Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
In short, Newent is a toilet
There isn't a dock in Newent. Well, not since 1885.
And oddly, most people there are pretty friendly (apart from one wanker called Thomas I met on Lakeside once thirty years ago).
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
In short, Newent is a toilet
There isn't a dock in Newent. Well, not since 1885.
And oddly, most people there are pretty friendly (apart from one wanker called Thomas I met on Lakeside once thirty years ago).
Was it Sean Thomas? He used to post on here, but I believe succumbed to a profound breakdown after a failed experiment in gestalt therapy.
In other news the CMA investigation into petrol prices and the effect of the Asda buyout seems to have had an immediate result of Asda cutting prices immediately. Hopefully it will force the others to all follow suit and we get to 144p within 10-12 days before Xmas.
I checked the Petrol Prices app this morning and noticed the local Asda is now 5p/l cheaper than everywhere else - I thought that might have been a data entry error but maybe not. It's a bit far out of my way, though so I hope it does feed through.
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
In short, Newent is a toilet
There isn't a dock in Newent. Well, not since 1885.
And oddly, most people there are pretty friendly (apart from one wanker called Thomas I met on Lakeside once thirty years ago).
Was it Sean Thomas? He used to post on here, but I believe succumbed to a profound breakdown after a failed experiment in gestalt therapy.
He announced himself as 'shtomas.' But I thought it was because he was drunk at the time.
"The website politicalbetting.com is a poo-house of a dumpster fire, filled with wolverines that have lost their minds."
I told it to use the words "wolverines", "poo-house" and "dumpster". But that is all the instruction I gave to the AI
It came up with the idea of "a poo-house of a dumpster fire" and it came up with the clause "filled with wolverines that have lost their minds"
ChatGPT is creative. It is mindlessly creative, but it is creative. Indeed, that is Hunter S Thompson levels of creativity
How much of what appeared in the paragraph was your input? Clearly the names and descriptions.
I confess it was me that came up with "that overwanked ginge, Robert Smithson"
Well clearly!
You say that, but take this line "that slippery tit of a man, The Screaming Eagles, who spends all day watching the Test and spouting off about how great he is."
All I did was give it "that slippery tit of a man, The Screaming Eagles" - ChatGPT came up with the notion that TSE endlessly watches Test cricket, and is prone to boasting
When oil was previously ~£60 per barrel petrol prices were ~£1.43 per litre. Today they are ~£1.57 per litre. Neither the government nor opposition gives a shit about it and it is a huge source of our continued high inflation environment. Plus hitting forecourts is such an easy win for either party, everyone loathes them.
What was the pound/dollar exchange rate at that time? Serious question.
Hasn't Max factored that in by pricing oil in pounds?
You know, I hadn't actually spotted that. So used to seeing oil priced in dollars I filled in the blanks. So presumably yes!
No - max is deliberately misleading by implying it’s the petrol stations.
It’s entirely down to the FX change - their costs are in dollars which have gone up in pound terms (ie the pound is weaker). The balance is operating costs & margin plus excise and VAT all priced in pounds
But he quoted the price of oil in pounds, so its surely already taken account of?
The impact of FX is in the price he quoted
But his implication was that the petrol retailers were doing something wrong, which they aren’t
When oil was previously ~£60 per barrel petrol prices were ~£1.43 per litre. Today they are ~£1.57 per litre. Neither the government nor opposition gives a shit about it and it is a huge source of our continued high inflation environment. Plus hitting forecourts is such an easy win for either party, everyone loathes them.
What was the pound/dollar exchange rate at that time? Serious question.
Hasn't Max factored that in by pricing oil in pounds?
You know, I hadn't actually spotted that. So used to seeing oil priced in dollars I filled in the blanks. So presumably yes!
No - max is deliberately misleading by implying it’s the petrol stations.
It’s entirely down to the FX change - their costs are in dollars which have gone up in pound terms (ie the pound is weaker). The balance is operating costs & margin plus excise and VAT all priced in pounds
But he quoted the price of oil in pounds, so its surely already taken account of?
The impact of FX is in the price he quoted
But his implication was that the petrol retailers were doing something wrong, which they aren’t
Just Stop Oil might disagree.
But they're self-seeking hypocritical twats, so who cares what they think?
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
When oil was previously ~£60 per barrel petrol prices were ~£1.43 per litre. Today they are ~£1.57 per litre. Neither the government nor opposition gives a shit about it and it is a huge source of our continued high inflation environment. Plus hitting forecourts is such an easy win for either party, everyone loathes them.
What was the pound/dollar exchange rate at that time? Serious question.
Hasn't Max factored that in by pricing oil in pounds?
You know, I hadn't actually spotted that. So used to seeing oil priced in dollars I filled in the blanks. So presumably yes!
No - max is deliberately misleading by implying it’s the petrol stations.
It’s entirely down to the FX change - their costs are in dollars which have gone up in pound terms (ie the pound is weaker). The balance is operating costs & margin plus excise and VAT all priced in pounds
But he quoted the price of oil in pounds, so its surely already taken account of?
The impact of FX is in the price he quoted
But his implication was that the petrol retailers were doing something wrong, which they aren’t
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
In short, Newent is a toilet
Someone started very early today. Hic!
The output of the chatbot I would have thought, given his earlier comments in the thread.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
When oil was previously ~£60 per barrel petrol prices were ~£1.43 per litre. Today they are ~£1.57 per litre. Neither the government nor opposition gives a shit about it and it is a huge source of our continued high inflation environment. Plus hitting forecourts is such an easy win for either party, everyone loathes them.
What was the pound/dollar exchange rate at that time? Serious question.
Hasn't Max factored that in by pricing oil in pounds?
You know, I hadn't actually spotted that. So used to seeing oil priced in dollars I filled in the blanks. So presumably yes!
No - max is deliberately misleading by implying it’s the petrol stations.
It’s entirely down to the FX change - their costs are in dollars which have gone up in pound terms (ie the pound is weaker). The balance is operating costs & margin plus excise and VAT all priced in pounds
But he quoted the price of oil in pounds, so its surely already taken account of?
The impact of FX is in the price he quoted
But his implication was that the petrol retailers were doing something wrong, which they aren’t
But I'm making a comparison to the same sterling price of oil to petrol prices. When oil was last ~£60 per barrel petrol prices were 12-15p per litre cheaper and it wasn't years ago either. The retailers are gouging customers because they have all decided "independently" that price cuts aren't necessary.
Belatedly it seems Asda have been prodded into action by the CMA, but it should have happened weeks ago, sterling has been up off the floor for ages and oil prices have been falling for ages. There are independent filling stations doing 135-137p per litre so unless you think they're collectively selling at a loss it's clear to me that the major forecourts are padding their margins at the expense of the consumer. Hopefully this latests move by Asda will force everyone else to compete on price again and Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons will at least match Asda and ideally come in below because they're still making gigantic margins even at 151p.
"The website politicalbetting.com is a poo-house of a dumpster fire, filled with wolverines that have lost their minds."
I told it to use the words "wolverines", "poo-house" and "dumpster". But that is all the instruction I gave to the AI
It came up with the idea of "a poo-house of a dumpster fire" and it came up with the clause "filled with wolverines that have lost their minds"
ChatGPT is creative. It is mindlessly creative, but it is creative. Indeed, that is Hunter S Thompson levels of creativity
How much of what appeared in the paragraph was your input? Clearly the names and descriptions.
I confess it was me that came up with "that overwanked ginge, Robert Smithson"
Well clearly!
You say that, but take this line "that slippery tit of a man, The Screaming Eagles, who spends all day watching the Test and spouting off about how great he is."
All I did was give it "that slippery tit of a man, The Screaming Eagles" - ChatGPT came up with the notion that TSE endlessly watches Test cricket, and is prone to boasting
'Wolf-whistling, catcalling and staring persistently will be criminalised in England under plans backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63916328
So I assume the police will have to be going to a lot of building sites then?
Voters - stop wasting time on this and fix the boat migrants issue.
Not to mention knife crime, street robberies,....
Criminialising wolf whistling is the sort of law Harriet Harperson would introduce, I didn't realise we had elected a labour government. If we are going to start criminalising all sort of arseholery, they better start building a lot of new prisons.
How the hell do you regulate "staring persistently"? And why on Earth should the state be policing what you can look at?
That's the problem with this Woke Home Secretary.
Perhaps it's designed to deal with those who stare in astonishment at her latest stupid idea.
Well we also now have the if you make noise at a protest you can get banged up, now no staring laws.
Why don't we go the whole way, and have a secular version of Iran's Morality Police ?
IIRC Corbyn backed a suggestion for women only carriages on the tube. This was originally suggested by exactly the kind of TheoFascist loony you’d expect.
Man ahead of his time?
