the fact that there are access tracks. Are you just slaying a straw man here?
A heck of a lot. It's not just their width, they are engineered structures, built to cope with heavy loads. They have minimum gradients, and therefore often wind around as they climb.
Our moorland is precious. It has been abused massively in the past (e.g. forestry). It needs protecting. As much as anything else, English peatlands 'store' over 500 million tonnes of carbon. It's just that where we still have wilderness, I quite like the idea of keeping it as wild as possible.
(Again, I've got no problem with windfarms in more lowland areas.
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Drunk driver's fallacy. People can do more than one thing at once. Large organisations can do thousands of different things at once. It is Nadine's time being taken up by this not Ben Wallace's.
Firstly I mentioned domestic issues not defence.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
It's just housekeeping innit? The "mischief" rule is a rule for the construction of statutes so not really relevant I would have thought.
No. Substitute "problem" or "issue" for "mischief" and my first question remains. Why?
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
I wonder whether the low SNP figure in the Survation Scottish subsample (yes, I know, I’ll probably be banned!) is showing the first signs of dissatisfaction among SNP voters? The ferry crisis has got through to Scots voters in the same way that partygate has got through to UK voters generally. The figure for Others seems to be high as well. SNP voters thinking about switching to Labour or Alba? The May elections will be interesting!
There was literally a full scotland poll out yesterday (by Survation no less). SNP were on 45% at Westminster.
It'll take another electoral cycle (at least) and the departure of Sturgeon to really impact on SNP numbers. She is given a lot of credit for Covid Management and then there's the contrast with Boris to be exploited. They may not do brilliantly in May but will still be significantly ahead.
The interesting party to watch is Scottish Labour, and whether they can establish themselves in second place, and start looking like a credible alternative. My guess is that Tories will pip them in May in terms of councillors elected.
Evening finding an Alba candidate will be a challenge. They're standing just 7 candidates in 19 wards in Aberdeenshire. SCon are standing 33, SNP 26, SLib 19, SGreen 12, SLab 11. Other assorted shitheads are available.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
NEW: Jeremy Hunt becomes the most senior Tory to criticise plans to privatise Channel 4. The former Culture Secretary: "I'm not in favour of it because as it stands Channel 4 provides competition to the BBC on public service broadcasting." https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1511232996468310017
Competition on public service broadcasting...
Erm...
Does that mean we need a second NHS?
Well that is why Trusts are set up that way, to compete with each other. So not a second NHS, but hundreds. Thousands if you include GPs.
Yes the classic idea of letting the market improve things. Yet you don't really get a choice of GP do you? If your surgery is too busy because there are too few GP's and too many patients, you can't choose a different surgery (at least not in my mid sized market town, as there is only one.)
Beckenham has 47,000 people and six GP surgeries, so far as I can make out from 30 seconds with Google, so yes. It may be different where you live, and perhaps if there is one practice per 5,000 people then there will be patients with less choice.
One practice, 18000 people. We are not well served...
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Name recognition, feeling of kinship. You may think "feeling of kinship" maps onto racism but actually it's merely an extension of being more invested in your cousins the joneses than the equally white British but unrelated Smiths.
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
So the government is only allowed to work on its top priority?
It shouldn't be working on stuff that is pointless.
Some might argue it should so that it doesn't bugger up the important stuff.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
Also worth noting that the opposition to lockdown which was threatened last December came about almost entirely due to a twitter conversation. So much stuff which wouldn't see the light of day does so because of twitter. The platform is awful, and frustrating, and there is a non-stop cacophony of people shouting at each other. But it is also a better way of everyone talking to everyone than has ever existed.
First Light Fusion seems to have cracked it, if they can scale it then we may have our first commercial fusion power process within 10 years. The first big step has been achieved which is incredible. If this works out we need to ensure the company stays in UK hands, even if it means a golden share taken by the government to prevent a foreign buy out and IP transfer.
I hope you are right but how many times have we heard 10 years for fusion? Finger's crossed because it would be huge.
I think the difference this time is that their fusion method uses a mechanical process rather than superconducting magnets for plasma confinement like tokamak based designs. Improving and scaling a mechanical process seems achievable, discovering new superconducting magnets that don't require shit loads of energy to keep at superconducting temperatures doesn't seem achievable in the short term.
It's why I'm not convinced that ITER is worth the money we're spending on it, but it's locked in now.
Also, thanks for that earlier link on aneutronic fusion earlier @JosiasJessop, I'm still yet to be convinced this can be made to work at scale without side reactions which will release neutrons, gamma rays and x-rays. The energy barrier to reach ignition for the ¹H+¹¹B reaction seems insanely high too, though I can see why they picked it as it has the lowest potential for side reactions and plasma quenching with energy absorption by those side reactions.
It also brings me back to mega projects like ITER which now feel completely outdated, by the time it's built smaller fusion startups may already have achieved a net energy gain because they can move quickly and aren't bogged down in the politics of which country gets to do what etc...
