@Lawton_Times Storm brewing about the anti-discrimination armbands here at the World Cup. Fifa trying to introduce their own, presumably to replace ‘One Love’ armband to be worn by England and other teams. Not until quarter finals does Fifa armband reference anti-discrimination.
Huge if true. Harry Kane and the rest of the England team will lose all credibility if they give in to this.
Maybe I'm unusual but I find myself getting annoyed if footballers do nothing and if they do something.
I think it must be that I don't like football.
They’ve become activists, particularly since COVID. Twenty years ago, football was politics free. Thierry Henry got into trouble for honouring the birth of his friend’s baby. But times have changed.
You cannot take a knee, wear rainbow laces and do adverts arguing for social justice and then meekly shut up when you’re told not to do so when playing in a Middle Ages Hell hole.
Yes, I think that's right.
In other news a left-wing Guardianista wokey bookshop opened in my town this week, which I didn't realise until I went in last night and couldn't find anything on history, military history, railways, espionage or geography but plenty on race, gender, spirituality and sexuality. I thought it would be as advertised: a nice independent bookshop with a cafe, which I could enjoy. But it wasn't.
I'm still annoyed about it. Thought about saying something but of course I just walked out after 90 seconds and simply won't go in there again.
What a shame.
Oh my God! An independent business choosing for itself what to sell to customers? It’s capitalism gone mad! If only the Conservatives would save us from this!
Yes, and they will live or die by that.
I give it a year.
If they’re a specialist, they may make most of their sales online. But it doesn’t sound like it has much of a chance on walk-ins alone.
Exactly. Clearly @bondegezou would love to toss himself off silly in their to achingly right-on titles, and I suspect @kinabalu would absolutely love it, but most people do not.
It's a small town an option for me to sit in a bookshop with a new bookshop and have a coffee is no longer available.
What will I do? Go to Waterstones or the secondhand bookshop (which sells all the stuff I like) instead, but have my coffees elsewhere.
Not the end of the world. But another example of how this Wokery we're kept being told doesn't exist very much does in the real world.
I suspect "most people" don't buy many books at all, and of the remainder, most of those will buy online, and of the rest, at the big chains like Waterstones. Running an independent bookshop must be a pretty precarious business model these days, and my guess is that to be successful you've pretty much got to either (1) take the "the business is a coffee shop that sells books on the side" approach or (2) have a niche and lean heavily into it. I don't think a small independent generalist has much chance at all.
Now it may well be that this specific shop has mismatched their niche and their location, but at least if they get word out online they can draw their customer base from a wider area than just local passing trade. And they might be able to do some worthwhile online sales too, if they are any good at curation and recommendations for books in their niche.
And the big thing is that anyone launching a new business right now, especially one depending on discretionary spending, deserves respect for the courage, if nothing else.
Apparently, some people regard spending on books, coffee and cake in that light- crazy, huh?
Talking of which, time to go and recycle some money into the local economy. It sounds better saying that than "eat some doughnuts".
Homer was not just a legendary author, but also the worlds biggest fan of donuts. Is there anything they can't do?
Frankly this Government’s actions are far more extreme than Jeremy Corbyn promised in 2019. Tax as a proportion of GDP was 32.9 per cent then, and 37 per cent by 2027 is far higher increase than Corbyn ever proposed. Public spending was £884billion in 2019; it will be £1,100billion next year. Inflation was 1.5 per cent in 2019, now it is 11.1 per cent. Some record...
No one is saying that given the mess they have created a recovery strategy is easy. It is not. While unfunded tax cuts are not credible, what would have been credible would have been to pare back spending to pre-pandemic levels in real terms. Taking spending back to 2019 levels is hardly a big ask...
So, what to do? Besides cancelling HS2 and other similar vanity projects, which is an easy win, over £100billion of public spending normalisation should be the simple starter. This merely takes real spending back to the eve of lockdown. Hardly a big ask and something to build on.
This could have funded tax cuts focused on a genuine growth strategy. Reshape the state merely back to 2019 levels and instead of tax rising to 37 per cent of GDP it could have fallen back to 33 per cent. Again, this is very modest: simply the pre-lockdown level and far higher than under even Tony Blair.
I don't normally tag people in posts, but I would urge @Big_G_NorthWales to have a read of this article and realise that Sunak and Hunt are anything but the safe option he seems to believe that they are, and those standing against the statement deserve support, not his bizarre wish to see them replaced by Labour MPs.
Very silly. And pinning the blame in entirely the wrong place - this mess is really (just another part of) Johnson’s toxic legacy, and he is lucky that having the brief interlude of Loopy Liz has distracted from the shambolic state of affairs that he left behind. But however idiotic was Truss’s budget, you can’t create a mess like this in a day.
Clearly you haven't read the article. Thr blame is placed squarely on successive Tory Governments.
Frankly this Government’s actions are far more extreme than Jeremy Corbyn promised in 2019. Tax as a proportion of GDP was 32.9 per cent then, and 37 per cent by 2027 is far higher increase than Corbyn ever proposed. Public spending was £884billion in 2019; it will be £1,100billion next year. Inflation was 1.5 per cent in 2019, now it is 11.1 per cent. Some record...
No one is saying that given the mess they have created a recovery strategy is easy. It is not. While unfunded tax cuts are not credible, what would have been credible would have been to pare back spending to pre-pandemic levels in real terms. Taking spending back to 2019 levels is hardly a big ask...
So, what to do? Besides cancelling HS2 and other similar vanity projects, which is an easy win, over £100billion of public spending normalisation should be the simple starter. This merely takes real spending back to the eve of lockdown. Hardly a big ask and something to build on.
This could have funded tax cuts focused on a genuine growth strategy. Reshape the state merely back to 2019 levels and instead of tax rising to 37 per cent of GDP it could have fallen back to 33 per cent. Again, this is very modest: simply the pre-lockdown level and far higher than under even Tony Blair.
I don't normally tag people in posts, but I would urge @Big_G_NorthWales to have a read of this article and realise that Sunak and Hunt are anything but the safe option he seems to believe that they are, and those standing against the statement deserve support, not his bizarre wish to see them replaced by Labour MPs.
Very silly. And pinning the blame in entirely the wrong place - this mess is really (just another part of) Johnson’s toxic legacy, and he is lucky that having the brief interlude of Loopy Liz has distracted from the shambolic state of affairs that he left behind. But however idiotic was Truss’s budget, you can’t create a mess like this in a day.
Astonishing that after everything anyone in their right mind still thinks they can have their tax cut. But are these people really in their right mind?
Good morning
As I am tagged in this I utterly reject this idiotic Truss like attitude and it only confirms the right of the conservative party have a desire to self combust
If people want to reduce taxes you are going to have to move towards a privatised health system and reform the pensions system. I don't see any other way.
Grow the economy faster than “health care inflation” and population growth, combined?
That’s how we got to the stage of being able to afford the NHS in the first place.
No one has any ideas on how to do that other than wish really hard though.
Maybe sadly we will have to ration healthcare in the future. No more extending the life of hopeless cases for a few months
Another issue on which the Tories have lost the public. Though I’ve been assured on here that no one wanted Singapore-on-Thames, Brillo seems confident it was a Brexiteer thing.
If there is any truth in that article it is quite sad that people thought that way. I certainly didn't. The reality is that our ability to operate in the world is severely constrained both in and out of the EU. Many people were delusional in thinking that membership of the SM and EU somehow gave us freedom to do what we wanted and it is true that we were able to pursue a ruinous policy of excess consumption for longer than we might otherwise have done. Some believed that Brexit gave us some additional freedom. It is true it allowed us to set our own rules for some things but only to the extent that the markets would tolerate.
Both in or out the EU we need to get our act together before it is too late. The self-indulgent nonsense of an economy built on consumption and other peoples' money has run its course. The change in our economy is going to be painful. Our living standards will fall to closer to what we actually earn as a country and we won't like it. Too bad. No one owes us a living and we have spent all our capital.
Another issue on which the Tories have lost the public. Though I’ve been assured on here that no one wanted Singapore-on-Thames, Brillo seems confident it was a Brexiteer thing.
If there is any truth in that article it is quite sad that people thought that way. I certainly didn't. The reality is that our ability to operate in the world is severely constrained both in and out of the EU. Many people were delusional in thinking that membership of the SM and EU somehow gave us freedom to do what we wanted and it is true that we were able to pursue a ruinous policy of excess consumption for longer than we might otherwise have done. Some believed that Brexit gave us some additional freedom. It is true it allowed us to set our own rules for some things but only to the extent that the markets would tolerate.
Both in or out the EU we need to get our act together before it is too late. The self-indulgent nonsense of an economy built on consumption and other peoples' money has run its course. The change in our economy is going to be painful. Our living standards will fall to closer to what we actually earn as a country and we won't like it. Too bad. No one owes us a living and we have spent all our capital.