I remember Ladies Only compartments on British Rail. They were discontinued in 1977.
When oil was previously ~£60 per barrel petrol prices were ~£1.43 per litre. Today they are ~£1.57 per litre. Neither the government nor opposition gives a shit about it and it is a huge source of our continued high inflation environment. Plus hitting forecourts is such an easy win for either party, everyone loathes them.
What was the pound/dollar exchange rate at that time? Serious question.
Hasn't Max factored that in by pricing oil in pounds?
You know, I hadn't actually spotted that. So used to seeing oil priced in dollars I filled in the blanks. So presumably yes!
No - max is deliberately misleading by implying it’s the petrol stations.
It’s entirely down to the FX change - their costs are in dollars which have gone up in pound terms (ie the pound is weaker). The balance is operating costs & margin plus excise and VAT all priced in pounds
But he quoted the price of oil in pounds, so its surely already taken account of?
The impact of FX is in the price he quoted
But his implication was that the petrol retailers were doing something wrong, which they aren’t
But I'm making a comparison to the same sterling price of oil to petrol prices. When oil was last ~£60 per barrel petrol prices were 12-15p per litre cheaper and it wasn't years ago either. The retailers are gouging customers because they have all decided "independently" that price cuts aren't necessary.
Belatedly it seems Asda have been prodded into action by the CMA, but it should have happened weeks ago, sterling has been up off the floor for ages and oil prices have been falling for ages. There are independent filling stations doing 135-137p per litre so unless you think they're collectively selling at a loss it's clear to me that the major forecourts are padding their margins at the expense of the consumer. Hopefully this latests move by Asda will force everyone else to compete on price again and Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons will at least match Asda and ideally come in below because they're still making gigantic margins even at 151p.
Where? I haven't seen anyone below 150 for months - not even in Dursley where fuel is always very cheap for some odd reason.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
I think they just don't care or the problem is so big that they just deem it unsolveable. I'm not a huge fan of HS2 or Hinkley Point C, yet if they'd kicked both of those off in the early 00s instead of mid 10s both would be nearing completion and have been done at a third of the cost. It's almost as if the government is wired to think that "something will come along" to save the day so inaction this day is fine. We know it's not and now we've got an infrastructure deficit that will cost hundreds of billions to fill rather than 10s of billions had these projects all started 20 years ago.
I don't think we're talking rotten apples any more. More diseased orchards.
Possibly. However what is the rate of being charged/convicted of such crimes for all men in the UK vs those in the police? Clearly we want procedures that prevent any of these criminals getting into the police but many offenders are capable of hiding their offending, at least to an extent.
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
Going forward, part of our problem is going to be that Truss managed to toxify the conversation by being so bonkers.
She rightly pointed out that economic growth was important, but her solutions were politically and financially implausible.
In the same way, she has gone on for ages about the high cost of childcare, but her simplistic answers were unlikely to fly.
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
I saw a suggestion that what we need is to severely cut back the rules and challenge in big projects, since the massive delays in doing anything strategic is proving very harmful, with the trade off being giving locals more say on smaller things.
Obviously I'm on record as not a fan of the latter, but if it was the price for speeding up the big stuff it might be worth it. We go well beyond careful and cautious.
The Scottish town of Wick is a complete and utter shithole. This backwater town is so boring and uninteresting that it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. There is absolutely nothing to do in this godforsaken place, and the people who live here are the most dull and insipid individuals I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.
Furthermore, the people who live in Wick live the most tedious and uninteresting lives imaginable. They spend their days sitting in front of their televisions, staring blankly at the screen and mindlessly shoveling food into their faces. They have no hobbies or passions, and their only form of entertainment is gossiping about their neighbors and watching reality TV shows. They are the epitome of mediocrity and intellectual vacuity.
In addition to its dullness and lack of culture, Wick is also known for its obsession with UFOs, leather buckets, and aliens. The town is filled with conspiracy theorists who claim to have seen strange lights in the sky and who believe that the government is covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life. They are also known for their strange fetish for leather buckets and their obsession with the SNP.
To make matters even worse, Wick is also home to the infamous "sheep with all poo on him," as well as a large number of people who enjoy whittling and collecting flints. The town is also obsessed with the app What3Words, which they use to navigate their mundane and uninteresting lives.
Furthermore, the town is home to Stuart Dickson, who is known for his tiny penis and his surprising political opinions. The town is also filled with subsamples, and many residents are "woke" and constantly searching for social justice causes to support.
Furthermore, the town has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and many residents have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. In addition, there are a number of sexy teenage girls in the town, but they are often overshadowed by the dull and uninteresting personalities of the older residents.
Wick, as I said, is a shithole
This is probably the best thing you’ve posted in months. Para 5, genuine lol.
Interesting how it responds to Leon, too. "obsessed with the app What3Words".
It’s Leon aping AI though, not the other way round.
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
Yet - rules were created that small energy storage (a few megawatt hours) didn’t need planning as a full power station. Which enables storage at fast charging sites. So someone did some thinking.
Also the offshore wind process was streamlined… providing an application answers the set of questions - navigation, fish, birds etc, it can go through quite quickly, without the decades long planning rubbish. A eco-planning lawyer complained to me most bitterly on that one.
Again someone was thinking.
I’ve heard it said that the legal framework for RR mini-nukes is that if each one is identical to the others, it can skip the design review stages. Which have been very useful in delaying previous projects.
"The website politicalbetting.com is a poo-house of a dumpster fire, filled with wolverines that have lost their minds."
I told it to use the words "wolverines", "poo-house" and "dumpster". But that is all the instruction I gave to the AI
It came up with the idea of "a poo-house of a dumpster fire" and it came up with the clause "filled with wolverines that have lost their minds"
ChatGPT is creative. It is mindlessly creative, but it is creative. Indeed, that is Hunter S Thompson levels of creativity
How much of what appeared in the paragraph was your input? Clearly the names and descriptions.
I confess it was me that came up with "that overwanked ginge, Robert Smithson"
Well clearly!
You say that, but take this line "that slippery tit of a man, The Screaming Eagles, who spends all day watching the Test and spouting off about how great he is."
All I did was give it "that slippery tit of a man, The Screaming Eagles" - ChatGPT came up with the notion that TSE endlessly watches Test cricket, and is prone to boasting
Yes. Exactly
No other prompts? nothing about test cricket etc?
I told it to use the word "Test" at some point, I did not associate cricket with TSE and I certainly didn't mention his tendency to boast! I would not be so rude. ChatGPT doesn't care, tho
Using latest Techne and PP polling in the EMA gives the Tories 109 seats and Labour a 254 majority (Blair got 179 majority in 1997).
For @HYFUD, transferring all the 5.9% from Reform UK to the Tories gives the Tories 185 seats and Labour a comfortable 114 majority.
If you then transfer say half the Green share to Labour, then the Tories get 160 seats and Labour a 164 overall majority - approaching the Blair result in 1997.
185 still more than 1997. As I said earlier Starmer's lead over Sunak is no larger than Cameron's was over Brown 2 years before the 2010 general election which produced a hung parliament.
Yougov in July 2008 for example had the Conservatives on 47% and Labour on just 25%
Depends what the result of the next election is. I think a 45-50% chance of a small Lab majority now is about right.
I can see how Labour gets exactly the same swing as 1997 from 2019 i.e. 10.5% ( obviously Labour cannot get a landslide as they are starting with 70 seats less than Kinnock).
Let's say Labour 42% Tories 33%.
I think the Tories will still get about 200 seats like Howard in 2005 or Corbyn in 2019 but it is quite feasible now to see how Labour wins back nearly all their 2019 losses even seats like Bassetlaw plus wins seats in the South of England in Bournemouth, Worthing, Southend, Colchester etc that they didn't win in 1997.
I can only now see a big Labour underperformance in the West Midlands at the next election plus I'd be surprised if Labour didn't win at least a handful in Scotland such as east lothian, midlothian, kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Glasgow East etc. on the basis of recent by/election results.
I can see Labour 40% Tories 30% LDs 11% RefUK 5%, SNP 4%, Greens 4% as a plausible result.
Even that 10% Labour lead however, despite being slightly bigger than Blair's 9% lead over Hague in 2001 and with the Tories under Sunak doing no better than Major did in 1997, leaves Starmer 1 short of a majority once the boundary changes go through
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
In short, Newent is a toilet
Someone started very early today. Hic!
I didn't write that. ChatGPT wrote it. I just suggested a few words to use in its excellent description of Newent
"The website politicalbetting.com is a poo-house of a dumpster fire, filled with wolverines that have lost their minds."