I am very keen on aneutronic fusion, but freely admit it probably won't be the first fusion system to be built (or even ever work). And yes, there may well be issues - as ever, the minor details of any system matter massively. But its advantages *might* be brilliant. E.g. in having no steam cycle. But if people are working on it, we'll discover more - and their knowledge may feed into other projects (and vice versa).
For that reason I'm also in favour of ITER. Whilst it may be a dead-end, we're learning a heck of a lot from doing it, e.g. in materials at IFMIF (*) . As with much tech, the more people we have working on different approaches, the more likely we are to get not just something that works, but the best thing.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
Also worth noting that the opposition to lockdown which was threatened last December came about almost entirely due to a twitter conversation. So much stuff which wouldn't see the light of day does so because of twitter. The platform is awful, and frustrating, and there is a non-stop cacophony of people shouting at each other. But it is also a better way of everyone talking to everyone than has ever existed.
I think we were probably better off before Twitter was invented. It has a lot of positives, but the negatives outweigh them. It's had a damaging effect on the sense of solidarity that holds societies together, especially in the United States.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
One of the three reactors was old and very unreliable, the operator had been begging to close it for years. But the other two, yes they should have kept them running.
I was listening to a debate wrt German electricity supplies on France 24, and it was pointed out that the 3 slated-for-closure N power stations were about 10% of supply, but that Green shad not yet come round to a postponed closure, but were thinking about it.
I think they will be kept open to help cover the gap, as that is a big chunk of the shortfall.
NEW: Jeremy Hunt becomes the most senior Tory to criticise plans to privatise Channel 4. The former Culture Secretary: "I'm not in favour of it because as it stands Channel 4 provides competition to the BBC on public service broadcasting." https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1511232996468310017
Competition on public service broadcasting...
Erm...
Does that mean we need a second NHS?
Well that is why Trusts are set up that way, to compete with each other. So not a second NHS, but hundreds. Thousands if you include GPs.
Yes the classic idea of letting the market improve things. Yet you don't really get a choice of GP do you? If your surgery is too busy because there are too few GP's and too many patients, you can't choose a different surgery (at least not in my mid sized market town, as there is only one.)
Beckenham has 47,000 people and six GP surgeries, so far as I can make out from 30 seconds with Google, so yes. It may be different where you live, and perhaps if there is one practice per 5,000 people then there will be patients with less choice.
One practice, 18000 people. We are not well served...
One terrible practice, 12,000 people. And they're planning to build another 2,350 homes, AIUI without any extra GP provision...
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Drunk driver's fallacy. People can do more than one thing at once. Large organisations can do thousands of different things at once. It is Nadine's time being taken up by this not Ben Wallace's.
Firstly I mentioned domestic issues not defence.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
It's just housekeeping innit? The "mischief" rule is a rule for the construction of statutes so not really relevant I would have thought.
No. Substitute "problem" or "issue" for "mischief" and my first question remains. Why?
Like I say, housekeeping. I am thinking of exchanging my 5 year old Isuzu truck for a year old Toyota. I'm not addressing a specific issue or solving a specific problem, it's just an idea which possibly makes sense
Here's the government case
"Channel 4 rightly holds a cherished place in British life and I want that to remain the case. I have come to the conclusion that government ownership is holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon.
"A change of ownership will give Channel 4 the tools and freedom to flourish and thrive as a public service broadcaster long into the future."
A government source said the channel would lose its "straitjacket" but retain its commitment to primetime news programming."
Now that may be utterly wrong, it may be a misdiagnosis and/or a disastrous remedy and/or a pretext for other, unstated reasons, but if Dorries is the minister responsible for channel 4 it is very hard to argue that she shouldn't be examining the questions she's examining at all, nor taking action on her conclusions.
And she's doing other stuff. Online Safety Bill for instance.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
The more energy we produce ourselves to supply our consumers the more that will lower their energy costs.
While globally the more countries use fracking and shale and alternative renewable energy supplies etc and don't rely on Russian oil and gas while the Russian war with Ukraine is going on the more that will reduce global energy prices too.
No it won't. See @Sandpit post. Our local energy providers will supply energy locally and abroad at the global commodity prices so it will have no impact on the cost of living. If produced locally it will help with tax revenue and employment, but it has zero impact on the price of energy.
Of course you could force local energy suppliers to supply fuel locally at a lower price but that is communism so I doubt you are keen on that.
Our increased production in theory may reduce global prices but in practice the impact is too small to matter.
On Channel 4, has the government done its homework/whipping? Is it certain there are the votes for it? A group of 40-50 determined rebels could sink it, and the Lords will be very difficult. https://twitter.com/iainmartin1/status/1511283910814179335
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
I would encourage people to care about wars everywhere, but it's obviously the case that people will care more about things that are closer to them.
I have a cousin who lives in Hong Kong. My grandmother was born in Ternopil. My brother-in-law worked in Ukraine a few years ago. I have no such connections to Venezuela, Ethiopia or Myanmar.