The easy money of the last 12 years or so has been very corrupting
It is true that the first snow of the year has been in the last couple of days, across large areas of Ukraine. It’s also true, that it’s a lot more difficult to hide vehicles when everything around is white, and anything that moves leaves a trail behind it.
Let’s hope that is indeed recent footage. The most pessimistic estimate, from Oryx, says there’s 1,500 Russian tanks down in the last nine months, the most optimistic estimate from the Ukranians is 2,900 Russian tanks down - out of around 3,300 in total.
There were only around 3,300 tanks in Russia at the start of this conflict, so even the most optimistic (for the Russians!) estimate has nearly half of them lost. If the Ukranians are right, there’s only 500 tanks left! There was a 1967 T-62 caputed a couple of weeks ago, although not sure what the Ukranians would want with such a relic.
If even the pessimistic number is correct I feel like they must be threatening to shoot people if they don't get in the damn things, as it's practically a death sentence to even be near them.
Yeah, being a Russian soldier in any capacity, doesn’t seem to be the best job in the world right now. They’re badly equipped, the equipment they do have is not the best and frequently unserviceable, motivation is lacking and it’s getting cold. They’re up against a motivated and well-equipped enemy in the Ukranians, who are fighting for their country and have some of the best kit in the world at their disposal.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
I was perusing their literary offer just last week, and there was a total absence of anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics. And not only did they not stock the Anarchists' Cookbook, they refused to order it for me. I shall not darken their door again.
I am also boycotting Dorothy Perkins, as they have no clothes appropriate for me.
As Schopenhauer never tired of pointing out, WH Smith don't stock anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics because nothing meaningful is to be had. He was a verbally profligate fraud.
However Smiths are weak on Schopenhauer and Kant as well.
Another issue on which the Tories have lost the public. Though I’ve been assured on here that no one wanted Singapore-on-Thames, Brillo seems confident it was a Brexiteer thing.
If there is any truth in that article it is quite sad that people thought that way. I certainly didn't. The reality is that our ability to operate in the world is severely constrained both in and out of the EU. Many people were delusional in thinking that membership of the SM and EU somehow gave us freedom to do what we wanted and it is true that we were able to pursue a ruinous policy of excess consumption for longer than we might otherwise have done. Some believed that Brexit gave us some additional freedom. It is true it allowed us to set our own rules for some things but only to the extent that the markets would tolerate.
Both in or out the EU we need to get our act together before it is too late. The self-indulgent nonsense of an economy built on consumption and other peoples' money has run its course. The change in our economy is going to be painful. Our living standards will fall to closer to what we actually earn as a country and we won't like it. Too bad. No one owes us a living and we have spent all our capital.
The easy money of the last 12 years or so has been very corrupting
I agree but I wouldn't have the cut off there. Even before the GFC we were living in a fool's paradise where our finance industry was only partially covering the gaping holes in our economic performance giving the illusion of growth on non-existent profits.
If people want to reduce taxes you are going to have to move towards a privatised health system and reform the pensions system. I don't see any other way.
Grow the economy faster than “health care inflation” and population growth, combined?
That’s how we got to the stage of being able to afford the NHS in the first place.
No one has any ideas on how to do that other than wish really hard though.
Maybe sadly we will have to ration healthcare in the future. No more extending the life of hopeless cases for a few months
Could go the Canadian route - euthania for all! (not really, but they are expanding I believe)
"Elizabeth Holmes - once one of Silicon Valley’s superstar CEOs - sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors with blood-testing start-up"
Seems incredible how long a fraud can keep going when the product doesn't work.
Next up: fusion power generation
Except that actually works.
Plenty of the projects getting funding certainly won't. Some might.
They’ve already demonstrated that fusion power can produce energy. Quite a difference from the Theranos scam.
Edit: Theranos, not Thanos.
It was demonstrated by the first H-bomb 70 years ago that fusion power can produce energy. But nobody has yet worked out how to use fusion energy to run a power station at all, let alone a commercially viable one. Most of what you read about commercial fusion power is somewhere between very wishful thinking and outright scam.
They’ve already demonstrated a design that is a net producer of energy, even if only for a brief period. To call it a scam is absurd conspiracy nonsense.
That is simply wrong. No fusion device has yet achieved energy breakeven, though JET ( which I once worked on as a young plasma physicist) has come closest. And even that would be miles away from commercial power generation. But feel free to invest if you like.
What absolute poppycock. Almost all the energy we use comes from fusion, albeit sometimes in a slightly tortuous way.
I’ve developed a vibrator that runs by harnessing neutrinos from the sun, so it never runs out of power. Am I going to be rich, or just remain very happy? 😇
If you live in the UK, neither.
About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second
I was perusing their literary offer just last week, and there was a total absence of anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics. And not only did they not stock the Anarchists' Cookbook, they refused to order it for me. I shall not darken their door again.
I am also boycotting Dorothy Perkins, as they have no clothes appropriate for me.
As Schopenhauer never tired of pointing out, WH Smith don't stock anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics because nothing meaningful is to be had. He was a verbally profligate fraud.
However Smiths are weak on Schopenhauer and Kant as well.
They are strong on Toblerone. Very strong indeed.
Do they stock the white version? Not interested, if they don’t.
I was perusing their literary offer just last week, and there was a total absence of anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics. And not only did they not stock the Anarchists' Cookbook, they refused to order it for me. I shall not darken their door again.
I am also boycotting Dorothy Perkins, as they have no clothes appropriate for me.
As Schopenhauer never tired of pointing out, WH Smith don't stock anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics because nothing meaningful is to be had. He was a verbally profligate fraud.
However Smiths are weak on Schopenhauer and Kant as well.
They are strong on Toblerone. Very strong indeed.
Sounds to me like they have their priorities right.
Another issue on which the Tories have lost the public. Though I’ve been assured on here that no one wanted Singapore-on-Thames, Brillo seems confident it was a Brexiteer thing.
If there is any truth in that article it is quite sad that people thought that way. I certainly didn't. The reality is that our ability to operate in the world is severely constrained both in and out of the EU. Many people were delusional in thinking that membership of the SM and EU somehow gave us freedom to do what we wanted and it is true that we were able to pursue a ruinous policy of excess consumption for longer than we might otherwise have done. Some believed that Brexit gave us some additional freedom. It is true it allowed us to set our own rules for some things but only to the extent that the markets would tolerate.
Both in or out the EU we need to get our act together before it is too late. The self-indulgent nonsense of an economy built on consumption and other peoples' money has run its course. The change in our economy is going to be painful. Our living standards will fall to closer to what we actually earn as a country and we won't like it. Too bad. No one owes us a living and we have spent all our capital.
The easy money of the last 12 years or so has been very corrupting
I agree but I wouldn't have the cut off there. Even before the GFC we were living in a fool's paradise where our finance industry was only partially covering the gaping holes in our economic performance giving the illusion of growth on non-existent profits.
Larry Elliott wrote a book on it called Fantasy Island. That was before 2008 i think
The Woke provincial bookshop may be a front for money laundering. Seriously
We had a Russian pie shop on Parkway, in Camden, that lasted three years, and had maybe three customers in that time. At first I couldn’t work out why and how it survived. Then I realised. Ah
Apparently some of the empty “Turkish barbershops” do the same job for Albanian money. And of course the candy stores
If I was going to wash drugs money, a Woke Bookshop in, say, Hove would be ideal. The last place you’d suspect
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Must be plenty of people in the world of tech who know their stuff and have long felt twitter was run by idiots and they could do it better.
@Lawton_Times Storm brewing about the anti-discrimination armbands here at the World Cup. Fifa trying to introduce their own, presumably to replace ‘One Love’ armband to be worn by England and other teams. Not until quarter finals does Fifa armband reference anti-discrimination.
Huge if true. Harry Kane and the rest of the England team will lose all credibility if they give in to this.
Maybe I'm unusual but I find myself getting annoyed if footballers do nothing and if they do something.
I think it must be that I don't like football.
They’ve become activists, particularly since COVID. Twenty years ago, football was politics free. Thierry Henry got into trouble for honouring the birth of his friend’s baby. But times have changed.
You cannot take a knee, wear rainbow laces and do adverts arguing for social justice and then meekly shut up when you’re told not to do so when playing in a Middle Ages Hell hole.
started with the poppy shagging tbf
Manchester United resisted it for a long time, and I agreed with them. The moment that poppies were allowed on shirts, it opened up football to all of this.
