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Starmer has better than a 56% chance of being PM after the next election – politicalbetting.com
Starmer has better than a 56% chance of being PM after the next election – politicalbetting.com
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First like Johnson in 2024.
Betfair next prime minister
1.05 Liz Truss 95%
21 Rishi Sunak 5%
Next Conservative leader
1.05 Liz Truss 95%
21 Rishi Sunak 5%
https://www.instructables.com/Uphill-Gardening/
Though I do wonder about this - and who might be sending it to whom.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Always-Preferred-Uphill-Gardening-greeting/dp/B00NWVTLWM
Anyone attending the London hustings needs to put a first class stamp on their vote Thursday morning.
What is the point of this extended charade?
Everyone's known the winner for at least a month now.
FPT for @Tres
That photo is something I created with Stable Diffusion, a new image-making AI very like Dalle-2. Unlike Dalle-2 they are just handing out access, tho you have to pay after a few freebies (not as much as you do for Dalle-2, mind)
The possibilities are boundless, but I am concentrating on synthesised photos and the opportunities for making nightmarish images. StabDiff seems quite good at this (better than Dalle-2, perhaps)
This afternoon I've been riffing on the prompt "a photo of a screaming albino girl possessed by a demon" - putting her in various places and times, and with different photographic styles, genres, etc
As you can see you can get some pretty impressive results. Scary and striking. I am convinced this tech will be enormously useful to film makers. And maybe novelists who fancy a few illustrations
But maybe the most impressive thing is that the makers of Stable Diffusion created it with just $600,000
There'd be some value in AN Other.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/29/leading-tories-call-on-new-pm-to-tackle-crisis-facing-schools-over-soaring-costs
Are they really necessary ?
I agree they are repulsive and frightening, and I promise not to do it again. But they do exhibit the enormous power of this new AI tech. Anyone can now be a brilliant horror photographer/filmmaker
And remember the photos are fake. Those are not real children. They do not exist
Pictures maybe.
And I've only had access for 1 day, and this machine is just 6 days old
But aren't you intrigued that anyone can make images as powerful as this? In a few seconds (or a few hours of honing a prompt)?
To explain the power I had to post the images
I have seen all kinds of things in my lifetime, not least images I was shown when I was in the police, so I am not easily upset but these went too far for me
I was thinking of doing a blog where I build one from scratch. And then I realised that I am not endowed with infinite time
Some schools are bound to go in the red.
In this he is completely wrong.
All schools are already in the red.
This will just make matters worse.
Hope your DBS is now sorted, btw, but I wonder whether schools will be able to afford supply teachers.
There is now a temporary moratorium on AI generated images. Images will be deleted if posted. Repeat offenders will be packed off to join the Russian forces in Kherson.
Whatever you do, don't tell the parents. No matter how ugly the offspring, the parents always take offence.
I asked it for “A painting of a man in a flat cap walking his black Labrador on the golf course early in the morning, as if painted by Eileen Cooper"
My parents can't believe that a computer made this in a few seconds
The pivotal moment was when I introduced the word "albino": that seemed to put the machine in a darker mood, because of unhappy associations with the word "albino", no doubt (loneliness, fear, deformation, death). At that point everything went up by several notches of horror
The machine is the visual subconscious of all humanity, and the human psyche is often dark
I won't do it again
I won't repeat!
Those images shocked ME as the machine coughed them out. Ugh!
I'm expecting you to take up in the morning, open the curtains, and ejaculate in amazement at that strange yellow orb in the sky...
Liz Truss has cancelled her BBC One interview with Nick Robinson which was due to air this Tuesday evening (30th August) at 7pm. Ms Truss’ team say she can no longer spare the time to appear on “Our Next Prime Minister”.
https://twitter.com/BBCNewsPR/status/1564281776821993472
Utterly unsurprising, but saddening as well.
It was the largest social gathering I’ve been at since covid with 160 guests and whilst fun and lovely in some ways I definitely didn’t enjoy it like I used to enjoy weddings.
I think that the social realities of the last couple of years made me more insular. I want remotely bothered about covid but didn’t enjoy being around loads of people because I realised I didn’t actually want to be around any of those people during covid apart from about ten of them. It’s sort of like the curtain being pulled back on the wizard of Oz that is social groups.
Close friends are great but I wonder if other PB’ers have found that they had a lot of social acquaintances that covid has shown to be completely superfluous or am I just now a grumpy antisocial bastard?