Yes, it's an uncomfortable discussion but I think we all acknowledge that there's a reality there. Kyiv in particular is a recognisably European city with lots of people who speak some English, making it more accessible to Western imagination than a village in DR Congo or Colombia. The Donbas, probably rather less.
There's an interesting article here by a Belorussian on the interaction between Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian identities:
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
I’ve finally got covid and resolved to do what I always do when I have a cold. Make a fragrantly hot Thai curry. Need to check I have the ingredients for a paste as will need to deploy son to fetch missing stuff.
It really is coming for us all. I'm still holding out, although I'm suspicious of my cold of a few weeks ago. Will never know one way or the other.
We have lots of issues to deal with, domestically. The ownership of Channel 4 doesn't even come into the top 250. And yet this is what the Tories are focusing on.
This frivolous approach to governance is why they should lose the next election.
Could be worse - could be a 'cones hotline' to report empty roadworks...
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
The SCons only control 1 council in the whole of Scotland by themselves anyway, Perth and Kinross. That only as a minority.
Any other councils they are in control in is only with LDs and Independents.
They are not exactly starting from a high base
The Tories could still be leading quite a few Scottish councils after May, South Ayrshire, Moray, Angus, Aberdeenshire, Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Borders and Perth and Kinross are most likely. They will be able to campaign against 6 incumbent SNP-Lab councils. Although they are only standing enough candidates to get a majority in Dumfries and Galloway, South Ayrshire and Perth and Kinross. They are also likely to remain the largest party in East Renfrewshire but SNP/Lab/Inds are probably likely to remain in power there.
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
Also, thanks for that earlier link on aneutronic fusion earlier @JosiasJessop, I'm still yet to be convinced this can be made to work at scale without side reactions which will release neutrons, gamma rays and x-rays. The energy barrier to reach ignition for the ¹H+¹¹B reaction seems insanely high too, though I can see why they picked it as it has the lowest potential for side reactions and plasma quenching with energy absorption by those side reactions.
It also brings me back to mega projects like ITER which now feel completely outdated, by the time it's built smaller fusion startups may already have achieved a net energy gain because they can move quickly and aren't bogged down in the politics of which country gets to do what etc...
I am very keen on aneutronic fusion, but freely admit it probably won't be the first fusion system to be built (or even ever work). And yes, there may well be issues - as ever, the minor details of any system matter massively. But its advantages *might* be brilliant. E.g. in having no steam cycle. But if people are working on it, we'll discover more - and their knowledge may feed into other projects (and vice versa).
For that reason I'm also in favour of ITER. Whilst it may be a dead-end, we're learning a heck of a lot from doing it, e.g. in materials at IFMIF (*) . As with much tech, the more people we have working on different approaches, the more likely we are to get not just something that works, but the best thing.
Yeah I get where you're coming from, my worry is that ITER may end up building a fusion reactor design that has already been shown not to work by a fusion start up, the lead times on it are massive and it may have been better to spend the money on funding 20 different smaller scale projects alongside private money.
It doesn't matter now because it's locked in but I do wonder whether some nations will begin to get cold feet when the next set of bills arrive and they're significantly higher than the initial costing. Anecdotally I know two scientists who refused jobs with ITER and are now both at different startups, one in the US and one in the UK. Both of them were put off by the politicking of a giant international project vs the ease of working in private industry.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I love the fact that on windy days we have so much power from turbines, and I think on the whole the are graceful and elegant. But there should be protected spaces and there must be an alternative that is more predictable. I know that there are challenges with tidal and lagoons, but we are good at solving challenges and the source is VERY predictable. It was always going to be tough to wean off fossil fuels when the price was cheap. We are only doing it because we have to - if climate change wasn't an issue and if the reserves we infinite (I know, stupid) we'd always use them.
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
Channel 4 was the harbinger of that particular doom when it picked up 'Big Brother'.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
In what way?
At the end of the 1980's there was backlash against "highbrow culture" from figures such as Murdoch, who had the ear of Thatcher. Part of the restructuring of broadcasting wasn't only market-fundamentalism, but also a sort of anti-elitism that didn't turn out too well, often replacing with commercial banalities. When all the delicate balance of commercial and non-commercial factors that made British TV was unpicked, all the huge variety that was on TV during this time - from the "lowest" to the "highest" art - was lost.
The point was I was making is that today's Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of any issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
The more energy we produce ourselves to supply our consumers the more that will lower their energy costs.
While globally the more countries use fracking and shale and alternative renewable energy supplies etc and don't rely on Russian oil and gas while the Russian war with Ukraine is going on the more that will reduce global energy prices too.
No it won't. See @Sandpit post. Our local energy providers will supply energy locally and abroad at the global commodity prices so it will have no impact on the cost of living. If produced locally it with tax revenue and employment, but it has zero impact on the price of energy.