I told it to use the words "wolverines", "poo-house" and "dumpster". But that is all the instruction I gave to the AI
It came up with the idea of "a poo-house of a dumpster fire" and it came up with the clause "filled with wolverines that have lost their minds"
ChatGPT is creative. It is mindlessly creative, but it is creative. Indeed, that is Hunter S Thompson levels of creativity
Well it's quite good. I think anyone who is unimpressed that a computer program can do this has gone remarkably quickly from wonder to entitlement. But it's not yet as good as a good human writer. The writing has a flat quality, like an overcast January Sunday at 3pm; like a drum machine or artificial speech, it is bereft of human variations of pace or technique. Mind you, I don't see why that can't be learned. Mind you, I quite enjoyed the inclusion if wolverines. Slightky reminiscent of Mark E Smith, though MES would have carried it off more surprisingly.
Anyway, for a glorious moment, @Leon, I thought you were actually in Newent. I thought you had started on your tour of unvisited Britain you suggested a few months back. Sadly not. But this too shows why humans still have a few years left: I would be genuinely interested to hear about your adventures in Newent. A chatbot, no matter how creative or clever, isn't going to have the encounters which will make up a human piece of writing Yet.
The Scottish town of Wick is a complete and utter shithole. This backwater town is so boring and uninteresting that it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. There is absolutely nothing to do in this godforsaken place, and the people who live here are the most dull and insipid individuals I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.
Furthermore, the people who live in Wick live the most tedious and uninteresting lives imaginable. They spend their days sitting in front of their televisions, staring blankly at the screen and mindlessly shoveling food into their faces. They have no hobbies or passions, and their only form of entertainment is gossiping about their neighbors and watching reality TV shows. They are the epitome of mediocrity and intellectual vacuity.
In addition to its dullness and lack of culture, Wick is also known for its obsession with UFOs, leather buckets, and aliens. The town is filled with conspiracy theorists who claim to have seen strange lights in the sky and who believe that the government is covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life. They are also known for their strange fetish for leather buckets and their obsession with the SNP.
To make matters even worse, Wick is also home to the infamous "sheep with all poo on him," as well as a large number of people who enjoy whittling and collecting flints. The town is also obsessed with the app What3Words, which they use to navigate their mundane and uninteresting lives.
Furthermore, the town is home to Stuart Dickson, who is known for his tiny penis and his surprising political opinions. The town is also filled with subsamples, and many residents are "woke" and constantly searching for social justice causes to support.
Furthermore, the town has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and many residents have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. In addition, there are a number of sexy teenage girls in the town, but they are often overshadowed by the dull and uninteresting personalities of the older residents.
Wick, as I said, is a shithole
Doesn't say much for AI. Or for you that you completely missed Pulteneytown within Wick itself and the area's considerable attractions.
I must have missed them too. From my experience that piece really ought to be published by the local tourist centre highlighting the attractions of the place.
Personally I blame the weather. It is consistently awful, always windy and usually raining. It drains the soul.
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
I think they just don't care or the problem is so big that they just deem it unsolveable. I'm not a huge fan of HS2 or Hinkley Point C, yet if they'd kicked both of those off in the early 00s instead of mid 10s both would be nearing completion and have been done at a third of the cost. It's almost as if the government is wired to think that "something will come along" to save the day so inaction this day is fine. We know it's not and now we've got an infrastructure deficit that will cost hundreds of billions to fill rather than 10s of billions had these projects all started 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, politicians have no real incentive to look past the next election.
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
In short, Newent is a toilet
Someone started very early today. Hic!
I didn't write that. ChatGPT wrote it. I just suggested a few words to use in its excellent description of Newent
It does seem as though you're automating your travel review job for the Knapper's Gazette and opinion pieces for the monthly Phallus Shaped Object periodical.
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance. The few shops that are still open are dismal and uninviting, with poorly stocked shelves and uninterested staff. Even the local pub, which is supposed to be the heart of the community, is a desolate and depressing place that serves watered down drinks and overpriced food.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town. They are also incredibly insular, with no interest in engaging with the outside world or trying new things. Instead, they are content to live their mundane and unfulfilling lives in this godforsaken town.
Newent is also known for its obsession with opinion polls and stepmoms. The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party. They are also known for their strange fascination with stepmoms and the issues they face.
To make matters even worse, Newent is home to "that wanker theuniondivvie" and "that idiot DuraAce," two of the most insufferable and annoying individuals imaginable. They can often be found hanging out at the dockside, harassing the ladies who work there and spouting off about their pointless and irrelevant opinions.
Furthermore, the town is obsessed with the latest technology, and many residents are eagerly anticipating the arrival of self-driving cars and other futuristic innovations. They are also known for their strange fascination with urinals and their obsession with the Home Secretary and Congress.
In short, Newent is a toilet
Someone started very early today. Hic!
I didn't write that. ChatGPT wrote it. I just suggested a few words to use in its excellent description of Newent
It's not really very accurate though, is it? It described you thus:
the elegant and multifarious gentleman Leon, who always manages to rise above the chaos and provide a level-headed and reasoned perspective.
Now, I ask you, how could anything that had an intelligence higher than that of say, a piece of moss or Dominic Cummings, have muddled you up with me?
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
Going forward, part of our problem is going to be that Truss managed to toxify the conversation by being so bonkers.
She rightly pointed out that economic growth was important, but her solutions were politically and financially implausible.
In the same way, she has gone on for ages about the high cost of childcare, but her simplistic answers were unlikely to fly.
According to the FT, Truss is briefing that she has “lost the battle, but not the war”.
The Scottish town of Wick is a complete and utter shithole. This backwater town is so boring and uninteresting that it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. There is absolutely nothing to do in this godforsaken place, and the people who live here are the most dull and insipid individuals I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.
Furthermore, the people who live in Wick live the most tedious and uninteresting lives imaginable. They spend their days sitting in front of their televisions, staring blankly at the screen and mindlessly shoveling food into their faces. They have no hobbies or passions, and their only form of entertainment is gossiping about their neighbors and watching reality TV shows. They are the epitome of mediocrity and intellectual vacuity.
In addition to its dullness and lack of culture, Wick is also known for its obsession with UFOs, leather buckets, and aliens. The town is filled with conspiracy theorists who claim to have seen strange lights in the sky and who believe that the government is covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life. They are also known for their strange fetish for leather buckets and their obsession with the SNP.
To make matters even worse, Wick is also home to the infamous "sheep with all poo on him," as well as a large number of people who enjoy whittling and collecting flints. The town is also obsessed with the app What3Words, which they use to navigate their mundane and uninteresting lives.
Furthermore, the town is home to Stuart Dickson, who is known for his tiny penis and his surprising political opinions. The town is also filled with subsamples, and many residents are "woke" and constantly searching for social justice causes to support.
Furthermore, the town has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and many residents have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. In addition, there are a number of sexy teenage girls in the town, but they are often overshadowed by the dull and uninteresting personalities of the older residents.
Wick, as I said, is a shithole
Doesn't say much for AI. Or for you that you completely missed Pulteneytown within Wick itself and the area's considerable attractions.
I must have missed them too. From my experience that piece really ought to be published by the local tourist centre highlighting the attractions of the place.
Personally I blame the weather. It is consistently awful, always windy and usually raining. It drains the soul.
Love the wind. And the scenery. And the whisky. Wildlife, history, buildings. Some folk don't know when they are lucky to be in Wick.
'Wolf-whistling, catcalling and staring persistently will be criminalised in England under plans backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63916328
So I assume the police will have to be going to a lot of building sites then?
Voters - stop wasting time on this and fix the boat migrants issue.
Not to mention knife crime, street robberies,....
Criminialising wolf whistling is the sort of law Harriet Harperson would introduce, I didn't realise we had elected a labour government. If we are going to start criminalising all sort of arseholery, they better start building a lot of new prisons.
How the hell do you regulate "staring persistently"? And why on Earth should the state be policing what you can look at?
That's the problem with this Woke Home Secretary.
Perhaps it's designed to deal with those who stare in astonishment at her latest stupid idea.
Well we also now have the if you make noise at a protest you can get banged up, now no staring laws.
I am old enough to remember when being arrested "for looking at me in a funny way" was regarded as satire:
The sad thing is the opposition are welcoming this new legislation....the whole point of an opposition is to point out when the government are making stupid laws.
I don't particularly have a problem with criminalising persistent public sexual harassment, indeed it has merit.
Staring seems a bit much though it is bad manners.
Harassment is already a crime, whether in public or private, sexual or otherwise.
As for staring, a perp might be able to get away with it if he adopts a "no tells" facial expression, dons dark glasses, and stares at a reasonably large angle to straight ahead.
Ah so make like Roy Orbison. But don't start singing Pretty Woman.
Great song, but exceptionally creepy if you take the lyrics seriously.
Yep that's what I mean. Totally gives the game away.
The lyrics aren’t creepy at all.