The world's richest person also warned of a challenge over the birth rate, claiming we must "make more babies" or "we will die with a whimper in adult diapers"."
https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musk-says-civilisation-would-crumble-if-sourcing-oil-and-gas-in-the-short-term-suddenly-stops-12684700
https://simonwillison.net/2022/Aug/29/stable-diffusion/
https://thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com/p/stable-diffusion-is-the-most-important
It's only £14 a bottle, which is pretty good for a decent Californian pinot
https://www.thewinesociety.com/product/parker-station-pinot-noir-2019
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/law9_final.pdf
And some more, here:
http://opiniojuris.org/2015/11/09/guest-post-is-the-execution-of-collaborators-a-war-crime-under-the-rome-statute-part-i/
This is also relevant:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule6
None of this is really of use in considering the current situation, though.
The Russian invasion is illegal; as occupiers, they have not followed the international laws (such as they are) covering the conduct of occupying armies.
And I think there are very few, if any cases of members if resistances being prosecuted after their countries have been liberated.
Should the Russians capture them in the meantime, it is almost certain that the conventions regarding the trial and punishment of civilian resistors will not be followed.
(2) He's not wrong about birth rates. And I think it's great that he's persuaded so many people to have his kids.
Especially the wealthiest ones which tend to be in, shall we say, less than well insulated buildings?
But two points. ATM Liz Truss is trying to win an election. She has only to consider the best tactics with regard to that electorate. What would make her think that an interview with Nick Robinson will help in this?
Secondly, and more widely, PMs and all leaders (as she aspires to be) are accountable to voters and parliament. To the voters PM Truss will issue a manifesto in due course. To parliament she will be accountable daily. Each day they can bring her reign to an end if they wish.
The media don't want us to think this but all other media activity for leaders is public relations and advertising, not accountability.
It will be interesting- at my old place it could be bloody cold in the winter. Medieval buildings up to Victorian buildings with single glazing and basic hot water pipes in the classrooms - the only warm places were science school and art school!
Our boarding house was suitably mid Victorian neo-gothic with beautiful windows that never really seemed to fit the frames allowing the cold air to fall into your bed in your dormitory.
Has given me conniptions when kids complain about the weather and warmth in classrooms as “we dealt with it - get on with it” but not nice all the same. But character building in character buildings.
I met Ted Hughes In his later years and, flatteringly, he remembered me as a child because - as he put it - you ‘were a very noisy boy’
Anyway to work it out, if the Tories (net) lose more than about 50 seats they are probably finished. And it makes no difference who they lose them to.
Of course there is a big area in which the outcome is confused etc, but few will help the Tories stay in.
Labour (and for now SKS) lead if the Tories don't. Obvious.
If Truss wins next week (she will) then the Tories chances diminish, as she is probably useless, but with a small chance of being the nation's next Mrs T. (I doubt it).
Labour look to me about 60/40 to form the next government.
Except for one thing. There is a significant chance (look at the rules) that after a confused election the Tories will be asked to try to form the next government but quickly fail.
That makes it to me about 56/44 Labour. Add in the chance that SKS for some reason is not leader at the next election, and the Smarket market is close but not quite on the bullseye.
Post of the day.
Not fond of the images either mind.
But at least stop posting the pictures.
I was just about to enter 'Radiohead eating pineapple topped pizza in the style of Dali' into one of these infernal machines.
The reality is that birth rates are already below replacement in most countries.
The next problem - and it's going to be a big problem - is how you persuade a small number of workers to pay for a large number of retirees.
@Euan_MacDonald
Russian media say 65-year-old Elena Belova, who set fire to a Russian military official's car in Moscow, was kidnapped by Ukrainian special forces, hypnotized and taught by them how to burn cars.
An absurd fairy tale to mask public opposition to the Kremlin's war on Ukraine.
https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1563886850984509442
The inversion of the demographic pyramid is a very painful phenomenon but we're going to have to live through it at some point, so we might as well get it over with rather than trying to pump more babies into the population Ponzi scheme. This will end up involving the old paying for their own upkeep, through some combination of having to give up their wealth and working until they are completely physically incapable - because they can vote for inflation busting pension increases but they can't vote to make what's left of the working age population any more productive. It's just a matter of time.
This is where you end up when you start to collectively deny that there is something called the truth that exists and instead replace it with made up shit like, erm, Trump won the GE in 2020 and the vote was rigged.
But there's also the leading the nation aspect. Telling the people of the UK what she plans and why is a part of making her plans work. For better or worse, the BBC is the biggest way to do this. And she's decided not to bother.
And if she really can't spare time to do this, that speaks volumes, in a bad way, about her time management.
The planet is already substantially ecologically denuded and the situation continues to deteriorate. This is entirely the fault of human beings. Quite how things would be worse if men tied a knot in it after the first kid and kept doing so until there were only about three billion of us left I don't know. That would only take the world population back to where it was circa 1960. Civilization would continue. It'd have a much better chance of continuing than under the course apparently advocated by Mr Musk.