Of course you could force local energy suppliers to supply fuel locally at a lower price but that is communism so I doubt you are keen on that.
Our increased production in theory may reduce global prices but in practice the impact is too small to matter.
Yes it will. Why are energy prices rising? First because of a surge in demand after the end of Covid lockdowns and a lack of supply to meet them. Second, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sanctions on imports of Russian gas and oil.
So obviously the more we can increase our energy supplies for UK consumers and the more the rest of the world can expand its energy production to reduce reliance on Russian energy, the lower energy prices will be.
So expanding domestic and global energy production, including expanding fracking and shale, will reduce global commodity and energy prices. That will in turn cut the cost of living
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
Confused. Who are these weird people with faith in Twitter?
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
The more energy we produce ourselves to supply our consumers the more that will lower their energy costs.
While globally the more countries use fracking and shale and alternative renewable energy supplies etc and don't rely on Russian oil and gas while the Russian war with Ukraine is going on the more that will reduce global energy prices too.
No it won't. See @Sandpit post. Our local energy providers will supply energy locally and abroad at the global commodity prices so it will have no impact on the cost of living. If produced locally it with tax revenue and employment, but it has zero impact on the price of energy.
Of course you could force local energy suppliers to supply fuel locally at a lower price but that is communism so I doubt you are keen on that.
Our increased production in theory may reduce global prices but in practice the impact is too small to matter.
Yes it will. Why are energy prices rising? First because of a surge in demand after the end of Covid lockdowns and a lack of supply to meet them. Second, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sanctions on imports of Russian gas and oil.
So obviously the more we can increase our energy supplies for UK consumers and the more the rest of the world can expand its energy production to reduce reliance on Russian energy, the lower energy prices will be.
So expanding energy production, including expanding fracking and shale, will reduce global commodity and energy prices. That will in turn cut the coat of living
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
Their pitch appears to be what cost of living crisis / look at all the towns fund money (you haven't had yet) / anyone successful is doing well so if you're not its your fault / we need to let energy bills go up so hat they can go down in future / SQUIRREL / beware cock-wielding woke "women" trying to molest your wives and daughters.
Not entirely unfair precis. Their only chance is if they double-down on Levelling-Up and give themselves some momentum and a positive reason for their new working-class voters to stick with them. It will need Boris to exert himself and overrule the fiscal hawks. Need to show they are on the side of "ordinary people" which is what BJ is actually quite good at, even if he enrages the intelligentsia.
I have said repeatedly that Sunak could have been cheered by the red wall if money was produced
Here is the problem. Not only is money not being produced, the same cash appears to be both being promised to competing towns and then announced multiple times. A multiplier effect where the expectation of Dosh is raised to silly levels and then a miserly amount actually produced.
"Is that it???" as a reaction won't be what the Tories were hoping for.
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
In what way?
At the end of the 1980's there was backlash against "highbrow culture" from figures such as Murdoch, who had the ear of Thatcher. Part of the restructuring of broadcasting wasn't only market-fundamentalism, but also a sort of anti-elitism that didn't turn out too well, often replacing with commercial banalities. When all the delicate balance of commercial and non-commercial factors that made British TV was unpicked, all the huge variety that was on TV during this time - from the "lowest" to the "highest" art - was lost.
My point was really that the modern Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
Thats not really Nadine though is it? Incidentally, do you have access to Sky Arts? Some excellent stuff on there. Also - the BBC did the excellent Hollow Crown Shakespeare adaptations not that long ago. Even naughtily casting a woman of colour in a key role, the swines. Just to wind up the gammons.
I guess for me broadcasting has been atomised. You want nature programmes, there's a channel for that. You want sport, theres about thirty, and in fact thats become atomised too. In the 70's and 80's there were 3 (three) TV channels in the UK. It was not the golden age we recall - the hits are recalled fondly, and still shown, but the dross is lost in the mists of time.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
The more energy we produce ourselves to supply our consumers the more that will lower their energy costs.
While globally the more countries use fracking and shale and alternative renewable energy supplies etc and don't rely on Russian oil and gas while the Russian war with Ukraine is going on the more that will reduce global energy prices too.
No it won't. See @Sandpit post. Our local energy providers will supply energy locally and abroad at the global commodity prices so it will have no impact on the cost of living. If produced locally it with tax revenue and employment, but it has zero impact on the price of energy.
Of course you could force local energy suppliers to supply fuel locally at a lower price but that is communism so I doubt you are keen on that.
Our increased production in theory may reduce global prices but in practice the impact is too small to matter.
Yes it will. Why are energy prices rising? First because of a surge in demand after the end of Covid lockdowns and a lack of supply to meet them. Second, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sanctions on imports of Russian gas and oil.
So obviously the more we can increase our energy supplies for UK consumers and the more the rest of the world can expand its energy production to reduce reliance on Russian energy, the lower energy prices will be.
