I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
Johnson will be PM until 2030 Johnson won't resign Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election Truss is better than Keir Starmer The polls will recover with Truss as leader Rishi Sunak will save the Tories Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I'd disagree with Callaghan in Tier 3. He gets criticised for his decision not to go to the polls early and his "Crisis, what crisis" but he was a PM with no majority, an extremely militant trade union sector but one, who by the end of his time, was showing economically better results
He sabotaged Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife so he got his just desserts with the winter of discontent.
Which is a fair charge but doesn't have to do with how well he did.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
The quality of the course materials that the OU provides is outstanding. The trouble nowadays is the cost of the courses, which since education tuition became a charageable affair is often prohibitive.
That's an interesting insight, thanks - and I certainly agree about the course materials.
Germany is facing a severe teacher shortage – at a time when schools are tasked with integrating more foreign students and training the skilled workers of tomorrow.
Recruiting teachers from abroad could help, but bureaucratic hurdles hinder efforts.
Brexit has exacerbated the problems arising from the pandemic, leaving us the only major economy that has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. It’s not difficult to understand.
Way Off Topic - this made me laugh out loud when I first read it . . . and again when I re-read it . . .
New York Times (S) - The Ads Fueling Truth Social: Trinkets and Scams
Between posts about conspiracy theories and right-wing grievances, there was an unusual advertisement: a photo of former President Donald J. Trump holding a $1,000 bill made of gold, which he was apparently offering free to supporters.
But there were a few catches. The bill was not free, it was not made of gold, and it was not offered by Mr. Trump.
The ad appeared on Truth Social, the right-wing social network started by Mr. Trump in late 2021, one of many pitches from hucksters and fringe marketeers dominating the ads on the site.
Ads from major brands are nonexistent on the site. Instead, the ads for Truth Social are for alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets, according to an analysis of hundreds of ads on the social network by the New York Times. . . .
Over time, the low-quality ads on Truth Social have irritated its own users, who have complained to Mr. Trump after repeatedly seeing the same disturbing images [for example of skin abnormalities and grotesque eyeballs] or after falling for misleading gimmicks.
"Can you not vet the ads on Truth?" asked on user in a post directed at Mr. Trump. "I'VE BEEN SCAMMED MORE THAN ONCE".
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
Thanks (though a pedant would say that's pretty faint praise).
Best thing you can say about Sunak is that he’s not Truss or Johnson or the rest of the freak show that is the modern freak show that is the Tory Party.
All of these events that lead to the inevitable thrashing of the Tories at the next election were started when the braindead end of the Tory membership thought it a good idea to someone who was a walking moral vacuum as leader because he is "popular". Member such as @HYUFD who continue to make excuses for him because he won a majority persist in overlooking that even with his majority he was a walking disaster area for party and country
I fear that the membership's collective stupidity will keep the Conservative Party out of office for years and we will be stuck with a Labour party that bloats the public sector and drives down our competitiveness year on year. I just hope they are not as bad as I fear they might be.
I fear the party will get madder with opposition.
Brexiteers like Casino Royale have observed the current Brexit settlement is unsustainable and that something will replace it.
Eventually Starmer will catch up to the polling and as de minimis we rejoin the Single Market, that will be another tipping point for the madness.
You can draw a straight line between the Brexiteer takeover of the Tory Party and the state of the party five years down the line.
There are many downsides to Brexit but one of the greatest has been the third rate, incompetent politicians it has thrust into positions of power - Johnson, Raab, Braverman, Dorries, Rees-Mogg, Zahawi, Patel, Truss, Kwartang - the list goes on and on.
Anyone who believes the two are not connected hasn't been paying attention.
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
Johnson will be PM until 2030 Johnson won't resign Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election Truss is better than Keir Starmer The polls will recover with Truss as leader Rishi Sunak will save the Tories Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
And only half of those were from our Leondamus…..
I had all but "Truss is better than Keir Starmer". Surely no one had that one chalked up.
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
One thought. NHS users are disproportionately elderly. Ergo disproportionately tech unclued up, let alone equipped.
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
Johnson will be PM until 2030 Johnson won't resign Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election Truss is better than Keir Starmer The polls will recover with Truss as leader Rishi Sunak will save the Tories Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
And only half of those were from our Leondamus…..
I had all but "Truss is better than Keir Starmer". Surely no one had that one chalked up.
She was apparently poised to “surprise on the upside”, just before she self-destructed?
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
Johnson will be PM until 2030 Johnson won't resign Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election Truss is better than Keir Starmer The polls will recover with Truss as leader Rishi Sunak will save the Tories Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
And only half of those were from our Leondamus…..
I had all but "Truss is better than Keir Starmer". Surely no one had that one chalked up.
One poster who is from Wales bigged up Truss for a week and then when he saw where the wind was blowing quickly changed his mind. Embarrassing he ever thought she was good
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
Johnson will be PM until 2030 Johnson won't resign Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election Truss is better than Keir Starmer The polls will recover with Truss as leader Rishi Sunak will save the Tories Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
And only half of those were from our Leondamus…..
I had all but "Truss is better than Keir Starmer". Surely no one had that one chalked up.
She was apparently poised to “surprise on the upside”, just before she self-destructed?
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
I had my first real life encounter with the effect of ChatGPT over the weekend. Was talking to a family member who owns a marketing and comms company and they are using it now for all “filler” copy for clients on social media etc where it doesn’t really need a cleverly crafted or tailored bit of work.
This has clearly made this part of their work very easy and quick however it is work that used to be farmed out to freelance copywriters who will clearly be casualties of this technology. Whereas they might have been able to survive on churning out copy each day for £50 a time (didn’t ask what they charge) why pay that now?
[See what I did there, I edited out the substance of the case you made to make your point, just as you did mine. If you insist on being petty like that I will continue to follow suit.]
Oh no it isn't.
Had I quoted a 43% improvement (17%+26%), you would have been perfectly entitled to point out that the swing was only 21.5%, in terms of how of Starmer's satisfaction rating v Sunak has improved on that of Miliband compared to Cameron. But since I didn't quote any "swing", just the raw figures, you have invented a straw man.
The problem is that net satisfaction is an incomplete measure. 40/45 giving -5 is better than 30/30 giving 0. And given that nearly everyone giving one leader a positive rating will be giving the other one a negative rating, you're definitely double counting.
What are the real satisfaction figures, not the net?
No, I don't accept that at all.
Look on the MORI pdf and historic political monitor yourself, I am afraid I have had enough of this.
[See what I did there, I edited out the substance of the case you made to make your point, just as you did mine. If you insist on being petty like that I will continue to follow suit.]
Oh no it isn't.
Had I quoted a 43% improvement (17%+26%), you would have been perfectly entitled to point out that the swing was only 21.5%, in terms of how of Starmer's satisfaction rating v Sunak has improved on that of Miliband compared to Cameron. But since I didn't quote any "swing", just the raw figures, you have invented a straw man.
The problem is that net satisfaction is an incomplete measure. 40/45 giving -5 is better than 30/30 giving 0. And given that nearly everyone giving one leader a positive rating will be giving the other one a negative rating, you're definitely double counting.
What are the real satisfaction figures, not the net?
No, I don't accept that at all.
Look on the MORI pdf and historic political monitor yourself, I am afraid I have had enough of this.
Got to go now.
Sorry you coudn't stay around to defend your ideas.
Washington Post ($) via Seattle Times - When she named her breakfast cafe Woke, a conservative backlash followed
When Carmen Quiroga named her new breakfast restaurant, she wanted people to associate the cafe with waking up in the morning.
She settled on Woke Breakfast & Coffee and spent six months renovating a building and developing a logo. Quiroga moved to Coventry, Conn., a few weeks before the restaurant’s opening this month. While finalizing the permits at town hall, another resident advised her to check Facebook.
There, Quiroga saw several town residents criticizing her restaurant’s name, suggesting she’d chosen Woke to make a political statement.
That was false, Quiroga told The Washington Post. She filled her days with work and never watched the news, she said. After viewing Facebook, she researched the term’s definition and recognized the misunderstanding the name provoked.
When Woke opened Jan. 19, however, Quiroga faced different stresses. The controversy spurred other residents to support the restaurant, which led to long lines and sold-out menu items.
. . . [H]er 23-year-old son created the logo, featuring a fried egg in place of the “O” in Woke. The family included the logo on the restaurant’s website, menus and mugs. The shop’s catchphrase: “You woke up and made the right choice.” . . .
One commenter posted that the restaurant would lose some Republican patrons, adding, “Naming it ‘woke.’ Is that really such a good idea?” . . . .
. . . [A]bout a dozen people left comments bashing the restaurant in a private town Facebook group and arguing it would fail. The Facebook group’s moderators later deleted posts for their insensitivity . . .