Glad to see the FAs of England and Wales have told FIFA to do one.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Well if he signs up a few more George Hotz of this world....the thing about people like Hotz as well, they are old school internet, money doesn't motivate them, they aren't interested in being activists at work, its all about the tech, the challenge that drives them.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Incredible how many people saw things in 2020 too, yet dozens upon dozens of legal challenges failed as they couldn't put up anything serious when it counted.
Knowingly abusing processes designed for legitimate challenge is despicable, since they know they are undercutting confidence in the system for no reason.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Well if he signs up a few more George Hotz of this world....the thing about people like Hotz as well, they are old school internet, money doesn't motivate them, they aren't interested in being activists at work, its all about the tech, the challenge that drives them.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
Incredible how many people saw things in 2020 too, yet dozens upon dozens of legal challenges failed as they couldn't put up anything serious when it counted.
Knowingly abusing processes designed for legitimate challenge is despicable, since they know they are undercutting confidence in the system for no reason.
Ah you see they will say the judges were corrupted lol
Presumption of innocence and all that, but that is highly unusul to see.
The leader came a creditable second to Lee Anderson in the 2019 GE.
Dyspeptic euromedia obsessive @MattW is a fan, from memory.
@Gardenwalker - If "dyspeptic euromedia obsessive" means "listens to France 24 and Deutsche Welle two/three times a week for international perspectives, in addition to the BBC WS", then I'm happy to plead guilty - LOL.
Fan of Zadrozny? That's a yes-but, plus a sympathy vote given his appalling treatment by Notts Police previously.
I'll post on the local politics stuff separately, as that is a touch - shall we say - "involved" and "intricate", like other places such as Croydon at present. It needs an essay, which I will keep down to comment size.
Problem is the count in Arizona took so long it lends itself to conspiracy theories. Hence the Kari Lake videos and of course i imagine Trump is encouraging her to do this
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
There’s a lot of people saying they’re leaving Twitter for Mastadon, finding out for the first time what a truly un-moderated experience looks like, then quickly heading back to Twitter.
Most of the Mastadon servers apparently make 4chan seem like an inclusive and welcoming place for outsiders. There’s a couple that are tightly moderated, but very woke echo-chamber all agreeing furiously with each other.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Must be plenty of people in the world of tech who know their stuff and have long felt twitter was run by idiots and they could do it better.
I'm not sure what will be happening at Mastodon, as that's where a lot of activist types seem to be headed.
It may go like mass-debate (copyright Radio-Active on Radio 4), but we shall see.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
Right wing people who were banned for things like “transphobia” have reappeared. Eg Jordan Peterson
He’s retained all his many followers and he’s being eagerly retweeted. The whole tone of Political Twitter has changed. More diverse. I like it
The shrieking of the left wing Twitterati is delicious, especially as they announce loudly on Twitter that they are going to Mastodon and then they sheepishly return because Mastodon is boring and Woke and stupidly difficult
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't think that's true, or not to the extent that you think. Twitter's 'strength' was its ability to engage. You can see lefties bemoaning that Twitter is full of Nazis, while right wingers go on about the mad woke shit. That made people angry and drove engagement in the platform.
Exactly. Clearly @bondegezou would love to toss himself off silly in their to achingly right-on titles, and I suspect @kinabalu would absolutely love it, but most people do not.
It's a small town an option for me to sit in a bookshop with a new bookshop and have a coffee is no longer available.
What will I do? Go to Waterstones or the secondhand bookshop (which sells all the stuff I like) instead, but have my coffees elsewhere.
Not the end of the world. But another example of how this Wokery we're kept being told doesn't exist very much does in the real world.
I suspect "most people" don't buy many books at all, and of the remainder, most of those will buy online, and of the rest, at the big chains like Waterstones. Running an independent bookshop must be a pretty precarious business model these days, and my guess is that to be successful you've pretty much got to either (1) take the "the business is a coffee shop that sells books on the side" approach or (2) have a niche and lean heavily into it. I don't think a small independent generalist has much chance at all.
Now it may well be that this specific shop has mismatched their niche and their location, but at least if they get word out online they can draw their customer base from a wider area than just local passing trade. And they might be able to do some worthwhile online sales too, if they are any good at curation and recommendations for books in their niche.
And the big thing is that anyone launching a new business right now, especially one depending on discretionary spending, deserves respect for the courage, if nothing else.
Apparently, some people regard spending on books, coffee and cake in that light- crazy, huh?
Talking of which, time to go and recycle some money into the local economy. It sounds better saying that than "eat some doughnuts".
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
But is that kind of "whip up an amazing proof-of-concept of something you didn't believe possible" engineer what Twitter actually needs? Twitter's a big company with a massive existing codebase, operating at a huge scale: they need people who can run that infra, and engineers who can make useful changes to a big confusing ball of code without breaking it, and people who ensure they're not accidentally running afoul of various legal requirements, and a moderation team, and so on. They're not a startup where they need super-quick coding up of cool new ideas to find a customer base, and they're not trying to make money out of being able to do bleeding-edge tech trickery either...
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
There’s a lot of people saying they’re leaving Twitter for Mastadon, finding out for the first time what a truly un-moderated experience looks like, then quickly heading back to Twitter. Most of the Mastadon servers apparently make 4chan seem like an inclusive and welcoming place for outsiders.
Leaving a platform over reduced censorship for a platform fundamentally designed to be DIY censorship is an interesting choice.
The Woke provincial bookshop may be a front for money laundering. Seriously
We had a Russian pie shop on Parkway, in Camden, that lasted three years, and had maybe three customers in that time. At first I couldn’t work out why and how it survived. Then I realised. Ah
Apparently some of the empty “Turkish barbershops” do the same job for Albanian money. And of course the candy stores
If I was going to wash drugs money, a Woke Bookshop in, say, Hove would be ideal. The last place you’d suspect
Doubt it on the bookshop (which sounds authentic and great) but, yes, in London it's amazing how many of these 'front' places you can spot if you have an eye for it. Businesses not even trying to attract customers, in many cases designed to actively repel, because what they are for is laundering the proceeds of vice. This hidden economy is absolutely huge - but it's largely outside GDP and Fiscal Corner.
If they really did racially abuse these girls then they should be expelled. That's what would happen at my kids' schools, but I suppose as always these people are held to different standards from the rest of us. We have these institutions whose entire purpose is to breed an entitled, out of touch elite and then wonder why we keep being ruled by an entitled, out of touch elite.
I'm all for bashing Eton for this and many other things, but would someone really be expelled for even racial abuse, as a first offence? A suspension and other sanction seems more likely than immediate expulsion.
At our school you can be permanently excluded for a serious breach of the behaviour policy. We don't know enough about this incident to say what happened but it certainly sounds like it might have been in that kind if category, and again we don't know the full facts but it sounds like the kids just got a slap on the wrist. Eton should provide a full account of the incident. Since they educate most of the people who run the country there is a clear public interest in knowing exactly what they're doing, and I'm sure that if they were a state school they would have to provide full disclosure (without providing the children's details, obviously).
That’s very unusual for a state school, if so, as local authorities will try their utmost to prevent it. This is because they have closed if not all at least a large majority of the schools that catered for children who had been expelled so there is nowhere to send them.
I have seen children physically assault staff, threaten sexual violence, be caught selling drugs and racially abusing anyone and everyone and they get a week’s suspension. There were two who had done all these things and it still took three months and a series of court cases to boot them out.
The only actual instant expulsion was for threatening someone with a knife. Even the LEA didn’t try to overrule that one.
Then people wonder why discipline isn’t all it might be.
If people want to reduce taxes you are going to have to move towards a privatised health system and reform the pensions system. I don't see any other way.
Grow the economy faster than “health care inflation” and population growth, combined?
That’s how we got to the stage of being able to afford the NHS in the first place.
No one has any ideas on how to do that other than wish really hard though.
Start with Heathcare Inflation - which seems to be like military equipment inflation. More each year for the same capability.
From stuff I read up on, concerning testing during lockdown, NHS medical testing, at the backend, is poorly automated and rather put of date in many areas. Which is why results often take a great deal of time to come back. Which can’t be ideal, medically. I’ll bet that costs more money in wrong/delayed treatment. So *invest* there as a start.
The problem with health is we have a vicious combo of more chronic conditions and technological advances. Obesity still hasn't really hit the NHS yet in the way it will over the next 50 years.
As others have pointed out, labour productivity in health grows really slowly too. Hard to replace nurses with tech. It's inherently physical.
The only way we can afford it is large increases in the labour supply. But productivity is growing at only 1%, our demographic profile and working age population is fucked because of low fertility, people are working fewer hours, and participation rates are dropping because (again) chronic conditions.
Our political class has been completely taken by non-workers (landlords and pensioners), so there is no prospect of change. And any attempt to reduce stuff like obesity in a thwarted by an inconsistent approach to policy intervention - it's stupid that we provide universal health care while not doing anything to reduce pressure on it.