So expanding energy production, including expanding fracking and shale, will reduce global commodity and energy prices. That will in turn cut the coat of living
Will take years though
The sooner we start, the less time we have to wait
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
Say hello DRoss. Stood up for the people of Scotland against the Big Dog. Then did a reverse ferret and suddenly a man he called a liar is his best mate.
I wonder which town he will be Baron of when ennobled.
I wonder whether the low SNP figure in the Survation Scottish subsample (yes, I know, I’ll probably be banned!) is showing the first signs of dissatisfaction among SNP voters? The ferry crisis has got through to Scots voters in the same way that partygate has got through to UK voters generally. The figure for Others seems to be high as well. SNP voters thinking about switching to Labour or Alba? The May elections will be interesting!
There was literally a full scotland poll out yesterday (by Survation no less). SNP were on 45% at Westminster.
It'll take another electoral cycle (at least) and the departure of Sturgeon to really impact on SNP numbers. She is given a lot of credit for Covid Management and then there's the contrast with Boris to be exploited. They may not do brilliantly in May but will still be significantly ahead.
The interesting party to watch is Scottish Labour, and whether they can establish themselves in second place, and start looking like a credible alternative. My guess is that Tories will pip them in May in terms of councillors elected.
Evening finding an Alba candidate will be a challenge. They're standing just 7 candidates in 19 wards in Aberdeenshire. SCon are standing 33, SNP 26, SLib 19, SGreen 12, SLab 11. Other assorted shitheads are available.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
In what way?
At the end of the 1980's there was backlash against "highbrow culture" from figures such as Murdoch, who had the ear of Thatcher. Part of the restructuring of broadcasting wasn't only market-fundamentalism, but also a sort of anti-elitism that didn't turn out too well, often replacing with commercial banalities. When all the delicate balance of commercial and non-commercial factors that made British TV was unpicked, all the huge variety that was on TV during this time - from the "lowest" to the "highest" art - was lost.
My point was really that the modern Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
Thats not really Nadine though is it? Incidentally, do you have access to Sky Arts? Some excellent stuff on there. Also - the BBC did the excellent Hollow Crown Shakespeare adaptations not that long ago. Even naughtily casting a woman of colour in a key role, the swines. Just to wind up the gammons.
I guess for me broadcasting has been atomised. You want nature programmes, there's a channel for that. You want sport, theres about thirty, and in fact thats become atomised too. In the 70's and 80's there were 3 (three) TV channels in the UK. It was not the golden age we recall - the hits are recalled fondly, and still shown, but the dross is lost in the mists of time.
I wouldn't really agree there, I have to say. I remember there was a specific schedule from 1990 posted up on one of the many discussions we've had about this recently on PB, and I was quite struck by the level of multi-generational agreement on the loss of variety and depth.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
When are you going to convert the Bitcoin?
Dunno. Nobody knows less about money and finance shit than me. I had to get the kid from the village that I pay to detail cars to set up the wallet for me.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
I watched (or rewatched I suppose) Hislop on 'Fake News' last night. My issue with twitter is not so much fake news, just concentrated shrieking. You have polarised opinions, followed by people who are very much of the same opinion and echo everything round in spades.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
In what way?
At the end of the 1980's there was backlash against "highbrow culture" from figures such as Murdoch, who had the ear of Thatcher. Part of the restructuring of broadcasting wasn't only market-fundamentalism, but also a sort of anti-elitism that didn't turn out too well, often replacing with commercial banalities. When all the delicate balance of commercial and non-commercial factors that made British TV was unpicked, all the huge variety that was on TV during this time - from the "lowest" to the "highest" art - was lost.
My point was really that the modern Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
Thats not really Nadine though is it? Incidentally, do you have access to Sky Arts? Some excellent stuff on there. Also - the BBC did the excellent Hollow Crown Shakespeare adaptations not that long ago. Even naughtily casting a woman of colour in a key role, the swines. Just to wind up the gammons.
I guess for me broadcasting has been atomised. You want nature programmes, there's a channel for that. You want sport, theres about thirty, and in fact thats become atomised too. In the 70's and 80's there were 3 (three) TV channels in the UK. It was not the golden age we recall - the hits are recalled fondly, and still shown, but the dross is lost in the mists of time.
I wouldn't really agree there, I have to say ; I remember a very specific schedule from 1990 was posted up on one of the discussions on this we've had recently on PB, and there was quite a lot of multi-generational agreement on the loss of variety and depth.
There is always a danger of cherry picking though. You'd need to look at some rainy Tuesday nights and get a broader sample to be fair.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
When are you going to convert the Bitcoin?
Dunno. Nobody knows less about money and finance shit than me. I had to get the kid from the village that I pay to detail cars to set up the wallet for me.
OK OK fine. I'll take that bitcoin in exchange for my Apollo Highway but the offer won't last forever so PM me and we'll sort out the deets.
The SCons only control 1 council in the whole of Scotland by themselves anyway, Perth and Kinross. That only as a minority.