Quiroga panicked and considered changing the name, but she said she didn’t have the money for rebranding.
Her anxiety persisted until opening day on Jan. 19. Quiroga said visitors to her small cafe, which has nine tables, saw an hourlong wait. The restaurant soon ran out of ingredients for its Mexican egg dishes. Quiroga said many customers comforted her, claiming the offensive comments didn’t represent the opinions of most residents.
Coventry’s Republican Town Committee also came out in support of Woke last week, writing on Facebook: “While the name at first may set off some conservatives’ alarm bells, it is clear that the owner never intended for it to be a political statement.”
After weeks of restlessness over the name, Quiroga has settled back into the routine of running a restaurant.
“We are very happy,” Quiroga said before pausing.
“Well, you know, it’s stressful because there’s many, many people waiting in line, and they’re waiting for tables to come.”
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
Thanks (though a pedant would say that's pretty faint praise).
The Open University and the 1970s and 80s BBC had a lot in common, which isn't a coincidence due to various appointments Wilson and Callaghan made in it.
There was also the Reithian drive of the then slightly more establishment figures who supported its presence on BBC2, like Attenborough. Many a happy morning spent in the 1980's watching academics in huge glasses, beards, flares, and their awkward monotones on complex topics.
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
One thought. NHS users are disproportionately elderly. Ergo disproportionately tech unclued up, let alone equipped.
Two points here
1) there is nothing new here beyond chatGPT being slightly better at understanding a request compared to the previous method MS has had within Dynamics for the past 5 or so years.
2) doing this in the public sector requires some upfront investment and I simply don't see where that money is going to come from.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
Thanks (though a pedant would say that's pretty faint praise).
The Open University and the 1970s and 80s BBC had a lot in common, which isn't a coincidence due to various appointments Wilson and Callaghan made in it.
There was also the Reithian drive of the then more establishment figures who supported its presence on BBC2, like Attenborough.
If you drank too much of an evening in the ‘80s and fell asleep watching the BBC, you would often wake in the small hours and find yourself in the middle of a maths lecture…
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
Thanks (though a pedant would say that's pretty faint praise).
The Open University and the 1970s and 80s BBC had a lot in common, which isn't a coincidence due to various appointments Wilson and Callaghan made in it.
There was also the Reithian drive of the then more establishment figures who supported its presence on BBC2, like Attenborough.
If you drank too much of an evening in the ‘80s and fell asleep watching the BBC, you would often wake in the small hours and find yourself in the middle of a maths lecture…
Given the report out today, sounds like they need to start putting those back on again, so the BBC employees can upskill....
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
I'm always wary of claims that some new technology will free up staff to focus on improving the service offered - more likely the firm will lay off staff until the level of service is back at the worst level they can get away with. Apologies for my cynicism, but I've spent too long shouting at bots on automated calls that can't understand what I'm saying to believe in utopian technological solutions.
Germany is facing a severe teacher shortage – at a time when schools are tasked with integrating more foreign students and training the skilled workers of tomorrow.
Recruiting teachers from abroad could help, but bureaucratic hurdles hinder efforts.
Brexit has exacerbated the problems arising from the pandemic, leaving us the only major economy that has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. It’s not difficult to understand.
FYI, after Germany reported a 0.2% q/q fall in Q4, here's an updated chart comparing UK and German #GDP since the #Brexit referendum.
A fair assessment is that cumulative UK growth since 2016 has been about the same as Germany's (5.7%), despite a much bigger hit from Covid.
I just watched a short bit of the 1968 film "The Swimmer", with Burt Lancaster. A girl in it references how she met her boyfriend through computer dating...
(The olden sort, where you send in details and they put it in a computer (yeah, right), and you get matches sent back.)
Germany is facing a severe teacher shortage – at a time when schools are tasked with integrating more foreign students and training the skilled workers of tomorrow.
Recruiting teachers from abroad could help, but bureaucratic hurdles hinder efforts.
Brexit has exacerbated the problems arising from the pandemic, leaving us the only major economy that has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. It’s not difficult to understand.
FYI, after Germany reported a 0.2% q/q fall in Q4, here's an updated chart comparing UK and German #GDP since the #Brexit referendum.
A fair assessment is that cumulative UK growth since 2016 has been about the same as Germany's (5.7%), despite a much bigger hit from Covid.
[See what I did there, I edited out the substance of the case you made to make your point, just as you did mine. If you insist on being petty like that I will continue to follow suit.]
Oh no it isn't.
Had I quoted a 43% improvement (17%+26%), you would have been perfectly entitled to point out that the swing was only 21.5%, in terms of how of Starmer's satisfaction rating v Sunak has improved on that of Miliband compared to Cameron. But since I didn't quote any "swing", just the raw figures, you have invented a straw man.
The problem is that net satisfaction is an incomplete measure. 40/45 giving -5 is better than 30/30 giving 0. And given that nearly everyone giving one leader a positive rating will be giving the other one a negative rating, you're definitely double counting.
What are the real satisfaction figures, not the net?
No, I don't accept that at all.
Look on the MORI pdf and historic political monitor yourself, I am afraid I have had enough of this.
Got to go now.
It's the same mistake that Corbyn's acolytes made and still make. The sweet spot in politics is to enthuse your supporters whilst not motivating your opponents to vote against you.
I just watched a short bit of the 1968 film "The Swimmer", with Burt Lancaster. A girl in it references how she met her boyfriend through computer dating...
(The olden sort, where you send in details and they put it in a computer (yeah, right), and you get matches sent back.)
Computer dating, 55 years ago.
This was also the theme of Carry on Loving from around the same time, one of the more under- rated Carry Ons..
Anyone who had to deal with a problem like Zahawi knows that it is difficult because of allegation & counter-allegation.
I personally favour all allegations against politicians being investigated quickly, then a report (& evidence) being made public and swift action taken.
So, Sunak does seem to me to have handled this OK. Just as the Labour Party did OK over the allegations regarding Chris Matheson, ex MP for Chester. They did not suspend him until after an independent report that confirmed that the sexual harassment allegations were true.
If you sack people just because there is an allegation, then you end up with instances like Conor Burns. He was cleared of all wrongdoing after a sexual harassment story was leaked to the public, but by then he had been sacked. The alleged victim hadn’t made a complaint & AIUI there was no evidence of misconduct.
Now in Zahawi's case, tax law is complex and his affairs were (probably) in the hands of a tax advisor. So, whether he was personally culpable did need a bit of time to investigate.
Though his offence was his failure to disclose his dispute with HMRC, rather than the dispute itself. All the enquiry did was reveal he had failed to disclose it on several more occasions.
I don't see he has any defence to that either before or after the enquiry.
Once upon a time, when I ran an organisation, I had to deal with a serious case of bullying.
Although it was pretty obvious to me that the alleged bully was likely guilty, it still took over 6 months.
The alleged bully's defence still actually needed to be examined.
And all the while, folks were saying: why has @YBarddCwsc not taken swift action against bullying?
Sharon Shoesmith says hello: It is worth reflecting that one of the key reasons why Ms Shoesmith was in such a strong legal position was due to the sheer trigger happy conduct of Mr Ed Balls who effectively removed Miss Shoesmith from her statutory role at Haringey with no warning and flouting the most basic legal procedures.
Mr Balls was Children's Secretary at the time of Ms Shoesmith's sacking.
A very good point, and a pleasant diversion from the Joanne Rowling narrative, well done!
Sharon Shoesmith was lynched by the press and the Labour Government's defence of lets pick on a scapegoat. A personal vilification to smokescreen a wider failure.
Not quite - she was clearly responsible for actively ignoring the concerns about the baby. And responsible for a bizarre vendetta against the junior employee trying to raise the concerns.
The wider system had its failings, yes. Shoesmith was definitely a failure, though.
Oh, Shoesmith deserved to be fired for gross misconduct, something that almost never happens in the administrative state. The problem was that Mr Balls, for want of a better expression, ballsed it up by bypassing the formal processes of employment law and contract. An elected minister cannot simply dismiss a civil servant, where several management layers exist between them.
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
1. Johnson will be PM until 2030 2. Johnson won't resign 3. Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election 4. Truss is better than Keir Starmer 5. The polls will recover with Truss as leader 6. Rishi Sunak will save the Tories 7. Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
[Added numbers to your post for ease of reference]
I had 2 and 3 (although not I thought he could well lose the next GE, so definitely not 1.
Also thought 5 was a short-term possibility. I expected Truss to engineer a Barber-style boom based on funny money - I thought she was useless, but might be popular short term. I feared she might even be able to win a well-timed snap election before the electorate saw through her.
So, 2-3 out of 7 is.... Not too bad?
