"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
I'll make another prediction: this gargantuan racket, in which the young can barely afford to live, whilst increasingly large chunks of their pathetic wages are syphoned off for old people to spend on cruises to Madeira and buying better food for their dogs than the poor can afford for their children, will last for about another twenty years. At which juncture, the nation will find itself bankrupt, and spending both on health and social care and on the state pension will collapse.
I'm confident of the timescale because I am due to retire in about another twenty years' time. It has this depressing feeling of inevitability about it.
I've only got 15 years until the state pension, so I reckon 2038 for everything going totally tits up. You heard it here first.
As you can see, life expectancy for both blacks and whites rose over those years, with some interuptions like World War II, and the gap between the two groups diminished, slowly.
Until about 2010. And then drugs, particularly fentanyl, took their toll. And the steady increase in life expectancy stopped.
We, as a nation, did not react well to this challenge. Others will differ, but I lay some of the blame for that failure on Barack Obama. Who should have learned from the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Just as I lay some of the blame for the high COVID toll in the US on Donald the Loser. Who could have learned from competent medical professionals.
(There is good news, and another lesson, in the way life expectancy has increased for Hispanics, so that it is now well above that of whites.)
it was the medical professionals who were dishing out fentanyl like they were M&Ms
The Sackler family have a lot to answer for. They spent as much as it took to convince US medical professionals to prescribe Oxycontin to their patients & earnt $billions as a result.
Somehow the UK missed out on their malign influence on the medical profession.
They own Napp Pharmaceuticals.
But MS Contin was largely restricted to hospital prescription
Think back into the depths of your memories for the endless debates between Truss and Sunak. What exactly in that campaign marked him out as a winner in a two horse race? Because I didn’t see it.
He was a bit underwhelming as I recall. But then his pitch was intentionally the blander of the two.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
I'll make another prediction: this gargantuan racket, in which the young can barely afford to live, whilst increasingly large chunks of their pathetic wages are syphoned off for old people to spend on cruises to Madeira and buying better food for their dogs than the poor can afford for their children, will last for about another twenty years. At which juncture, the nation will find itself bankrupt, and spending both on health and social care and on the state pension will collapse.
I'm confident of the timescale because I am due to retire in about another twenty years' time. It has this depressing feeling of inevitability about it.
I'm due to retire in 30ish years, hopefully that'll give enough time for some recovery!
As you can see, life expectancy for both blacks and whites rose over those years, with some interuptions like World War II, and the gap between the two groups diminished, slowly.
Until about 2010. And then drugs, particularly fentanyl, took their toll. And the steady increase in life expectancy stopped.
We, as a nation, did not react well to this challenge. Others will differ, but I lay some of the blame for that failure on Barack Obama. Who should have learned from the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Just as I lay some of the blame for the high COVID toll in the US on Donald the Loser. Who could have learned from competent medical professionals.
(There is good news, and another lesson, in the way life expectancy has increased for Hispanics, so that it is now well above that of whites.)
it was the medical professionals who were dishing out fentanyl like they were M&Ms
The Sackler family have a lot to answer for. They spent as much as it took to convince US medical professionals to prescribe Oxycontin to their patients & earnt $billions as a result.
Somehow the UK missed out on their malign influence on the medical profession.
There is a fantastic book called Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe which catalogues the opiate crisis and the attempt by the Sacklers to launder their reputations as patrons of the arts
One thing I hadn’t realised is that, strictly speaking, the Sacklers are *Anglo-*-American. So the Brits don’t escape culpability completely.
Utter bullshit and prejudice.
One branch of the family sold their shares in Purdue and moved to the UK long before OxyContin was approved and launched
The latest polling suggests the Conservatives are getting closer to 30% than 20% as they were under Truss, which is something for Sunak. Even if Hunt's budget didn't produce a big bounce
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
I'll make another prediction: this gargantuan racket, in which the young can barely afford to live, whilst increasingly large chunks of their pathetic wages are syphoned off for old people to spend on cruises to Madeira and buying better food for their dogs than the poor can afford for their children, will last for about another twenty years. At which juncture, the nation will find itself bankrupt, and spending both on health and social care and on the state pension will collapse.
I'm confident of the timescale because I am due to retire in about another twenty years' time. It has this depressing feeling of inevitability about it.
I get increasingly bored by losers blaming everything that's wrong with their lives on people aged over 50.