The man looks longingly at the woman, thinks she has ignored him, and then sees her approaching after all.
Where’s the creepy bit?
It's enigmatic and yearning but my take is he's clearly on the path to stalking.
But TUD is right that Living Doll blows everything else in the genre away. Surprised Cliff hasn't been taken to task for that song.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
You might add the point that the affair has a particular interest in Scotland. Ms Mone (which she was then, being precise) was repeatedly held up as a shining example of Unionist businesspersonship that the Scots would lose if they voted Yes to indy. No doubt the frequency was, in part, due to the opportunity with which pics of lingerie models could be shoehorned in, but the resulting column inches, or rather yardage, are undeniable. They have had their impact. What that impact will end up as being remains to be seen.
'Wolf-whistling, catcalling and staring persistently will be criminalised in England under plans backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63916328
So I assume the police will have to be going to a lot of building sites then?
Voters - stop wasting time on this and fix the boat migrants issue.
Not to mention knife crime, street robberies,....
Criminialising wolf whistling is the sort of law Harriet Harperson would introduce, I didn't realise we had elected a labour government. If we are going to start criminalising all sort of arseholery, they better start building a lot of new prisons.
How the hell do you regulate "staring persistently"? And why on Earth should the state be policing what you can look at?
That's the problem with this Woke Home Secretary.
Perhaps it's designed to deal with those who stare in astonishment at her latest stupid idea.
Well we also now have the if you make noise at a protest you can get banged up, now no staring laws.
Why don't we go the whole way, and have a secular version of Iran's Morality Police ?
IIRC Corbyn backed a suggestion for women only carriages on the tube. This was originally suggested by exactly the kind of TheoFascist loony you’d expect.
Man ahead of his time?
I remember Ladies Only compartments on British Rail. They were discontinued in 1977.
They wouldn't work now. Anyone can self-ID as a woman.
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
All South Koreans to become younger as traditional age system scrapped ... Koreans are deemed to be a year old when born and a year is added every 1 January. It’s this age most commonly cited by Koreans in everyday life.
A separate system also exists for conscription purposes or calculating the legal age to drink alcohol and smoke, in which a person’s age is calculated from zero at birth and a year is added on 1 January.
So someone born on 31 December turned 2 the next day? Confusing.
Personally I'm in favour of the new year reverting to sometime in March, end of winter. Yes, its unfair on the southern hemisphere, but we outnumber them.
I always wanted a thirteen month calendar system. 28 days x 13 = 364. Give one month an extra day and then ANOTHER one every four years to cover the leap year and that would be great.
I know either Danny Wallace or Dave Gorman did a comedy show around this, and it appears to work better than the current bollocks.
It seemed great to me, until I thought about it harder as an accountant and then went...... "quarterly reporting........ ahhhhhh.... won't work."
But changing our time and calendar system to something 'metric' seems like a good idea (but will never happen). How many days in a quarter? Depending on how you count it, could be anywhere between 89 and 92.
And don't get me started on the Gregorian calendar anyway. It's wrong. Not as bad as the Julian one, but still, won't we have a problem in 4000 years or so..... I'm thinking long term here....... doesn't it count the leap years wrong anyway?
'Wolf-whistling, catcalling and staring persistently will be criminalised in England under plans backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63916328
So I assume the police will have to be going to a lot of building sites then?
Voters - stop wasting time on this and fix the boat migrants issue.
Not to mention knife crime, street robberies,....
Criminialising wolf whistling is the sort of law Harriet Harperson would introduce, I didn't realise we had elected a labour government. If we are going to start criminalising all sort of arseholery, they better start building a lot of new prisons.
How the hell do you regulate "staring persistently"? And why on Earth should the state be policing what you can look at?
That's the problem with this Woke Home Secretary.
Perhaps it's designed to deal with those who stare in astonishment at her latest stupid idea.
Well we also now have the if you make noise at a protest you can get banged up, now no staring laws.
Why don't we go the whole way, and have a secular version of Iran's Morality Police ?
IIRC Corbyn backed a suggestion for women only carriages on the tube. This was originally suggested by exactly the kind of TheoFascist loony you’d expect.
Man ahead of his time?
I remember Ladies Only compartments on British Rail. They were discontinued in 1977.
They wouldn't work now. Anyone can self-ID as a woman.
'Wolf-whistling, catcalling and staring persistently will be criminalised in England under plans backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63916328
So I assume the police will have to be going to a lot of building sites then?
Voters - stop wasting time on this and fix the boat migrants issue.
Not to mention knife crime, street robberies,....
Criminialising wolf whistling is the sort of law Harriet Harperson would introduce, I didn't realise we had elected a labour government. If we are going to start criminalising all sort of arseholery, they better start building a lot of new prisons.
How the hell do you regulate "staring persistently"? And why on Earth should the state be policing what you can look at?
That's the problem with this Woke Home Secretary.
Perhaps it's designed to deal with those who stare in astonishment at her latest stupid idea.
Well we also now have the if you make noise at a protest you can get banged up, now no staring laws.
Why don't we go the whole way, and have a secular version of Iran's Morality Police ?
IIRC Corbyn backed a suggestion for women only carriages on the tube. This was originally suggested by exactly the kind of TheoFascist loony you’d expect.
Man ahead of his time?
I remember Ladies Only compartments on British Rail. They were discontinued in 1977.
They wouldn't work now. Anyone can self-ID as a woman.
Only in Scotland.
Not true. Anyone can. Whethers it is official for certain matters is another matter.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
You might add the point that the affair has a particular interest in Scotland. Ms Mone (which she was then, being precise) was repeatedly held up as a shining example of Unionist businesspersonship that the Scots would lose if they voted Yes to indy. No doubt the frequency was, in part, due to the opportunity with which pics of lingerie models could be shoehorned in, but the resulting column inches, or rather yardage, are undeniable. They have had their impact. What that impact will end up as being remains to be seen.
Yes I was rather disappointed to discover she is Scottish.
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
You might add the point that the affair has a particular interest in Scotland. Ms Mone (which she was then, being precise) was repeatedly held up as a shining example of Unionist businesspersonship that the Scots would lose if they voted Yes to indy. No doubt the frequency was, in part, due to the opportunity with which pics of lingerie models could be shoehorned in, but the resulting column inches, or rather yardage, are undeniable. They have had their impact. What that impact will end up as being remains to be seen.
Yes I was rather disappointed to discover she is Scottish.
Not even sure if she is by birth? But she was certainly resident and operating her lingerie company in Scotland and making a great to-do about shutting it down in the event of a Yes vote and moving it south of the border or wherever. Didn't help her image when she moved anyway and when the firm shut down anyway, of course, after she sold it. But this new stuff has the potential to be massively different.
One of the weirdest things about ChatGPT is it seems to work better IF YOU ARE POLITE
The training dataset will have been nicely formulated questions.
Yes. Must be something like that. I'm not the only person to notice. It also works better if you are friendly and casual "ooh, that's great. Thanks ChatGPT. lol, I'm talking to you like a human! Anyway, can we do this instead..."
If you talk like that it will respond quicker and more lucidly
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
Yet all the things they were mad at were happening under Boris too, yet they surge now.
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
But there’s an idea here that there is a bunch of underemployed people who could be fencing.
The Scottish town of Wick is a complete and utter shithole. This backwater town is so boring and uninteresting that it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. There is absolutely nothing to do in this godforsaken place, and the people who live here are the most dull and insipid individuals I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.
Furthermore, the people who live in Wick live the most tedious and uninteresting lives imaginable. They spend their days sitting in front of their televisions, staring blankly at the screen and mindlessly shoveling food into their faces. They have no hobbies or passions, and their only form of entertainment is gossiping about their neighbors and watching reality TV shows. They are the epitome of mediocrity and intellectual vacuity.
In addition to its dullness and lack of culture, Wick is also known for its obsession with UFOs, leather buckets, and aliens. The town is filled with conspiracy theorists who claim to have seen strange lights in the sky and who believe that the government is covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life. They are also known for their strange fetish for leather buckets and their obsession with the SNP.
To make matters even worse, Wick is also home to the infamous "sheep with all poo on him," as well as a large number of people who enjoy whittling and collecting flints. The town is also obsessed with the app What3Words, which they use to navigate their mundane and uninteresting lives.
Furthermore, the town is home to Stuart Dickson, who is known for his tiny penis and his surprising political opinions. The town is also filled with subsamples, and many residents are "woke" and constantly searching for social justice causes to support.
Furthermore, the town has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and many residents have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. In addition, there are a number of sexy teenage girls in the town, but they are often overshadowed by the dull and uninteresting personalities of the older residents.
Wick, as I said, is a shithole
Is that GPT doing a mad Englishman who's mislaid his prose style ?