It's depressing tbh. I enjoy my work but it gets to me a bit sometimes.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
But is that kind of "whip up an amazing proof-of-concept of something you didn't believe possible" engineer what Twitter actually needs? Twitter's a big company with a massive existing codebase, operating at a huge scale: they need people who can run that infra, and engineers who can make useful changes to a big confusing ball of code without breaking it, and people who ensure they're not accidentally running afoul of various legal requirements, and a moderation team, and so on. They're not a startup where they need super-quick coding up of cool new ideas to find a customer base, and they're not trying to make money out of being able to do bleeding-edge tech trickery either...
There is an argument that actually they do need people like. Twitter product innovation has been close to zero....e.g. the much wanted edit button taking years of I presume meetings about meeting about meetings.
Remember Musk has stated he wants to innovate the product, that is the only way to make it a long term profitable business. Musk appears to be doing exactly the start-up thing, albeit having spend $40bn on it !!!!
Also a big one is the bot problem. Hotz is the sort of guy that lives to work on those kind of challenges.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't think that's true, or not to the extent that you think. Twitter's 'strength' was its ability to engage. You can see lefties bemoaning that Twitter is full of Nazis, while right wingers go on about the mad woke shit. That made people angry and drove engagement in the platform.
Yet Twitter usage and downloads have surged since Musk took over. Some have come for the anticipated car crash, some have come because Twitter is more welcoming to right wing voices, some have come for whatever reason
The Woke provincial bookshop may be a front for money laundering. Seriously
We had a Russian pie shop on Parkway, in Camden, that lasted three years, and had maybe three customers in that time. At first I couldn’t work out why and how it survived. Then I realised. Ah
Apparently some of the empty “Turkish barbershops” do the same job for Albanian money. And of course the candy stores
If I was going to wash drugs money, a Woke Bookshop in, say, Hove would be ideal. The last place you’d suspect
Doubt it on the bookshop (which sounds authentic and great) but, yes, in London it's amazing how many of these 'front' places you can spot if you have an eye for it. Businesses not even trying to attract customers, in many cases designed to actively repel, because what they are for is laundering the proceeds of vice. This hidden economy is absolutely huge - but it's largely outside GDP and Fiscal Corner.
Highly unlikely for a bookshop, which will mostly be a non cash business; a woke bookshop appealing to the young who don't even know what cash is even less likely I'd have thought.
This is the most interesting local politics thing I have seen this week - Croydon Council sending the lawyers in against a blogger who reported on Reports on Doings In Croydon Council that they had published on their own website (allegedly in error).
It's like it was 2008.
All to do with a possible waste of £30m or £40m ish, and reports thereinto.
The Croydon Council Head of Legal pleaded that he could not make the Court Hearing physically as the tubes were on strike.
Lawrence-Orumwense had emailed in, saying that he could not get from Croydon to the Strand because there was a strike on the Underground. No one made mention of the complete absence of Tube stations in Croydon…
(You go overground or by bus, or get a taxi if the poor bloody taxpayers are funding it.)
The judge observed the stable door/ horse bolted truth that pleading confidentiality was a bit of a stretch as umpteen thousand people could have seen it, and hoofed them out of the interim hearing in his Court with a size 11 boot print on their backside, plus a promise from the blogger not to further publish until the main hearing was held.
If they really did racially abuse these girls then they should be expelled. That's what would happen at my kids' schools, but I suppose as always these people are held to different standards from the rest of us. We have these institutions whose entire purpose is to breed an entitled, out of touch elite and then wonder why we keep being ruled by an entitled, out of touch elite.
I'm all for bashing Eton for this and many other things, but would someone really be expelled for even racial abuse, as a first offence? A suspension and other sanction seems more likely than immediate expulsion.
At our school you can be permanently excluded for a serious breach of the behaviour policy. We don't know enough about this incident to say what happened but it certainly sounds like it might have been in that kind if category, and again we don't know the full facts but it sounds like the kids just got a slap on the wrist. Eton should provide a full account of the incident. Since they educate most of the people who run the country there is a clear public interest in knowing exactly what they're doing, and I'm sure that if they were a state school they would have to provide full disclosure (without providing the children's details, obviously).
That’s very unusual for a state school, if so, as local authorities will try their utmost to prevent it. This is because they have closed if not all at least a large majority of the schools that catered for children who had been expelled so there is nowhere to send them.
I have seen children physically assault staff, threaten sexual violence, be caught selling drugs and racially abusing anyone and everyone and they get a week’s suspension. There were two who had done all these things and it still took three months and a series of court cases to boot them out.
The only actual instant expulsion was for threatening someone with a knife. Even the LEA didn’t try to overrule that one.
Then people wonder why discipline isn’t all it might be.
Our school is pretty tough on this kind of thing. As an academy I'm not sure how much influence the LEA would have, but you're the expert on this, I'm just a parent.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
If they really did racially abuse these girls then they should be expelled. That's what would happen at my kids' schools, but I suppose as always these people are held to different standards from the rest of us. We have these institutions whose entire purpose is to breed an entitled, out of touch elite and then wonder why we keep being ruled by an entitled, out of touch elite.
I'm all for bashing Eton for this and many other things, but would someone really be expelled for even racial abuse, as a first offence? A suspension and other sanction seems more likely than immediate expulsion.
At our school you can be permanently excluded for a serious breach of the behaviour policy. We don't know enough about this incident to say what happened but it certainly sounds like it might have been in that kind if category, and again we don't know the full facts but it sounds like the kids just got a slap on the wrist. Eton should provide a full account of the incident. Since they educate most of the people who run the country there is a clear public interest in knowing exactly what they're doing, and I'm sure that if they were a state school they would have to provide full disclosure (without providing the children's details, obviously).
That’s very unusual for a state school, if so, as local authorities will try their utmost to prevent it. This is because they have closed if not all at least a large majority of the schools that catered for children who had been expelled so there is nowhere to send them.
I have seen children physically assault staff, threaten sexual violence, be caught selling drugs and racially abusing anyone and everyone and they get a week’s suspension. There were two who had done all these things and it still took three months and a series of court cases to boot them out.
The only actual instant expulsion was for threatening someone with a knife. Even the LEA didn’t try to overrule that one.
Then people wonder why discipline isn’t all it might be.
I've known areas where the schools essentially agreed between themselves never to permanently exclude someone, since it would just cause too many headaches.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
There’s a lot of people saying they’re leaving Twitter for Mastadon, finding out for the first time what a truly un-moderated experience looks like, then quickly heading back to Twitter.
Most of the Mastadon servers apparently make 4chan seem like an inclusive and welcoming place for outsiders. There’s a couple that are tightly moderated, but very woke echo-chamber all agreeing furiously with each other.
Picking the wrong servers??? You choose the server, the server chooses who and what it moderates, including which other servers it'll pull from. My experience has been totally lacking in trolling and toxicity, but apart from that I quite like it.
Also there's no algorithm promoting stuff and shoving it into your timeline, so your experience depends a lot more on who you follow, like Twitter used to be back in the old days.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't really follow people who do politics, but what I have just found it full of people saying they are leaving to Mastadon, before carrying on using twitter. I think more people are smackhead level addicted to it then they realise.
There’s a lot of people saying they’re leaving Twitter for Mastadon, finding out for the first time what a truly un-moderated experience looks like, then quickly heading back to Twitter.
Most of the Mastadon servers apparently make 4chan seem like an inclusive and welcoming place for outsiders. There’s a couple that are tightly moderated, but very woke echo-chamber all agreeing furiously with each other.
Picking the wrong servers??? You choose the server, the server chooses who and what it moderates, including which other servers it'll pull from. My experience has been totally lacking in trolling and toxicity, but apart from that I quite like it.
Also there's no algorithm promoting stuff and shoving it into your timeline, so your experience depends a lot more on who you follow, like Twitter used to be back in the old days.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
If people want to reduce taxes you are going to have to move towards a privatised health system and reform the pensions system. I don't see any other way.
Grow the economy faster than “health care inflation” and population growth, combined?
That’s how we got to the stage of being able to afford the NHS in the first place.
No one has any ideas on how to do that other than wish really hard though.
Start with Heathcare Inflation - which seems to be like military equipment inflation. More each year for the same capability.
From stuff I read up on, concerning testing during lockdown, NHS medical testing, at the backend, is poorly automated and rather put of date in many areas. Which is why results often take a great deal of time to come back. Which can’t be ideal, medically. I’ll bet that costs more money in wrong/delayed treatment. So *invest* there as a start.
The problem with health is we have a vicious combo of more chronic conditions and technological advances. Obesity still hasn't really hit the NHS yet in the way it will over the next 50 years.
As others have pointed out, labour productivity in health grows really slowly too. Hard to replace nurses with tech. It's inherently physical.