Any other councils they are in control in is only with LDs and Independents.
They are not exactly starting from a high base
The Tories could still be leading quite a few Scottish councils after May, South Ayrshire, Moray, Angus, Aberdeenshire, Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Borders and Perth and Kinross are most likely. They will be able to campaign against 6 incumbent SNP-Lab councils. Although they are only standing enough candidates to get a majority in Dumfries and Galloway, South Ayrshire and Perth and Kinross. They are also likely to remain the largest party in East Renfrewshire but SNP/Lab/Inds are probably likely to remain in power there.
As they are running fewer candidates in Aberdeenshire and fighting some quite amusing internecine battles for supremacy between candidates in the few wards where they have multiple candidates, don't be so confident about Aberdeenshire.
The cost of living and the damage to fishing / farming / energy industries are hot topics up here. With the Tories actively doing the damage. I expect the SNP will do some damage to Tory seat totals. We hope to take a few as well
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
So we are all "sort of racist" because humans are more interested in humans more like them, or nearer to them
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
I watched (or rewatched I suppose) Hislop on 'Fake News' last night. My issue with twitter is not so much fake news, just concentrated shrieking. You have polarised opinions, followed by people who are very much of the same opinion and echo everything round in spades.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
As I said it's great for live events (eg the various terrorist attacks in London) where someone will post on Twitter if not live feeds then close to that.
For everything else it is part of the whole body of knowledge, which has to be carefully sifted through and 2x checked from other sources.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
This is like getting paid in gold coins. What a pain in the arse. (Unless you actual want the BTC of course.)
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
In what way?
At the end of the 1980's there was backlash against "highbrow culture" from figures such as Murdoch, who had the ear of Thatcher. Part of the restructuring of broadcasting wasn't only market-fundamentalism, but also a sort of anti-elitism that didn't turn out too well, often replacing with commercial banalities. When all the delicate balance of commercial and non-commercial factors that made British TV was unpicked, all the huge variety that was on TV during this time - from the "lowest" to the "highest" art - was lost.
My point was really that the modern Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
Thats not really Nadine though is it? Incidentally, do you have access to Sky Arts? Some excellent stuff on there. Also - the BBC did the excellent Hollow Crown Shakespeare adaptations not that long ago. Even naughtily casting a woman of colour in a key role, the swines. Just to wind up the gammons.
I guess for me broadcasting has been atomised. You want nature programmes, there's a channel for that. You want sport, theres about thirty, and in fact thats become atomised too. In the 70's and 80's there were 3 (three) TV channels in the UK. It was not the golden age we recall - the hits are recalled fondly, and still shown, but the dross is lost in the mists of time.
I wouldn't really agree there, I have to say ; I remember a very specific schedule from 1990 was posted up on one of the discussions on this we've had recently on PB, and there was quite a lot of multi-generational agreement on the loss of variety and depth.
There is always a danger of cherry picking though. You'd need to look at some rainy Tuesday nights and get a broader sample to be fair.
I also worked in broadcasting during this period - and after - so I do feel I have a fair view. There were just a significant number of factors making schedules objectively more unpredictable, and programme-making less inhibited, than now, I would say. Some of these were structural and legal, but not all.
First Light Fusion seems to have cracked it, if they can scale it then we may have our first commercial fusion power process within 10 years. The first big step has been achieved which is incredible. If this works out we need to ensure the company stays in UK hands, even if it means a golden share taken by the government to prevent a foreign buy out and IP transfer.
Chinese Tencent has a stake.
I agree that this is technology which should stay in UK control. We've been too ready to sell off our good stuff early in development.
The SCons only control 1 council in the whole of Scotland by themselves anyway, Perth and Kinross. That only as a minority.
Any other councils they are in control in is only with LDs and Independents.
They are not exactly starting from a high base
The Tories could still be leading quite a few Scottish councils after May, South Ayrshire, Moray, Angus, Aberdeenshire, Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Borders and Perth and Kinross are most likely. They will be able to campaign against 6 incumbent SNP-Lab councils. Although they are only standing enough candidates to get a majority in Dumfries and Galloway, South Ayrshire and Perth and Kinross. They are also likely to remain the largest party in East Renfrewshire but SNP/Lab/Inds are probably likely to remain in power there.
As they are running fewer candidates in Aberdeenshire and fighting some quite amusing internecine battles for supremacy between candidates in the few wards where they have multiple candidates, don't be so confident about Aberdeenshire.
The cost of living and the damage to fishing / farming / energy industries are hot topics up here. With the Tories actively doing the damage. I expect the SNP will do some damage to Tory seat totals. We hope to take a few as well
Don't forget a lot of so-called Independents in local gmt are Tory in all but name - often because of internecine rows that did get a bit too far. But other reasons exist.
I’ve finally got covid and resolved to do what I always do when I have a cold. Make a fragrantly hot Thai curry. Need to check I have the ingredients for a paste as will need to deploy son to fetch missing stuff.