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
I think they just don't care or the problem is so big that they just deem it unsolveable. I'm not a huge fan of HS2 or Hinkley Point C, yet if they'd kicked both of those off in the early 00s instead of mid 10s both would be nearing completion and have been done at a third of the cost. It's almost as if the government is wired to think that "something will come along" to save the day so inaction this day is fine. We know it's not and now we've got an infrastructure deficit that will cost hundreds of billions to fill rather than 10s of billions had these projects all started 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, politicians have no real incentive to look past the next election.
It has been noted in private and public matters that a long process can suit the decision makers.
If it takes 10 years to get a project done, then the person who started the project has moved jobs and the person after them has probably moved as well. So neither can be blamed for the result.
The person who is there when the project competes can blame their predecessors - after all they only came in at the end.
So no-one is to blame for the zillion pound fuck up. Promotions all round.
"Been playing around with ChatGPT and we are all fucked. The book publishing industry is about to be completely steamrolled by AI. Here's a quick thread showing how ChatGPT is about to absolutely displace this industry:"
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
But there’s an idea here that there is a bunch of underemployed people who could be fencing.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
There's something like 1m extra people in the long term sick column, especially in the over 50s that weren't there before COVID. We're the only country experiencing this too, so it's unlikely to be related to COVID. What it seems to me is that the benefits system has become too generous and too easy to live off for people determined not to work. We had the same phenomenon in the mid 00s, it wasn't until the Tories won and started the benefit sanctions for the "sick" that they got of their arses and got jobs.
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
I think they just don't care or the problem is so big that they just deem it unsolveable. I'm not a huge fan of HS2 or Hinkley Point C, yet if they'd kicked both of those off in the early 00s instead of mid 10s both would be nearing completion and have been done at a third of the cost. It's almost as if the government is wired to think that "something will come along" to save the day so inaction this day is fine. We know it's not and now we've got an infrastructure deficit that will cost hundreds of billions to fill rather than 10s of billions had these projects all started 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, politicians have no real incentive to look past the next election.
It has been noted in private and public matters that a long process can suit the decision makers.
If it takes 10 years to get a project done, then the person who started the project has moved jobs and the person after them has probably moved as well. So neither can be blamed for the result.
The person who is there when the project competes can blame their predecessors - after all they only came in at the end.
So no-one is to blame for the zillion pound fuck up. Promotions all round.
Mentioned in the Yes Minister book:
I begin to see that senior civil servants in the open structure have, surprisingly enough, almost as brilliant minds as they themselves would claim to have. However, since there are virtually no goals or targets that can be achieved by a civil servant personally, his high IQ is usually devoted to the avoidance of error. Civil servants are posted to new jobs every three years or so. This is supposed to gain them all-round experience on the way to the top. In practice, it merely ensures that they can never have any personal interest in achieving the success of a policy: a policy of any complexity takes longer than three years to see through from start to finish, so a civil servant either has to leave it before its passage is completed or he arrives on the scene long after it started. This also means you can never pin the blame for failure on any individual: the man in charge at the end will say it was started wrong, and the man in charge at the beginning will say it was finished wrong. ... Afterthought: considering that the avoidance of error is their main priority, it is surprising how many errors they make!
'Wolf-whistling, catcalling and staring persistently will be criminalised in England under plans backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63916328
So I assume the police will have to be going to a lot of building sites then?
Voters - stop wasting time on this and fix the boat migrants issue.
Not to mention knife crime, street robberies,....
Criminialising wolf whistling is the sort of law Harriet Harperson would introduce, I didn't realise we had elected a labour government. If we are going to start criminalising all sort of arseholery, they better start building a lot of new prisons.
How the hell do you regulate "staring persistently"? And why on Earth should the state be policing what you can look at?
That's the problem with this Woke Home Secretary.
Perhaps it's designed to deal with those who stare in astonishment at her latest stupid idea.
Well we also now have the if you make noise at a protest you can get banged up, now no staring laws.
I am old enough to remember when being arrested "for looking at me in a funny way" was regarded as satire:
The sad thing is the opposition are welcoming this new legislation....the whole point of an opposition is to point out when the government are making stupid laws.
I don't particularly have a problem with criminalising persistent public sexual harassment, indeed it has merit.
Staring seems a bit much though it is bad manners.
Harassment is already a crime, whether in public or private, sexual or otherwise.
As for staring, a perp might be able to get away with it if he adopts a "no tells" facial expression, dons dark glasses, and stares at a reasonably large angle to straight ahead.
Ah so make like Roy Orbison. But don't start singing Pretty Woman.
Great song, but exceptionally creepy if you take the lyrics seriously.
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
But there’s an idea here that there is a bunch of underemployed people who could be fencing.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
Because they are not paid enough for tiring, physical work. So the corporate lobby gets the government to let in people from developing countries, for whom the real return is much higher at the same wage, to come in to do it. And the rest of the country picks up the cost in terms of housing prices, congestion, pension etc.
'Wolf-whistling, catcalling and staring persistently will be criminalised in England under plans backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63916328
So I assume the police will have to be going to a lot of building sites then?
Voters - stop wasting time on this and fix the boat migrants issue.
Not to mention knife crime, street robberies,....
Criminialising wolf whistling is the sort of law Harriet Harperson would introduce, I didn't realise we had elected a labour government. If we are going to start criminalising all sort of arseholery, they better start building a lot of new prisons.
How the hell do you regulate "staring persistently"? And why on Earth should the state be policing what you can look at?
That's the problem with this Woke Home Secretary.
Perhaps it's designed to deal with those who stare in astonishment at her latest stupid idea.
Well we also now have the if you make noise at a protest you can get banged up, now no staring laws.
I am old enough to remember when being arrested "for looking at me in a funny way" was regarded as satire:
The sad thing is the opposition are welcoming this new legislation....the whole point of an opposition is to point out when the government are making stupid laws.
I don't particularly have a problem with criminalising persistent public sexual harassment, indeed it has merit.
Staring seems a bit much though it is bad manners.
Harassment is already a crime, whether in public or private, sexual or otherwise.
As for staring, a perp might be able to get away with it if he adopts a "no tells" facial expression, dons dark glasses, and stares at a reasonably large angle to straight ahead.
Ah so make like Roy Orbison. But don't start singing Pretty Woman.
Great song, but exceptionally creepy if you take the lyrics seriously.
Every breath you take?
Every move you make, I'll be staring at you persistently.
The Scottish town of Wick is a complete and utter shithole. This backwater town is so boring and uninteresting that it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. There is absolutely nothing to do in this godforsaken place, and the people who live here are the most dull and insipid individuals I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.
Furthermore, the people who live in Wick live the most tedious and uninteresting lives imaginable. They spend their days sitting in front of their televisions, staring blankly at the screen and mindlessly shoveling food into their faces. They have no hobbies or passions, and their only form of entertainment is gossiping about their neighbors and watching reality TV shows. They are the epitome of mediocrity and intellectual vacuity.
In addition to its dullness and lack of culture, Wick is also known for its obsession with UFOs, leather buckets, and aliens. The town is filled with conspiracy theorists who claim to have seen strange lights in the sky and who believe that the government is covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life. They are also known for their strange fetish for leather buckets and their obsession with the SNP.
To make matters even worse, Wick is also home to the infamous "sheep with all poo on him," as well as a large number of people who enjoy whittling and collecting flints. The town is also obsessed with the app What3Words, which they use to navigate their mundane and uninteresting lives.
Furthermore, the town is home to Stuart Dickson, who is known for his tiny penis and his surprising political opinions. The town is also filled with subsamples, and many residents are "woke" and constantly searching for social justice causes to support.
Furthermore, the town has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and many residents have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. In addition, there are a number of sexy teenage girls in the town, but they are often overshadowed by the dull and uninteresting personalities of the older residents.
Wick, as I said, is a shithole
Is that GPT doing a mad Englishman who's mislaid his prose style ?
The Scottish town of Wick is a complete and utter shithole. This backwater town is so boring and uninteresting that it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. There is absolutely nothing to do in this godforsaken place, and the people who live here are the most dull and insipid individuals I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.
Furthermore, the people who live in Wick live the most tedious and uninteresting lives imaginable. They spend their days sitting in front of their televisions, staring blankly at the screen and mindlessly shoveling food into their faces. They have no hobbies or passions, and their only form of entertainment is gossiping about their neighbors and watching reality TV shows. They are the epitome of mediocrity and intellectual vacuity.
In addition to its dullness and lack of culture, Wick is also known for its obsession with UFOs, leather buckets, and aliens. The town is filled with conspiracy theorists who claim to have seen strange lights in the sky and who believe that the government is covering up the existence of extraterrestrial life. They are also known for their strange fetish for leather buckets and their obsession with the SNP.