The only way we can afford it is large increases in the labour supply. But productivity is growing at only 1%, our demographic profile and working age population is fucked because of low fertility, people are working fewer hours, and participation rates are dropping because (again) chronic conditions.
Our political class has been completely taken by non-workers (landlords and pensioners), so there is no prospect of change. And any attempt to reduce stuff like obesity in a thwarted by an inconsistent approach to policy intervention - it's stupid that we provide universal health care while not doing anything to reduce pressure on it.
It's depressing tbh. I enjoy my work but it gets to me a bit sometimes.
That's interesting. My recent experience as a (more than I would like) user is that our local service (Sherwood Forest Trust) is pretty good. Currently my district hospital is "good" to "outstanding" across the board. 10 years ago it was in a bit of a mess.
Perhaps I am prioritised?
If I am in a clinic and need blood tests in advance, they work on a 24 hr or so turnaround as routine, and if I have not been asked, but they need them, I go to the blood-test clinic, jump the queue as the other clinic has called it urgent, and the results are back in 45-60 minutes.
I just have a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the volunteer run cafe, and go back in to the same clinic slightly delayed.
Here is the most recent CQC I can see, which TBF is from immediately before lockdown.
This is the most interesting local politics thing I have seen this week - Croydon Council sending the lawyers in against a blogger who reported on Reports on Doings In Croydon Council that they had published on their own website (allegedly in error).
It's like it was 2008.
All to do with a possible waste of £30m or £40m ish, and reports thereinto.
The Croydon Council Head of Legal pleaded that he could not make the Court Hearing physically as the tubes were on strike.
Lawrence-Orumwense had emailed in, saying that he could not get from Croydon to the Strand because there was a strike on the Underground. No one made mention of the complete absence of Tube stations in Croydon…
(You go overground or by bus, or get a taxi if the poor bloody taxpayers are funding it.)
The judge observed the stable door/ horse bolted truth that pleading confidentiality was a bit of a stretch as umpteen thousand people could have seen it, and hoofed them out of the interim hearing in his Court with a size 11 boot print on their backside, plus a promise from the blogger not to further publish until the main hearing was held.
If they are using a standard council system they won't be able to evidence how many people accessed or viewed the documents unwittingly published, but even exempt information should only be withheld if the public interest in doing so it outweighs the public interest in disclosing it. Given how publicly available it had already been, an injunction would have been pointless.
Sounds like their monitoring officer is incompetent from their communications to the editor as well.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Well if he signs up a few more George Hotz of this world....the thing about people like Hotz as well, they are old school internet, money doesn't motivate them, they aren't interested in being activists at work, its all about the tech, the challenge that drives them.
George Hotz was driven by activism. Specificaally the "You own what you buy" activism.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't think that's true, or not to the extent that you think. Twitter's 'strength' was its ability to engage. You can see lefties bemoaning that Twitter is full of Nazis, while right wingers go on about the mad woke shit. That made people angry and drove engagement in the platform.
Yet Twitter usage and downloads have surged since Musk took over. Some have come for the anticipated car crash, some have come because Twitter is more welcoming to right wing voices, some have come for whatever reason
It hasn’t collapsed yet. The opposite
The midterms happened. And now the World Cup. A million people posting "GOALLLLLLLLL" simultaneously will do the stats wonders.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
But is that kind of "whip up an amazing proof-of-concept of something you didn't believe possible" engineer what Twitter actually needs? Twitter's a big company with a massive existing codebase, operating at a huge scale: they need people who can run that infra, and engineers who can make useful changes to a big confusing ball of code without breaking it, and people who ensure they're not accidentally running afoul of various legal requirements, and a moderation team, and so on. They're not a startup where they need super-quick coding up of cool new ideas to find a customer base, and they're not trying to make money out of being able to do bleeding-edge tech trickery either...
There is an argument that actually they do need people like. Twitter product innovation has been close to zero....e.g. the much wanted edit button taking years of I presume meetings about meeting about meetings.
Remember Musk has stated he wants to innovate the product, that is the only way to make it a long term profitable business. Musk appears to be doing exactly the start-up thing, albeit having spend $40bn on it !!!!
Also a big one is the bot problem. Hotz is the sort of guy that lives to work on those kind of challenges.
I think the 'edit button' part is evidence for my side: you don't need engineering genius to implement that, you just need people who can work on a big codebase and a management process that doesn't get in their way too much -- and if you don't have the management part right then a supergenius engineer is not going to have any more luck in rolling out the edit button than J Average Programmer. Bot detection is a good point, though: that's the kind of feature you could prototype and build out as a basically separate thing that just feeds its output into the existing "looks like a bot" handling, and where a really clever idea or implementation could help a lot.
I agree Musk seems to be trying to run the company a bit like a startup (including the awful long-hours high-commitment culture). I just don't think you can do that to an existing company with thousands of employees, a product and codebase that's over a decade old, and a massive pre-existing customer base. Well, you can try, but you're likely to lose a lot of the employees and the customers in the process...
If people want to reduce taxes you are going to have to move towards a privatised health system and reform the pensions system. I don't see any other way.
Grow the economy faster than “health care inflation” and population growth, combined?
That’s how we got to the stage of being able to afford the NHS in the first place.
No one has any ideas on how to do that other than wish really hard though.
Start with Heathcare Inflation - which seems to be like military equipment inflation. More each year for the same capability.
From stuff I read up on, concerning testing during lockdown, NHS medical testing, at the backend, is poorly automated and rather put of date in many areas. Which is why results often take a great deal of time to come back. Which can’t be ideal, medically. I’ll bet that costs more money in wrong/delayed treatment. So *invest* there as a start.
The problem with health is we have a vicious combo of more chronic conditions and technological advances. Obesity still hasn't really hit the NHS yet in the way it will over the next 50 years.
As others have pointed out, labour productivity in health grows really slowly too. Hard to replace nurses with tech. It's inherently physical.
The only way we can afford it is large increases in the labour supply. But productivity is growing at only 1%, our demographic profile and working age population is fucked because of low fertility, people are working fewer hours, and participation rates are dropping because (again) chronic conditions.
Our political class has been completely taken by non-workers (landlords and pensioners), so there is no prospect of change. And any attempt to reduce stuff like obesity in a thwarted by an inconsistent approach to policy intervention - it's stupid that we provide universal health care while not doing anything to reduce pressure on it.
It's depressing tbh. I enjoy my work but it gets to me a bit sometimes.
Productivity doesn’t mean replacing nurses with robots. From watching medical staff in hospitals, you can see they have to tons of non healthcare stuff as part of their job.
It is possible that some doctors live to fight their way through multiple conflicting and non working systems to order tests, but I doubt it.
Classically, increases in productivity involve reducing useless work or moving work from expensive specialists to cheaper staff.
For example, I am currently automating flows in middle/back office at a bank. When we are done 99% of the time, a trade will be made. And then not touched by a human. The system will detect problems and flag them for manual intervention.
So the people whose job is fixing issues will have massively less shovelling stuff that is fine and can actually fix issues
@Lawton_Times Storm brewing about the anti-discrimination armbands here at the World Cup. Fifa trying to introduce their own, presumably to replace ‘One Love’ armband to be worn by England and other teams. Not until quarter finals does Fifa armband reference anti-discrimination.
Huge if true. Harry Kane and the rest of the England team will lose all credibility if they give in to this.
Maybe I'm unusual but I find myself getting annoyed if footballers do nothing and if they do something.
I think it must be that I don't like football.
They’ve become activists, particularly since COVID. Twenty years ago, football was politics free. Thierry Henry got into trouble for honouring the birth of his friend’s baby. But times have changed.
You cannot take a knee, wear rainbow laces and do adverts arguing for social justice and then meekly shut up when you’re told not to do so when playing in a Middle Ages Hell hole.
Yes, I think that's right.
In other news a left-wing Guardianista wokey bookshop opened in my town this week, which I didn't realise until I went in last night and couldn't find anything on history, military history, railways, espionage or geography but plenty on race, gender, spirituality and sexuality. I thought it would be as advertised: a nice independent bookshop with a cafe, which I could enjoy. But it wasn't.
I'm still annoyed about it. Thought about saying something but of course I just walked out after 90 seconds and simply won't go in there again.
What a shame.
Oh my God! An independent business choosing for itself what to sell to customers? It’s capitalism gone mad! If only the Conservatives would save us from this!
Yes, and they will live or die by that.
I give it a year.
An independent book store is a pretty hazardous commercial venture anyway. Targeting a particular market probably makes their survival marginally more, not less likely.
I was perusing their literary offer just last week, and there was a total absence of anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics. And not only did they not stock the Anarchists' Cookbook, they refused to order it for me. I shall not darken their door again.