I also agree that, though boring and uncharismatic, SKS has a ruthless streak. I’ve been impressed by just how brutal and thorough his extirpation of Corbyn and Corbynism has been.
Yes. It's brutally effective. And it is Starmer doing it
It is like a very good Mafioso slowly and silently eliminating all his rivals, while seeming quite boring and scholastic, and going to church a lot
It's the one thing that gives me hope for the next government. Starmer is a c*nt, like, say, Mandelson
C*nts can make brilliant leaders. Rather that than a pious dim fool like Corbyn, or a pathetic vain posho like Cameron
I'd say the Tories are on c.30%. Labour probably draw back to 40-42% in a GE.
Question is whether the Tories can creep any closer.
you are making the mistake of extrapolating a trend. The tories could just as easily fall back again.
Anything is possible but I don't think they will.
Sunak's competent government is rallying the base and Boris/Truss are a busted flush.
In general, people don't hold hard times against the government, if they think the government is doing its best.
Under Boris and Truss, the government was both corrupt and frivolous. Now, it's beginning to appear fairly competent.
Sunak's ratings have shown a marked improvement, relative to Starmer's, with Redfield and Wilton.
Within the population as a whole, a substantial number (especially in the Midlands and parts of the North) have done pretty well over the past 13 years.
I still think time for a change wins out, in 2024, but I'm quite certain now, the government will be retaining 200+ seats.
I'd favour Tissue Price to hold his seat.
I'm strongly warming to Sunak. He's the size of an anorexic bipedal weasel, he's annoyingly rich, his wife was a non dom, he isn't full of exciting ideas, and yet.... after so many years of Borisian madness or Etonian mediocrity to Truss-May OMG, he seems weirdly refreshing
I can now see myself voting for Sunak's party, over my local MP, Sir Kir Royale
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
I'll make another prediction: this gargantuan racket, in which the young can barely afford to live, whilst increasingly large chunks of their pathetic wages are syphoned off for old people to spend on cruises to Madeira and buying better food for their dogs than the poor can afford for their children, will last for about another twenty years. At which juncture, the nation will find itself bankrupt, and spending both on health and social care and on the state pension will collapse.
I'm confident of the timescale because I am due to retire in about another twenty years' time. It has this depressing feeling of inevitability about it.
I get increasingly bored by losers blaming everything that's wrong with their lives on people aged over 50.
It's like listening to people blaming the Jews.
Bribery of the aged isn't responsible for all of our problems. But it certainly doesn't help.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
I'd say the Tories are on c.30%. Labour probably draw back to 40-42% in a GE.
Question is whether the Tories can creep any closer.
you are making the mistake of extrapolating a trend. The tories could just as easily fall back again.
Anything is possible but I don't think they will.
Sunak's competent government is rallying the base and Boris/Truss are a busted flush.
In general, people don't hold hard times against the government, if they think the government is doing its best.
Under Boris and Truss, the government was both corrupt and frivolous. Now, it's beginning to appear fairly competent.
Sunak's ratings have shown a marked improvement, relative to Starmer's, with Redfield and Wilton.
Within the population as a whole, a substantial number (especially in the Midlands and parts of the North) have done pretty well over the past 13 years.
I still think time for a change wins out, in 2024, but I'm quite certain now, the government will be retaining 200+ seats.
I'd favour Tissue Price to hold his seat.
I'm strongly warming to Sunak. He's the size of an anorexic bipedal weasel, he's annoyingly rich, his wife was a non dom, he isn't full of exciting ideas, and yet.... after so many years of Borisian madness or Etonian mediocrity to Truss-May OMG, he seems weirdly refreshing
I can now see myself voting for Sunak's party, over my local MP, Sir Kir Royale
Hold the press:
"Leon May Vote Tory, Shocker"
I tried to prepare the site by muting myself for a while. I am aware it will be an emotional shock for many
I don't think I've heard the word "Muslim" on the six o'clock news in a long time. Was the word Hindu mentioned this much when Sunak became Tory leader?
Yes.
Plus it was Diwali the next day.
Fair enough, I can't remember what I was doing when Sunak became PM.
I was having lunch with JohnO in Claridge’s celebrating.
I was nearly delayed by Sunak’s motorcade.
My American relatives (New York Democrats since before FDR) were non-plussed at the lack on interest - where were the riots? the counter protests? - in Rishi becoming PM.
There was some interest in fairness. Just not much.