2 was also a good (and profitable) betting angle for some time. One of my best returns in recent years was repeatedly betting against Johnson going (mostly through the proxy of Starmer as next PM) and then trading out when things settled down after each crisis.
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
1. Johnson will be PM until 2030 2. Johnson won't resign 3. Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election 4. Truss is better than Keir Starmer 5. The polls will recover with Truss as leader 6. Rishi Sunak will save the Tories 7. Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
[Added numbers to your post for ease of reference]
I had 2 and 3 (although not I thought he could well lose the next GE, so definitely not 1.
Also thought 5 was a short-term possibility. I expected Truss to engineer a Barber-style boom based on funny money - I thought she was useless, but might be popular short term. I feared she might even be able to win a well-timed snap election before the electorate saw through her.
So, 2-3 out of 7 is.... Not too bad?
2 was also a good (and profitable) betting angle for some time. One of my best returns in recent years was repeatedly betting against Johnson going (mostly through the proxy of Starmer as next PM) and then trading out when things settled down after each crisis.
Notable that nobody is quibbling with Truss sitting in glitches in the matrix.
Pray for the history teachers yet to come, who are going to have to teach 2022 to teenagers. They're not going to believe a word of it.
It will just be seen as part of the decline of Britain during the period known as the Interregnum which occurred between the UK's memberships of the EU.
The EU won’t let us back, other than that spot on.
No, they will let us back and for the same reason that Brexit is so stupid - because we are too big an economy to ignore, just like the EU is too big for us to ignore. Even a diminished Britain would be valuable.
They will just ensure that the process of entanglement is more complete.
I just watched a short bit of the 1968 film "The Swimmer", with Burt Lancaster. A girl in it references how she met her boyfriend through computer dating...
(The olden sort, where you send in details and they put it in a computer (yeah, right), and you get matches sent back.)
Computer dating, 55 years ago.
This was also the theme of Carry on Loving from around the same time, one of the more under- rated Carry Ons..
[See what I did there, I edited out the substance of the case you made to make your point, just as you did mine. If you insist on being petty like that I will continue to follow suit.]
Oh no it isn't.
Had I quoted a 43% improvement (17%+26%), you would have been perfectly entitled to point out that the swing was only 21.5%, in terms of how of Starmer's satisfaction rating v Sunak has improved on that of Miliband compared to Cameron. But since I didn't quote any "swing", just the raw figures, you have invented a straw man.
The problem is that net satisfaction is an incomplete measure. 40/45 giving -5 is better than 30/30 giving 0. And given that nearly everyone giving one leader a positive rating will be giving the other one a negative rating, you're definitely double counting.
What are the real satisfaction figures, not the net?
No, I don't accept that at all.
Look on the MORI pdf and historic political monitor yourself, I am afraid I have had enough of this.
Got to go now.
It's the same mistake that Corbyn's acolytes made and still make. The sweet spot in politics is to enthuse your supporters whilst not motivating your opponents to vote against you.
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
1. Johnson will be PM until 2030 2. Johnson won't resign 3. Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election 4. Truss is better than Keir Starmer 5. The polls will recover with Truss as leader 6. Rishi Sunak will save the Tories 7. Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
[Added numbers to your post for ease of reference]
I had 2 and 3 (although not I thought he could well lose the next GE, so definitely not 1.
Also thought 5 was a short-term possibility. I expected Truss to engineer a Barber-style boom based on funny money - I thought she was useless, but might be popular short term. I feared she might even be able to win a well-timed snap election before the electorate saw through her.
So, 2-3 out of 7 is.... Not too bad?
2 was also a good (and profitable) betting angle for some time. One of my best returns in recent years was repeatedly betting against Johnson going (mostly through the proxy of Starmer as next PM) and then trading out when things settled down after each crisis.
Hope you are doing good
I am, thank you, CHB. Lots going on and not all of it good, to be fair (health issues for some family and a couple of friends' little ones) but sometimes that helps to give a bit of perspective on how lucky you are and enjoying the moment while you can.
Ed is Crap, is Prime Minister. Bit of a meme here at the time. Never really opened out enough of a lead, though.
I don't get it, is it that Ed is crap but will be PM regardless?
I never thought Ed was crap, just shouldn't have been the leader.
Glad to hear you're staying well and glad you're here posting.
Pretty much. Ed is dweeby and not Prime Ministerial and... a bit crap. But despite that, he was ahead in the polls which some saw as pointing to him being on track for Downing Street.
Anyone who had to deal with a problem like Zahawi knows that it is difficult because of allegation & counter-allegation.
I personally favour all allegations against politicians being investigated quickly, then a report (& evidence) being made public and swift action taken.
So, Sunak does seem to me to have handled this OK. Just as the Labour Party did OK over the allegations regarding Chris Matheson, ex MP for Chester. They did not suspend him until after an independent report that confirmed that the sexual harassment allegations were true.
If you sack people just because there is an allegation, then you end up with instances like Conor Burns. He was cleared of all wrongdoing after a sexual harassment story was leaked to the public, but by then he had been sacked. The alleged victim hadn’t made a complaint & AIUI there was no evidence of misconduct.
Now in Zahawi's case, tax law is complex and his affairs were (probably) in the hands of a tax advisor. So, whether he was personally culpable did need a bit of time to investigate.
Though his offence was his failure to disclose his dispute with HMRC, rather than the dispute itself. All the enquiry did was reveal he had failed to disclose it on several more occasions.
I don't see he has any defence to that either before or after the enquiry.
Once upon a time, when I ran an organisation, I had to deal with a serious case of bullying.
Although it was pretty obvious to me that the alleged bully was likely guilty, it still took over 6 months.
The alleged bully's defence still actually needed to be examined.
And all the while, folks were saying: why has @YBarddCwsc not taken swift action against bullying?
Sharon Shoesmith says hello: It is worth reflecting that one of the key reasons why Ms Shoesmith was in such a strong legal position was due to the sheer trigger happy conduct of Mr Ed Balls who effectively removed Miss Shoesmith from her statutory role at Haringey with no warning and flouting the most basic legal procedures.
Mr Balls was Children's Secretary at the time of Ms Shoesmith's sacking.
Yes, but employment law doesn't apply to ministerial appointments. They can be fired at will with no notice.
What possible circumstances could have exonerated Zahawi? He accepted his guilt when he paid the penalty charge.
Sunak was obviously just hoping media interest would die down so that they could get away with it.
The outcome of that strategy has just been to underline the "weak" part of the opposition attack line (three times, in red). And to set things up nicely for the next ministerial problem he has to deal with. Tally ho!
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world. Part of the plan is even for American students to be able to ‘buddy’ with a 3rd world student, paying their fees and working together on their degree projects.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Would be interesting to know the age demographics of those taking OU courses these days. Anecdotally it always seems like oldies taking courses to keep their minds active in retirement.
Germany is facing a severe teacher shortage – at a time when schools are tasked with integrating more foreign students and training the skilled workers of tomorrow.
Recruiting teachers from abroad could help, but bureaucratic hurdles hinder efforts.
Brexit has exacerbated the problems arising from the pandemic, leaving us the only major economy that has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. It’s not difficult to understand.
FYI, after Germany reported a 0.2% q/q fall in Q4, here's an updated chart comparing UK and German #GDP since the #Brexit referendum.
A fair assessment is that cumulative UK growth since 2016 has been about the same as Germany's (5.7%), despite a much bigger hit from Covid.
Beware the starting points for such comparisons. If you take 2005 or 2008 (before GFC) as the starting point, it will not support Jessop's point.
Since the debate is about the impact of Brexit, the Brexit referendum is not an unreasonable starting point.....I'm sure you could pick dates showing the UK doing better....
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I just watched a short bit of the 1968 film "The Swimmer", with Burt Lancaster. A girl in it references how she met her boyfriend through computer dating...
(The olden sort, where you send in details and they put it in a computer (yeah, right), and you get matches sent back.)
Computer dating, 55 years ago.
This was also the theme of Carry on Loving from around the same time, one of the more under- rated Carry Ons..
Thanks, I'd forgotten about that! Although forgetting about that film might be for the best...
It does have its certain charm ; not at the Carry on Up The Kyber level, but a certain Swinging London, vaguely psychedelic-era aspect. Another one which gets neglected is Carry On Behind, because Elke Sommer is quite shockingly good in it ; most people assume the last few are all dreadful, and that was admittedly the last watchable, or even vaguely charming or historically interesting one.
In contrast to this morning's pre-print suggesting the Census may be overcounting the trans population, an alternative take - based on anecdote - that it may be under counting it:
This is very interesting from @aendra on why trans people might have avoiding telling the Census their gender identity
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
Johnson will be PM until 2030 Johnson won't resign Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election Truss is better than Keir Starmer The polls will recover with Truss as leader Rishi Sunak will save the Tories Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
And only half of those were from our Leondamus…..