It really is coming for us all. I'm still holding out, although I'm suspicious of my cold of a few weeks ago. Will never know one way or the other.
My dose really is indistinguishable from a (fairly mild) cold.
But still zero action over the Filipino based gambling companies owned by Triads who illegally serve the Chinese market and use an Eastern European IT company with an equally iffy ownership being advertised by the UK football industry.
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
So we are all "sort of racist" because humans are more interested in humans more like them, or nearer to them
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
Uh, no. When I said "it's not racism", how did you understand that to mean the opposite?
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
This is supposed to be an endorsement of twitter?
The point is that the definitive (if there is one) commentary on any given subject is overwhelmingly likely not to be found on Twitter. It is likely to be found in various articles, papers, newspapers, other accounts. If some of those are referenced on Twitter then you are back where you started vs Gary Google. Arguably worse because as everyone including you acknowledge it's easy to get yourself into a self-affirming death spiral on twitter.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
My missus paid 2k for a brand new one in 1987.
Mine wasn't even particularly good. It didn't have any rust and I'd done the Harley-Davidson electronic ignition mod but the LHS cylinder was completely fucked and it smoked more than Laura Kuenssberg on a hen night.
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
In what way?
At the end of the 1980's there was backlash against "highbrow culture" from figures such as Murdoch, who had the ear of Thatcher. Part of the restructuring of broadcasting wasn't only market-fundamentalism, but also a sort of anti-elitism that didn't turn out too well, often replacing with commercial banalities. When all the delicate balance of commercial and non-commercial factors that made British TV was unpicked, all the huge variety that was on TV during this time - from the "lowest" to the "highest" art - was lost.
My point was really that the modern Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
Thats not really Nadine though is it? Incidentally, do you have access to Sky Arts? Some excellent stuff on there. Also - the BBC did the excellent Hollow Crown Shakespeare adaptations not that long ago. Even naughtily casting a woman of colour in a key role, the swines. Just to wind up the gammons.
I guess for me broadcasting has been atomised. You want nature programmes, there's a channel for that. You want sport, theres about thirty, and in fact thats become atomised too. In the 70's and 80's there were 3 (three) TV channels in the UK. It was not the golden age we recall - the hits are recalled fondly, and still shown, but the dross is lost in the mists of time.
I wouldn't really agree there, I have to say ; I remember a very specific schedule from 1990 was posted up on one of the discussions on this we've had recently on PB, and there was quite a lot of multi-generational agreement on the loss of variety and depth.
There is always a danger of cherry picking though. You'd need to look at some rainy Tuesday nights and get a broader sample to be fair.
This is the schedule for Tuesday 5th April 1994 (ie today for whichever year in the early 90's today was also a Tuesday). https://tvrdb.com/listings/1994-04-05
Presented without comment other than to say that 'Throw Momma from the Train' is apparently a Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal film that I was previously entirely unaware of.
Comments
The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
Resignation.
I have a cousin who lives in Hong Kong. My grandmother was born in Ternopil. My brother-in-law worked in Ukraine a few years ago. I have no such connections to Venezuela, Ethiopia or Myanmar.
And even in the media, culture and sport sector is this really a priority? Why?
As per my header the other day, what is the mischief this is intended to deal with? What is the improvement this will bring? What are the adverse consequences and how will they be mitigated?
e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Farr,+Inverness+IV2+6XJ/@57.3293229,-4.1144983,2610m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x488f6e310a2a7cf3:0x7215bc78247500d2!8m2!3d57.372608!4d-4.192058
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
They think that if the US becomes totally self-sufficient in energy, then they will be insulated from the global markets and their producers definitely won’t sell to the highest bidder.
Yes, there’s the inflexibility of transport that saw the oil price briefly go negative a couple of years ago, but that small friction doesn’t distort the market as much as commentators would like to think it does.
A few years back GOLD was just Men Behaving Badly, Only Fools and One Foot in the grave. It’s come a long way.
They brought back Red Dwarf and remade three missing Dads Army episodes too.
AIUI the objections people have to grouse moors are rarely to do with the fact that there are access tracks. Are you just slaying a straw man here?
Oh.
For the other part of its intended structure to be fully working again, too, all this or any other future government would need to do is restore the funding link from ITV - again, not too difficult by reference to the original laws and its charter, but simply the opposite political direction from this one.
It also brings me back to mega projects like ITER which now feel completely outdated, by the time it's built smaller fusion startups may already have achieved a net energy gain because they can move quickly and aren't bogged down in the politics of which country gets to do what etc...
While globally the more countries use fracking and shale and alternative renewable energy supplies etc and don't rely on Russian oil and gas while the Russian war with Ukraine is going on the more that will reduce global energy prices too.
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
@PeterDaszak
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
@K_G_Andersen
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
@richardhorton1
One of the main British players in this suppression was the head of Wellcome
@JeremyFarrar
The lab leak theory returned when some scientist-thinkers began talking to other anonymous scientists. Thinkers like
@Ayjchan
“Advisor to Harvard and MIT”.