If not for Trevor Noah pretending there was a big reaction against Rishi because of his race and then disingenuously claim that's not what he was doing, I'm surprised they even picked up on the story at all.
The compulsion felt by Party members to vote for candidates who are such obvious duds is surely worthy of a doctoral dissertation.
IDS, Truss, Ed Miliband, Corbyn. Their names are legion.
The unusual thing about Yousaf is that he was not voted in by the members against the better judgement of the parliamentarians. So he's worth a special chapter on his own.
Think back into the depths of your memories for the endless debates between Truss and Sunak. What exactly in that campaign marked him out as a winner in a two horse race? Because I didn’t see it.
I believe he is genuinely clever. He is clever in a Macron-esque, Enarquiste, rich boy merchant banker sense - so quite narrow - he's not clever socially or artistically or emotionally - but nonetheless he is properly clever. And works hard. And doesn't drink. He lives for the job. You can see it
There are worse fates if you seek a national leader. Macron has been a pretty good leader for France, and the French are twats for not realising this
As you can see, life expectancy for both blacks and whites rose over those years, with some interuptions like World War II, and the gap between the two groups diminished, slowly.
Until about 2010. And then drugs, particularly fentanyl, took their toll. And the steady increase in life expectancy stopped.
We, as a nation, did not react well to this challenge. Others will differ, but I lay some of the blame for that failure on Barack Obama. Who should have learned from the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Just as I lay some of the blame for the high COVID toll in the US on Donald the Loser. Who could have learned from competent medical professionals.
(There is good news, and another lesson, in the way life expectancy has increased for Hispanics, so that it is now well above that of whites.)
it was the medical professionals who were dishing out fentanyl like they were M&Ms
The Sackler family have a lot to answer for. They spent as much as it took to convince US medical professionals to prescribe Oxycontin to their patients & earnt $billions as a result.
Somehow the UK missed out on their malign influence on the medical profession.
They own Napp Pharmaceuticals.
But MS Contin was largely restricted to hospital prescription
The Sacklers owned Perdue Pharma, who sold Oxycontin (slow release Oxycodone) in the US which could be prescribed for home use. It was Oxycontin that was blamed for the latest epidemic of opioid adiction in the US.
Oxycontin is available on prescription in the UK & we haven’t entirely escaped: there have been deaths due to overdoses of Oxycontin here too, but the scale is completely different in the US.
(MS Contin is morphine sulphate slow release. Different drug, although very similar in action.)
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
As you can see, life expectancy for both blacks and whites rose over those years, with some interuptions like World War II, and the gap between the two groups diminished, slowly.
Until about 2010. And then drugs, particularly fentanyl, took their toll. And the steady increase in life expectancy stopped.
We, as a nation, did not react well to this challenge. Others will differ, but I lay some of the blame for that failure on Barack Obama. Who should have learned from the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Just as I lay some of the blame for the high COVID toll in the US on Donald the Loser. Who could have learned from competent medical professionals.
(There is good news, and another lesson, in the way life expectancy has increased for Hispanics, so that it is now well above that of whites.)
it was the medical professionals who were dishing out fentanyl like they were M&Ms
The Sackler family have a lot to answer for. They spent as much as it took to convince US medical professionals to prescribe Oxycontin to their patients & earnt $billions as a result.
Somehow the UK missed out on their malign influence on the medical profession.
They own Napp Pharmaceuticals.
But MS Contin was largely restricted to hospital prescription
The Sacklers owned Perdue Pharma, who sold Oxycontin (slow release Oxycodone) in the US which could be prescribed for home use. It was Oxycontin that was blamed for the latest epidemic of opioid adiction in the US.
MS Contin is morphine sulphate slow release. Different drug, although very similar in action.
They own Napp as well - it’s all part of Mundi Global. (Alongside their otc business Alva? which owns Betadine, their stake in Dr Kade and Mundipharma. I’ve been wary of them ever since JP Garnier nearly threw me out of his office for mentioning Purdue Frederick in front of him.
Think back into the depths of your memories for the endless debates between Truss and Sunak. What exactly in that campaign marked him out as a winner in a two horse race? Because I didn’t see it.
I believe he is genuinely clever. He is clever in a Macron-esque, Enarquiste, rich boy merchant banker sense - so quite narrow - he's not clever socially or artistically or emotionally - but nonetheless he is properly clever. And works hard. And doesn't drink. He lives for the job. You can see it
There are worse fates if you seek a national leader. Macron has been a pretty good leader for France, and the French are twats for not realising this
Sunak is a technocrat manager, not a leader. The sort of person they used to rescue Italy.