I had all but "Truss is better than Keir Starmer". Surely no one had that one chalked up.
She was apparently poised to “surprise on the upside”, just before she self-destructed?
She certainly isn't as good a politician as Keir Starmer. Whether her policy programme was better than his is an entirely different question.
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been about for 10-15 years now, where you can complete coursework etc and gain a qualification. The problem is a) hardly anybody actually completes them and b) the wider world doesn't value that the same as if you attended in person.
[See what I did there, I edited out the substance of the case you made to make your point, just as you did mine. If you insist on being petty like that I will continue to follow suit.]
Oh no it isn't.
Had I quoted a 43% improvement (17%+26%), you would have been perfectly entitled to point out that the swing was only 21.5%, in terms of how of Starmer's satisfaction rating v Sunak has improved on that of Miliband compared to Cameron. But since I didn't quote any "swing", just the raw figures, you have invented a straw man.
The problem is that net satisfaction is an incomplete measure. 40/45 giving -5 is better than 30/30 giving 0. And given that nearly everyone giving one leader a positive rating will be giving the other one a negative rating, you're definitely double counting.
What are the real satisfaction figures, not the net?
No, I don't accept that at all.
Look on the MORI pdf and historic political monitor yourself, I am afraid I have had enough of this.
Got to go now.
It's the same mistake that Corbyn's acolytes made and still make. The sweet spot in politics is to enthuse your supporters whilst not motivating your opponents to vote against you.
(Notice, by the way, that dissatisfied with X doesn't mean satisfied with not-X. Mr, Mrs, Miss and Mx voter tend to be grumpy so-and-sos.)
Thanks, this is very useful. Sir Keir still seems to have very high "don't knows" for someone who's been in office so long. The GB result at the 2015 election was about 37/31 and a similar move from July 2012 ends up as 32/38 (VI) or 30/35 (satisfaction), the latter of which would be almost certainly a hung parliament and the former of which might be. But that does rely on Sunak getting a decent share of votes from those currently saying "don't know" to satisfaction for both leaders.
On the final point, I'm not claiming "dissatisfied with X => satisifed with not-X", I'm claiming "satisfied with X => dissatisfied with not-X (in most cases)", which isn't quite the same thing. In short: dissatisfied with both is much more significant than satisfied with both.
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
I'm always wary of claims that some new technology will free up staff to focus on improving the service offered - more likely the firm will lay off staff until the level of service is back at the worst level they can get away with. Apologies for my cynicism, but I've spent too long shouting at bots on automated calls that can't understand what I'm saying to believe in utopian technological solutions.
I specifically said at the end the state should implement it all and shed staff so we save money/tax. It's an actual efficiency saving we can make.
As to companies using bots, the way they have implemented it is free form text entry rather than form filling, the bot then uses NLP and pattern matching to give the approximate response. They have showed it leads to 45% fewer customer complaints and their CSAT score has risen significantly since implementation, they also showed compelling data that the majority of users interacting with the bot didn't realise they were doing so. The point of the bot is that for them the freeform entry is now the first point of contact and they promise a response to any query within 5 mins with follow up information or a schedule a callback from a real person where the bot is unable to get a reasonable response. They showed 80% of queries having a partial or complete resolution with the first reply from the bot.
Imagine the person hours that can be saved/redeployed even with half of that rate in the public sector. How many time wasting queries are there clogging up queues simply asking about when something is going to happen, how much money is owed to them or they owe, can they reschedule some appointment, information on something slightly more complicated than what's in an FAQ, or just linking the relevant part of the FAQ with the answers. Yes, it's totally impersonal, but it also gives people answers in 5 minutes compared to waiting in an endless queue on the phone and dealing with significantly worse automated phone queuing software.
The GMail (possibly other providers, too?) thing of ignoring everything after + added to your email address is handy. I always use myemailaddress+dodgycompany@gmail.com when signing up for things. Easy to cull (just filter everything matching that to bin/spam) and also easy to track who has passed on your email address and to whom.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been about for 10-15 years now, where you can complete coursework etc and gain a qualification. The problem is a) hardly anybody actually completes them and b) the wider world doesn't value that the same as if you attended in person.
But if you are taking them for personal interest, it may be a different matter and certainly a LOT cheaper
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
1. Johnson will be PM until 2030 2. Johnson won't resign 3. Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election 4. Truss is better than Keir Starmer 5. The polls will recover with Truss as leader 6. Rishi Sunak will save the Tories 7. Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
[Added numbers to your post for ease of reference]
I had 2 and 3 (although not I thought he could well lose the next GE, so definitely not 1.
Also thought 5 was a short-term possibility. I expected Truss to engineer a Barber-style boom based on funny money - I thought she was useless, but might be popular short term. I feared she might even be able to win a well-timed snap election before the electorate saw through her.
So, 2-3 out of 7 is.... Not too bad?
2 was also a good (and profitable) betting angle for some time. One of my best returns in recent years was repeatedly betting against Johnson going (mostly through the proxy of Starmer as next PM) and then trading out when things settled down after each crisis.
Hope you are doing good
I am, thank you, CHB. Lots going on and not all of it good, to be fair (health issues for some family and a couple of friends' little ones) but sometimes that helps to give a bit of perspective on how lucky you are and enjoying the moment while you can.
I hope all is good with you?
Sorry to hear re family and friends, sending them my best wishes. But glad you are yourself doing ok.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
Thanks (though a pedant would say that's pretty faint praise).
The Open University and the 1970s and 80s BBC had a lot in common, which isn't a coincidence due to various appointments Wilson and Callaghan made in it.
There was also the Reithian drive of the then more establishment figures who supported its presence on BBC2, like Attenborough.
If you drank too much of an evening in the ‘80s and fell asleep watching the BBC, you would often wake in the small hours and find yourself in the middle of a maths lecture…
To be fair, plenty of maths students have woken up and found themselves in the middle of a maths lecture.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I have done a whole bunch of courses from Stanford, that they put online. But they can’t ever lead to assessment, that’s the problem. Dr Peterson wants to use a similar model of online lectures, but with assessment and actually awarding degrees.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
One thought. NHS users are disproportionately elderly. Ergo disproportionately tech unclued up, let alone equipped.
Two points here
1) there is nothing new here beyond chatGPT being slightly better at understanding a request compared to the previous method MS has had within Dynamics for the past 5 or so years.
2) doing this in the public sector requires some upfront investment and I simply don't see where that money is going to come from.
This all off the shelf SAAS, there's little to no upfront investment required, that's what's so impressive about it, as they scale they can bring the functionality in house but initially it's very little upfront cost to them, significantly less than hiring 10 new permanent call handlers/email responders.
Wilson would have been called woke by today's nutty Tories
You mean Wilson was not a grasping, callous b******d who would rather promote and maintain social prejudice than see it called out and rolled back?
I suspect he might have worn a badge reading "Woke and proud" ...
Today's Tories would have called him a Communist probably.
Hope you are well
Err, I rated Harold, but national hero and right-wing treasure Peter Wright was convinced Wilson was a Soviet spy and in his book Spycatcher claims to have been involved in a coup plot to overthrow the Wilson Government.
I suspect Wilson was broadly sympathetic to some elements of Soviet Russia, but I doubt he was ever a Communist (back in the day Denis Healey of course was a member of the British Communist Party- but few doubted his later life credentials as a moderate) despite Wilson's connections to Driberg, Kagan and Maxwell.
I wonder what Peter Wright would have made of a Foreign Secretary slipping his minders to party on the yacht of a former KGB officer?
Anyone who had to deal with a problem like Zahawi knows that it is difficult because of allegation & counter-allegation.
I personally favour all allegations against politicians being investigated quickly, then a report (& evidence) being made public and swift action taken.
So, Sunak does seem to me to have handled this OK. Just as the Labour Party did OK over the allegations regarding Chris Matheson, ex MP for Chester. They did not suspend him until after an independent report that confirmed that the sexual harassment allegations were true.
If you sack people just because there is an allegation, then you end up with instances like Conor Burns. He was cleared of all wrongdoing after a sexual harassment story was leaked to the public, but by then he had been sacked. The alleged victim hadn’t made a complaint & AIUI there was no evidence of misconduct.
Now in Zahawi's case, tax law is complex and his affairs were (probably) in the hands of a tax advisor. So, whether he was personally culpable did need a bit of time to investigate.
Though his offence was his failure to disclose his dispute with HMRC, rather than the dispute itself. All the enquiry did was reveal he had failed to disclose it on several more occasions.
I don't see he has any defence to that either before or after the enquiry.
Once upon a time, when I ran an organisation, I had to deal with a serious case of bullying.
Although it was pretty obvious to me that the alleged bully was likely guilty, it still took over 6 months.