I am also boycotting Dorothy Perkins, as they have no clothes appropriate for me.
As Schopenhauer never tired of pointing out, WH Smith don't stock anything meaningful on Hegelian dialectics because nothing meaningful is to be had. He was a verbally profligate fraud.
However Smiths are weak on Schopenhauer and Kant as well.
They are strong on Toblerone. Very strong indeed.
Do they stock the white version? Not interested, if they don’t.
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
As far as I can tell, Twitter's business model is to get producers to put up content that is of interest to a larger number of consumers so Twitter can advertise to those consumers when they engage with the content. Twitter has to keep producers, consumers and advertisers happy. Getting this environment right requires organisation, consistency and a deep understanding of what each of the three groups want. It is rather mundane. It is not - Elon take note - rocket science.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
The uks problems are deep. This is Peston saying half a million people have dropped out of the wirkforce since 2019. Big rise in long term sickness in those aged 16 to 34
Fascinating, Musk has hired George Hotz...if that is the sort of people he is hiring to replace the blue haired activist free lunch is my human right lot, its going to be a fun ride.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
The race is on for Musk, to find enough good people quickly enough, to stop Twitter falling over at the hands of the outgoing activist mob.
Well if he signs up a few more George Hotz of this world....the thing about people like Hotz as well, they are old school internet, money doesn't motivate them, they aren't interested in being activists at work, its all about the tech, the challenge that drives them.
George Hotz was driven by activism. Specificaally the "You own what you buy" activism.
Incidentally Musk has a poll on whether to let Trump back on.
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
I don't think that's true, or not to the extent that you think. Twitter's 'strength' was its ability to engage. You can see lefties bemoaning that Twitter is full of Nazis, while right wingers go on about the mad woke shit. That made people angry and drove engagement in the platform.
Yet Twitter usage and downloads have surged since Musk took over. Some have come for the anticipated car crash, some have come because Twitter is more welcoming to right wing voices, some have come for whatever reason
It hasn’t collapsed yet. The opposite
The midterms happened. And now the World Cup. A million people posting "GOALLLLLLLLL" simultaneously will do the stats wonders.
When he was 15....that part of the problem with too many at twitter they still acting like they are 15. Also how much of it was really that and how much was it some genius teenager seems crazy hard challenge other people can't solve, so wants to solve it.
He still has a rebellious side, see how comma ai skirts the legal frameworks on driver assist. But what I mean is he isn't interested all these current ideological political clashes.
Another issue on which the Tories have lost the public. Though I’ve been assured on here that no one wanted Singapore-on-Thames, Brillo seems confident it was a Brexiteer thing.
If they really did racially abuse these girls then they should be expelled. That's what would happen at my kids' schools, but I suppose as always these people are held to different standards from the rest of us. We have these institutions whose entire purpose is to breed an entitled, out of touch elite and then wonder why we keep being ruled by an entitled, out of touch elite.
I'm all for bashing Eton for this and many other things, but would someone really be expelled for even racial abuse, as a first offence? A suspension and other sanction seems more likely than immediate expulsion.
At our school you can be permanently excluded for a serious breach of the behaviour policy. We don't know enough about this incident to say what happened but it certainly sounds like it might have been in that kind if category, and again we don't know the full facts but it sounds like the kids just got a slap on the wrist. Eton should provide a full account of the incident. Since they educate most of the people who run the country there is a clear public interest in knowing exactly what they're doing, and I'm sure that if they were a state school they would have to provide full disclosure (without providing the children's details, obviously).
That’s very unusual for a state school, if so, as local authorities will try their utmost to prevent it. This is because they have closed if not all at least a large majority of the schools that catered for children who had been expelled so there is nowhere to send them.
I have seen children physically assault staff, threaten sexual violence, be caught selling drugs and racially abusing anyone and everyone and they get a week’s suspension. There were two who had done all these things and it still took three months and a series of court cases to boot them out.
The only actual instant expulsion was for threatening someone with a knife. Even the LEA didn’t try to overrule that one.
Then people wonder why discipline isn’t all it might be.
Yep. There's a lot in limbo in Units like mine. 3 of 5 regulars off with COVID. Replaced by entirely untrained, unqualified, inexperienced supply. We were not safe yesterday.
The uks problems are deep. This is Peston saying half a million people have dropped out of the wirkforce since 2019. Big rise in long term sickness in those aged 16 to 34
The big problem for those opposed to HS2 is that there is a chronic need for more capacity on the West Coast main line. Its main problem is its name which sounds like a vanity project.
So much work is already underway on HS2 [near where I live for instance] that it would be ridiculous to cancel it. Some politicians don't seem to understand that, perhaps because they don't live near it and don't visit those areas.
People get het up about the supposed speed increases from HS2 ( a scant few minutes). But I was under the impression that some of the benefits are freeing up more line capacity for freight etc. Besides, all those working on the line are getting paid, then taxed and spending the money into the economy. That’s a good thing.
At the moment there are roughly 16 trains per hour (tph) on the WCML which is mostly four tracked. This is because it is a curious mixture of fast, semi-fast, stopping and freight trains. It is the busiest and most congested mixed-rail line in the whole of Europe.
HS2 on its own has a theoretical capacity of 14tph. All running at the same speed, so it's easy to have consistent distances between them. I suspect in practice it will be about 10-11 trains per hour, but that's still a pretty impressive record set against a mixed-use line with twice the number of tracks.*
This also means the WCML now doesn't have so many fast expresses thundering up and down it - every one of those removed frees up roughly two pathways for slower services, partly due to pathing and partly due to the increased capacity at stations (Curzon Street may be a 500 yard walk/tram ride from New Street, but opening it will triple the latter's capacity, which is sorely needed).
Estimated increase in traffic - from 16 to 32tph.
I've seen estimates suggesting the overall number of tph will go from 16 to 52. That strikes me as optimistic but it's not ridiculous to think it will be over 40 in total.
More than a doubling of capacity, with only a 50% increase in track space, with far less disruption and far more cheaply than trying to upgrade an existing line.
If I'm honest, this is not only a no-brainer but the big mistake was not building it 25 years ago instead of getting sidetracked by widening the WCML. Which not only took far longer but was more costly than building a high speed line would have been.
*It will actually be quite a bit faster than the WCML as well - about half an hour shaved off the time to Birmingham, more to Manchester - because if you build a new line, why not make it high speed? (Whether it needs to be quite as fast as it's being planned to be is another question.)
How much money might be saved by reducing the top speed ? I had read that a small compromise there might have seen substantial savings, but I've no substantive knowledge about that.
Sadly i think its been a bad week for Zelensky. He jumped the gun on the missile in Poland by saying it was Russian. Hes a good guy but must be careful not to destroy his credibility. You cant play games with ww3.
This from the ft Responding to Zelensky’s remarks tonight, a NATO country diplomat told me: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place to work
This is the most interesting local politics thing I have seen this week - Croydon Council sending the lawyers in against a blogger who reported on Reports on Doings In Croydon Council that they had published on their own website (allegedly in error).
It's like it was 2008.
All to do with a possible waste of £30m or £40m ish, and reports thereinto.
The Croydon Council Head of Legal pleaded that he could not make the Court Hearing physically as the tubes were on strike.
Lawrence-Orumwense had emailed in, saying that he could not get from Croydon to the Strand because there was a strike on the Underground. No one made mention of the complete absence of Tube stations in Croydon…
(You go overground or by bus, or get a taxi if the poor bloody taxpayers are funding it.)
The judge observed the stable door/ horse bolted truth that pleading confidentiality was a bit of a stretch as umpteen thousand people could have seen it, and hoofed them out of the interim hearing in his Court with a size 11 boot print on their backside, plus a promise from the blogger not to further publish until the main hearing was held.
If they are using a standard council system they won't be able to evidence how many people accessed or viewed the documents unwittingly published, but even exempt information should only be withheld if the public interest in doing so it outweighs the public interest in disclosing it. Given how publicly available it had already been, an injunction would have been pointless.
Sounds like their monitoring officer is incompetent from their communications to the editor as well.
It's in the piece linked. The Council were trying to injunct previous publication afaics, and the blogger supplied traffic data. Here's an extract.
(The Inside Croydon blogger is one of the early ultra-local survivors, so knows his stuff.)
He invited Lewin to make his opening remarks. My notes, I have to admit, are a little sketchier than if I were simply observing procedures. But Lewin began talking about “non-disclosure”, and “confidential reports”.
And then he said something about “published accidentally as long ago as September”.
Oh.
Judge Nicklin seized on this point. “I rather think that the documents have lost their confidentiality, don’t you?” the judge said, peering across the empty courtroom at Lewin.