To make matters even worse, Wick is also home to the infamous "sheep with all poo on him," as well as a large number of people who enjoy whittling and collecting flints. The town is also obsessed with the app What3Words, which they use to navigate their mundane and uninteresting lives.
Furthermore, the town is home to Stuart Dickson, who is known for his tiny penis and his surprising political opinions. The town is also filled with subsamples, and many residents are "woke" and constantly searching for social justice causes to support.
Furthermore, the town has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and many residents have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. In addition, there are a number of sexy teenage girls in the town, but they are often overshadowed by the dull and uninteresting personalities of the older residents.
Wick, as I said, is a shithole
Is that GPT doing a mad Englishman who's mislaid his prose style ?
Yes
It's developed to the stage where you're willing to have sex with it
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
You might add the point that the affair has a particular interest in Scotland. Ms Mone (which she was then, being precise) was repeatedly held up as a shining example of Unionist businesspersonship that the Scots would lose if they voted Yes to indy. No doubt the frequency was, in part, due to the opportunity with which pics of lingerie models could be shoehorned in, but the resulting column inches, or rather yardage, are undeniable. They have had their impact. What that impact will end up as being remains to be seen.
Yes I was rather disappointed to discover she is Scottish.
Scoddish is I believe the term in that particular transatlantic twang that jetsetters like Money and Lulu adopt as the pounds come rolling in. At least Lulu earned hers.
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
I think they just don't care or the problem is so big that they just deem it unsolveable. I'm not a huge fan of HS2 or Hinkley Point C, yet if they'd kicked both of those off in the early 00s instead of mid 10s both would be nearing completion and have been done at a third of the cost. It's almost as if the government is wired to think that "something will come along" to save the day so inaction this day is fine. We know it's not and now we've got an infrastructure deficit that will cost hundreds of billions to fill rather than 10s of billions had these projects all started 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, politicians have no real incentive to look past the next election.
It has been noted in private and public matters that a long process can suit the decision makers.
If it takes 10 years to get a project done, then the person who started the project has moved jobs and the person after them has probably moved as well. So neither can be blamed for the result.
The person who is there when the project competes can blame their predecessors - after all they only came in at the end.
So no-one is to blame for the zillion pound fuck up. Promotions all round.
Mentioned in the Yes Minister book:
I begin to see that senior civil servants in the open structure have, surprisingly enough, almost as brilliant minds as they themselves would claim to have. However, since there are virtually no goals or targets that can be achieved by a civil servant personally, his high IQ is usually devoted to the avoidance of error. Civil servants are posted to new jobs every three years or so. This is supposed to gain them all-round experience on the way to the top. In practice, it merely ensures that they can never have any personal interest in achieving the success of a policy: a policy of any complexity takes longer than three years to see through from start to finish, so a civil servant either has to leave it before its passage is completed or he arrives on the scene long after it started. This also means you can never pin the blame for failure on any individual: the man in charge at the end will say it was started wrong, and the man in charge at the beginning will say it was finished wrong. ... Afterthought: considering that the avoidance of error is their main priority, it is surprising how many errors they make!
Indeed. IIRC it was suggested that, in the MOD, the result of a project you started would be tied to your career. So if you started a project the result would follow you. The horror with which the idea was met was hilarious.
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
But there’s an idea here that there is a bunch of underemployed people who could be fencing.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
There's something like 1m extra people in the long term sick column, especially in the over 50s that weren't there before COVID. We're the only country experiencing this too, so it's unlikely to be related to COVID. What it seems to me is that the benefits system has become too generous and too easy to live off for people determined not to work. We had the same phenomenon in the mid 00s, it wasn't until the Tories won and started the benefit sanctions for the "sick" that they got of their arses and got jobs.
The benefits system hasn’t got more generous though, has it?
The current theory is that the collapse of NHS services has meant long Coviders are not being helped back into work, although I confess that doesn’t completely satisfy me, either.
Also, 50+ “idlers” are not suddenly going to take up fencing.
"Been playing around with ChatGPT and we are all fucked. The book publishing industry is about to be completely steamrolled by AI. Here's a quick thread showing how ChatGPT is about to absolutely displace this industry:"
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
World cup to Qatar and the French get rather a lot of defence orders.
Incidently, whether or not the Grauniad have this story correct, what is the status of the money? If money was paid for goods not delivered, or deemed not to be fit for the role, surely the government is going after the suppliers for the money back?
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
But there’s an idea here that there is a bunch of underemployed people who could be fencing.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
There's something like 1m extra people in the long term sick column, especially in the over 50s that weren't there before COVID. We're the only country experiencing this too, so it's unlikely to be related to COVID. What it seems to me is that the benefits system has become too generous and too easy to live off for people determined not to work. We had the same phenomenon in the mid 00s, it wasn't until the Tories won and started the benefit sanctions for the "sick" that they got of their arses and got jobs.
The benefits system hasn’t got more generous though, has it?
The current theory is that the collapse of NHS services has meant long Coviders are not being helped back into work, although I confess that doesn’t completely satisfy me, either.
Also, 50+ “idlers” are not suddenly going to take up fencing.
No, but new entrants to the workforce might. Especially when automation eliminated a bunch of other jobs they would have gone into previously.
Setting aside any views on his policies and philosophy, can you name a minister who has had more influence on society in recent years - without holding a Cabinet position - than Nick Gibb?
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
But there’s an idea here that there is a bunch of underemployed people who could be fencing.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
There's something like 1m extra people in the long term sick column, especially in the over 50s that weren't there before COVID. We're the only country experiencing this too, so it's unlikely to be related to COVID. What it seems to me is that the benefits system has become too generous and too easy to live off for people determined not to work. We had the same phenomenon in the mid 00s, it wasn't until the Tories won and started the benefit sanctions for the "sick" that they got of their arses and got jobs.
The benefits system hasn’t got more generous though, has it?
The current theory is that the collapse of NHS services has meant long Coviders are not being helped back into work, although I confess that doesn’t completely satisfy me, either.
Also, 50+ “idlers” are not suddenly going to take up fencing.
The fifty/sixtysomethings have essentially retired, haven't they? Not on formal pensions yet, sure, but on savings and perhaps the windfall they made when they sold their big house.
Hard to see how much they'd have to be paid to return to the working world.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
World cup to Qatar and the French get rather a lot of defence orders.
Incidently, whether or not the Grauniad have this story correct, what is the status of the money? If money was paid for goods not delivered, or deemed not to be fit for the role, surely the government is going after the suppliers for the money back?
I'm talking about UK political scandals. I agree if we go global there are bigger ones. I believe the government is trying to recover its money, and perhaps coincidentally Lady Mone is selling her properties and yacht. The real scandal is the VIP lane system that the government put in place, which seems (as one would have imagined) to have hindered rather than helped the cost effective delivery of equipment. Setting up that system was at best stupid and naive, at worst a deliberate invitation to corruption. We need an independent inquiry, urgently.
From Previous Thread, "BIDEN’S PRESSING FOR THE WH2024 PRIMARIES TO START WITH S CAROLINA"
Mike adds,
"Surely it’s not because he thinks it will help him! There is a big argument going on in the Democratic party about the sequencing of primaries for the 2024 White House race. Above is a table of what happened in the first four primaries last time and how Biden struggled in the first 3 but it all came good for him in South Carolina.
Now he wants 2024 primaries to start with South Carolina .
This looks like special pleading from the incumbent because clearly it would mean his effort to get the nomination would start with a big boost. Following the normal timetable and could mean some difficult going and that would be very risky for the 80 year old"
SSI - While this is correct, AS FAR AS IT GOES, this commentary by OGH totally ignores the following:
> Iowa 2020 Democratic precinct caucuses were an organizational shit-show, thanks to the incompetence of both Iowa Democratic Party "leadership" AND the DNC "leadership". As punters may recall?
> AND not the for the FIRST time, for example the 2008 Republican precinct caucuses, when Iowa Republican Party "leaders" declared (in time for New Hampshire Primary) that Mitt Romney was the winner . . . only to latter declare (correctly) that REAL winner was Rick Santorum.
> Plus fact that Iowa is becoming less - not more - representative of the national Democratic electorate. Or even the Democratic voters of the Midwest.
> Also note that, for all the guff and bumpf about how the caucus process compels POTUS hopefuls to reach out to the grassroots in every bowling alley, watering hole and country crossroads in the great Hawkeye State, fact is that the Iowa precinct caucuses, from the state's perspective, are really a quadrennial cottage industry AND wonderful fundraising mechanism for the state's Democratic AND Republican parties.
> Finally (for this screed) the Democratic Party has been committed for years to replacing precinct caucuses with PRIMARIES. Why? Because precinct caucuses turnout for pct meetings is MUCH less than for primaries, because of the practical impediments to attending a caucus as opposed to casting a ballot, either on primary day or via early voting, via in-person or postal voting.