The alleged bully's defence still actually needed to be examined.
And all the while, folks were saying: why has @YBarddCwsc not taken swift action against bullying?
Sharon Shoesmith says hello: It is worth reflecting that one of the key reasons why Ms Shoesmith was in such a strong legal position was due to the sheer trigger happy conduct of Mr Ed Balls who effectively removed Miss Shoesmith from her statutory role at Haringey with no warning and flouting the most basic legal procedures.
Mr Balls was Children's Secretary at the time of Ms Shoesmith's sacking.
A very good point, and a pleasant diversion from the Joanne Rowling narrative, well done!
Sharon Shoesmith was lynched by the press and the Labour Government's defence of lets pick on a scapegoat. A personal vilification to smokescreen a wider failure.
Not quite - she was clearly responsible for actively ignoring the concerns about the baby. And responsible for a bizarre vendetta against the junior employee trying to raise the concerns.
The wider system had its failings, yes. Shoesmith was definitely a failure, though.
Nevertheless, the moment you put a foot wrong in a disciplinary procedure, you lose. Basic, elementary, competence. Not to mention employment law.
Indeed. Some cynical people suggested that Balls played for this - binned her publicly to satisfy public fury and expected the result of the tribunal that award her a big payout. Triangulation....
I'm reminded of some great predictions over the last two years.
Johnson will be PM until 2030 Johnson won't resign Johnson will definitely lead the Tories into the next election Truss is better than Keir Starmer The polls will recover with Truss as leader Rishi Sunak will save the Tories Rishi Sunak will be more popular than Keir Starmer
And only half of those were from our Leondamus…..
I had all but "Truss is better than Keir Starmer". Surely no one had that one chalked up.
She was apparently poised to “surprise on the upside”, just before she self-destructed?
She certainly isn't as good a politician as Keir Starmer. Whether her policy programme was better than his is an entirely different question.
You don't get away with that. You were saying she was brilliant
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
One thought. NHS users are disproportionately elderly. Ergo disproportionately tech unclued up, let alone equipped.
There is a already a big usage of this stuff on the customer chat messaging option on websites and apps - with nearly all of them you are talking to an expert system first.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I have done a whole bunch of courses from Stanford, that they put online. But they can’t ever lead to assessment, that’s the problem. Dr Peterson wants to use a similar model of online lectures, but with assessment and actually awarding degrees.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
As a kid, I occasionally used to see my uncle, in typical 1970s flairs, teaching geology on OU programs. This was in the 1980s, and the clothing was rather (ahem) outdated.
I've just looked him up on Linkedin, and he's been at the same university for 50 years! (He's mostly retired now, though).
The GMail (possibly other providers, too?) thing of ignoring everything after + added to your email address is handy. I always use myemailaddress+dodgycompany@gmail.com when signing up for things. Easy to cull (just filter everything matching that to bin/spam) and also easy to track who has passed on your email address and to whom.
Sadly, the spammers have caught onto that one, they have software that can strip out the +xxx and work out your actual email address.
A load of companies, including Mozilla, Apple and Google, have systems that can generate you a random email address that forwards to your actual email.
Me, I do it the old-fashioned way, I bought a domain for my business, and give a different email address to anyone who asks for it. So my registered email with this site is vanilla@[mydomain].com which confused the admin once (hi @rcs1000 👋🏼).
Anyone who spams me, their address can be set to disappear into the ether.
The Tories are not the only ones playing Culture Wars with the Trans debate.
Accusing the Tories of playing culture wars on trans is like accusing Ukraine of warmongering. There was a culture. And then some nutters came in and said you could be whatever gender you wanted just by wishing it were so and anyone who says otherwise is an evil transphobe. It seems odd to accuse of saying 'er, perhaps this might not be a good idea' of stirring up a culture war.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I have done a whole bunch of courses from Stanford, that they put online. But they can’t ever lead to assessment, that’s the problem. Dr Peterson wants to use a similar model of online lectures, but with assessment and actually awarding degrees.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
As a kid, I occasionally used to see my uncle, in typical 1970s flairs, teaching geology on OU programs. This was in the 1980s, and the clothing was rather (ahem) outdated.
I've just looked him up on Linkedin, and he's been at the same university for 50 years! (He's mostly retired now, though).
This was a huge part of the charm of 80's OU. Beardedly earnest academics with flares who already seemed to belong to a slightly different world ; as I remember the spoof series Look Around You satirised parts of this ethos perfectly. Now it's gone I'd rather see it back.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I have done a whole bunch of courses from Stanford, that they put online. But they can’t ever lead to assessment, that’s the problem. Dr Peterson wants to use a similar model of online lectures, but with assessment and actually awarding degrees.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
Although the lecturers' sartorial choices made absolutely none whatsoever.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I have done a whole bunch of courses from Stanford, that they put online. But they can’t ever lead to assessment, that’s the problem. Dr Peterson wants to use a similar model of online lectures, but with assessment and actually awarding degrees.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
As a kid, I occasionally used to see my uncle, in typical 1970s flairs, teaching geology on OU programs. This was in the 1980s, and the clothing was rather (ahem) outdated.
I've just looked him up on Linkedin, and he's been at the same university for 50 years! (He's mostly retired now, though).
This was a huge part of the charm of 80's EU. Beardedly earnest academics with flares who already seemed to belong to a slightly different world ; as I remember Look Around You satirised parts of this ethos perfectly. Now it's gone I'd rather see it back.
He's a highly intelligent, and very nice, man. Oddly enough, one of my nieces is studying something at a different university, and it turned out my uncle (her grand-uncle) created part of the course. They honestly did not know before she started at the uni, as it's not strictly geology.
Wilson would have been called woke by today's nutty Tories
You mean Wilson was not a grasping, callous b******d who would rather promote and maintain social prejudice than see it called out and rolled back?
I suspect he might have worn a badge reading "Woke and proud" ...
Today's Tories would have called him a Communist probably.
Hope you are well
Err, I rated Harold, but national hero and right-wing treasure Peter Wright was convinced Wilson was a Soviet spy and in his book Spycatcher claims to have been involved in a coup plot to overthrow the Wilson Government.
I suspect Wilson was broadly sympathetic to some elements of Soviet Russia, but I doubt he was ever a Communist (back in the day Denis Healey of course was a member of the British Communist Party- but few doubted his later life credentials as a moderate) despite Wilson's connections to Driberg, Kagan and Maxwell.
I wonder what Peter Wright would have made of a Foreign Secretary slipping his minders to party on the yacht of a former KGB officer?
Was this in Shanghai? Wright would probably be thinking its either a madhouse or the Foreign Secretary should have busted. Or that could be a load of bull.
Those who claim to be for "Woke", or against "Woke", would do us all a favor if they dropped the term, and instead told us, specifically, what they are for, and against.
The Tories are not the only ones playing Culture Wars with the Trans debate.
Accusing the Tories of playing culture wars on trans is like accusing Ukraine of warmongering. There was a culture. And then some nutters came in and said you could be whatever gender you wanted just by wishing it were so and anyone who says otherwise is an evil transphobe. It seems odd to accuse of saying 'er, perhaps this might not be a good idea' of stirring up a culture war.
I am offended on behalf of Ukraine.
The current Dick Dastardly Conservatives see their only way out of electoral oblivion by jumping on the anti-Trans bandwagon. It may work. I am very much the uninformed agnostic, but I have grave reservations in prescribing puberty blockers to children.
Wilson would have been called woke by today's nutty Tories
You mean Wilson was not a grasping, callous b******d who would rather promote and maintain social prejudice than see it called out and rolled back?
I suspect he might have worn a badge reading "Woke and proud" ...
Today's Tories would have called him a Communist probably.
Hope you are well
Err, I rated Harold, but national hero and right-wing treasure Peter Wright was convinced Wilson was a Soviet spy and in his book Spycatcher claims to have been involved in a coup plot to overthrow the Wilson Government.
I suspect Wilson was broadly sympathetic to some elements of Soviet Russia, but I doubt he was ever a Communist (back in the day Denis Healey of course was a member of the British Communist Party- but few doubted his later life credentials as a moderate) despite Wilson's connections to Driberg, Kagan and Maxwell.
I wonder what Peter Wright would have made of a Foreign Secretary slipping his minders to party on the yacht of a former KGB officer?
Was this in Shanghai? Wright would probably be thinking its either a madhouse or the Foreign Secretary should have busted. Or that could be a load of bull.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Would be interesting to know the age demographics of those taking OU courses these days. Anecdotally it always seems like oldies taking courses to keep their minds active in retirement.
Ooh, interesting, hadn’t thought of that. Rightly, there should be hundreds of thousands of twentysomethings signed up, but OU themselves don’t want to get away from the “£9k per year (on a pro-rata basis)” model, where there’s never any incentive to charge less.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I have done a whole bunch of courses from Stanford, that they put online. But they can’t ever lead to assessment, that’s the problem. Dr Peterson wants to use a similar model of online lectures, but with assessment and actually awarding degrees.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
As a kid, I occasionally used to see my uncle, in typical 1970s flairs, teaching geology on OU programs. This was in the 1980s, and the clothing was rather (ahem) outdated.
I've just looked him up on Linkedin, and he's been at the same university for 50 years! (He's mostly retired now, though).
This was a huge part of the charm of 80's OU. Beardedly earnest academics with flares who already seemed to belong to a slightly different world ; as I remember the spoof series Look Around You satirised parts of this ethos perfectly. Now it's gone I'd rather see it back.
Gosh. Look Around You. A little gem with a very young Olivia Colman.
The GMail (possibly other providers, too?) thing of ignoring everything after + added to your email address is handy. I always use myemailaddress+dodgycompany@gmail.com when signing up for things. Easy to cull (just filter everything matching that to bin/spam) and also easy to track who has passed on your email address and to whom.
Sadly, the spammers have caught onto that one, they have software that can strip out the +xxx and work out your actual email address.
A load of companies, including Mozilla, Apple and Google, have systems that can generate you a random email address that forwards to your actual email.
Me, I do it the old-fashioned way, I bought a domain for my business, and give a different email address to anyone who asks for it. So my registered email with this site is vanilla@[mydomain].com which confused the admin once (hi @rcs1000 👋🏼).
Anyone who spams me, their address can be set to disappear into the ether.
Ah Figures, I guess. I used to use a personal domain too, but my provider started blocking unregistered addresses (i.e. you had to explicitly enable all valid addresses at the domain) which was when I switched to the GMail feature.
I do generally avoid providing email address now, to be fair, which may be why I haven't noticed an issue. If free registration is needed for something and can't be easily bypassed, I generally just don't bother. Companies selling products are generally a bit more scrupulous, e.g. not passsing on without consent and respecting unsubscribe.
The Tories are not the only ones playing Culture Wars with the Trans debate.
Accusing the Tories of playing culture wars on trans is like accusing Ukraine of warmongering. There was a culture. And then some nutters came in and said you could be whatever gender you wanted just by wishing it were so and anyone who says otherwise is an evil transphobe. It seems odd to accuse of saying 'er, perhaps this might not be a good idea' of stirring up a culture war.
I am offended on behalf of Ukraine.
The current Dick Dastardly Conservatives see their only way out of electoral oblivion by jumping on the anti-Trans bandwagon. It may work. I am very much the uninformed agnostic, but I have grave reservations in prescribing puberty blockers to children.
Describing it as "anti-Trans" is very much taking part in a culture war.
The Tories are not the only ones playing Culture Wars with the Trans debate.
Accusing the Tories of playing culture wars on trans is like accusing Ukraine of warmongering. There was a culture. And then some nutters came in and said you could be whatever gender you wanted just by wishing it were so and anyone who says otherwise is an evil transphobe. It seems odd to accuse of saying 'er, perhaps this might not be a good idea' of stirring up a culture war.
I am offended on behalf of Ukraine.
The current Dick Dastardly Conservatives see their only way out of electoral oblivion by jumping on the anti-Trans bandwagon. It may work. I am very much the uninformed agnostic, but I have grave reservations in prescribing puberty blockers to children.
Describing it as "anti-Trans" is very much taking part in a culture war.
Those who claim to be for "Woke", or against "Woke", would do us all a favor if they dropped the term, and instead told us, specifically, what they are for, and against.
I don't think I've ever encountered anyone claiming to be woke, any more than I encountered anyone claiming to be politically correct way back when that was a thing.
(I do occasionally describe myself as part of woke, lefty academia, but you shouldn't take me too seriously on that.)
The GMail (possibly other providers, too?) thing of ignoring everything after + added to your email address is handy. I always use myemailaddress+dodgycompany@gmail.com when signing up for things. Easy to cull (just filter everything matching that to bin/spam) and also easy to track who has passed on your email address and to whom.
Sadly, the spammers have caught onto that one, they have software that can strip out the +xxx and work out your actual email address.
A load of companies, including Mozilla, Apple and Google, have systems that can generate you a random email address that forwards to your actual email.
Me, I do it the old-fashioned way, I bought a domain for my business, and give a different email address to anyone who asks for it. So my registered email with this site is vanilla@[mydomain].com which confused the admin once (hi @rcs1000 👋🏼).
Anyone who spams me, their address can be set to disappear into the ether.
Ah Figures, I guess. I used to use a personal domain too, but my provider started blocking unregistered addresses (i.e. you had to explicitly enable all valid addresses at the domain) which was when I switched to the GMail feature.
I do generally avoid providing email address now, to be fair, which may be why I haven't noticed an issue. If free registration is needed for something and can't be easily bypassed, I generally just don't bother. Companies selling products are generally a bit more scrupulous, e.g. not passsing on without consent and respecting unsubscribe.
And I guess you'll be telling me next that putting a space in my email address on my geocities weblog or replacing @ with 'at' doesn't fool the spammers either?
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Would be interesting to know the age demographics of those taking OU courses these days. Anecdotally it always seems like oldies taking courses to keep their minds active in retirement.
It is a few years since I finished my OU degree, but there was a spread of ages among the students I encountered. From 20ish to 70+. A fair proportion were undertaking higher education for the first time, and also motivated to study for career development reasons. I would anticipate that the latter would be more prevalent in STEM subjects than the wonky PPE courses I was studying.
This was all before the fees were hiked. Studying with the OU for pleasure is now a much bigger financial commitment, but in contrast it is a lower cost option than attending a traditional university. Therefore, I would have expected the age profile to have shifted younger in recent years. I certainly wouldn't be embarking on a PPE degree with today's fees, and they have put me off embarking on a Philosophy MA.
The Tories are not the only ones playing Culture Wars with the Trans debate.
Accusing the Tories of playing culture wars on trans is like accusing Ukraine of warmongering. There was a culture. And then some nutters came in and said you could be whatever gender you wanted just by wishing it were so and anyone who says otherwise is an evil transphobe. It seems odd to accuse of saying 'er, perhaps this might not be a good idea' of stirring up a culture war.
I am offended on behalf of Ukraine.
The current Dick Dastardly Conservatives see their only way out of electoral oblivion by jumping on the anti-Trans bandwagon. It may work. I am very much the uninformed agnostic, but I have grave reservations in prescribing puberty blockers to children.
Describing it as "anti-Trans" is very much taking part in a culture war.
Just had a presentation from a company we've invested in, 45% reduction in complaints due to automation of responses for common queries using an NLP parser and pattern matching for answers. Headcount pressure eased, they were previously looking at 10 new permanent hires in their customer service division, now holding steady and team being retrained to work on better automation and macros as well as rolling out a chatbot on site and being backup to the chatbot where it's necessary to have a real person.
Very impressive metrics as well, I wonder how much the NHS and other giant public sector orgs would benefit from this kind of approach. They mentioned around 80% of incoming emails/queries had some or all of their issues resolved by the NLP bot leaving the team to actually help the 20% of more complex problems that needed real human interaction and resolution, hence the massive reduction in complaints. Most common question from end users was "I ordered X items, can I cancel/return/change some" and the NLP parser just sends along a link to the amend order page for their latest order with some nice language that someone has pre-written.
In the NHS how many person hours are wasted manually responding to this kind of stuff around appointment booking, rebooking and cancelling, or even slightly more complex issues around repeat prescriptions timing.
@Leon is right about one thing, AI should greatly improve workplace productivity as fewer and fewer manual tasks such as these are necessary. This was a fairly simple bit of NLP and pattern matching, the scope for what is possible is huge and the government must force all of the public sector to utilise AI for productivity improvement so we can start shedding jobs, improving efficiency of service delivery and cutting tax/close the deficit.
I'm always wary of claims that some new technology will free up staff to focus on improving the service offered - more likely the firm will lay off staff until the level of service is back at the worst level they can get away with. Apologies for my cynicism, but I've spent too long shouting at bots on automated calls that can't understand what I'm saying to believe in utopian technological solutions.
I agree.
What is a 45% reduction in complaints due to automation based on - is the service really 45% better, or are more people just giving up, which is the opposite of what you want?
Best thing you can say about Sunak is that he’s not Truss or Johnson or the rest of the freak show that is the modern freak show that is the Tory Party.
All of these events that lead to the inevitable thrashing of the Tories at the next election were started when the braindead end of the Tory membership thought it a good idea to someone who was a walking moral vacuum as leader because he is "popular". Member such as @HYUFD who continue to make excuses for him because he won a majority persist in overlooking that even with his majority he was a walking disaster area for party and country
I fear that the membership's collective stupidity will keep the Conservative Party out of office for years and we will be stuck with a Labour party that bloats the public sector and drives down our competitiveness year on year. I just hope they are not as bad as I fear they might be.