The Judge asked Lewin how many times the documents had been accessed or downloaded in the month and a half they had been freely available via the website of Croydon Council. “I haven’t got evidence to demonstrate that today,” Lewin said, sounding a little crest-fallen. He’d not done his homework.
Judge Nicklin, however, had. “It seems to me that you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. I’d barely had to say two words so far.
Judge Nicklin had checked out Inside Croydon. He’d seen that we have nearly 20,000 people signed up to receive alerts when we publish content, and that we have had 16million page views. And he’d even found that we have 15,000 followers on Twitter. Our ad manager, if we had one, would be a big fan of Judge Nicklin.
“It’s a bit of a stretch,” the judge said, addressing Lewin, “that you can keep a secret which has been seen by 16,000 people.”
Lewin was definitely crest-fallen now. I’m sure I heard him say something along the lines of, “The horse has bolted, m’lud.”
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
But is that kind of "whip up an amazing proof-of-concept of something you didn't believe possible" engineer what Twitter actually needs? Twitter's a big company with a massive existing codebase, operating at a huge scale: they need people who can run that infra, and engineers who can make useful changes to a big confusing ball of code without breaking it, and people who ensure they're not accidentally running afoul of various legal requirements, and a moderation team, and so on. They're not a startup where they need super-quick coding up of cool new ideas to find a customer base, and they're not trying to make money out of being able to do bleeding-edge tech trickery either...
There is an argument that actually they do need people like. Twitter product innovation has been close to zero....e.g. the much wanted edit button taking years of I presume meetings about meeting about meetings.
Remember Musk has stated he wants to innovate the product, that is the only way to make it a long term profitable business. Musk appears to be doing exactly the start-up thing, albeit having spend $40bn on it !!!!
Also a big one is the bot problem. Hotz is the sort of guy that lives to work on those kind of challenges.
I think the 'edit button' part is evidence for my side: you don't need engineering genius to implement that, you just need people who can work on a big codebase and a management process that doesn't get in their way too much -- and if you don't have the management part right then a supergenius engineer is not going to have any more luck in rolling out the edit button than J Average Programmer. Bot detection is a good point, though: that's the kind of feature you could prototype and build out as a basically separate thing that just feeds its output into the existing "looks like a bot" handling, and where a really clever idea or implementation could help a lot.
I agree Musk seems to be trying to run the company a bit like a startup (including the awful long-hours high-commitment culture). I just don't think you can do that to an existing company with thousands of employees, a product and codebase that's over a decade old, and a massive pre-existing customer base. Well, you can try, but you're likely to lose a lot of the employees and the customers in the process...
Well if media reports are to be believed it doesn't have the 1000s of employees anymore :-)
Also, I highly doubt somebody like Hotz is a) put himself forward / b) being hired, to do the mundane.
It could definitely all blow up. I am reminded of the Silicon Valley episode(s) where the Google-esque company boss fires everybody who is working on a new compression product and then ends up rehiring them all.
The uks problems are deep. This is Peston saying half a million people have dropped out of the wirkforce since 2019. Big rise in long term sickness in those aged 16 to 34
Sadly i think its been a bad week for Zelensky. He jumped the gun on the missile in Poland by saying it was Russian. Hes a good guy but must be careful not to destroy his credibility. You cant play games with ww3.
This from the ft Responding to Zelensky’s remarks tonight, a NATO country diplomat told me: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”
Careful now. If you don't think Zelensky trying to bullshit us into WW3 last week was a great idea you'll get an unlubed pineapple up your dumper on your way to a ban.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
The West is in relative decline with the rise of the Chinese and Indian and Brazilian economies and vast population growth in Africa certainly. However gdp per capita wise it is still likely to be at or near the top, even if Australia for example is probably better placed on that front than us
Many people have realised just how damaging to their relationships and own psychology a lot of low-end work is. The nonsense of the New Right of the 1970's of the "dignity of all work" has been broken , and you're not going to easily reverse that. It may be better to accept that increasing automation will also be a factor, and to also encourage people who are in a position to to do creative and socially beneficial things with their time, as many hoped for in the "creative society" of the 1960s.
Many low-end jobs that people are absent from have also contributed relatively little to economies or society ; this isn't to say we can abandon work on a large scale as yet, or function without large numbers of people working, but we will need to start to think a little differently about what that will entail.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
@Lawton_Times Storm brewing about the anti-discrimination armbands here at the World Cup. Fifa trying to introduce their own, presumably to replace ‘One Love’ armband to be worn by England and other teams. Not until quarter finals does Fifa armband reference anti-discrimination.
Huge if true. Harry Kane and the rest of the England team will lose all credibility if they give in to this.
Maybe I'm unusual but I find myself getting annoyed if footballers do nothing and if they do something.
I think it must be that I don't like football.
They’ve become activists, particularly since COVID. Twenty years ago, football was politics free. Thierry Henry got into trouble for honouring the birth of his friend’s baby. But times have changed.
You cannot take a knee, wear rainbow laces and do adverts arguing for social justice and then meekly shut up when you’re told not to do so when playing in a Middle Ages Hell hole.
Yes, I think that's right.
In other news a left-wing Guardianista wokey bookshop opened in my town this week, which I didn't realise until I went in last night and couldn't find anything on history, military history, railways, espionage or geography but plenty on race, gender, spirituality and sexuality. I thought it would be as advertised: a nice independent bookshop with a cafe, which I could enjoy. But it wasn't.
I'm still annoyed about it. Thought about saying something but of course I just walked out after 90 seconds and simply won't go in there again.
What a shame.
Oh my God! An independent business choosing for itself what to sell to customers? It’s capitalism gone mad! If only the Conservatives would save us from this!
Yes, and they will live or die by that.
I give it a year.
An independent book store is a pretty hazardous commercial venture anyway. Targeting a particular market probably makes their survival marginally more, not less likely.
Especially as such shops often operate also, very significantly, on the internet. Mail order was a key strategy of such bookshops long before this internet thingy. For instance I was buying stuff regularly by mail from that railway bookshop at Stamford ca. 1990. Edit: I see already well dealt with by @pm215 .
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
There’s millions of Ukranians fighting for a better future, we should all help them as much as possible in kicking out the Russians.
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Philosophically i think we get bored with prosperity. Most of human existence has been a struggle for survival and modern work is soul crushing for many. Maybe we just dont want growth any more
Brilliant Spectator piece on the pathetic, bathetic state of Britain in 2022. Plenty of killer lines. “The first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council”
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place
The west in general is in decline so there is no easy escape...why not actually fight for a better future
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
Many people have realised just how damaging to their relationships and own psychology a lot of work is. The nonsense of the New Right of the 1970's of the "dignity of all work" has been broken , and you're not going to easily reverse that. It may be better to accept that increasing automation will also be a factor, and to also encourage people who are in a position to to do creative and socially beneficial things with their time, as many hoped for the "creative society" of the 1960s.
Many low-end jobs that people are absent from have also contributed relatively little to our economies or society ; this isn't to say we can abandon work on a large scale as yet, or function without large numbers of people working, but we may need to start to think a little differently about what that will entail.
Dignity of work is only true in some top end jobs. Ask a sewage worker about the dignity of his work
Comments
Both in or out the EU we need to get our act together before it is too late. The self-indulgent nonsense of an economy built on consumption and other peoples' money has run its course. The change in our economy is going to be painful. Our living standards will fall to closer to what we actually earn as a country and we won't like it. Too bad. No one owes us a living and we have spent all our capital.
For those that don't know, Hotz is an absolute total legit genius. As a kid he famously jailbreaking PlayStations and iPhone when nobody else could. Has most recently built a open source version of Tesla FSD (which is on par with it), with just a team of 10 people and hacked all the cars it works on.
Hotz is as mad as a box of frogs, but is a real life incarnations of those super genius computer nerds out the movies that is able to pick anything tech in minutes and codes at the speed of light .
https://minerva.fnal.gov/why-study-neutrinos/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-a-neutrino/
Sometimes I also have them for breakfast. 😋
We had a Russian pie shop on Parkway, in Camden, that lasted three years, and had maybe three customers in that time. At first I couldn’t work out why and how it survived. Then I realised. Ah
Apparently some of the empty “Turkish barbershops” do the same job for Albanian money. And of course the candy stores
If I was going to wash drugs money, a Woke Bookshop in, say, Hove would be ideal. The last place you’d suspect
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1593592959123038209?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
The Big Donald winning 53/47 at the moment. Ten minutes left to vote.
I thought Twitter was a massive left wing woke echo chamber?
Glad to see the FAs of England and Wales have told FIFA to do one.
https://twitter.com/KatieDaviscourt/status/1591981752033374208?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
https://twitter.com/KariLake/status/1593347781422301186?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
Twitter is already noticeably more right wing than it was ten days ago
Tho that isn’t hard as it was remarkably left wing and Woke, having carefully suppressed right-of-centre voices for years
Knowingly abusing processes designed for legitimate challenge is despicable, since they know they are undercutting confidence in the system for no reason.