Please note that I am speaking as a proud veteran of the Iowa precinct caucuses, having spent weeks in the state as an presidential campaign organizer, down at the ground level. AND also have worked on targeting & analysis for Iowa precinct caucuses as an campaign consultant.
So I have some basis for my opinions, more I suspect that OGH in this particular instance.
Problem seems to be we have spent the 2010s imposing fiendishly cumbersome but ambiguous planning rules.
Yup, nothing gets build here and any time someone wants to build something there's 17 court cases, 2 judicial reviews and usually 3 changes of government.
The government seems not to know or care. Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
The government (Mays? Cameron’s?) tried to reduce childcare costs by changing the limit I think from 3 to 4 children per adult and were screamed down
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
It’s actually quite depressing that there are apparently enough twats prepared to tell pollsters that they will vote for Reform - a party that has done nothing, has nobody and stands for very little - as support the LibDems who, whatever your politics, have a long-standing place in British politics and take their policy making seriously.
The only consolation is that there won’t actually be a Reform (sic) candidate in most constituencies come the election.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Really? The biggest? You either have a poor memory, or this is a recency bias (we attribute more recent events as better or worse than more distant ones).
More than £200mn of taxpayers money given to a shady offshore network of companies whose beneficiary seems to be a politician from the governing party and her family, by ministers from the same party, for defective equipment, with £100mn of profits, in the middle of a pandemic, via a channel set up to prioritise people close to the governing party... It puts Neil Hamilton's brown envelopes full of banknotes to shame that's for sure. £200mn is a hell of a lot of money, and based on what the Graun is reporting it looks like pretty outrageous corruption. What scandal do you remember that's bigger than this one?
World cup to Qatar and the French get rather a lot of defence orders.
Incidently, whether or not the Grauniad have this story correct, what is the status of the money? If money was paid for goods not delivered, or deemed not to be fit for the role, surely the government is going after the suppliers for the money back?
I'm talking about UK political scandals. I agree if we go global there are bigger ones. I believe the government is trying to recover its money, and perhaps coincidentally Lady Mone is selling her properties and yacht. The real scandal is the VIP lane system that the government put in place, which seems (as one would have imagined) to have hindered rather than helped the cost effective delivery of equipment. Setting up that system was at best stupid and naive, at worst a deliberate invitation to corruption. We need an independent inquiry, urgently.
I agree we should look at what happened. I only ask, as always, judge by what was happening at the time. France, our dear friends and allies impounded and seized PPE that was on its way to the UK. Labour was screaming about lack of PPE.
The government did its best and got some things badly wrong. I suspect, from the Graun story, the Mone is a wrong 'un and hopefully will be persued to the full extent of the law if laws have been broken.
Setting aside any views on his policies and philosophy, can you name a minister who has had more influence on society in recent years - without holding a Cabinet position - than Nick Gibb?
I'm surprised someone I'd barely heard of has stuck around for so long across multiple PMs. What's his secret?
The DfE like him because he agrees with everything they say. Most ministers get moved on because their civil servants find a way to bad mouth them.
He is a muppet, though. Just take this:
“I’m always surprised and disappointed when I hear schools, certainly some primary schools, saying, ‘We are just focusing on English and maths in Year 5 and 6 because that is what we are being tested on,’” he says. “That is not my objective, it is not government policy. And, actually, it will hinder getting good results in English and maths. It is a mistake to have a reductionist approach to education.”
I am willing to bet that not one single teacher has ever said that to him. What they will have said - and they are right to say this - is that they have to focus on English and Maths in Years 5 and 6 because the curriculum is so overstuffed there literally is no time to do anything else.
And who wrote the curriculum? He did. Who created the new assessments, that prize rote learning ahead of understanding? He did.
So who is to blame for this 'reductionist' approach? Well - actually it's him.
He may flatter himself he understands education. But he does not. He has read many papers, but only those that agree with his prejudices. He has implemented many policies designed to return us to some mythical pre-progressive utopia, but never paused to ask himself if there was a reason why they were abandonedby a Conservative government whose education secretary was Margaret Thatcher in the first place. He visits schools only to bark at people he doesn't like.
Influential? Undoubtedly. He has done more damage than any other government minister or politician.
’Exclusive poll: Tories face WIPEOUT at General Election as Reform UK support surges’
A new poll by People’s Polling for GB News, found Labour is on 47% of the national vote, the Conservative Party down to 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Greens on 6% and Reform on 9%.
This represents a one-point fall for Conservatives and a one-point jump for Labour from last week, increasing the gap between the two parties to 27 points.
It comes amid reports “Red Wall” MPs are being courted by Reform as it seeks a wave of Ukip-style defections among dissatisfied Tories.
More than 7,000 grassroots Conservatives have joined Reform since, i has been told, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister and the party is increasingly confident of MP defections.
It is understood Mr Tice the party’s founder and Nigel Farage its honorary president, have met several “Red Wall” MPs in recent weeks in an effort to tempt them over to the party.
The last time a poll showed a higher lead than 27 points was late October
What are they even hoping Reform would do that the Tories wouldn't if they could? Reform have no identity other that 'whatever momentarily takes support from Tories/Labour'
Presumably, Reform UK wouldn't be giving out skilled worker visas to people doing flower arranging and fencing on 26k a year. And they would likely clamp down on arranged brides being brought in too.
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
The thing is, who should be arranging our flowers and mending our fences? It can't all be done by newly out-of-work writers.
The price for those things can go up until it pays a wage where Brits are willing to train up and do it. I suspect it won't need to go up much. The idea that no-one in the UK is capable of mending fences is a joke from the property development lobby.
But there’s an idea here that there is a bunch of underemployed people who could be fencing.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
Again, where is this army of couldbe fencers? What are they doing instead?
Because they are not paid enough for tiring, physical work. So the corporate lobby gets the government to let in people from developing countries, for whom the real return is much higher at the same wage, to come in to do it. And the rest of the country picks up the cost in terms of housing prices, congestion, pension etc.
Newent is a small town in England that is both terrible and boring. The locals are unwelcoming and unfriendly, making it impossible to have a good time in this dump of a town.
The streets are dirty and littered with trash, giving the town a rundown and neglected appearance.
The people of Newent are equally as disappointing. They are rude and unaccommodating, making it clear that they do not want outsiders in their town.
The town is filled with political junkies who are constantly checking the latest polls and arguing about the merits of the Conservative Party.
In short, Newent is a toilet
If you think Newent is bad, you should go visit Camden Town. Litter and squalor everywhere, and lots of rude and unpleasant residents. A real dump of a place.
Comments
And oddly, most people there are pretty friendly (apart from one wanker called Thomas I met on Lakeside once thirty years ago).
He used to post on here, but I believe succumbed to a profound breakdown after a failed experiment in gestalt therapy.
Mind, he defrauded them with every penny of salary he took for ostensibly defending their interests...
All I did was give it "that slippery tit of a man, The Screaming Eagles" - ChatGPT came up with the notion that TSE endlessly watches Test cricket, and is prone to boasting
Yes. Exactly
But his implication was that the petrol retailers were doing something wrong, which they aren’t
Rang the National Grid at 9, supply was disconnected at 9.30, local plumber came out at 12.30 and sorted it.
Not too dusty in this day and age.
But they're self-seeking hypocritical twats, so who cares what they think?
Too busy trying to criminalise “staring”.
The government simply has no theory of growth. They only understand “regulatory burden” as a rhetorical concept. And when was the last time you heard anybody talk about monopolies?
Who in government cares that Britain has the highest childcare costs in the developed world? This is market and regulatory failure.
Labour are not much better.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-63900099
And so far, there is no sign of either side yielding. This could get worse before there is any sort of resolution.
This is the biggest political scandal that I can remember. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Is there a next minister to leave the Cabinet market up currently?
Met Police officer charged with two rapes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-63914891
I don't think we're talking rotten apples any more. More diseased orchards.
Belatedly it seems Asda have been prodded into action by the CMA, but it should have happened weeks ago, sterling has been up off the floor for ages and oil prices have been falling for ages. There are independent filling stations doing 135-137p per litre so unless you think they're collectively selling at a loss it's clear to me that the major forecourts are padding their margins at the expense of the consumer. Hopefully this latests move by Asda will force everyone else to compete on price again and Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons will at least match Asda and ideally come in below because they're still making gigantic margins even at 151p.
They were discontinued in 1977.
She rightly pointed out that economic growth was important, but her solutions were politically and financially implausible.
In the same way, she has gone on for ages about the high cost of childcare, but her simplistic answers were unlikely to fly.