I fear the party will get madder with opposition.
Brexiteers like Casino Royale have observed the current Brexit settlement is unsustainable and that something will replace it.
Eventually Starmer will catch up to the polling and as de minimis we rejoin the Single Market, that will be another tipping point for the madness.
You can draw a straight line between the Brexiteer takeover of the Tory Party and the state of the party five years down the line.
There are many downsides to Brexit but one of the greatest has been the third rate, incompetent politicians it has thrust into positions of power - Johnson, Raab, Braverman, Dorries, Rees-Mogg, Zahawi, Patel, Truss, Kwartang - the list goes on and on.
Anyone who believes the two are not connected hasn't been paying attention.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
Heath should be 3rd tier as should Brown (in retrospect Major who left a growing economy, low inflation and a largely balanced budget in 1997, replaced the poll tax with council tax and won the Gulf War and began the NI peace process should be second tier).
Johnson should arguably be tier 1, having delivered Brexit and the vaccines.
Time will tell if Sunak is Tier 2 or 3
I am not sure you understand this game. Johnson is in a category all on his own. If he comes back and finishes the job of crashing the nation into oblivion, you may have a point.
I suppose Sunak might have time to turn the supertanker around before it hits the rocks, although my money would be on a massive pollution incident.
Sunak is securing his place in box 3 of the pantheon of PMs. It becomes ever harder for him to shift boxes as time goes on.
Box 1: important PMs. Love them or hate them, these PMs marked a political turning point and defined an epoch. Lloyd George, Churchill, Atlee, Thatcher, Blair
Box 2. Notable but second tier: MacMillan, Wilson, Heath, possibly Brown, Cameron
Box 3: weak PMs/ victims of forces outside their control: Chamberlain, Eden, Callaghan, Major, May, Sunak
Box 4 (new category) complete plonkers: Johnson
Box 5: glitches in the matrix. Truss
I think you are generous to Cameron & Brown..... but like the idea (mainly agree)
I agree. Cameron resides in Box 2 until 2015 after which he firmly sits in Box 3. He was red carded mid way through the second half. Brown always was and always will be Box 3.
Home was not a weak PM if not a great one either. He left a reasonable economy in 1964 and won most seats in England against the odds in 1964 even if he lost across the UK very narrowly overall, he was also an outstanding diplomat and came back as Heath's Foreign Secretary
Home is definitely Box 3 too.
No he isn't, I would in fact put Home as the second best PM between 1955 and 1979 after MacMillan, at least in terms of foreign policy and leaving relative prosperity and stability when they left office.
Though Wilson left a longer legacy admittedly with legal homosexuality and abortion and comprehensive schools and the Open University coming when he was PM
So you pretty much only need boxes 1, which is now very crowded, 3 and 5.
Anyway I thought you wanted to replace Comprehensive Schools.
HYUFD doesn't approve of the Open University either, one is forced to conclude. Not posh enough?
I approve of the Open University rather more than I approve of comprehensive schools replacing grammar schools
OU is a massive opportunity for upskilling the country in an online world.
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world.
Harvard (or possibly MIT???) has put entire courses on YouTube for free. Weird that it should be a US fee-taking institution rather than something that started like the OU (remember the broadcasts of the OU on late-night TV and Saturday/Sunday mornings?)
I have done a whole bunch of courses from Stanford, that they put online. But they can’t ever lead to assessment, that’s the problem. Dr Peterson wants to use a similar model of online lectures, but with assessment and actually awarding degrees.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
As a kid, I occasionally used to see my uncle, in typical 1970s flairs, teaching geology on OU programs. This was in the 1980s, and the clothing was rather (ahem) outdated.
I've just looked him up on Linkedin, and he's been at the same university for 50 years! (He's mostly retired now, though).
This was a huge part of the charm of 80's OU. Beardedly earnest academics with flares who already seemed to belong to a slightly different world ; as I remember the spoof series Look Around You satirised parts of this ethos perfectly. Now it's gone I'd rather see it back.
Gosh. Look Around You. A little gem with a very young Olivia Colman.
The Tories are not the only ones playing Culture Wars with the Trans debate.
Accusing the Tories of playing culture wars on trans is like accusing Ukraine of warmongering. There was a culture. And then some nutters came in and said you could be whatever gender you wanted just by wishing it were so and anyone who says otherwise is an evil transphobe. It seems odd to accuse of saying 'er, perhaps this might not be a good idea' of stirring up a culture war.
I am offended on behalf of Ukraine.
The current Dick Dastardly Conservatives see their only way out of electoral oblivion by jumping on the anti-Trans bandwagon. It may work. I am very much the uninformed agnostic, but I have grave reservations in prescribing puberty blockers to children.
Describing it as "anti-Trans" is very much taking part in a culture war.
“Pro-women” or “Anti-rapist” is much better.
Isn't 'TERF' the accepted neutral term?
Trans Exclusionary Homophobic Misogynistic Racist (TM) is the new standardised terminology, I understand.
Comments
New York Times (S) - The Ads Fueling Truth Social: Trinkets and Scams
Between posts about conspiracy theories and right-wing grievances, there was an unusual advertisement: a photo of former President Donald J. Trump holding a $1,000 bill made of gold, which he was apparently offering free to supporters.
But there were a few catches. The bill was not free, it was not made of gold, and it was not offered by Mr. Trump.
The ad appeared on Truth Social, the right-wing social network started by Mr. Trump in late 2021, one of many pitches from hucksters and fringe marketeers dominating the ads on the site.
Ads from major brands are nonexistent on the site. Instead, the ads for Truth Social are for alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets, according to an analysis of hundreds of ads on the social network by the New York Times. . . .
Over time, the low-quality ads on Truth Social have irritated its own users, who have complained to Mr. Trump after repeatedly seeing the same disturbing images [for example of skin abnormalities and grotesque eyeballs] or after falling for misleading gimmicks.
"Can you not vet the ads on Truth?" asked on user in a post directed at Mr. Trump. "I'VE BEEN SCAMMED MORE THAN ONCE".
SSI - No shit!
I said she would be terrible and I was right.
This has clearly made this part of their work very easy and quick however it is work that used to be farmed out to freelance copywriters who will clearly be casualties of this technology. Whereas they might have been able to survive on churning out copy each day for £50 a time (didn’t ask what they charge) why pay that now?
Look on the MORI pdf and historic political monitor yourself, I am afraid I have had enough of this.
Got to go now.
Washington Post ($) via Seattle Times - When she named her breakfast cafe Woke, a conservative backlash followed
When Carmen Quiroga named her new breakfast restaurant, she wanted people to associate the cafe with waking up in the morning.
She settled on Woke Breakfast & Coffee and spent six months renovating a building and developing a logo. Quiroga moved to Coventry, Conn., a few weeks before the restaurant’s opening this month. While finalizing the permits at town hall, another resident advised her to check Facebook.
There, Quiroga saw several town residents criticizing her restaurant’s name, suggesting she’d chosen Woke to make a political statement.
That was false, Quiroga told The Washington Post. She filled her days with work and never watched the news, she said. After viewing Facebook, she researched the term’s definition and recognized the misunderstanding the name provoked.
“If nobody supports this,” Quiroga, 42, recalled thinking, “I’m going to lose everything.”
When Woke opened Jan. 19, however, Quiroga faced different stresses. The controversy spurred other residents to support the restaurant, which led to long lines and sold-out menu items.
. . . [H]er 23-year-old son created the logo, featuring a fried egg in place of the “O” in Woke. The family included the logo on the restaurant’s website, menus and mugs. The shop’s catchphrase: “You woke up and made the right choice.” . . .
One commenter posted that the restaurant would lose some Republican patrons, adding, “Naming it ‘woke.’ Is that really such a good idea?” . . . .
. . . [A]bout a dozen people left comments bashing the restaurant in a private town Facebook group and arguing it would fail. The Facebook group’s moderators later deleted posts for their insensitivity . . .
Quiroga panicked and considered changing the name, but she said she didn’t have the money for rebranding.
Her anxiety persisted until opening day on Jan. 19. Quiroga said visitors to her small cafe, which has nine tables, saw an hourlong wait. The restaurant soon ran out of ingredients for its Mexican egg dishes. Quiroga said many customers comforted her, claiming the offensive comments didn’t represent the opinions of most residents.
Coventry’s Republican Town Committee also came out in support of Woke last week, writing on Facebook: “While the name at first may set off some conservatives’ alarm bells, it is clear that the owner never intended for it to be a political statement.”
After weeks of restlessness over the name, Quiroga has settled back into the routine of running a restaurant.