1. Charity shops
2. The book exchange at the station
3. The library (but I'm not a member)
Book shops? Luxury!
Fan of Zadrozny? That's a yes-but, plus a sympathy vote given his appalling treatment by Notts Police previously.
I'll post on the local politics stuff separately, as that is a touch - shall we say - "involved" and "intricate", like other places such as Croydon at present. It needs an essay, which I will keep down to comment size.
Most of the Mastadon servers apparently make 4chan seem like an inclusive and welcoming place for outsiders. There’s a couple that are tightly moderated, but very woke echo-chamber all agreeing furiously with each other.
It may go like mass-debate (copyright Radio-Active on Radio 4), but we shall see.
He’s retained all his many followers and he’s being eagerly retweeted. The whole tone of Political Twitter has changed. More diverse. I like it
The shrieking of the left wing Twitterati is delicious, especially as they announce loudly on Twitter that they are going to Mastodon and then they sheepishly return because Mastodon is boring and Woke and stupidly difficult
Just don’t fuck it up, Elon. This is fun
2:05 Ascot - L'Homme Presse
2:25 Haydock - Wholestone Long Shot of The Week
2:40 Ascot - Constitution Hill
3:00 Haydock - A Plus Tard
Whatever you bet on, good luck 🙂
I have seen children physically assault staff, threaten sexual violence, be caught selling drugs and racially abusing anyone and everyone and they get a week’s suspension. There were two who had done all these things and it still took three months and a series of court cases to boot them out.
The only actual instant expulsion was for threatening someone with a knife. Even the LEA didn’t try to overrule that one.
Then people wonder why discipline isn’t all it might be.
As others have pointed out, labour productivity in health grows really slowly too. Hard to replace nurses with tech. It's inherently physical.
The only way we can afford it is large increases in the labour supply. But productivity is growing at only 1%, our demographic profile and working age population is fucked because of low fertility, people are working fewer hours, and participation rates are dropping because (again) chronic conditions.
Our political class has been completely taken by non-workers (landlords and pensioners), so there is no prospect of change. And any attempt to reduce stuff like obesity in a thwarted by an inconsistent approach to policy intervention - it's stupid that we provide universal health care while not doing anything to reduce pressure on it.
It's depressing tbh. I enjoy my work but it gets to me a bit sometimes.
Remember Musk has stated he wants to innovate the product, that is the only way to make it a long term profitable business. Musk appears to be doing exactly the start-up thing, albeit having spend $40bn on it !!!!
Also a big one is the bot problem. Hotz is the sort of guy that lives to work on those kind of challenges.
Yet Twitter usage and downloads have surged since Musk took over. Some have come for the anticipated car crash, some have come because Twitter is more welcoming to right wing voices, some have come for whatever reason
It hasn’t collapsed yet. The opposite
This is the most interesting local politics thing I have seen this week - Croydon Council sending the lawyers in against a blogger who reported on Reports on Doings In Croydon Council that they had published on their own website (allegedly in error).
It's like it was 2008.
All to do with a possible waste of £30m or £40m ish, and reports thereinto.
The Croydon Council Head of Legal pleaded that he could not make the Court Hearing physically as the tubes were on strike.
Lawrence-Orumwense had emailed in, saying that he could not get from Croydon to the Strand because there was a strike on the Underground. No one made mention of the complete absence of Tube stations in Croydon…
(You go overground or by bus, or get a taxi if the poor bloody taxpayers are funding it.)
The judge observed the stable door/ horse bolted truth that pleading confidentiality was a bit of a stretch as umpteen thousand people could have seen it, and hoofed them out of the interim hearing in his Court with a size 11 boot print on their backside, plus a promise from the blogger not to further publish until the main hearing was held.
The story is here:
https://insidecroydon.com/2022/11/11/you-seem-to-be-trying-to-put-the-genie-back-in-the-bottle/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/young-britons-should-emigrate-now/
Also there's no algorithm promoting stuff and shoving it into your timeline, so your experience depends a lot more on who you follow, like Twitter used to be back in the old days.
Perhaps I am prioritised?
If I am in a clinic and need blood tests in advance, they work on a 24 hr or so turnaround as routine, and if I have not been asked, but they need them, I go to the blood-test clinic, jump the queue as the other clinic has called it urgent, and the results are back in 45-60 minutes.
I just have a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the volunteer run cafe, and go back in to the same clinic slightly delayed.
Here is the most recent CQC I can see, which TBF is from immediately before lockdown.
Sounds like their monitoring officer is incompetent from their communications to the editor as well.
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1592620203917164545?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
I agree Musk seems to be trying to run the company a bit like a startup (including the awful long-hours high-commitment culture). I just don't think you can do that to an existing company with thousands of employees, a product and codebase that's over a decade old, and a massive pre-existing customer base. Well, you can try, but you're likely to lose a lot of the employees and the customers in the process...
It is possible that some doctors live to fight their way through multiple conflicting and non working systems to order tests, but I doubt it.
Classically, increases in productivity involve reducing useless work or moving work from expensive specialists to cheaper staff.
For example, I am currently automating flows in middle/back office at a bank. When we are done 99% of the time, a trade will be made. And then not touched by a human. The system will detect problems and flag them for manual intervention.
So the people whose job is fixing issues will have massively less shovelling stuff that is fine and can actually fix issues
Targeting a particular market probably makes their survival marginally more, not less likely.
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1592422258672570369?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
He still has a rebellious side, see how comma ai skirts the legal frameworks on driver assist. But what I mean is he isn't interested all these current ideological political clashes.
Let's see how it goes.
3 of 5 regulars off with COVID. Replaced by entirely untrained, unqualified, inexperienced supply.
We were not safe yesterday.
I had read that a small compromise there might have seen substantial savings, but I've no substantive knowledge about that.
This from the ft
Responding to Zelensky’s remarks tonight, a NATO country diplomat told me: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”
https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1592970499293818880?s=20&t=nEFlfJpdT3N1gGPNoRcf0g
There is inflation too in New Zealand and Canada and high house prices around the biggest cities and they also have ageing populations. Completely ignores the parents and grandparents who help their children with deposits etc.
However if young people want to move fine, we are far more densely populated than them anyway. However they need high enough skills for Canada and New Zealand to let them in in the first place to work
(The Inside Croydon blogger is one of the early ultra-local survivors, so knows his stuff.)
He invited Lewin to make his opening remarks. My notes, I have to admit, are a little sketchier than if I were simply observing procedures. But Lewin began talking about “non-disclosure”, and “confidential reports”.
And then he said something about “published accidentally as long ago as September”.
Oh.
Judge Nicklin seized on this point. “I rather think that the documents have lost their confidentiality, don’t you?” the judge said, peering across the empty courtroom at Lewin.
The Judge asked Lewin how many times the documents had been accessed or downloaded in the month and a half they had been freely available via the website of Croydon Council. “I haven’t got evidence to demonstrate that today,” Lewin said, sounding a little crest-fallen. He’d not done his homework.
Judge Nicklin, however, had. “It seems to me that you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. I’d barely had to say two words so far.
Judge Nicklin had checked out Inside Croydon. He’d seen that we have nearly 20,000 people signed up to receive alerts when we publish content, and that we have had 16million page views. And he’d even found that we have 15,000 followers on Twitter. Our ad manager, if we had one, would be a big fan of Judge Nicklin.
“It’s a bit of a stretch,” the judge said, addressing Lewin, “that you can keep a secret which has been seen by 16,000 people.”
Lewin was definitely crest-fallen now. I’m sure I heard him say something along the lines of, “The horse has bolted, m’lud.”
Also, I highly doubt somebody like Hotz is a) put himself forward / b) being hired, to do the mundane.
It could definitely all blow up. I am reminded of the Silicon Valley episode(s) where the Google-esque company boss fires everybody who is working on a new compression product and then ends up rehiring them all.
Let's see how it goes
Many low-end jobs that people are absent from have also contributed relatively little to economies or society ; this isn't to say we can abandon work on a large scale as yet, or function without large numbers of people working, but we will need to start to think a little differently about what that will entail.
It’s not just the West. Here is a startlingly bleak article on the plunging birth rates and dwindling populations of South Korea and Japan. They are dying out
One striking thing goes unmentioned. In the photos they are all still wearing masks. Everyone. Why? They have been terrified into defacing themselves
And if you want babies, a good place to start is to make kissing easier and allow beautiful faces to be seen
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/19/fear-older-future-japan-south-korea-birth-fertility-rates-population
Edit: I see already well dealt with by @pm215 .
If you make being in a couple horrible and unpleasant for one half, then strangely….