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
Our moorland is precious. It has been abused massively in the past (e.g. forestry). It needs protecting. As much as anything else, English peatlands 'store' over 500 million tonnes of carbon. It's just that where we still have wilderness, I quite like the idea of keeping it as wild as possible.
(Again, I've got no problem with windfarms in more lowland areas.
So much stuff which wouldn't see the light of day does so because of twitter.
The platform is awful, and frustrating, and there is a non-stop cacophony of people shouting at each other. But it is also a better way of everyone talking to everyone than has ever existed.
Any other councils they are in control in is only with LDs and Independents.
They are not exactly starting from a high base
It's why I'm not convinced that ITER is worth the money we're spending on it, but it's locked in now.
For that reason I'm also in favour of ITER. Whilst it may be a dead-end, we're learning a heck of a lot from doing it, e.g. in materials at IFMIF (*) . As with much tech, the more people we have working on different approaches, the more likely we are to get not just something that works, but the best thing.
(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fusion_Materials_Irradiation_Facility
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
I think they will be kept open to help cover the gap, as that is a big chunk of the shortfall.
Here's the government case
"Channel 4 rightly holds a cherished place in British life and I want that to remain the case. I have come to the conclusion that government ownership is holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon.
"A change of ownership will give Channel 4 the tools and freedom to flourish and thrive as a public service broadcaster long into the future."
A government source said the channel would lose its "straitjacket" but retain its commitment to primetime news programming."
Now that may be utterly wrong, it may be a misdiagnosis and/or a disastrous remedy and/or a pretext for other, unstated reasons, but if Dorries is the minister responsible for channel 4 it is very hard to argue that she shouldn't be examining the questions she's examining at all, nor taking action on her conclusions.
And she's doing other stuff. Online Safety Bill for instance.
Of course you could force local energy suppliers to supply fuel locally at a lower price but that is communism so I doubt you are keen on that.
Our increased production in theory may reduce global prices but in practice the impact is too small to matter.
https://twitter.com/iainmartin1/status/1511283910814179335
There's an interesting article here by a Belorussian on the interaction between Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian identities:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/apr/05/belarus-russia-and-ukraine-putin-dysfunctional-family
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
It doesn't matter now because it's locked in but I do wonder whether some nations will begin to get cold feet when the next set of bills arrive and they're significantly higher than the initial costing. Anecdotally I know two scientists who refused jobs with ITER and are now both at different startups, one in the US and one in the UK. Both of them were put off by the politicking of a giant international project vs the ease of working in private industry.
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
@MichaelWorobey
Also
@K_G_Andersen
And
@MarionKoopmans
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
The point was I was making is that today's Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of any issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
So obviously the more we can increase our energy supplies for UK consumers and the more the rest of the world can expand its energy production to reduce reliance on Russian energy, the lower energy prices will be.
So expanding domestic and global energy production, including expanding fracking and shale, will reduce global commodity and energy prices. That will in turn cut the cost of living
Here is the problem. Not only is money not being produced, the same cash appears to be both being promised to competing towns and then announced multiple times. A multiplier effect where the expectation of Dosh is raised to silly levels and then a miserly amount actually produced.
"Is that it???" as a reaction won't be what the Tories were hoping for.
Also - the BBC did the excellent Hollow Crown Shakespeare adaptations not that long ago. Even naughtily casting a woman of colour in a key role, the swines. Just to wind up the gammons.
I guess for me broadcasting has been atomised. You want nature programmes, there's a channel for that. You want sport, theres about thirty, and in fact thats become atomised too. In the 70's and 80's there were 3 (three) TV channels in the UK. It was not the golden age we recall - the hits are recalled fondly, and still shown, but the dross is lost in the mists of time.
I wonder which town he will be Baron of when ennobled.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-60994022
The cost of living and the damage to fishing / farming / energy industries are hot topics up here. With the Tories actively doing the damage. I expect the SNP will do some damage to Tory seat totals. We hope to take a few as well
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
For everything else it is part of the whole body of knowledge, which has to be carefully sifted through and 2x checked from other sources.
I agree that this is technology which should stay in UK control.
We've been too ready to sell off our good stuff early in development.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60994728
But still zero action over the Filipino based gambling companies owned by Triads who illegally serve the Chinese market and use an Eastern European IT company with an equally iffy ownership being advertised by the UK football industry.
The point is that the definitive (if there is one) commentary on any given subject is overwhelmingly likely not to be found on Twitter. It is likely to be found in various articles, papers, newspapers, other accounts. If some of those are referenced on Twitter then you are back where you started vs Gary Google. Arguably worse because as everyone including you acknowledge it's easy to get yourself into a self-affirming death spiral on twitter.
Presented without comment other than to say that 'Throw Momma from the Train' is apparently a Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal film that I was previously entirely unaware of.