“We are very happy,” Quiroga said before pausing.
“Well, you know, it’s stressful because there’s many, many people waiting in line, and they’re waiting for tables to come.”
There was also the Reithian drive of the then slightly more establishment figures who supported its presence on BBC2, like Attenborough. Many a happy morning spent in the 1980's watching academics in huge glasses, beards, flares, and their awkward monotones on complex topics.
1) there is nothing new here beyond chatGPT being slightly better at understanding a request compared to the previous method MS has had within Dynamics for the past 5 or so years.
2) doing this in the public sector requires some upfront investment and I simply don't see where that money is going to come from.
A fair assessment is that cumulative UK growth since 2016 has been about the same as Germany's (5.7%), despite a much bigger hit from Covid.
https://twitter.com/julianHjessop/status/1620017627988099075
“You should get married”, comes back the advice.
“Then I will live for ever?”, s/he asks
“No, but the desire to do so will quickly go away”
(The olden sort, where you send in details and they put it in a computer (yeah, right), and you get matches sent back.)
Computer dating, 55 years ago.
Does Scotland’s First Minister believe all trans women are women?
Scottish Gov has just implemented an effective ban on trans prisoners who’ve committed sexual & violent crimes against women being moved to a women-only prison. @itvnews
https://twitter.com/PeterAdamSmith/status/1620051699900755970
However, since Driver asked:
January 2023 political monitor:
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/two-three-britons-say-it-time-change-next-election
Topline votes: Lab 51 Con 26 LD 9 Grn 6 Others 10
Sunak: satisfied 26, dissatisfied 55
Starmer: satisfied 37, dissatisfied 40
July 2012 political monitor (roughly peak EICIPM)
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/ipsos-mori-political-monitor-july-2012
Topline votes: Lab 44 Con 31 LD 12 Grn 3 UKIP 5
Cameron: satisifed 33, dissatisfied 60
Miliband: satisfied 33, dissatisfied 51
Clegg: satisfied 26, dissatisfied 64
(Notice, by the way, that dissatisfied with X doesn't mean satisfied with not-X. Mr, Mrs, Miss and Mx voter tend to be grumpy so-and-sos.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFOB4ad_Hb4&t=19s
I suspect he might have worn a badge reading "Woke and proud" ...
EICIPM?
I had 2 and 3 (although not I thought he could well lose the next GE, so definitely not 1.
Also thought 5 was a short-term possibility. I expected Truss to engineer a Barber-style boom based on funny money - I thought she was useless, but might be popular short term. I feared she might even be able to win a well-timed snap election before the electorate saw through her.
So, 2-3 out of 7 is.... Not too bad?
2 was also a good (and profitable) betting angle for some time. One of my best returns in recent years was repeatedly betting against Johnson going (mostly through the proxy of Starmer as next PM) and then trading out when things settled down after each crisis.
Hope you are well
They will just ensure that the process of entanglement is more complete.
Ed is Crap, is Prime Minister. Bit of a meme here at the time. Never really opened out enough of a lead, though.
I never thought Ed was crap, just shouldn't have been the leader.
Glad to hear you're staying well and glad you're here posting.
I hope all is good with you?
Or something like that. It's all a long time ago.
The outcome of that strategy has just been to underline the "weak" part of the opposition attack line (three times, in red). And to set things up nicely for the next ministerial problem he has to deal with. Tally ho!
A massive opportunity that it appears isn’t being taken.
There was a really interesting trailing of an announcement over the weekend, with Dr Jordan Peterson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s about to launch a genuine online university, with a plan to charge $4,000 for a degree, and has a lot of backers for the project from all over academia, people fed up with the artificial scarcity around higher education who want to educate the world. Part of the plan is even for American students to be able to ‘buddy’ with a 3rd world student, paying their fees and working together on their degree projects.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/technology/personaltech/email-address-digital-tracking.html
This is very interesting from @aendra on why trans people might have avoiding telling the Census their gender identity
https://twitter.com/joshspero/status/1620033593392386054
It doesn't explore why Newham and Brent (possibly surprisingly) have relatively higher trans populations.
On the final point, I'm not claiming "dissatisfied with X => satisifed with not-X", I'm claiming "satisfied with X => dissatisfied with not-X (in most cases)", which isn't quite the same thing. In short: dissatisfied with both is much more significant than satisfied with both.
As to companies using bots, the way they have implemented it is free form text entry rather than form filling, the bot then uses NLP and pattern matching to give the approximate response. They have showed it leads to 45% fewer customer complaints and their CSAT score has risen significantly since implementation, they also showed compelling data that the majority of users interacting with the bot didn't realise they were doing so. The point of the bot is that for them the freeform entry is now the first point of contact and they promise a response to any query within 5 mins with follow up information or a schedule a callback from a real person where the bot is unable to get a reasonable response. They showed 80% of queries having a partial or complete resolution with the first reply from the bot.
Imagine the person hours that can be saved/redeployed even with half of that rate in the public sector. How many time wasting queries are there clogging up queues simply asking about when something is going to happen, how much money is owed to them or they owe, can they reschedule some appointment, information on something slightly more complicated than what's in an FAQ, or just linking the relevant part of the FAQ with the answers. Yes, it's totally impersonal, but it also gives people answers in 5 minutes compared to waiting in an endless queue on the phone and dealing with significantly worse automated phone queuing software.
Doing fine here, just sad I can't run very much.
Yes, BBC2 in the ‘80s used to have OU programming overnight. I recall all sorts of science lectures I watched as a primary school kid, some of which occasionally made a little bit of sense to me.
I suspect Wilson was broadly sympathetic to some elements of Soviet Russia, but I doubt he was ever a Communist (back in the day Denis Healey of course was a member of the British Communist Party- but few doubted his later life credentials as a moderate) despite Wilson's connections to Driberg, Kagan and Maxwell.
I wonder what Peter Wright would have made of a Foreign Secretary slipping his minders to party on the yacht of a former KGB officer?
I've just looked him up on Linkedin, and he's been at the same university for 50 years! (He's mostly retired now, though).
A load of companies, including Mozilla, Apple and Google, have systems that can generate you a random email address that forwards to your actual email.
Me, I do it the old-fashioned way, I bought a domain for my business, and give a different email address to anyone who asks for it. So my registered email with this site is vanilla@[mydomain].com which confused the admin once (hi @rcs1000 👋🏼).
Anyone who spams me, their address can be set to disappear into the ether.
There was a culture. And then some nutters came in and said you could be whatever gender you wanted just by wishing it were so and anyone who says otherwise is an evil transphobe. It seems odd to accuse of saying 'er, perhaps this might not be a good idea' of stirring up a culture war.
Two radically different examples illustrate my point: First, the Nazis used "Deutschland Erwache" as an offical slogan.
Second, supporters of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 called themselves "Wide Awakes". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Awakes
Those who claim to be for "Woke", or against "Woke", would do us all a favor if they dropped the term, and instead told us, specifically, what they are for, and against.
The current Dick Dastardly Conservatives see their only way out of electoral oblivion by jumping on the anti-Trans bandwagon. It may work. I am very much the uninformed agnostic, but I have grave reservations in prescribing puberty blockers to children.
Look Around You.
A little gem with a very young Olivia Colman.
I do generally avoid providing email address now, to be fair, which may be why I haven't noticed an issue. If free registration is needed for something and can't be easily bypassed, I generally just don't bother. Companies selling products are generally a bit more scrupulous, e.g. not passsing on without consent and respecting unsubscribe.
(I do occasionally describe myself as part of woke, lefty academia, but you shouldn't take me too seriously on that.)
This was all before the fees were hiked. Studying with the OU for pleasure is now a much bigger financial commitment, but in contrast it is a lower cost option than attending a traditional university. Therefore, I would have expected the age profile to have shifted younger in recent years. I certainly wouldn't be embarking on a PPE degree with today's fees, and they have put me off embarking on a Philosophy MA.
What is a 45% reduction in complaints due to automation based on - is the service really 45% better, or are more people just giving up, which is the opposite of what you want?
Labour leads by 21%.
Westminster VI (29 January):
Labour 49% (+1)
Conservative 28% (+2)
Liberal Democrat 8% (-1)
Reform UK 5% (-1)
Green 5% (+1)
Scottish National Party 4% (-1)
Other 1% (–)
Changes +/- 22 January
https://twitter.com/redfieldwilton/status/1620104678968070150?s=46&t=yVyUPcTYx2Bgt5APc3wDeg
https://www.quantamagazine.org/astronomers-say-they-have-spotted-the-universes-first-stars-20230130/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-MlkvAVqUI
A deep fake before it was a thing. According to Wiki, Peter Serafinowicz did the voice. He is a truly superb impersonator.