Obviously I'm on record as not a fan of the latter, but if it was the price for speeding up the big stuff it might be worth it. We go well beyond careful and cautious.
Also the offshore wind process was streamlined… providing an application answers the set of questions - navigation, fish, birds etc, it can go through quite quickly, without the decades long planning rubbish. A eco-planning lawyer complained to me most bitterly on that one.
Again someone was thinking.
I’ve heard it said that the legal framework for RR mini-nukes is that if each one is identical to the others, it can skip the design review stages. Which have been very useful in delaying previous projects.
So it can be done.
Even that 10% Labour lead however, despite being slightly bigger than Blair's 9% lead over Hague in 2001 and with the Tories under Sunak doing no better than Major did in 1997, leaves Starmer 1 short of a majority once the boundary changes go through
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=30&LAB=40&LIB=11&Reform=5&Green=4&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=14.3&SCOTLAB=30.7&SCOTLIB=6.7&SCOTReform=0.6&SCOTGreen=1.7&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=43.7&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase
But it's not yet as good as a good human writer. The writing has a flat quality, like an overcast January Sunday at 3pm; like a drum machine or artificial speech, it is bereft of human variations of pace or technique.
Mind you, I don't see why that can't be learned.
Mind you, I quite enjoyed the inclusion if wolverines. Slightky reminiscent of Mark E Smith, though MES would have carried it off more surprisingly.
Anyway, for a glorious moment, @Leon, I thought you were actually in Newent. I thought you had started on your tour of unvisited Britain you suggested a few months back. Sadly not. But this too shows why humans still have a few years left: I would be genuinely interested to hear about your adventures in Newent. A chatbot, no matter how creative or clever, isn't going to have the encounters which will make up a human piece of writing Yet.
Personally I blame the weather. It is consistently awful, always windy and usually raining. It drains the soul.
the elegant and multifarious gentleman Leon, who always manages to rise above the chaos and provide a level-headed and reasoned perspective.
Now, I ask you, how could anything that had an intelligence higher than that of say, a piece of moss or Dominic Cummings, have muddled you up with me?
https://twitter.com/paulskallas/status/1601216192840335365?s=46&t=vrKykZbgjhmiVKqA3imNSA
Plus they might do something about the abuse of proxy and postal voting. Or foreigners getting to vote in UK elections.
I salute her indefatigabilty.
But TUD is right that Living Doll blows everything else in the genre away. Surprised Cliff hasn't been taken to task for that song.
An unshackled GPT4 will be able to do great humour, if it is allowed. And it will write very well
Or sensitive woke programmers.
In other related news, we've just updated our database stack to accept semantic questions, it uses a fork of GPT3, I'm testing it at the moment.
If you talk like that it will respond quicker and more lucidly
The Hawksmoor was really beautiful.
I would post, but it would contravene the rules (which I support).
On balance I am 80% excited and only 20% fearful.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
If it takes 10 years to get a project done, then the person who started the project has moved jobs and the person after them has probably moved as well. So neither can be blamed for the result.
The person who is there when the project competes can blame their predecessors - after all they only came in at the end.
So no-one is to blame for the zillion pound fuck up. Promotions all round.
Blimey.
The philosophical implications of that are deeply perturbing
I begin to see that senior civil servants in the open structure have, surprisingly enough, almost as brilliant minds as they themselves would claim to have. However, since there are virtually no goals or targets that can be achieved by a civil servant personally, his high IQ is usually devoted to the avoidance of error. Civil servants are posted to new jobs every three years or so. This is supposed to gain them all-round experience on the way to the top. In practice, it merely ensures that they can never have any personal interest in achieving the success of a policy: a policy of any complexity takes longer than three years to see through from start to finish, so a civil servant either has to leave it before its passage is completed or he arrives on the scene long after it started. This also means you can never pin the blame for failure on any individual: the man in charge at the end will say it was started wrong, and the man in charge at the beginning will say it was finished wrong. ... Afterthought: considering that the avoidance of error is their main priority, it is surprising how many errors they make!
The current theory is that the collapse of NHS services has meant long Coviders are not being helped back into work, although I confess that doesn’t completely satisfy me, either.
Also, 50+ “idlers” are not suddenly going to take up fencing.
Incidently, whether or not the Grauniad have this story correct, what is the status of the money? If money was paid for goods not delivered, or deemed not to be fit for the role, surely the government is going after the suppliers for the money back?
Hard to see how much they'd have to be paid to return to the working world.
Well, except how to successfully conduct a coup obvs.
I believe the government is trying to recover its money, and perhaps coincidentally Lady Mone is selling her properties and yacht.
The real scandal is the VIP lane system that the government put in place, which seems (as one would have imagined) to have hindered rather than helped the cost effective delivery of equipment. Setting up that system was at best stupid and naive, at worst a deliberate invitation to corruption. We need an independent inquiry, urgently.
Comres
Lab 42 (-5)
Con 31 (+5)
LD 10
Reform 5
Asks GPTchat about outliers.
Mike adds,
"Surely it’s not because he thinks it will help him!
There is a big argument going on in the Democratic party about the sequencing of primaries for the 2024 White House race. Above is a table of what happened in the first four primaries last time and how Biden struggled in the first 3 but it all came good for him in South Carolina.
Now he wants 2024 primaries to start with South Carolina .
This looks like special pleading from the incumbent because clearly it would mean his effort to get the nomination would start with a big boost. Following the normal timetable and could mean some difficult going and that would be very risky for the 80 year old"
SSI - While this is correct, AS FAR AS IT GOES, this commentary by OGH totally ignores the following:
> Iowa 2020 Democratic precinct caucuses were an organizational shit-show, thanks to the incompetence of both Iowa Democratic Party "leadership" AND the DNC "leadership". As punters may recall?
> AND not the for the FIRST time, for example the 2008 Republican precinct caucuses, when Iowa Republican Party "leaders" declared (in time for New Hampshire Primary) that Mitt Romney was the winner . . . only to latter declare (correctly) that REAL winner was Rick Santorum.
> Plus fact that Iowa is becoming less - not more - representative of the national Democratic electorate. Or even the Democratic voters of the Midwest.
> Also note that, for all the guff and bumpf about how the caucus process compels POTUS hopefuls to reach out to the grassroots in every bowling alley, watering hole and country crossroads in the great Hawkeye State, fact is that the Iowa precinct caucuses, from the state's perspective, are really a quadrennial cottage industry AND wonderful fundraising mechanism for the state's Democratic AND Republican parties.
> Finally (for this screed) the Democratic Party has been committed for years to replacing precinct caucuses with PRIMARIES. Why? Because precinct caucuses turnout for pct meetings is MUCH less than for primaries, because of the practical impediments to attending a caucus as opposed to casting a ballot, either on primary day or via early voting, via in-person or postal voting.
Please note that I am speaking as a proud veteran of the Iowa precinct caucuses, having spent weeks in the state as an presidential campaign organizer, down at the ground level. AND also have worked on targeting & analysis for Iowa precinct caucuses as an campaign consultant.
So I have some basis for my opinions, more I suspect that OGH in this particular instance.
The only consolation is that there won’t actually be a Reform (sic) candidate in most constituencies come the election.
The government did its best and got some things badly wrong. I suspect, from the Graun story, the Mone is a wrong 'un and hopefully will be persued to the full extent of the law if laws have been broken.
But we were in extraordinary times.
He is a muppet, though. Just take this:
“I’m always surprised and disappointed when I hear schools, certainly some primary schools, saying, ‘We are just focusing on English and maths in Year 5 and 6 because that is what we are being tested on,’” he says. “That is not my objective, it is not government policy. And, actually, it will hinder getting good results in English and maths. It is a mistake to have a reductionist approach to education.”
I am willing to bet that not one single teacher has ever said that to him. What they will have said - and they are right to say this - is that they have to focus on English and Maths in Years 5 and 6 because the curriculum is so overstuffed there literally is no time to do anything else.
And who wrote the curriculum? He did. Who created the new assessments, that prize rote learning ahead of understanding? He did.
So who is to blame for this 'reductionist' approach? Well - actually it's him.
He may flatter himself he understands education. But he does not. He has read many papers, but only those that agree with his prejudices. He has implemented many policies designed to return us to some mythical pre-progressive utopia, but never paused to ask himself if there was a reason why they were abandonedby a Conservative government whose education secretary was Margaret Thatcher in the first place. He visits schools only to bark at people he doesn't like.
Influential? Undoubtedly. He has done more damage than any other government minister or politician.
The tragedy is that he undoubtedly meant well.
Utterly batshit.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=31&LAB=42&LIB=10&Reform=5&Green=2&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=14.3&SCOTLAB=30.7&SCOTLIB=6.7&SCOTReform=0.6&SCOTGreen=1.7&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=43.7&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase