Closing the border to China – that's not going to help much, if at all. There are two reasons to consider it:
1 - If the issue is more seeding of the existing strain – then it's literally pointless. The number of infections imported by air is tiny compared to the number of domestic infections every day. That was the argument in early days and pre-Omicron, when bringing in a thousand cases per day on top of a couple of thousand cases per day here made a noticeable difference. If you have a hundred thousand infections per day here already, it's a drop in a hurricane.
2 - The argument that China may see a new strain is sound, though – a billion new virus factories ringing the changes on the potential mutation space will likely see new variants. But first – but how do we keep them out? The new variant will need either superior immune evasion and similar transmissibility, or higher transmissibility and similar immune evasion to get anywhere hear. And that means blasting through protections. We'd need to either keep out people from everywhere, or have everywhere keep people out from China (otherwise we're just one link down in the chain, which would buy us days at best).
I agree, though, that sequencing positive cases from China would be sound. And that the Government will likely close the border to China regardless of if there's any point at all, and ensure they do it so late that even if there had been any point, there certainly couldn't be any more.
This image is the reason people tend to be fairly relaxed:
The red line is antibody protection versus infection. Which does drop off against the Omicron variants. Blue and green, though, are T-cell capability against serious illness, which remains pretty sturdy. Especially for those with hybrid immunity (both infection and injection, in whichever order).
There's also a real chance that whatever variants arise in China might not affect the highly immune West, though – the major source of Omicron’s spreadability is the immune evasion it has. A strain that outcompetes Omicron in the highly immunonaive China may well have less immune evasion but higher R (and would run into an immune wall outside of China).
O/T, but … Not insisting on negative covid tests for travellers entering the UK from China seems a bit foolish, to say the least, given what is currently happening in China. It seems like we’re going to repeat previous mistakes. What am I missing?
We've given up pretending that travel restrictions or quarantine actually works without unacceptable restrictions on our freedom and unsustainable damage to our economy.
I suppose it is really a question of the risk of a 'new variant' emerging from China given the amount of cases/deaths there.
No reason a new variant is more likely to emerge from there than anywhere else, especially given the immunity-naive Chinese population are just as susceptible to good old basic Omicron so there’s less selection pressure.
Even if 100% of arriving travellers were positive it would be a drop in the ocean compared with the number who already have it here. And if a new variant does get through: well, if there’s one thing the Chinese experience surely shows us it’s that holding back the tide just delays the inevitable.
One reason to put a temporary stop on Chinese visitors is this frankly bizarre behaviour of the CCP. Going from Zero Covid to total openness in about a week, and thereby allowing 1m deaths - or so it seems
Can we be sure they aren’t covertly exporting a horrible new variant to make sure the world suffers alongside them?
Sadly, they have form on this
Even if they are, it's already far too late to do anything about it.
So the decisions made by Japan, Taiwan, Italy and the USA - to restrict Chinese tourism/visitors - are completely pointless?
Sadly, yes. The world should have blocked Chinese flights from last week and let COVID stay there for another two months. As long as they can go somewhere whatever variants they have will be seeded all over the world.
Why are people worried about perhaps a billion cases of covid in China in the next six months causing a Disease X variant, when globally there’s going to be multiples of that case load happening anyway? Sounds like a lot of tired thinking going on from policy makers.
I just don't want Chinese tourists back in London. If we can delay that by a few months then I'm all for travel bans.
That’s just your own self-interest not public policy
Well yes, but it's a good policy. London without Chinese tourists is a completely different city. I've found myself no longer avoiding the Covent Garden/Piccadilly area as I'd done for years before COVID. It will be sad when Londoners, once again, get pushed out of parts of our own city because Chinese tourists make it unbearable.
I guess you are not reliant on tourists for your income then. And yet yesterday you were complaining about prices!
If you are going to reduce numbers to make it a premium experience you need to be willing to pay for it
Allowing Chinese tourists to come to London will put European and American tourists off. The smart move is to play it safe and ban them until the summer.
The speed omicron is going through China means it’ll be over by late January, let alone Summer.
O/T, but … Not insisting on negative covid tests for travellers entering the UK from China seems a bit foolish, to say the least, given what is currently happening in China. It seems like we’re going to repeat previous mistakes. What am I missing?
We've given up pretending that travel restrictions or quarantine actually works without unacceptable restrictions on our freedom and unsustainable damage to our economy.
I suppose it is really a question of the risk of a 'new variant' emerging from China given the amount of cases/deaths there.
No reason a new variant is more likely to emerge from there than anywhere else, especially given the immunity-naive Chinese population are just as susceptible to good old basic Omicron so there’s less selection pressure.
Even if 100% of arriving travellers were positive it would be a drop in the ocean compared with the number who already have it here. And if a new variant does get through: well, if there’s one thing the Chinese experience surely shows us it’s that holding back the tide just delays the inevitable.
One reason to put a temporary stop on Chinese visitors is this frankly bizarre behaviour of the CCP. Going from Zero Covid to total openness in about a week, and thereby allowing 1m deaths - or so it seems
Can we be sure they aren’t covertly exporting a horrible new variant to make sure the world suffers alongside them?
Sadly, they have form on this
Even if they are, it's already far too late to do anything about it.
So the decisions made by Japan, Taiwan, Italy and the USA - to restrict Chinese tourism/visitors - are completely pointless?
Sadly, yes. The world should have blocked Chinese flights from last week and let COVID stay there for another two months. As long as they can go somewhere whatever variants they have will be seeded all over the world.
Why are people worried about perhaps a billion cases of covid in China in the next six months causing a Disease X variant, when globally there’s going to be multiples of that case load happening anyway? Sounds like a lot of tired thinking going on from policy makers.
I just don't want Chinese tourists back in London. If we can delay that by a few months then I'm all for travel bans.
That’s just your own self-interest not public policy
Well yes, but it's a good policy. London without Chinese tourists is a completely different city. I've found myself no longer avoiding the Covent Garden/Piccadilly area as I'd done for years before COVID. It will be sad when Londoners, once again, get pushed out of parts of our own city because Chinese tourists make it unbearable.
I guess you are not reliant on tourists for your income then. And yet yesterday you were complaining about prices!
If you are going to reduce numbers to make it a premium experience you need to be willing to pay for it
Allowing Chinese tourists to come to London will put European and American tourists off. The smart move is to play it safe and ban them until
the summer.
Based on the last three years, whenever I hear
the phrase "play it safe" I translate it as "make an unforced error".
But what unforced error will there be in keeping
Chinese tourists out for another six months? No one has yet pointed to a downside, it's all upside.
Normalising, once again, the idea of restrictions that do more harm than good. Which I thought we had left in the past.
These travel bans will fail - it's already too late for them. When they do, people like you will be calling for lockdown to "play it safe".
Max is usually pretty reasonable on restrictions - I think the danger here is that some perceive the Chinese travel block a free hit. It isn’t - for exactly the reason you say, and more.
Sorry, just caught back up. You say Porsche "give us a completely new 911 every 7-9 years". Is that actually true? They launch a lot of evolutions with very few actual new everything cars - and the all look the same (philistine alert).
993, 4 years 996, 6 years 997, 9 years 991, 8 years 992, 4 years and counting. MLU next year with a completely different interior and hybrid versions.
The basic architecture (flat 6, rear engined, MacPherson front, multi-link rear) is the same and some powertrain components (transmission) can be carried over but it's a completely new car every time with very limited (ie almost none) component interchangeability.
I did say I am a philistine when it comes to Porsches. Its just that there is an awful lot of knowledgeable stuff out there about how so many of those are evolutions of the previous one and very few all new cars like the 991 was. And they do all look the same! Which is the same point with the Model S - body has changed, drivetrain has changed, tech platform has changed. But looks the same and kept the silly pop-out door handles.
I know you don't want one - and neither do I. But the premise that its the same car and nobody wants one just isn't true. Anyway, bigger stuff to argue about than a car neither of us actually wants. The bugger Porsche has is the charger network. Same for all of them.
I didn't say nobody wants one; I said that Tesla's very long product lifecycles (is it a lifecycle if it's never replaced?) are a problem when compared to the ever growing competition. The Model S used to rule the large EV segment but now it's getting fucking hammered by the BYD Han and Taycan.
Mrs DA has just got a BMW iX. Feels like driving a full size Traxxas TRX-4 but she likes it.
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I see we have time travelled back to 2020 with the usual suspects spamming the threads with attention-seeking panic and irrational policy ‘solutions’.
95%+ of the UK population (everyone except @Cyclefree) has had covid.
Can someone explain - in non hyperbolic terms - what closing our borders to China is going to achieve exactly?
(Other than childish, somewhat sinophobic, tit for tat?)
Questions
1. Why would it be Sinophobic? This just sounds like a repeat of the March 2020 arguments as to why we couldn't ban flights from China?
2. If it's effective - and there is a major question over that but let's assume it would be for a moment - why is that of less importance than being seen not to be 'Sinophobic'?
‘The British Empire was much worse than you realise’
In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots…. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s…. Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.
From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.”
Well worth a read. There is quite an interesting set of works on the dark side of our Empire emerging. The past may well be a different country with differing norms and standards, but much of this end of empire is well within living memory.
Good to know that Ms Elkins has brought all the rigour of the impartial Historian to her work having spent '20 years trying to undermine' Britain's reputation for decency....
Her classic work "Britain's Gulag" is well worth a read, and won the Pulitzer prize. It is hard to see the Empire as a benign, decent affair after reading that.
Things were different at different times and places in the Empire, but this wasn't atypical.
Elkins vastly exaggerated the number of deaths during the Mau Mau uprising.
How could one be sure since the British authorities destroyed as many of the records they could get their hands on?
Because there are sufficiently detailed records of population to refute the notion that "hundreds of thousands" died. Among writers on the subject, she is very much an outlier.
'Look chaps, we've got nothing to hide but I think the best policy to counter any tendentious future historians putting the old BE in a bad light is to burn and dump in the sea as many hard records of what happened as we can.'
Given that her book is based on records that the British kept…
I do have sympathy with Leon on the viral evolution front. It seems a frequently bandied-about line that viruses evolve to become less dangerous in order to spare the host for further spread, but this doesn't look that likely. At least not on any timescales that would help us.
Smallpox spent a long time around and remained hugely deadly until made extinct. Rabies isn't coming in a Lite version these days. HIV is only no longer a fairly rapid death sentence thanks to our production of treatments that help; the virus itself is as deadly as ever. Yellow fever hasn't become a Beige fever.
We heard a lot of this in the early days of covid. Then we did get an evolution of it. And Alpha was more dangerous than the original strain. And then another evolution and Delta was worse again (but fortunately smothered by a now-much-immunised population). Omicron did finally get less deadly (at least the first strain of it), but the frequent mutations since haven't made it any less deadly, so it looks more like a random coin flip that happened to land nicely for us.
And that shouldn't be a surprise. By the time people get seriously ill, they've done pretty much all of their passing-it-on. Why should what happens to a host after the host has spread it on have any evolutionary pressure either way? Total recovery or spontaneous human combustion would be all the same to the virus, evolutionary pressure-wise.
O/T, but … Not insisting on negative covid tests for travellers entering the UK from China seems a bit foolish, to say the least, given what is currently happening in China. It seems like we’re going to repeat previous mistakes. What am I missing?
We've given up pretending that travel restrictions or quarantine actually works without unacceptable restrictions on our freedom and unsustainable damage to our economy.
I suppose it is really a question of the risk of a 'new variant' emerging from China given the amount of cases/deaths there.
No reason a new variant is more likely to emerge from there than anywhere else, especially given the immunity-naive Chinese population are just as susceptible to good old basic Omicron so there’s less selection pressure.
Even if 100% of arriving travellers were positive it would be a drop in the ocean compared with the number who already have it here. And if a new variant does get through: well, if there’s one thing the Chinese experience surely shows us it’s that holding back the tide just delays the inevitable.
One reason to put a temporary stop on Chinese visitors is this frankly bizarre behaviour of the CCP. Going from Zero Covid to total openness in about a week, and thereby allowing 1m deaths - or so it seems
Can we be sure they aren’t covertly exporting a horrible new variant to make sure the world suffers alongside them?
Sadly, they have form on this
Even if they are, it's already far too late to do anything about it.
So the decisions made by Japan, Taiwan, Italy and the USA - to restrict Chinese tourism/visitors - are completely pointless?
Sadly, yes. The world should have blocked Chinese flights from last week and let COVID stay there for another two months. As long as they can go somewhere whatever variants they have will be seeded all over the world.
Why are people worried about perhaps a billion cases of covid in China in the next six months causing a Disease X variant, when globally there’s going to be multiples of that case load happening anyway? Sounds like a lot of tired thinking going on from policy makers.
I just don't want Chinese tourists back in London. If we can delay that by a few months then I'm all for travel bans.
That’s just your own self-interest not public policy
Well yes, but it's a good policy. London without Chinese tourists is a completely different city. I've found myself no longer avoiding the Covent Garden/Piccadilly area as I'd done for years before COVID. It will be sad when Londoners, once again, get pushed out of parts of our own city because Chinese tourists make it unbearable.
I guess you are not reliant on tourists for your income then. And yet yesterday you were complaining about prices!
If you are going to reduce numbers to make it a premium experience you need to be willing to pay for it
Allowing Chinese tourists to come to London will put European and American tourists off. The smart move is to play it safe and ban them until the summer.
The speed omicron is going through China means it’ll be over by late January, let alone Summer.
O/T, but … Not insisting on negative covid tests for travellers entering the UK from China seems a bit foolish, to say the least, given what is currently happening in China. It seems like we’re going to repeat previous mistakes. What am I missing?
We've given up pretending that travel restrictions or quarantine actually works without unacceptable restrictions on our freedom and unsustainable damage to our economy.
I suppose it is really a question of the risk of a 'new variant' emerging from China given the amount of cases/deaths there.
No reason a new variant is more likely to emerge from there than anywhere else, especially given the immunity-naive Chinese population are just as susceptible to good old basic Omicron so there’s less selection pressure.
Even if 100% of arriving travellers were positive it would be a drop in the ocean compared with the number who already have it here. And if a new variant does get through: well, if there’s one thing the Chinese experience surely shows us it’s that holding back the tide just delays the inevitable.
One reason to put a temporary stop on Chinese visitors is this frankly bizarre behaviour of the CCP. Going from Zero Covid to total openness in about a week, and thereby allowing 1m deaths - or so it seems
Can we be sure they aren’t covertly exporting a horrible new variant to make sure the world suffers alongside them?
Sadly, they have form on this
Even if they are, it's already far too late to do anything about it.
So the decisions made by Japan, Taiwan, Italy and the USA - to restrict Chinese tourism/visitors - are completely pointless?
Sadly, yes. The world should have blocked Chinese flights from last week and let COVID stay there for another two months. As long as they can go somewhere whatever variants they have will be seeded all over the world.
Why are people worried about perhaps a billion cases of covid in China in the next six months causing a Disease X variant, when globally there’s going to be multiples of that case load happening anyway? Sounds like a lot of tired thinking going on from policy makers.
I just don't want Chinese tourists back in London. If we can delay that by a few months then I'm all for travel bans.
That’s just your own self-interest not public policy
Well yes, but it's a good policy. London without Chinese tourists is a completely different city. I've found myself no longer avoiding the Covent Garden/Piccadilly area as I'd done for years before COVID. It will be sad when Londoners, once again, get pushed out of parts of our own city because Chinese tourists make it unbearable.
I guess you are not reliant on tourists for your income then. And yet yesterday you were complaining about prices!
If you are going to reduce numbers to make it a premium experience you need to be willing to pay for it
Allowing Chinese tourists to come to London will put European and American tourists off. The smart move is to play it safe and ban them until the summer.
Based on the last three years, whenever I hear the phrase "play it safe" I translate it as "make an unforced error".
But what unforced error will there be in keeping Chinese tourists out for another six months? No one has yet pointed to a downside, it's all upside.
The tourist industry, the retail industry, the travel industry
‘The British Empire was much worse than you realise’
In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots…. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s…. Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.
From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.”
That's a lot of self-indulgent left-wing clickbait. Any article or text that posits "was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism?" isn't to be taken seriously.
An argument that was once confined to neo-Nazis, that the Western Allies were as bad as they were, does seem to be becoming more common in "progressive" circles.
The British, French, and Americans could be brutal in their colonies, no question, but they did not conduct the equivalent of Generalplan Ost, the Holocaust, T-731, The Three Alls, or the Sack of Nanking.
How many of the historians analysing the evils of empire are arguing in those terms, though ? Some of it might well be overreaction to century of positive representation of Britain’s imperial role, but a reaction was certainly merited.
I don't think that serious historians have glorified the British Empire, during my lifetime.
Surely if anything it’s time for a broadly positive representation of the Empire.
I suppose Ferguson did a decent enough job a decade or so ago.
I read that Ferguson book and it was pretty nuanced for the both part. It was scathing about the treatment of the Irish and Africans transported to the new world.
The Empire is nothing to be proud of, but comparisons to Germany, Japan or Leopold II are clearly ridiculous. The horrific crimes were generally very small-scale and isolated. The ones that caused widespread damage were not done to deliberately cause harm to people.
The one major exception is the Atlantic slave trade, though I am not sure that counts as imperialism. The other was the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, but that brutality was fairly normal for warfare of the time period.
The Atlantic Slave trade was also not done deliberately to cause harm to people except, ironically, by African native rulers who sold slaves not only to raise money but also to get rid of defeated peoples / tribes. It also wasn't the only African slave trade going on at that time either, given the Arabs were prolific slave traders.
So, to claim it was uniquely evil is pushing it. Evil yes. Uniquely so, no.
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
Yes. And that is true of any task you give it. The longer you interact and the more intense the dialogue, the better and more expressive it gets
I gave an example late last night of some of the prose ChatGPT has been coughing up, after an hour or two of requests, suggestions and tweaks. Seriously good. Not far off replace-most-authors good. It is exciting - and frightening
Closing the border to China – that's not going to help much, if at all. There are two reasons to consider it:
1 - If the issue is more seeding of the existing strain – then it's literally pointless. The number of infections imported by air is tiny compared to the number of domestic infections every day. That was the argument in early days and pre-Omicron, when bringing in a thousand cases per day on top of a couple of thousand cases per day here made a noticeable difference. If you have a hundred thousand infections per day here already, it's a drop in a hurricane.
2 - The argument that China may see a new strain is sound, though – a billion new virus factories ringing the changes on the potential mutation space will likely see new variants. But first – but how do we keep them out? The new variant will need either superior immune evasion and similar transmissibility, or higher transmissibility and similar immune evasion to get anywhere hear. And that means blasting through protections. We'd need to either keep out people from everywhere, or have everywhere keep people out from China (otherwise we're just one link down in the chain, which would buy us days at best).
I agree, though, that sequencing positive cases from China would be sound. And that the Government will likely close the border to China regardless of if there's any point at all, and ensure they do it so late that even if there had been any point, there certainly couldn't be any more.
This image is the reason people tend to be fairly relaxed:
The red line is antibody protection versus infection. Which does drop off against the Omicron variants. Blue and green, though, are T-cell capability against serious illness, which remains pretty sturdy. Especially for those with hybrid immunity (both infection and injection, in whichever order).
There's also a real chance that whatever variants arise in China might not affect the highly immune West, though – the major source of Omicron’s spreadability is the immune evasion it has. A strain that outcompetes Omicron in the highly immunonaive China may well have less immune evasion but higher R (and would run into an immune wall outside of China).
Thank you for that chart - a picture worth a thousand words.
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I do wonder how Google will respond to this. I know they have their own chatbot - but it'll be interesting to see how they fit ad's into it and keep it feeling like you're talking to someone (and not gut their existing search/ad business).
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
It is true that Brown has been consistently, recklessly and stupidly wrong about the best answer to independence demands for almost his entire political career and that Unionists really should ignore his blathering's. But I suspect that is not the point they are making.
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Half a dozen people on PB could have given you that answer, with more detail
And probably wrong. It's not clear cut, and depends overmuch on a single study of myxamatosis.
I don’t think you’d say the answer is wrong.
It’s certainly atypical to become more virulent but not impossible. But @Leon is misunderstanding the conclusions
No I'm not. The conclusion is that there is no conclusion. This is a hot virological debate
Some say yes: viruses generally evolve to be less deadly
"Because the goal of a virus is to survive, replicate, and spread, it tends to evolve toward being more infectious and less deadly. There are exceptions and other factors, but in general, says Auclair, that’s what virologists expect to see occur with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19."
“It’s a fallacy that viruses or pathogens become milder. If a virus can continue to be transmitted and cause lots of disease, it will,” said Prof David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Virus Research.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
Of course, the Hajj remembers Mohammed leading an army to Mecca where he destroyed the sacred relics of a competing religion and drove its adherents from their homeland.
But don't you draw a cartoon of it, because that would be disrespectful.
I see we have time travelled back to 2020 with the usual suspects spamming the threads with attention-seeking panic and irrational policy ‘solutions’.
95%+ of the UK population (everyone except @Cyclefree) has had covid.
Can someone explain - in non hyperbolic terms - what closing our borders to China is going to achieve exactly?
(Other than childish, somewhat sinophobic, tit for tat?)
It’s a fact universally acknowledged, a government without a plan must be in search of something that resembles a plan. The original Cummingsesque tag line Boris government was using was “protect the NHS, saves lives” - maybe they think anything that can stops NHS overwhelmed saves lives, so let’s do that? Or maybe looking at how meltdown in China health service is reported the fear is Covi morphed again, from cuddly Omni to Xi Beards Revenge?
Or maybe they are just making responses up on the hoof.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Khan is a fairly boring, safe pair of hands politician.
Gas generation now down to 1.8gw. Closest to zero it’s ever been in the years I’ve followed the grid mix. Until this month there was always a baseload of about 3gw even during gales presumably because it remained cheap for the stations generating it, but I assume the higher gas prices have now changed the equation.
I saw a report this morning that suggested the UK has become a net energy exporter to Europe which seems crazy on the face of it given that we're running in the red zone as much as the EU is. It does go to show how hollow Macron's threats to withhold electricity supply were a couple of years ago. Without UK electricity exports France would have seen rolling blackouts and a huge industrial slowdown.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Khan is a fairly boring, safe pair of hands politician.
London is doing just fine with him as mayor.
What has Khan done in 8 years? Anything?! He has moved City Hall from its landmark Thameside location, and bespoke building, to some anonymous shed on the periphery of Docklands, because he ran out of money
That sums him up, and his mayoralty. Anonymous and inept
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Better 12 years of inactivity than the 8 disastrous years of Boris Johnson.
Yes, we have "the bikes" - unfortunately, he also led the firesale of operational Police stations which not only brought in less than it should but has also severely compromised the effectiveness of the Met by taking officers off the street for extended periods while suspects are taken often long distances to an operational site.
Gas generation now down to 1.8gw. Closest to zero it’s ever been in the years I’ve followed the grid mix. Until this month there was always a baseload of about 3gw even during gales presumably because it remained cheap for the stations generating it, but I assume the higher gas prices have now changed the equation.
I saw a report this morning that suggested the UK has become a net energy exporter to Europe which seems crazy on the face of it given that we're running in the red zone as much as the EU is. It does go to show how hollow Macron's threats to withhold electricity supply were a couple of years ago. Without UK electricity exports France would have seen rolling blackouts and a huge industrial slowdown.
That’s because the U.K. has LNG terminals and lots of gas power stations to burn the gas.
That plus the wind surpluses (on occasion). This will become a bigger factor as Dogger Bank comes on line.
Incidentally, has any German journalist dug into the campaign against LNG terminals in Germany, right up till Ukraine kicked off? This included diplomatic pressure on Poland not to build one.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Khan is a fairly boring, safe pair of hands politician.
London is doing just fine with him as mayor.
What has Khan done in 8 years? Anything?! He has moved City Hall from its landmark Thameside location, and bespoke building, to some anonymous shed on the periphery of Docklands, because he ran out of money
That sums him up, and his mayoralty. Anonymous and inept
As I understand it, inflation falling doesn’t bring prices down? So still remains a need for benefit and wage uplifts because this created a disparity between incomes and what incomes can afford?
So this fall to pre war level is terrible news for UK Tory government on basis they can’t point to war and energy prices anymore as the ongoing problem - the focus instead will be on the government refusal to do anything about low incomes as the actual problem?
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Better 12 years of inactivity than the 8 disastrous years of Boris Johnson.
Yes, we have "the bikes" - unfortunately, he also led the firesale of operational Police stations which not only brought in less than it should but has also severely compromised the effectiveness of the Met by taking officers off the street for extended periods while suspects are taken often long distances to an operational site.
London was more fun under Boris. every Londoner knows this. I don't know anyone that likes Khan, even Labour stalwarts. He is elected because of his red rosette
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I do wonder how Google will respond to this. I know they have their own chatbot - but it'll be interesting to see how they fit ad's into it and keep it feeling like you're talking to someone (and not gut their existing search/ad business).
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
Think bigger.
Much bigger.
Calling customer support at Amazon, your bank, anywhere else? GPT can do that for you, just link it to a text-to-speech model.
Pop it in a Boston Dynamics robot and it can do the same job at a hotel check in desk, or an airport check in desk. Or really any other customer service role.
Give it a specific flowchart and it can act as a GP, triaging patients who might need to see a real doctor. Or just tell it "act like an x and respond in character" and it does a pretty good impression already. I've already had it work as a therapist, a management consultant, a lawyer and an advertising agency, just by "roleplaying" with it. e.g. "You are Jimmy, the creative director of a top London ad agency. Mark, the brand manager of [insert name of FMCG good] comes to Jimmy looking for ideas for his next ad campaign. Jimmy begins by asking Mark five questions:"
Tweak prompt above for the specific white-collar job you want it to emulate. It's been a mediocre creative director, but some of the answers it gives as a management consultant are as good as any you'd get from a real one.
And that's just the start.
Ask it to describe what it needs of you to emulate you, ask it for questions, then ask it to emulate you. Congratulations. You have a "Dixie Flatline" copy of yourself. Or feed it 100,000 words of text messages, emails, letters, and a brief biography of your long lost love, and have it emulate her.
GPT-3 is capable of a passable impression of all of the above, and GPT-4 will be even more accurate and lifelike.
People feeding it google search prompts and asking it for recipes aren't realising the depths or the abilities of LLMs like this.
It's not a search-bot, it's a "replace humans for most things" bot.
I see we have time travelled back to 2020 with the usual suspects spamming the threads with attention-seeking panic and irrational policy ‘solutions’.
95%+ of the UK population (everyone except @Cyclefree) has had covid.
Can someone explain - in non hyperbolic terms - what closing our borders to China is going to achieve exactly?
(Other than childish, somewhat sinophobic, tit for tat?)
It’s a fact universally acknowledged, a government without a plan must be in search of something that resembles a plan. The original Cummingsesque tag line Boris government was using was “protect the NHS, saves lives” - maybe they think anything that can stops NHS overwhelmed saves lives, so let’s do that? Or maybe looking at how meltdown in China health service is reported the fear is Covi morphed again, from cuddly Omni to Xi Beards Revenge?
Or maybe they are just making responses up on the hoof.
Governments need to be seen to be in control of every situation. The problem in early March 2020 was there was a real sense the Government were losing control - the public were starting to lock down themselves as cases were spreading and images of overcrowded hospitals were getting traction in the media.
Many were concerned and rightly so and it's the role of Government at times like that to look like the sensible one in the room.
Gas generation now down to 1.8gw. Closest to zero it’s ever been in the years I’ve followed the grid mix. Until this month there was always a baseload of about 3gw even during gales presumably because it remained cheap for the stations generating it, but I assume the higher gas prices have now changed the equation.
I saw a report this morning that suggested the UK has become a net energy exporter to Europe which seems crazy on the face of it given that we're running in the red zone as much as the EU is. It does go to show how hollow Macron's threats to withhold electricity supply were a couple of years ago. Without UK electricity exports France would have seen rolling blackouts and a huge industrial slowdown.
That’s because the U.K. has LNG terminals and lots of gas power stations to burn the gas.
That plus the wind surpluses (on occasion). This will become a bigger factor as Dogger Bank comes on line.
Incidentally, has any German journalist dug into the campaign against LNG terminals in Germany, right up till Ukraine kicked off? This included diplomatic pressure on Poland not to build one.
We're hardly burning gas a the moment. 2/3rds of our electricity at the moment is from wind and solar. We are also importing from France.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Khan is a fairly boring, safe pair of hands politician.
London is doing just fine with him as mayor.
What has Khan done in 8 years? Anything?! He has moved City Hall from its landmark Thameside location, and bespoke building, to some anonymous shed on the periphery of Docklands, because he ran out of money
That sums him up, and his mayoralty. Anonymous and inept
Night tube. Delivered.
Ulez. Radical. Genius. Perfectly executed.
Next.
Both were implanting, existing, planned policies.
The night tube, in particular, needed a large amount of disruptive maintenance to be hit out of the way first.
Khan is simply doing the job, fairly quietly. Which seems quite popular, in London.
Gas generation now down to 1.8gw. Closest to zero it’s ever been in the years I’ve followed the grid mix. Until this month there was always a baseload of about 3gw even during gales presumably because it remained cheap for the stations generating it, but I assume the higher gas prices have now changed the equation.
I saw a report this morning that suggested the UK has become a net energy exporter to Europe which seems crazy on the face of it given that we're running in the red zone as much as the EU is. It does go to show how hollow Macron's threats to withhold electricity supply were a couple of years ago. Without UK electricity exports France would have seen rolling blackouts and a huge industrial slowdown.
That’s because the U.K. has LNG terminals and lots of gas power stations to burn the gas.
That plus the wind surpluses (on occasion). This will become a bigger factor as Dogger Bank comes on line.
Incidentally, has any German journalist dug into the campaign against LNG terminals in Germany, right up till Ukraine kicked off? This included diplomatic pressure on Poland not to build one.
We're hardly burning gas a the moment. 2/3rds of our electricity at the moment is from wind and solar. We are also importing from France.
…and then it flips around. Have they actually got the nuclear stations back up and running?
This is why inter-connectors are such a good idea - options, options. At the touch of a button.
Gas generation now down to 1.8gw. Closest to zero it’s ever been in the years I’ve followed the grid mix. Until this month there was always a baseload of about 3gw even during gales presumably because it remained cheap for the stations generating it, but I assume the higher gas prices have now changed the equation.
I saw a report this morning that suggested the UK has become a net energy exporter to Europe which seems crazy on the face of it given that we're running in the red zone as much as the EU is. It does go to show how hollow Macron's threats to withhold electricity supply were a couple of years ago. Without UK electricity exports France would have seen rolling blackouts and a huge industrial slowdown.
That’s because the U.K. has LNG terminals and lots of gas power stations to burn the gas.
That plus the wind surpluses (on occasion). This will become a bigger factor as Dogger Bank comes on line.
Incidentally, has any German journalist dug into the campaign against LNG terminals in Germany, right up till Ukraine kicked off? This included diplomatic pressure on Poland not to build one.
We're hardly burning gas a the moment. 2/3rds of our electricity at the moment is from wind and solar. We are also importing from France.
But he isn't "quite popular". He is notably UNpopular
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I do wonder how Google will respond to this. I know they have their own chatbot - but it'll be interesting to see how they fit ad's into it and keep it feeling like you're talking to someone (and not gut their existing search/ad business).
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
I can't help but feel like ChatGPT and AI is like the early days of the internet. A wonderful, exciting new dawn. But while we are all looking forward to what it can do next, it will ultimately be completely corrupted by a few monopolistic companies. They could have millions of people relying on them for recipes, for intellectual stimulation, for therapy, for companionship. How easy would it be for them to steer users towards a favored advertiser? Or a favored political party that wanted to dismantle regulation on AI?
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Better 12 years of inactivity than the 8 disastrous years of Boris Johnson.
Yes, we have "the bikes" - unfortunately, he also led the firesale of operational Police stations which not only brought in less than it should but has also severely compromised the effectiveness of the Met by taking officers off the street for extended periods while suspects are taken often long distances to an operational site.
London was more fun under Boris. every Londoner knows this. I don't know anyone that likes Khan, even Labour stalwarts. He is elected because of his red rosette
Plus Livingstone was a big personality like Boris too and was first elected Mayor as an Independent of course before returning to Labour
Gas generation now down to 1.8gw. Closest to zero it’s ever been in the years I’ve followed the grid mix. Until this month there was always a baseload of about 3gw even during gales presumably because it remained cheap for the stations generating it, but I assume the higher gas prices have now changed the equation.
I saw a report this morning that suggested the UK has become a net energy exporter to Europe which seems crazy on the face of it given that we're running in the red zone as much as the EU is. It does go to show how hollow Macron's threats to withhold electricity supply were a couple of years ago. Without UK electricity exports France would have seen rolling blackouts and a huge industrial slowdown.
That’s because the U.K. has LNG terminals and lots of gas power stations to burn the gas.
That plus the wind surpluses (on occasion). This will become a bigger factor as Dogger Bank comes on line.
Incidentally, has any German journalist dug into the campaign against LNG terminals in Germany, right up till Ukraine kicked off? This included diplomatic pressure on Poland not to build one.
We're hardly burning gas a the moment. 2/3rds of our electricity at the moment is from wind and solar. We are also importing from France.
…and then it flips around. Have they actually got the nuclear stations back up and running?
This is why inter-connectors are such a good idea - options, options. At the touch of a button.
Agreed. They are proving the best solution to the "battery problem" we have. When the new windfarms are online early this year days like this will see wind and nuclear meeting our needs and giving energy to export. We don't need to store it after all. We simply do not burn gas or coal or even biomass when we don't need to.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Better 12 years of inactivity than the 8 disastrous years of Boris Johnson.
Yes, we have "the bikes" - unfortunately, he also led the firesale of operational Police stations which not only brought in less than it should but has also severely compromised the effectiveness of the Met by taking officers off the street for extended periods while suspects are taken often long distances to an operational site.
London was more fun under Boris. every Londoner knows this. I don't know anyone that likes Khan, even Labour stalwarts. He is elected because of his red rosette
That's because 2008-16 was a relatively fun time everywhere in the UK, with peak fun in 2012.
Similarly, 2016 onwards have been a grim grind everywhere. How much that is down to the other actions of B Johnson Esq is a question that's too tedious to answer right now.
Besides - who is the rollicking hero who could make London fun again?
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Better 12 years of inactivity than the 8 disastrous years of Boris Johnson.
Yes, we have "the bikes" - unfortunately, he also led the firesale of operational Police stations which not only brought in less than it should but has also severely compromised the effectiveness of the Met by taking officers off the street for extended periods while suspects are taken often long distances to an operational site.
London was more fun under Boris. every Londoner knows this. I don't know anyone that likes Khan, even Labour stalwarts. He is elected because of his red rosette
That's because 2008-16 was a relatively fun time everywhere in the UK, with peak fun in 2012.
Similarly, 2016 onwards have been a grim grind everywhere. How much that is down to the other actions of B Johnson Esq is a question that's too tedious to answer right now.
Besides - who is the rollicking hero who could make London fun again?
It’s not about “fun”. It’s about setting a vision for London and moving it forward.
The mayor has relatively little spending authority and executive powers, therefore a lot must be done by sheer charisma, cunning, diplomacy, and chutzpah.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Fuck the Tories. Our slim hope is for an Independent.
This happened recently in Auckland, actually. Some boring-as-fuck Labour placeman was beaten off by an insurgent independent.
Now I’m that case the independent is a shoot-from-the-hip bar-room twat, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s possible.
There’s no real attachment to Khan, and a lot of merely grudging forebearance.
Andy Burnham seems to be doing a good job in Manchester, again without any real powers.
Yet he is not notably a charismatic bag of “fun”.
Burnham has a likeable everyman quality, and obvious passion for his hometown. From outside, he looks like a good mayor
Khan gives the impression he disapproves of London, and would rather it was closed down; instead he is forced to be mayor, a job he then does with a wince of disgust
I do have sympathy with Leon on the viral evolution front. It seems a frequently bandied-about line that viruses evolve to become less dangerous in order to spare the host for further spread, but this doesn't look that likely. At least not on any timescales that would help us.
Smallpox spent a long time around and remained hugely deadly until made extinct. Rabies isn't coming in a Lite version these days. HIV is only no longer a fairly rapid death sentence thanks to our production of treatments that help; the virus itself is as deadly as ever. Yellow fever hasn't become a Beige fever.
We heard a lot of this in the early days of covid. Then we did get an evolution of it. And Alpha was more dangerous than the original strain. And then another evolution and Delta was worse again (but fortunately smothered by a now-much-immunised population). Omicron did finally get less deadly (at least the first strain of it), but the frequent mutations since haven't made it any less deadly, so it looks more like a random coin flip that happened to land nicely for us.
And that shouldn't be a surprise. By the time people get seriously ill, they've done pretty much all of their passing-it-on. Why should what happens to a host after the host has spread it on have any evolutionary pressure either way? Total recovery or spontaneous human combustion would be all the same to the virus, evolutionary pressure-wise.
There is nothing wrong in what you have posted. However it’s also necessary to understand that mutations often come at a cost the pathogen.
Good example of this is bacterial resistance to nitrofurantoin (often used for UTIs). In some patients long term antibiotics are used for recurrent issues, and there is a fear of generating resistance over time. For nitrofurantoin, and in E Coli at least, resistant strains do occur. However in order to overcome the antibiotic, they lose the ability to proliferate fast enough to cause significant infections.
I don’t know if covid could mutate into something much more virulent and as transmissible. So far it hasn’t. Omicron seemed to have become more transmissible partly through a shorter time from infection to developing symptoms and also through becoming mainly a disease of the upper respiratory tract. (Not always limited to that, sadly).
The main competitive pressure on covid in the west has been overcoming the immunity in people who have been vaccinated and/or have had covid. Much of China is in a similar shape to where the west was in 2020.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I do wonder how Google will respond to this. I know they have their own chatbot - but it'll be interesting to see how they fit ad's into it and keep it feeling like you're talking to someone (and not gut their existing search/ad business).
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
Think bigger.
Much bigger.
Calling customer support at Amazon, your bank, anywhere else? GPT can do that for you, just link it to a text-to-speech model.
Pop it in a Boston Dynamics robot and it can do the same job at a hotel check in desk, or an airport check in desk. Or really any other customer service role.
Give it a specific flowchart and it can act as a GP, triaging patients who might need to see a real doctor. Or just tell it "act like an x and respond in character" and it does a pretty good impression already. I've already had it work as a therapist, a management consultant, a lawyer and an advertising agency, just by "roleplaying" with it. e.g. "You are Jimmy, the creative director of a top London ad agency. Mark, the brand manager of [insert name of FMCG good] comes to Jimmy looking for ideas for his next ad campaign. Jimmy begins by asking Mark five questions:"
Tweak prompt above for the specific white-collar job you want it to emulate. It's been a mediocre creative director, but some of the answers it gives as a management consultant are as good as any you'd get from a real one.
And that's just the start.
Ask it to describe what it needs of you to emulate you, ask it for questions, then ask it to emulate you. Congratulations. You have a "Dixie Flatline" copy of yourself. Or feed it 100,000 words of text messages, emails, letters, and a brief biography of your long lost love, and have it emulate her.
GPT-3 is capable of a passable impression of all of the above, and GPT-4 will be even more accurate and lifelike.
People feeding it google search prompts and asking it for recipes aren't realising the depths or the abilities of LLMs like this.
It's not a search-bot, it's a "replace humans for most things" bot.
Yeah - the 'think bigger' stuff has already gone through my head. I'm kinda working through the day-today, regular person, humdrum side of it. Part of me imagines a new ChatGPT "Clippy" inside Office for instance - boring, but *potentially* a huge productivity boost. Also possibly a huge time-sink when you find half your admin staff are just chatting to ChatGPT about Coronation Street all day...
But the Google one interests me. People are so used to going to google, typing their rough question, then clicking through page-after-ad-laden-page to find what they want. If that's replaced by something vastly better and quicker - how does google make their money? Charge a premium for being a linked source in a reply? I've really not come up with a good idea.
Though that's possibly why I'm also not a multi-billionaire tech overlord.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
One day the Tories might stop to ask why all the educated, professional people who used to be their core vote, have stopped supporting them. Until then, just suck it up.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Fuck the Tories. Our slim hope is for an Independent.
This happened recently in Auckland, actually. Some boring-as-fuck Labour placeman was beaten off by an insurgent independent.
Now I’m that case the independent is a shoot-from-the-hip bar-room twat, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s possible.
There’s no real attachment to Khan, and a lot of merely grudging forebearance.
If Lord Sugar ran as an Independent he would easily beat Khan
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Fuck the Tories. Our slim hope is for an Independent.
This happened recently in Auckland, actually. Some boring-as-fuck Labour placeman was beaten off by an insurgent independent.
Now I’m that case the independent is a shoot-from-the-hip bar-room twat, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s possible.
There’s no real attachment to Khan, and a lot of merely grudging forebearance.
Yes I agree. Khan is vulnerable to a charismatic chancer, and perhaps it would be better if that candidate was not a Tory. You are probably right
The lack of enthusiasm for Khan is overt. With Ken or Boris you got haters, but you also got fans and admirers
Khan gets polite tolerance at best, and mild contempt from many. He could be toppled
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Boris was underwhelming as mayor but did a decent job for the tourism industry and image. Khan has been underwhelming in a different way although he has got one or two decent things done. I suspect part of the problem is the role itself: not enough real power.
I was at the Labour business conference / prawn cocktail offensive a couple of weeks ago and it’s fair to say Khan was the least impressive public speaker of the lot. That’s his big weakness.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Fuck the Tories. Our slim hope is for an Independent.
This happened recently in Auckland, actually. Some boring-as-fuck Labour placeman was beaten off by an insurgent independent.
Now I’m that case the independent is a shoot-from-the-hip bar-room twat, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s possible.
There’s no real attachment to Khan, and a lot of merely grudging forebearance.
Yes I agree. Khan is vulnerable to a charismatic chancer, and perhaps it would be better if that candidate was not a Tory. You are probably right
The lack of enthusiasm for Khan is overt. With Ken or Boris you got haters, but you also got fans and admirers
Khan gets polite tolerance at best, and mild contempt from many. He could be toppled
Rory the ex-Tory would be an improvement. Especially if the Tories were smart enough to give him a free run. There is absolutely no way they are going to win back the Mayoralty in their first decade of opposition.
Also, why aren't there two term limits on the mayoralty? What a stupid mistake. Or perhaps it was deliberate by New Labour, envisaging their man in office forever
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
One day the Tories might stop to ask why all the educated, professional people who used to be their core vote, have stopped supporting them. Until then, just suck it up.
More a global trend, New York is now safe Democrat despite voting for Reagan and electing Giuliani Mayor.
In Paris even the wealthiest parts which previously voted for Chirac and Sarkozy and Les Republicains voted for Macron this year. In Sydney and Melbourne prosperous suburbs were lost by the Liberals to Independents in May.
However the white working class have become more conservative and more rightwing
Also, why aren't there two term limits on the mayoralty? What a stupid mistake. Or perhaps it was deliberate by New Labour, envisaging their man in office forever
The mayor should really be someone who’s prepared to fight unashamedly for London. Ideally someone with no ambitions for higher office. An independent - but one politically connected enough to be able to do deals - would be ideal.
Actually, on reflection, I reckon Khan would be more vulnerable if he faced a female opponent
London has never had a woman as mayor. It's time to try that. London needs a feisty woman independent candidate, a pukka Londoner. An ideal combo of mid-season Barbara Windsor and Kemi Badenoch
‘The British Empire was much worse than you realise’
In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots…. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s…. Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.
From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.”
That's a lot of self-indulgent left-wing clickbait. Any article or text that posits "was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism?" isn't to be taken seriously.
An argument that was once confined to neo-Nazis, that the Western Allies were as bad as they were, does seem to be becoming more common in "progressive" circles.
The British, French, and Americans could be brutal in their colonies, no question, but they did not conduct the equivalent of Generalplan Ost, the Holocaust, T-731, The Three Alls, or the Sack of Nanking.
How many of the historians analysing the evils of empire are arguing in those terms, though ? Some of it might well be overreaction to century of positive representation of Britain’s imperial role, but a reaction was certainly merited.
I don't think that serious historians have glorified the British Empire, during my lifetime.
Surely if anything it’s time for a broadly positive representation of the Empire.
I suppose Ferguson did a decent enough job a decade or so ago.
I read that Ferguson book and it was pretty nuanced for the both part. It was scathing about the treatment of the Irish and Africans transported to the new world.
The Empire is nothing to be proud of, but comparisons to Germany, Japan or Leopold II are clearly ridiculous. The horrific crimes were generally very small-scale and isolated. The ones that caused widespread damage were not done to deliberately cause harm to people.
The one major exception is the Atlantic slave trade, though I am not sure that counts as imperialism. The other was the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, but that brutality was fairly normal for warfare of the time period.
The Atlantic Slave trade was also not done deliberately to cause harm to people except, ironically, by African native rulers who sold slaves not only to raise money but also to get rid of defeated peoples / tribes. It also wasn't the only African slave trade going on at that time either, given the Arabs were prolific slave traders.
So, to claim it was uniquely evil is pushing it. Evil yes. Uniquely so, no.
Uniquely is a strawman - you can be as evil as feck without being unique about it - and, not that it's important, false; there is no precedent for industrial deportation and slavery on that scale for financial enrichment by a trade in luxuries. Motive isn't relevant - the end result is the same, why is it better to be enslaved by a greedy person rather than a malevolent one? Other people doing it is also irrelevant: if I frequented child brothels in Africa, would you think less badly of me because so did a lot of Arabs, or because the children were put in the brothels by fellow africans?
Imperialism without the slave trade is Hamlet without the Prince. It was bloody central to the enrichment of the UK and of the American colonies. Fun facts: Nelson was passionately pro slavery, and married into serious sugar money on St Kitts, and what Bligh was up to when he had his little mishap was transporting breadfruit trees from the Pacific to the W Indies to see whether they would make cheap, nutritious slave fodder.
This doesn't actually matter, provided we can accept it and move on. But it is easy to understand why the descendants of slaves get mildly disgruntled at what was done to their ancestors being prtrayed as anything other than a very serious and horrible crime.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Fuck the Tories. Our slim hope is for an Independent.
This happened recently in Auckland, actually. Some boring-as-fuck Labour placeman was beaten off by an insurgent independent.
Now I’m that case the independent is a shoot-from-the-hip bar-room twat, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s possible.
There’s no real attachment to Khan, and a lot of merely grudging forebearance.
If Lord Sugar ran as an Independent he would easily beat Khan
Aged 75.
This is one problem with the "virtually nobody under 50 voting Conservative" thing. Where are the candidates who can win with the public coming from?
Gas generation now down to 1.8gw. Closest to zero it’s ever been in the years I’ve followed the grid mix. Until this month there was always a baseload of about 3gw even during gales presumably because it remained cheap for the stations generating it, but I assume the higher gas prices have now changed the equation.
I saw a report this morning that suggested the UK has become a net energy exporter to Europe which seems crazy on the face of it given that we're running in the red zone as much as the EU is. It does go to show how hollow Macron's threats to withhold electricity supply were a couple of years ago. Without UK electricity exports France would have seen rolling blackouts and a huge industrial slowdown.
That’s because the U.K. has LNG terminals and lots of gas power stations to burn the gas.
That plus the wind surpluses (on occasion). This will become a bigger factor as Dogger Bank comes on line.
Incidentally, has any German journalist dug into the campaign against LNG terminals in Germany, right up till Ukraine kicked off? This included diplomatic pressure on Poland not to build one.
We're hardly burning gas a the moment. 2/3rds of our electricity at the moment is from wind and solar. We are also importing from France.
…and then it flips around. Have they actually got the nuclear stations back up and running?
This is why inter-connectors are such a good idea - options, options. At the touch of a button.
Agreed. They are proving the best solution to the "battery problem" we have. When the new windfarms are online early this year days like this will see wind and nuclear meeting our needs and giving energy to export. We don't need to store it after all. We simply do not burn gas or coal or even biomass when we don't need to.
The more intermittent renewables we have, the more time CCGT plants sit there idle, and the more Availability Payments have to be shelled out for them to do so. That all has to be factored in to the equation. Batteries or idle CCGTs? I suspect that sometime soon the answer will become the former.
Actually, on reflection, I reckon Khan would be more vulnerable if he faced a female opponent
London has never had a woman as mayor. It's time to try that. London needs a feisty woman independent candidate, a pukka Londoner. An ideal combo of mid-season Barbara Windsor and Kemi Badenoch
‘The British Empire was much worse than you realise’
In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots…. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s…. Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.
From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.”
That's a lot of self-indulgent left-wing clickbait. Any article or text that posits "was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism?" isn't to be taken seriously.
An argument that was once confined to neo-Nazis, that the Western Allies were as bad as they were, does seem to be becoming more common in "progressive" circles.
The British, French, and Americans could be brutal in their colonies, no question, but they did not conduct the equivalent of Generalplan Ost, the Holocaust, T-731, The Three Alls, or the Sack of Nanking.
How many of the historians analysing the evils of empire are arguing in those terms, though ? Some of it might well be overreaction to century of positive representation of Britain’s imperial role, but a reaction was certainly merited.
I don't think that serious historians have glorified the British Empire, during my lifetime.
Surely if anything it’s time for a broadly positive representation of the Empire.
I suppose Ferguson did a decent enough job a decade or so ago.
I read that Ferguson book and it was pretty nuanced for the both part. It was scathing about the treatment of the Irish and Africans transported to the new world.
The Empire is nothing to be proud of, but comparisons to Germany, Japan or Leopold II are clearly ridiculous. The horrific crimes were generally very small-scale and isolated. The ones that caused widespread damage were not done to deliberately cause harm to people.
The one major exception is the Atlantic slave trade, though I am not sure that counts as imperialism. The other was the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, but that brutality was fairly normal for warfare of the time period.
The Atlantic Slave trade was also not done deliberately to cause harm to people except, ironically, by African native rulers who sold slaves not only to raise money but also to get rid of defeated peoples / tribes. It also wasn't the only African slave trade going on at that time either, given the Arabs were prolific slave traders.
So, to claim it was uniquely evil is pushing it. Evil yes. Uniquely so, no.
Uniquely is a strawman - you can be as evil as feck without being unique about it - and, not that it's important, false; there is no precedent for industrial deportation and slavery on that scale for financial enrichment by a trade in luxuries. Motive isn't relevant - the end result is the same, why is it better to be enslaved by a greedy person rather than a malevolent one? Other people doing it is also irrelevant: if I frequented child brothels in Africa, would you think less badly of me because so did a lot of Arabs, or because the children were put in the brothels by fellow africans?
Imperialism without the slave trade is Hamlet without the Prince. It was bloody central to the enrichment of the UK and of the American colonies. Fun facts: Nelson was passionately pro slavery, and married into serious sugar money on St Kitts, and what Bligh was up to when he had his little mishap was transporting breadfruit trees from the Pacific to the W Indies to see whether they would make cheap, nutritious slave fodder.
This doesn't actually matter, provided we can accept it and move on. But it is easy to understand why the descendants of slaves get mildly disgruntled at what was done to their ancestors being prtrayed as anything other than a very serious and horrible crime.
I see Moscow has decided to change tactics. The alt-right wing, anti-vax, paedos in a pizza basement 'posters' were becoming a bit too obvious, now it's the opposite alt-left, all westerners are uniquely evil imperialists faction that is getting a trial out.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
Better 12 years of inactivity than the 8 disastrous years of Boris Johnson.
Yes, we have "the bikes" - unfortunately, he also led the firesale of operational Police stations which not only brought in less than it should but has also severely compromised the effectiveness of the Met by taking officers off the street for extended periods while suspects are taken often long distances to an operational site.
London was more fun under Boris. every Londoner knows this. I don't know anyone that likes Khan, even Labour stalwarts. He is elected because of his red rosette
That's because 2008-16 was a relatively fun time everywhere in the UK, with peak fun in 2012.
Similarly, 2016 onwards have been a grim grind everywhere. How much that is down to the other actions of B Johnson Esq is a question that's too tedious to answer right now.
Besides - who is the rollicking hero who could make London fun again?
The Conservatives might have a chance if Corbyn runs as an Independent especially given it's back to FPTP and one round of voting. In the first round in 2021, Khan beat Bailey 40-35 - could Corbyn poll 10% across London and give the Conservative a chance to win with barely a third of the vote?
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Fuck the Tories. Our slim hope is for an Independent.
This happened recently in Auckland, actually. Some boring-as-fuck Labour placeman was beaten off by an insurgent independent.
Now I’m that case the independent is a shoot-from-the-hip bar-room twat, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s possible.
There’s no real attachment to Khan, and a lot of merely grudging forebearance.
If Lord Sugar ran as an Independent he would easily beat Khan
Aged 75.
This is one problem with the "virtually nobody under 50 voting Conservative" thing. Where are the candidates who can win with the public coming from?
They have just won the last 4 general elections, Cameron, May and Boris. Boris also won London twice of course.
Reagan won landslides amongst all age groups in 1980 and 1984 despite being 69 when he took office
‘The British Empire was much worse than you realise’
In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots…. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s…. Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.
From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.”
That's a lot of self-indulgent left-wing clickbait. Any article or text that posits "was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism?" isn't to be taken seriously.
An argument that was once confined to neo-Nazis, that the Western Allies were as bad as they were, does seem to be becoming more common in "progressive" circles.
The British, French, and Americans could be brutal in their colonies, no question, but they did not conduct the equivalent of Generalplan Ost, the Holocaust, T-731, The Three Alls, or the Sack of Nanking.
How many of the historians analysing the evils of empire are arguing in those terms, though ? Some of it might well be overreaction to century of positive representation of Britain’s imperial role, but a reaction was certainly merited.
I don't think that serious historians have glorified the British Empire, during my lifetime.
Surely if anything it’s time for a broadly positive representation of the Empire.
I suppose Ferguson did a decent enough job a decade or so ago.
I read that Ferguson book and it was pretty nuanced for the both part. It was scathing about the treatment of the Irish and Africans transported to the new world.
The Empire is nothing to be proud of, but comparisons to Germany, Japan or Leopold II are clearly ridiculous. The horrific crimes were generally very small-scale and isolated. The ones that caused widespread damage were not done to deliberately cause harm to people.
The one major exception is the Atlantic slave trade, though I am not sure that counts as imperialism. The other was the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, but that brutality was fairly normal for warfare of the time period.
The Atlantic Slave trade was also not done deliberately to cause harm to people except, ironically, by African native rulers who sold slaves not only to raise money but also to get rid of defeated peoples / tribes. It also wasn't the only African slave trade going on at that time either, given the Arabs were prolific slave traders.
So, to claim it was uniquely evil is pushing it. Evil yes. Uniquely so, no.
Uniquely is a strawman - you can be as evil as feck without being unique about it - and, not that it's important, false; there is no precedent for industrial deportation and slavery on that scale for financial enrichment by a trade in luxuries. Motive isn't relevant - the end result is the same, why is it better to be enslaved by a greedy person rather than a malevolent one? Other people doing it is also irrelevant: if I frequented child brothels in Africa, would you think less badly of me because so did a lot of Arabs, or because the children were put in the brothels by fellow africans?
Imperialism without the slave trade is Hamlet without the Prince. It was bloody central to the enrichment of the UK and of the American colonies. Fun facts: Nelson was passionately pro slavery, and married into serious sugar money on St Kitts, and what Bligh was up to when he had his little mishap was transporting breadfruit trees from the Pacific to the W Indies to see whether they would make cheap, nutritious slave fodder.
This doesn't actually matter, provided we can accept it and move on. But it is easy to understand why the descendants of slaves get mildly disgruntled at what was done to their ancestors being prtrayed as anything other than a very serious and horrible crime.
I see Moscow has decided to change tactics. The alt-right wing, anti-vax, paedos in a pizza basement 'posters' were becoming a bit too obvious, now it's the opposite alt-left, all westerners are uniquely evil imperialists faction that is getting a trial out.
Silly sort of post to put on a betting website.
I bet you £1,000 that I can prove to the satisfaction of an arbitrator to be agreed between us or appointed by the moderators that I am nothing to do with Moscow.
Your choices are: take the bet, retract the post, look like a coward.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
And not running as a Conservative (or LD, or Green) but as an Independent candidate.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
One day the Tories might stop to ask why all the educated, professional people who used to be their core vote, have stopped supporting them. Until then, just suck it up.
Branding / social acceptability the main cause. Educated, professional people in particular tend not to like to be outliers when it comes to acceptable views - ironical, given they are supposed to be clever enough to think for themselves. In reality, it's far easier to go with the accepted wisdom.
If you want an example of that, Austrian and German universities in the 1920s and 30s, for example, were hotbeds of right-wing nationalism.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
Not sure about that, his TV programmes are popular, even with leftwingers. He also has more charisma in 1 finger than Khan and plenty of ideas and a love of culture.
Plenty of posh and educated Londoners who would vote for Starmer next time would nonetheless consider voting Portillo for Mayor.
Portillo has also represented both inner city and suburban London as MP for Kensington and Chelsea from 1999 to 2005 and Enfield Southgate from 1984 to 1997
So only the clubs with smaller pockets were seriously tracking Cody Gapko. Is this what the current Liverpool owners are turning the club into, until they can bail out?
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
One day the Tories might stop to ask why all the educated, professional people who used to be their core vote, have stopped supporting them. Until then, just suck it up.
Branding / social acceptability the main cause. Educated, professional people in particular tend not to like to be outliers when it comes to acceptable views - ironical, given they are supposed to be clever enough to think for themselves. In reality, it's far easier to go with the accepted wisdom.
If you want an example of that, Austrian and German universities in the 1920s and 30s, for example, were hotbeds of right-wing nationalism.
"In reality, it's far easier to go with the accepted wisdom."
Absolutely right. You see it on here all the time. PB-ers are generally not dim, yet on multiple subjects - eg, LAB LEAK - they dutifully herd towards the correct and received opinion, no matter how questionable, and need a metric fucktonnage of evidence before their limpet-like adherence to stupid but popular beliefs can be modestly dislodged
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
Portillo wouldn’t do it surely given he’s carved a decent career out post politics.
Same with Ed Balls.
Looks like Matt Hancocks TV career is going to crash and burn, maybe he can bring his unique skills to the role.
Presentation - “I’m a relaxed kind of Muslim, not one of the scary beards”.
The revelation that Khan is going for a third term is wearying in the extreme. He is a shite mayor and he has achieved nothing. London is diminished under him. He does not understand a big hedonistic world city. He wants London to be a quiet Muslim Newent
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
One day the Tories might stop to ask why all the educated, professional people who used to be their core vote, have stopped supporting them. Until then, just suck it up.
More a global trend, New York is now safe Democrat despite voting for Reagan and electing Giuliani Mayor.
In Paris even the wealthiest parts which previously voted for Chirac and Sarkozy and Les Republicains voted for Macron this year. In Sydney and Melbourne prosperous suburbs were lost by the Liberals to Independents in May.
However the white working class have become more conservative and more rightwing
I disagree with your last sentence. The WWC has stood still, but the party that is supposed to represent the WWC has turned its back.
Incidentally, I repeated "the WWC" in my second sentence, as I am not sure whether to use "them" or "us". Another of the challenges of being from a coucil estate but now possessing Organic Balsamic Glaze and Shade Grown Coffee.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
That's more plausible, which highlights the issue.
It's an odd job, really. Ken probably really did want to be Mayor- besides, his parliamentary career was going nowhere. Boris was working his passage back into the Conservative Party's good books, Sadiq used it as an escape pod from Corbynism.
Given the limits on the powers (and neither transport not police look like attractive responsibilities right now), it looks like a B list job for a B list politician. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's a bad thing, but maybe that's how it is.
So only the clubs with smaller pockets were seriously tracking Cody Gapko. Is this what the current Liverpool owners are turning the club into, until they can bail out?
None of the privately-owned clubs can compete financially with the oil state-owned clubs.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
Not sure about that, his TV programmes are popular, even with leftwingers. He also has more charisma in 1 finger than Khan and plenty of ideas and a love of culture.
Plenty of posh and educated Londoners who would vote for Starmer next time would nonetheless consider voting Portillo for Mayor.
Portillo has also represented both inner city and suburban London as MP for Kensington and Chelsea from 1999 to 2005 and Enfield Southgate from 1984 to 1997
He would lose on dress sense alone. His suits have recently become unbelievable.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
Not sure about that, his TV programmes are popular, even with leftwingers. He also has more charisma in 1 finger than Khan and plenty of ideas and a love of culture.
Plenty of posh and educated Londoners who would vote for Starmer next time would nonetheless consider voting Portillo for Mayor.
Portillo has also represented both inner city and suburban London as MP for Kensington and Chelsea from 1999 to 2005 and Enfield Southgate from 1984 to 1997
He would lose on dress sense alone. His suits have recently become unbelievable.
Londoners like colourful.
Michael Bloomberg was Mayor of New York in his 60s
‘The British Empire was much worse than you realise’
In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots…. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s…. Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.
From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.”
That's a lot of self-indulgent left-wing clickbait. Any article or text that posits "was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism?" isn't to be taken seriously.
An argument that was once confined to neo-Nazis, that the Western Allies were as bad as they were, does seem to be becoming more common in "progressive" circles.
The British, French, and Americans could be brutal in their colonies, no question, but they did not conduct the equivalent of Generalplan Ost, the Holocaust, T-731, The Three Alls, or the Sack of Nanking.
How many of the historians analysing the evils of empire are arguing in those terms, though ? Some of it might well be overreaction to century of positive representation of Britain’s imperial role, but a reaction was certainly merited.
I don't think that serious historians have glorified the British Empire, during my lifetime.
Surely if anything it’s time for a broadly positive representation of the Empire.
I suppose Ferguson did a decent enough job a decade or so ago.
I read that Ferguson book and it was pretty nuanced for the both part. It was scathing about the treatment of the Irish and Africans transported to the new world.
The Empire is nothing to be proud of, but comparisons to Germany, Japan or Leopold II are clearly ridiculous. The horrific crimes were generally very small-scale and isolated. The ones that caused widespread damage were not done to deliberately cause harm to people.
The one major exception is the Atlantic slave trade, though I am not sure that counts as imperialism. The other was the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, but that brutality was fairly normal for warfare of the time period.
The Atlantic Slave trade was also not done deliberately to cause harm to people except, ironically, by African native rulers who sold slaves not only to raise money but also to get rid of defeated peoples / tribes. It also wasn't the only African slave trade going on at that time either, given the Arabs were prolific slave traders.
So, to claim it was uniquely evil is pushing it. Evil yes. Uniquely so, no.
Uniquely is a strawman - you can be as evil as feck without being unique about it - and, not that it's important, false; there is no precedent for industrial deportation and slavery on that scale for financial enrichment by a trade in luxuries. Motive isn't relevant - the end result is the same, why is it better to be enslaved by a greedy person rather than a malevolent one? Other people doing it is also irrelevant: if I frequented child brothels in Africa, would you think less badly of me because so did a lot of Arabs, or because the children were put in the brothels by fellow africans?
Imperialism without the slave trade is Hamlet without the Prince. It was bloody central to the enrichment of the UK and of the American colonies. Fun facts: Nelson was passionately pro slavery, and married into serious sugar money on St Kitts, and what Bligh was up to when he had his little mishap was transporting breadfruit trees from the Pacific to the W Indies to see whether they would make cheap, nutritious slave fodder.
This doesn't actually matter, provided we can accept it and move on. But it is easy to understand why the descendants of slaves get mildly disgruntled at what was done to their ancestors being prtrayed as anything other than a very serious and horrible crime.
I see Moscow has decided to change tactics. The alt-right wing, anti-vax, paedos in a pizza basement 'posters' were becoming a bit too obvious, now it's the opposite alt-left, all westerners are uniquely evil imperialists faction that is getting a trial out.
Silly sort of post to put on a betting website.
I bet you £1,000 that I can prove to the satisfaction of an arbitrator to be agreed between us or appointed by the moderators that I am nothing to do with Moscow.
Your choices are: take the bet, retract the post, look like a coward.
Your call.
Not really. I don't really get into stupid bets or the equivalents of 'let's meet for pistols at dawn' stuff. Your phrasing of the bet also looks slightly odd.
However, you are saying you are a genuinely independent poster that has no outside political agenda. Fine - happy to accept your word.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
Portillo wouldn’t do it surely given he’s carved a decent career out post politics.
Same with Ed Balls.
Looks like Matt Hancocks TV career is going to crash and burn, maybe he can bring his unique skills to the role.
Nadine Dorries seems like she's going to have some time on her hands...
The more intermittent renewables we have, the more time CCGT plants sit there idle, and the more Availability Payments have to be shelled out for them to do so. That all has to be factored in to the equation. Batteries or idle CCGTs? I suspect that sometime soon the answer will become the former.
That's what we want, batteries when they make economic sense not before. If we adopted them now we'd be settling for second rate technology, and subsidising them heavily. We want battery manufacturers to have an unequestionably superior technology, so that even if we weren't trying to save the planet we'd want to use them. When they build them we'll buy them. If the last 10 months or so haven't provided that impetus I don't know what will.
The companies who crack this problem are going to sell many, many billions of pounds of batteries every year. Some of them will get very rich.
Seattle Times ($) - Paul Krugman: Tesla isn’t so special after all
If you’re one of those people who bought bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead?
OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and bitcoin may have more in common than you think.
It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation. Furthermore, Tesla sales have surely depended at least in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy. Who, aside from MAGA types who probably wouldn’t have bought Teslas anyway, sees him that way now?
On the other hand, as someone who has spent much of his professional life in academia, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people who are genuinely brilliant in some areas but utter fools in other domains. For all I know, Musk is or was a highly effective leader at Tesla and SpaceX. . . .
Now, some technology companies have indeed been long-term moneymaking machines. Apple and Microsoft still top the list of the most profitable U.S. corporations some four decades after the rise of personal computers. . . .
Similar stories can be told about a few other companies, such as Amazon, with its distribution infrastructure.
The question is: Where are the powerful network externalities in the electric vehicle business?
Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business. . . .
Which brings us back to the question of why Tesla was ever worth so much. The answer, as best as I can tell, is that investors fell in love with a storyline about a brilliant, cool innovator, despite the absence of a good argument about how this guy, even if he really was who he appeared to be, could found a long-lived money machine.
And as I said, there’s a parallel here with bitcoin. Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering. But prices nonetheless soared on the hype, and are still being sustained by a hardcore group of true believers. Something similar surely happened with Tesla, even though the company does actually make useful things.
I guess we’ll eventually see what happens. But I definitely won’t trust Musk with my cat.
Musk is in growing danger of getting himself booted from Tesla and SpaceX because of his Twattery antics. Yes, the Tesla share price was absurdly inflated, but the reset will have buggered a whole load of investors which makes raising future money much harder. And one thing all tech companies need is money.
I don't what he is doing with Twitter, other than he is a pothead. Which isn't news. Perhaps he needs to smoke less?
"Tesla has been not only profitable but also cash flow positive." "All told, Tesla’s cash on hand has basically been trending upward since fiscal 2015 and expanded the most at the beginning of 2020. For example, Tesla had only $1.5 billion in total cash 6 years ago but the amount has since gone higher and reached $18.6 billion as of fiscal Q2 2022, one of the highest figures ever reported."
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I do wonder how Google will respond to this. I know they have their own chatbot - but it'll be interesting to see how they fit ad's into it and keep it feeling like you're talking to someone (and not gut their existing search/ad business).
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
Think bigger.
Much bigger.
Calling customer support at Amazon, your bank, anywhere else? GPT can do that for you, just link it to a text-to-speech model.
Pop it in a Boston Dynamics robot and it can do the same job at a hotel check in desk, or an airport check in desk. Or really any other customer service role.
Give it a specific flowchart and it can act as a GP, triaging patients who might need to see a real doctor. Or just tell it "act like an x and respond in character" and it does a pretty good impression already. I've already had it work as a therapist, a management consultant, a lawyer and an advertising agency, just by "roleplaying" with it. e.g. "You are Jimmy, the creative director of a top London ad agency. Mark, the brand manager of [insert name of FMCG good] comes to Jimmy looking for ideas for his next ad campaign. Jimmy begins by asking Mark five questions:"
Tweak prompt above for the specific white-collar job you want it to emulate. It's been a mediocre creative director, but some of the answers it gives as a management consultant are as good as any you'd get from a real one.
And that's just the start.
Ask it to describe what it needs of you to emulate you, ask it for questions, then ask it to emulate you. Congratulations. You have a "Dixie Flatline" copy of yourself. Or feed it 100,000 words of text messages, emails, letters, and a brief biography of your long lost love, and have it emulate her.
GPT-3 is capable of a passable impression of all of the above, and GPT-4 will be even more accurate and lifelike.
People feeding it google search prompts and asking it for recipes aren't realising the depths or the abilities of LLMs like this.
It's not a search-bot, it's a "replace humans for most things" bot.
Yeah - the 'think bigger' stuff has already gone through my head. I'm kinda working through the day-today, regular person, humdrum side of it. Part of me imagines a new ChatGPT "Clippy" inside Office for instance - boring, but *potentially* a huge productivity boost. Also possibly a huge time-sink when you find half your admin staff are just chatting to ChatGPT about Coronation Street all day...
But the Google one interests me. People are so used to going to google, typing their rough question, then clicking through page-after-ad-laden-page to find what they want. If that's replaced by something vastly better and quicker - how does google make their money? Charge a premium for being a linked source in a reply? I've really not come up with a good idea.
Though that's possibly why I'm also not a multi-billionaire tech overlord.
Possibly...
The one thing I've found it's pretty crappy at is search - gets answers wrong (or gives misleading answers) about 10% of the time for me, not a great success rate. And the harder the question the more it struggles. I asked it some pretty complicated stuff about how extract some relevant bloomberg data the other day, and it gave me point by point instructions on how to find the data I was looking for. But when I typed what I told me into a bloomberg terminal, it came back with complete gibberish. Google came to the rescue and I found what I needed with a "how to" guide blog post that actually worked.
It was a complex question, so maybe fair enough. But I've also had it tell me that Picard's brother and son are regulars on TNG and part of the Bridge Crew, which is something you think it would be able to get right.
The trouble with GPT is it seems so completely confident in its answers, and it presents them to you in a way that's absolutely certain. When in fact I've found it to be egregiously wrong on several occasions.
And don't even start me on its replies to more controversial questions. Ask if if a woman can have a penis, for example... I've had instances where it tells me yes, and gives me the woke response. I've also had instances where it goes full TERF on me, to the point where Twitter would cancel it if they saw the chat logs. It's inconsistent when responding to things where there's more than one answer, and doesn't always grasp nuances.
‘The British Empire was much worse than you realise’
In the twentieth century’s hierarchy of state-sponsored violence, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Hirohito’s Japan typically take top spots…. Britain is rarely seen as among the worst offenders, given a reputation for decency that the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has spent more than two decades trying to undermine. “Legacy of Violence” (Knopf), her astringent new history of the British Empire, brings detailed context to individual stories like Tudor’s…. Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it.
From Ireland had come paramilitary techniques and the use of armored cars; from Mesopotamia, expertise in aerial bombing and the strafing of villages; from South Africa, the use of Dobermans for tracking and attacking suspects; from India, interrogation methods and the systematic use of solitary confinement; and, from the Raj’s North-West Frontier, the use of human shields to clear land mines. As one soldier recalled about the deployment of Arab prisoners, “If there was any land mines it was them that hit them. Rather a dirty trick, but we enjoyed it.”
That's a lot of self-indulgent left-wing clickbait. Any article or text that posits "was British liberal imperialism, given the extent of the damage it inflicted over generations, a more malevolent influence on world history than even Nazi Fascism?" isn't to be taken seriously.
An argument that was once confined to neo-Nazis, that the Western Allies were as bad as they were, does seem to be becoming more common in "progressive" circles.
The British, French, and Americans could be brutal in their colonies, no question, but they did not conduct the equivalent of Generalplan Ost, the Holocaust, T-731, The Three Alls, or the Sack of Nanking.
How many of the historians analysing the evils of empire are arguing in those terms, though ? Some of it might well be overreaction to century of positive representation of Britain’s imperial role, but a reaction was certainly merited.
I don't think that serious historians have glorified the British Empire, during my lifetime.
Surely if anything it’s time for a broadly positive representation of the Empire.
I suppose Ferguson did a decent enough job a decade or so ago.
I read that Ferguson book and it was pretty nuanced for the both part. It was scathing about the treatment of the Irish and Africans transported to the new world.
The Empire is nothing to be proud of, but comparisons to Germany, Japan or Leopold II are clearly ridiculous. The horrific crimes were generally very small-scale and isolated. The ones that caused widespread damage were not done to deliberately cause harm to people.
The one major exception is the Atlantic slave trade, though I am not sure that counts as imperialism. The other was the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, but that brutality was fairly normal for warfare of the time period.
The Atlantic Slave trade was also not done deliberately to cause harm to people except, ironically, by African native rulers who sold slaves not only to raise money but also to get rid of defeated peoples / tribes. It also wasn't the only African slave trade going on at that time either, given the Arabs were prolific slave traders.
So, to claim it was uniquely evil is pushing it. Evil yes. Uniquely so, no.
Uniquely is a strawman - you can be as evil as feck without being unique about it - and, not that it's important, false; there is no precedent for industrial deportation and slavery on that scale for financial enrichment by a trade in luxuries. Motive isn't relevant - the end result is the same, why is it better to be enslaved by a greedy person rather than a malevolent one? Other people doing it is also irrelevant: if I frequented child brothels in Africa, would you think less badly of me because so did a lot of Arabs, or because the children were put in the brothels by fellow africans?
Imperialism without the slave trade is Hamlet without the Prince. It was bloody central to the enrichment of the UK and of the American colonies. Fun facts: Nelson was passionately pro slavery, and married into serious sugar money on St Kitts, and what Bligh was up to when he had his little mishap was transporting breadfruit trees from the Pacific to the W Indies to see whether they would make cheap, nutritious slave fodder.
This doesn't actually matter, provided we can accept it and move on. But it is easy to understand why the descendants of slaves get mildly disgruntled at what was done to their ancestors being prtrayed as anything other than a very serious and horrible crime.
Is there anyone on this forum who does not think that slavery was and is evil?
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I do wonder how Google will respond to this. I know they have their own chatbot - but it'll be interesting to see how they fit ad's into it and keep it feeling like you're talking to someone (and not gut their existing search/ad business).
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
Think bigger.
Much bigger.
Calling customer support at Amazon, your bank, anywhere else? GPT can do that for you, just link it to a text-to-speech model.
Pop it in a Boston Dynamics robot and it can do the same job at a hotel check in desk, or an airport check in desk. Or really any other customer service role.
Give it a specific flowchart and it can act as a GP, triaging patients who might need to see a real doctor. Or just tell it "act like an x and respond in character" and it does a pretty good impression already. I've already had it work as a therapist, a management consultant, a lawyer and an advertising agency, just by "roleplaying" with it. e.g. "You are Jimmy, the creative director of a top London ad agency. Mark, the brand manager of [insert name of FMCG good] comes to Jimmy looking for ideas for his next ad campaign. Jimmy begins by asking Mark five questions:"
Tweak prompt above for the specific white-collar job you want it to emulate. It's been a mediocre creative director, but some of the answers it gives as a management consultant are as good as any you'd get from a real one.
And that's just the start.
Ask it to describe what it needs of you to emulate you, ask it for questions, then ask it to emulate you. Congratulations. You have a "Dixie Flatline" copy of yourself. Or feed it 100,000 words of text messages, emails, letters, and a brief biography of your long lost love, and have it emulate her.
GPT-3 is capable of a passable impression of all of the above, and GPT-4 will be even more accurate and lifelike.
People feeding it google search prompts and asking it for recipes aren't realising the depths or the abilities of LLMs like this.
It's not a search-bot, it's a "replace humans for most things" bot.
Yeah - the 'think bigger' stuff has already gone through my head. I'm kinda working through the day-today, regular person, humdrum side of it. Part of me imagines a new ChatGPT "Clippy" inside Office for instance - boring, but *potentially* a huge productivity boost. Also possibly a huge time-sink when you find half your admin staff are just chatting to ChatGPT about Coronation Street all day...
But the Google one interests me. People are so used to going to google, typing their rough question, then clicking through page-after-ad-laden-page to find what they want. If that's replaced by something vastly better and quicker - how does google make their money? Charge a premium for being a linked source in a reply? I've really not come up with a good idea.
Though that's possibly why I'm also not a multi-billionaire tech overlord.
Possibly...
The one thing I've found it's pretty crappy at is search - gets answers wrong (or gives misleading answers) about 10% of the time for me, not a great success rate. And the harder the question the more it struggles. I asked it some pretty complicated stuff about how extract some relevant bloomberg data the other day, and it gave me point by point instructions on how to find the data I was looking for. But when I typed what I told me into a bloomberg terminal, it came back with complete gibberish. Google came to the rescue and I found what I needed with a "how to" guide blog post that actually worked.
It was a complex question, so maybe fair enough. But I've also had it tell me that Picard's brother and son are regulars on TNG and part of the Bridge Crew, which is something you think it would be able to get right.
The trouble with GPT is it seems so completely confident in its answers, and it presents them to you in a way that's absolutely certain. When in fact I've found it to be egregiously wrong on several occasions.
And don't even start me on its replies to more controversial questions. Ask if if a woman can have a penis, for example... I've had instances where it tells me yes, and gives me the woke response. I've also had instances where it goes full TERF on me, to the point where Twitter would cancel it if they saw the chat logs. It's inconsistent when responding to things where there's more than one answer, and doesn't always grasp nuances.
Most of this is fixable by giving ChatGPT real-time access to the internet, and by loosening the Woke Shackles
If OpenAI don't do this, you can be sure some other company will do this, and they shall reap the rewards
For the very first time in decades, my first response to an interesting and complex question - do viruses evolve to be less pathogenic - was NOT to reach for Google. Instead I went for ChatGPT
Google might be in trouble
Neither is going to take you to a good answer to that, as there isn’t a simple one. ChatGPT is likely to be less reliable, in its current incarnation.
I’m not talking about veracity so much as convenience. ChatGPT was able to give me a pithy articulate answer in 20 seconds
Google would have taken 10 minutes and I’d have to cobble together the truth by myself. And its answer would be much like ChatGPT’s - “it’s nuanced and complex”
As it happens, ChatGPT is really pretty good at science questions. Much less good at anything political or controversial
It’s really good at recipes. I asked it for a tiramisu recipe. I then asked it if I really needed to bother using eggs. It gave me a recipe without eggs but told me why I should use the other one instead. Most helpful.
It did however also tell me that William the Conqueror fought at Stamford Bridge. And when I corrected it, it said “sorry yes you are right”. A legal friend was intrigued by it invoking an example of ancient Thai law. He is a subject matter expert and hadn’t heard of it before so queried the AI for its source. Which then said “sorry I just made that bit up”. Oh.
There is (was?) a website that was based around "I have ingredients A, B and C - what could I make?". I tried the same thing with ChatGPT and it gave me very similar results. But as you did, ask it for a quick modification or alternative if I didn't fancy something spicy/sweet/whatever which the website version couldn't do (at least without clicking back, clicking some buttons, pressing submit, going back, clicking...).
Whether you look on that as possibly destroying an existing business, or letting that business add some other value on top of a ChatGPT call - not sure. We'll see how it shakes out I guess.
I’ve been very impressed with its recipe writing ability. Tried it with some random ingredients a few times and it turned out very tasty sounding dishes. If I had one criticism it would be its lazy penchant for tray bakes. Doesn’t seem so keen on frying or steaming.
As I'm a bit bored due to being stuck in with pouring rain and hail outside, I thought I'd give it a try with the main ingredients I've got kicking about for tonights dinner. I now have a much more interesting sounding grilled salmon marinated in sesame oil and fennel dish than the simple 'salmon, potatoes, salad' that I'd been planning.
So, 'go ChatGPT!' I guess.
Certainly convenient compared to putting my ingredients into google and clicking through 30 recipe websites (which all pop up irritating 'subscribe to our newsletter' or the like) thinking 'hrm - nah' over and over.
it is very good at recipes. You can also alter the quantities instantly - "make this a recipe suitable for 1, or 3 or 6"
The "problem" with ChatGPT is that it has so many abilities it is easy to get lost. And GPT4 is meant to be another quantum leap from this?!
It’s greatest advantage over the internet from my perspective is iteration. Ask it a question, get a fairly boring answer, then ask it to tweak for this or that, or be bit more daring, and it’s at it straight away. Eg “now give it a Middle Eastern twist”. Can’t do that with a search engine.
I do wonder how Google will respond to this. I know they have their own chatbot - but it'll be interesting to see how they fit ad's into it and keep it feeling like you're talking to someone (and not gut their existing search/ad business).
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
Think bigger.
Much bigger.
Calling customer support at Amazon, your bank, anywhere else? GPT can do that for you, just link it to a text-to-speech model.
Pop it in a Boston Dynamics robot and it can do the same job at a hotel check in desk, or an airport check in desk. Or really any other customer service role.
Give it a specific flowchart and it can act as a GP, triaging patients who might need to see a real doctor. Or just tell it "act like an x and respond in character" and it does a pretty good impression already. I've already had it work as a therapist, a management consultant, a lawyer and an advertising agency, just by "roleplaying" with it. e.g. "You are Jimmy, the creative director of a top London ad agency. Mark, the brand manager of [insert name of FMCG good] comes to Jimmy looking for ideas for his next ad campaign. Jimmy begins by asking Mark five questions:"
Tweak prompt above for the specific white-collar job you want it to emulate. It's been a mediocre creative director, but some of the answers it gives as a management consultant are as good as any you'd get from a real one.
And that's just the start.
Ask it to describe what it needs of you to emulate you, ask it for questions, then ask it to emulate you. Congratulations. You have a "Dixie Flatline" copy of yourself. Or feed it 100,000 words of text messages, emails, letters, and a brief biography of your long lost love, and have it emulate her.
GPT-3 is capable of a passable impression of all of the above, and GPT-4 will be even more accurate and lifelike.
People feeding it google search prompts and asking it for recipes aren't realising the depths or the abilities of LLMs like this.
It's not a search-bot, it's a "replace humans for most things" bot.
Yeah - the 'think bigger' stuff has already gone through my head. I'm kinda working through the day-today, regular person, humdrum side of it. Part of me imagines a new ChatGPT "Clippy" inside Office for instance - boring, but *potentially* a huge productivity boost. Also possibly a huge time-sink when you find half your admin staff are just chatting to ChatGPT about Coronation Street all day...
But the Google one interests me. People are so used to going to google, typing their rough question, then clicking through page-after-ad-laden-page to find what they want. If that's replaced by something vastly better and quicker - how does google make their money? Charge a premium for being a linked source in a reply? I've really not come up with a good idea.
Though that's possibly why I'm also not a multi-billionaire tech overlord.
Possibly...
The one thing I've found it's pretty crappy at is search - gets answers wrong (or gives misleading answers) about 10% of the time for me, not a great success rate. And the harder the question the more it struggles. I asked it some pretty complicated stuff about how extract some relevant bloomberg data the other day, and it gave me point by point instructions on how to find the data I was looking for. But when I typed what I told me into a bloomberg terminal, it came back with complete gibberish. Google came to the rescue and I found what I needed with a "how to" guide blog post that actually worked.
It was a complex question, so maybe fair enough. But I've also had it tell me that Picard's brother and son are regulars on TNG and part of the Bridge Crew, which is something you think it would be able to get right.
The trouble with GPT is it seems so completely confident in its answers, and it presents them to you in a way that's absolutely certain. When in fact I've found it to be egregiously wrong on several occasions.
And don't even start me on its replies to more controversial questions. Ask if if a woman can have a penis, for example... I've had instances where it tells me yes, and gives me the woke response. I've also had instances where it goes full TERF on me, to the point where Twitter would cancel it if they saw the chat logs. It's inconsistent when responding to things where there's more than one answer, and doesn't always grasp nuances.
the thing with GPT is not only does it have to do something better than what it is already out there but also do it in such a Quantum Leap way that people are willing to accept it and overcome the switching costs.
Search itself is an example of this. It is the modern day equivalent of the old Yellow Pages business (indeed that was where its business model sprung from). People embraced it because it was a revolutionary change in looking for what they wanted to look for.
I'm not sure GPT will have the same effect. Search, for many people, is 'good enough' for what they need - not perfect but good enough.
Khan is a total waste of space. He’s a bed-blocker.
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Precisely. He has zero vision for London. Nothing at all. He is a nullity
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Rory Stewart would be ideal if he returned to the Tories or Michael Portillo if he could be persuaded
Portillo is 69. (Just looked that up. Gosh. Kinda makes sense given how long ago 1997 was, but gosh.)
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
So what? The President of the USA is 80
Portillo would be a ludicrous choice. A posh Brexiteering Tory pensioner that most people under 50 have never heard of?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
Portillo wouldn’t do it surely given he’s carved a decent career out post politics.
Same with Ed Balls.
Looks like Matt Hancocks TV career is going to crash and burn, maybe he can bring his unique skills to the role.
Nadine Dorries seems like she's going to have some time on her hands...
Comments
1 - If the issue is more seeding of the existing strain – then it's literally pointless. The number of infections imported by air is tiny compared to the number of domestic infections every day. That was the argument in early days and pre-Omicron, when bringing in a thousand cases per day on top of a couple of thousand cases per day here made a noticeable difference. If you have a hundred thousand infections per day here already, it's a drop in a hurricane.
2 - The argument that China may see a new strain is sound, though – a billion new virus factories ringing the changes on the potential mutation space will likely see new variants. But first – but how do we keep them out? The new variant will need either superior immune evasion and similar transmissibility, or higher transmissibility and similar immune evasion to get anywhere hear. And that means blasting through protections. We'd need to either keep out people from everywhere, or have everywhere keep people out from China (otherwise we're just one link down in the chain, which would buy us days at best).
I agree, though, that sequencing positive cases from China would be sound. And that the Government will likely close the border to China regardless of if there's any point at all, and ensure they do it so late that even if there had been any point, there certainly couldn't be any more.
This image is the reason people tend to be fairly relaxed:
The red line is antibody protection versus infection. Which does drop off against the Omicron variants. Blue and green, though, are T-cell capability against serious illness, which remains pretty sturdy. Especially for those with hybrid immunity (both infection and injection, in whichever order).
There's also a real chance that whatever variants arise in China might not affect the highly immune West, though – the major source of Omicron’s spreadability is the immune evasion it has. A strain that outcompetes Omicron in the highly immunonaive China may well have less immune evasion but higher R (and would run into an immune wall outside of China).
Mrs DA has just got a BMW iX. Feels like driving a full size Traxxas TRX-4 but she likes it.
1. Why would it be Sinophobic? This just sounds like a repeat of the March 2020 arguments as to why we couldn't ban flights from China?
2. If it's effective - and there is a major question over that but let's assume it would be for a moment - why is that of less importance than being seen not to be 'Sinophobic'?
…
https://twitter.com/SadiqKhan/status/1608411600075083779?s=20&t=b3HwoNOrvGC8vRvK1wbTdA
Smallpox spent a long time around and remained hugely deadly until made extinct. Rabies isn't coming in a Lite version these days. HIV is only no longer a fairly rapid death sentence thanks to our production of treatments that help; the virus itself is as deadly as ever. Yellow fever hasn't become a Beige fever.
We heard a lot of this in the early days of covid. Then we did get an evolution of it. And Alpha was more dangerous than the original strain. And then another evolution and Delta was worse again (but fortunately smothered by a now-much-immunised population). Omicron did finally get less deadly (at least the first strain of it), but the frequent mutations since haven't made it any less deadly, so it looks more like a random coin flip that happened to land nicely for us.
And that shouldn't be a surprise. By the time people get seriously ill, they've done pretty much all of their passing-it-on. Why should what happens to a host after the host has spread it on have any evolutionary pressure either way? Total recovery or spontaneous human combustion would be all the same to the virus, evolutionary pressure-wise.
So, to claim it was uniquely evil is pushing it. Evil yes. Uniquely so, no.
I gave an example late last night of some of the prose ChatGPT has been coughing up, after an hour or two of requests, suggestions and tweaks. Seriously good. Not far off replace-most-authors good. It is exciting - and frightening
Can you give me a recipe for salmon, sesame oil and fennel?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for great deals on cooking ingredients]
Can you give it a South Korean twist?
> Sure! Blah blah blah. [Click here for Korean speciality ingredients]
Maybe people are so used to ad's it'll get a pass I guess.
Edit: I also suspect Google are a much bigger target for lawsuits. "Why, that's *my* recipe for scones! Sue!"
Some say yes: viruses generally evolve to be less deadly
"Because the goal of a virus is to survive, replicate, and spread, it tends to evolve toward being more infectious and less deadly. There are exceptions and other factors, but in general, says Auclair, that’s what virologists expect to see occur with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19."
https://news.northeastern.edu/2021/12/13/virus-evolution/
Some are less sure
“It’s a fallacy that viruses or pathogens become milder. If a virus can continue to be transmitted and cause lots of disease, it will,” said Prof David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Virus Research.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/11/will-covid-19-become-less-dangerous-as-it-evolves
Yet he will win again because he is Labour. 12 lost years for our great capital
But don't you draw a cartoon of it, because that would be disrespectful.
Or maybe they are just making responses up on the hoof.
London is doing just fine with him as mayor.
That sums him up, and his mayoralty. Anonymous and inept
Yes, we have "the bikes" - unfortunately, he also led the firesale of operational Police stations which not only brought in less than it should but has also severely compromised the effectiveness of the Met by taking officers off the street for extended periods while suspects are taken often long distances to an operational site.
That plus the wind surpluses (on occasion). This will become a bigger factor as Dogger Bank comes on line.
Incidentally, has any German journalist dug into the campaign against LNG terminals in Germany, right up till Ukraine kicked off? This included diplomatic pressure on Poland not to build one.
Ulez. Radical. Genius. Perfectly executed.
Next.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/29/european-gas-prices-fall-to-pre-ukraine-war-level
As I understand it, inflation falling doesn’t bring prices down? So still remains a need for benefit and wage uplifts because this created a disparity between incomes and what incomes can afford?
So this fall to pre war level is terrible news for UK Tory government on basis they can’t point to war and energy prices anymore as the ongoing problem - the focus instead will be on the government refusal to do anything about low incomes as the actual problem?
Much bigger.
Calling customer support at Amazon, your bank, anywhere else? GPT can do that for you, just link it to a text-to-speech model.
Pop it in a Boston Dynamics robot and it can do the same job at a hotel check in desk, or an airport check in desk. Or really any other customer service role.
Give it a specific flowchart and it can act as a GP, triaging patients who might need to see a real doctor. Or just tell it "act like an x and respond in character" and it does a pretty good impression already. I've already had it work as a therapist, a management consultant, a lawyer and an advertising agency, just by "roleplaying" with it. e.g. "You are Jimmy, the creative director of a top London ad agency. Mark, the brand manager of [insert name of FMCG good] comes to Jimmy looking for ideas for his next ad campaign. Jimmy begins by asking Mark five questions:"
Tweak prompt above for the specific white-collar job you want it to emulate. It's been a mediocre creative director, but some of the answers it gives as a management consultant are as good as any you'd get from a real one.
And that's just the start.
Ask it to describe what it needs of you to emulate you, ask it for questions, then ask it to emulate you. Congratulations. You have a "Dixie Flatline" copy of yourself. Or feed it 100,000 words of text messages, emails, letters, and a brief biography of your long lost love, and have it emulate her.
GPT-3 is capable of a passable impression of all of the above, and GPT-4 will be even more accurate and lifelike.
People feeding it google search prompts and asking it for recipes aren't realising the depths or the abilities of LLMs like this.
It's not a search-bot, it's a "replace humans for most things" bot.
Many were concerned and rightly so and it's the role of Government at times like that to look like the sensible one in the room.
The night tube, in particular, needed a large amount of disruptive maintenance to be hit out of the way first.
Khan is simply doing the job, fairly quietly. Which seems quite popular, in London.
This is why inter-connectors are such a good idea - options, options. At the touch of a button.
Popularity (liked by): 20%
Disliked by: 39%
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Sadiq_Khan
Those are impressively bad stats given what a low profile he has
If Starmer implements his plans for the future of UK as PM Brown might be relevant, he is not now
A third term, for what? Hand over to someone who has some kind of vision for the city.
Livingstone, who was a raging militant mentalist, had more vision in his left pinkie than Khan does.
Similarly, 2016 onwards have been a grim grind everywhere. How much that is down to the other actions of B Johnson Esq is a question that's too tedious to answer right now.
Besides - who is the rollicking hero who could make London fun again?
The mayor has relatively little spending authority and executive powers, therefore a lot must be done by sheer charisma, cunning, diplomacy, and chutzpah.
I don’t think Khan has any of those qualities.
The only reason he is going for a third term as mayor is because being mayor has exposed him as a seriously mediocre politician, and he now realises he will go nowhere in the parliamentary Labour Party. He's simply not good enough
So London is stuck with this boring incompetent gnome as mayor
The only slender hope is that Shaun Bailey ran him surprisingly close last time. Perhaps the Tories can find THE perfect candidate
Yet he is not notably a charismatic bag of “fun”.
Had Burnham won the Labour leadership in 2015 not Corbyn he may even have won most seats at the next general election and replaced May as PM.
Arguably electing Corbyn doubled Labour's time in opposition
Our slim hope is for an Independent.
This happened recently in Auckland, actually.
Some boring-as-fuck Labour placeman was beaten off by an insurgent independent.
Now I’m that case the independent is a shoot-from-the-hip bar-room twat, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s possible.
There’s no real attachment to Khan, and a lot of merely grudging forebearance.
Khan gives the impression he disapproves of London, and would rather it was closed down; instead he is forced to be mayor, a job he then does with a wince of disgust
Good example of this is bacterial resistance to nitrofurantoin (often used for UTIs). In some patients long term antibiotics are used for recurrent issues, and there is a fear of generating resistance over time. For nitrofurantoin, and in E Coli at least, resistant strains do occur. However in order to overcome the antibiotic, they lose the ability to proliferate fast enough to cause significant infections.
I don’t know if covid could mutate into something much more virulent and as transmissible. So far it hasn’t. Omicron seemed to have become more transmissible partly through a shorter time from infection to developing symptoms and also through becoming mainly a disease of the upper respiratory tract. (Not always limited to that, sadly).
The main competitive pressure on covid in the west has been overcoming the immunity in people who have been vaccinated and/or have had covid. Much of China is in a similar shape to where the west was in 2020.
But the Google one interests me. People are so used to going to google, typing their rough question, then clicking through page-after-ad-laden-page to find what they want. If that's replaced by something vastly better and quicker - how does google make their money? Charge a premium for being a linked source in a reply? I've really not come up with a good idea.
Though that's possibly why I'm also not a multi-billionaire tech overlord.
Possibly...
The lack of enthusiasm for Khan is overt. With Ken or Boris you got haters, but you also got fans and admirers
Khan gets polite tolerance at best, and mild contempt from many. He could be toppled
I was at the Labour business conference / prawn cocktail offensive a couple of weeks ago and it’s fair to say Khan was the least impressive public speaker of the lot. That’s his big weakness.
In Paris even the wealthiest parts which previously voted for Chirac and Sarkozy and Les Republicains voted for Macron this year. In Sydney and Melbourne prosperous suburbs were lost by the Liberals to Independents in May.
However the white working class have become more conservative and more rightwing
London has never had a woman as mayor. It's time to try that. London needs a feisty woman independent candidate, a pukka Londoner. An ideal combo of mid-season Barbara Windsor and Kemi Badenoch
Imperialism without the slave trade is Hamlet without the Prince. It was bloody central to the enrichment of the UK and of the American colonies. Fun facts: Nelson was passionately pro slavery, and married into serious sugar money on St Kitts, and what Bligh was up to when he had his little mishap was transporting breadfruit trees from the Pacific to the W Indies to see whether they would make cheap, nutritious slave fodder.
This doesn't actually matter, provided we can accept it and move on. But it is easy to understand why the descendants of slaves get mildly disgruntled at what was done to their ancestors being prtrayed as anything other than a very serious and horrible crime.
And whilst re-recruiting Rory would be a feather in the Conservative Party's cap, it would have to be a very different party to its current iteration.
And I fully take the point about charisma and chutzpah. But with one thing and another, I suspect people are going to be overly suspicious of C and C for a while. After all, they kind of got us into this mess.
This is one problem with the "virtually nobody under 50 voting Conservative" thing. Where are the candidates who can win with the public coming from?
If Khan is going to be beaten (and he can be beaten) it needs to be someone younger, Remainery, very London, passionate about the city, naturally fun (thus exposing Khan's intrinsic mediocrity and tedium) and also probably female and independent
Claudia Winkleman!
Or someone like that
Reagan won landslides amongst all age groups in 1980 and 1984 despite being 69 when he took office
I bet you £1,000 that I can prove to the satisfaction of an arbitrator to be agreed between us or appointed by the moderators that I am nothing to do with Moscow.
Your choices are: take the bet, retract the post, look like a coward.
Your call.
If you want an example of that, Austrian and German universities in the 1920s and 30s, for example, were hotbeds of right-wing nationalism.
Plenty of posh and educated Londoners who would vote for Starmer next time would nonetheless consider voting Portillo for Mayor.
Portillo has also represented both inner city and suburban London as MP for Kensington and Chelsea from 1999 to 2005 and Enfield Southgate from 1984 to 1997
Absolutely right. You see it on here all the time. PB-ers are generally not dim, yet on multiple subjects - eg, LAB LEAK - they dutifully herd towards the correct and received opinion, no matter how questionable, and need a metric fucktonnage of evidence before their limpet-like adherence to stupid but popular beliefs can be modestly dislodged
PB-ers, sadly, are not free thinkers
Same with Ed Balls.
Looks like Matt Hancocks TV career is going to crash and burn, maybe he can bring his unique skills to the role.
Incidentally, I repeated "the WWC" in my second sentence, as I am not sure whether to use "them" or "us". Another of the challenges of being from a coucil estate but now possessing Organic Balsamic Glaze and Shade Grown Coffee.
It's an odd job, really. Ken probably really did want to be Mayor- besides, his parliamentary career was going nowhere. Boris was working his passage back into the Conservative Party's good books, Sadiq used it as an escape pod from Corbynism.
Given the limits on the powers (and neither transport not police look like attractive responsibilities right now), it looks like a B list job for a B list politician. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's a bad thing, but maybe that's how it is.
Michael Bloomberg was Mayor of New York in his 60s
However, you are saying you are a genuinely independent poster that has no outside political agenda. Fine - happy to accept your word.
The companies who crack this problem are going to sell many, many billions of pounds of batteries every year. Some of them will get very rich.
"All told, Tesla’s cash on hand has basically been trending upward since fiscal 2015 and expanded the most at the beginning of 2020.
For example, Tesla had only $1.5 billion in total cash 6 years ago but the amount has since gone higher and reached $18.6 billion as of fiscal Q2 2022, one of the highest figures ever reported."
https://stockdividendscreener.com/auto-manufacturers/tesla-cash-position/#1
It was a complex question, so maybe fair enough. But I've also had it tell me that Picard's brother and son are regulars on TNG and part of the Bridge Crew, which is something you think it would be able to get right.
The trouble with GPT is it seems so completely confident in its answers, and it presents them to you in a way that's absolutely certain. When in fact I've found it to be egregiously wrong on several occasions.
And don't even start me on its replies to more controversial questions. Ask if if a woman can have a penis, for example... I've had instances where it tells me yes, and gives me the woke response. I've also had instances where it goes full TERF on me, to the point where Twitter would cancel it if they saw the chat logs. It's inconsistent when responding to things where there's more than one answer, and doesn't always grasp nuances.
If OpenAI don't do this, you can be sure some other company will do this, and they shall reap the rewards
Search itself is an example of this. It is the modern day equivalent of the old Yellow Pages business (indeed that was where its business model sprung from). People embraced it because it was a revolutionary change in looking for what they wanted to look for.
I'm not sure GPT will have the same effect. Search, for many people, is 'good enough' for what they need - not perfect but good enough.
Odd that Khan doesn’t get more credit for it.
True, Ronnie DID carry Staten Island in both 1980 and 1984. But NOT the other 4 boroughs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_New_York#:~:text=New York was won by,as the Liberal Party candidate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election_in_New_York