Think back into the depths of your memories for the endless debates between Truss and Sunak. What exactly in that campaign marked him out as a winner in a two horse race? Because I didn’t see it.
I believe he is genuinely clever. He is clever in a Macron-esque, Enarquiste, rich boy merchant banker sense - so quite narrow - he's not clever socially or artistically or emotionally - but nonetheless he is properly clever. And works hard. And doesn't drink. He lives for the job. You can see it
There are worse fates if you seek a national leader. Macron has been a pretty good leader for France, and the French are twats for not realising this
Thing I've noticed about Rishi is how comfortable he is with himself and with being PM. Blair and Cameron had that quality. Winners both. Losers like Brown and May didn't - seemed to be in gurning agony most of the time, as was late Major. Not sure about Sir Keir.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
Western liberal democracies have not flourished since the GFC, but the world’s dictatorships have done worse.
Russia is vanishing down the plug hole, China got old before it got rich, and the rest of them are hellholes.
The unusual thing about Yousaf is that he was not voted in by the members against the better judgement of the parliamentarians. So he's worth a special chapter on his own.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI can only pick up what it is programmed for and can source, even ChatGPT just picks up what is most frequently found on the internet and moulds it into an argument
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
Russia is also in decline admittedly and even more so than the West, see Ukraine
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI can only pick up what it is programmed for and can source, even ChatGPT just picks up what is most frequently found on the internet and moulds it into an argument
You should see the latest stuff, it’s moved on from that.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI can only pick up what it is programmed for and can source, even ChatGPT just picks up what is most frequently found on the internet and moulds it into an argument
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Perhaps you DO believe that, You are quite orthodox religious. I do not believe that (and I am spiritually inclined)
Humans grow mentally by reading and copying and gathering influences from their surroundings, by seeing and reading what other humans do. Specifically, they use language, the operating system of the human mind. That is exactly what Large Language Model computers do. They learn like us, only on a much bigger, more powerful scale
I also agree that, though boring and uncharismatic, SKS has a ruthless streak. I’ve been impressed by just how brutal and thorough his extirpation of Corbyn and Corbynism has been.
Yes. It's brutally effective. And it is Starmer doing it
It is like a very good Mafioso slowly and silently eliminating all his rivals, while seeming quite boring and scholastic, and going to church a lot
It's the one thing that gives me hope for the next government. Starmer is a c*nt, like, say, Mandelson
C*nts can make brilliant leaders. Rather that than a pious dim fool like Corbyn, or a pathetic vain posho like Cameron
Putin is a c*nt.
Netanyahu is a c*nt.
Starmer showed c*ntish tendencies, sitting in Corbyn's shadow cabinet as the party was full of anti-semites running riot in order to get the job of top c*nt.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI can only pick up what it is programmed for and can source, even ChatGPT just picks up what is most frequently found on the internet and moulds it into an argument
You should see the latest stuff, it’s moved on from that.
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
As you can see, life expectancy for both blacks and whites rose over those years, with some interuptions like World War II, and the gap between the two groups diminished, slowly.
Until about 2010. And then drugs, particularly fentanyl, took their toll. And the steady increase in life expectancy stopped.
We, as a nation, did not react well to this challenge. Others will differ, but I lay some of the blame for that failure on Barack Obama. Who should have learned from the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Just as I lay some of the blame for the high COVID toll in the US on Donald the Loser. Who could have learned from competent medical professionals.
(There is good news, and another lesson, in the way life expectancy has increased for Hispanics, so that it is now well above that of whites.)
it was the medical professionals who were dishing out fentanyl like they were M&Ms
The Sackler family have a lot to answer for. They spent as much as it took to convince US medical professionals to prescribe Oxycontin to their patients & earnt $billions as a result.
Somehow the UK missed out on their malign influence on the medical profession.
They own Napp Pharmaceuticals.
But MS Contin was largely restricted to hospital prescription
The Sacklers owned Perdue Pharma, who sold Oxycontin (slow release Oxycodone) in the US which could be prescribed for home use. It was Oxycontin that was blamed for the latest epidemic of opioid adiction in the US.
Oxycontin is available on prescription in the UK & we haven’t entirely escaped: there have been deaths due to overdoses of Oxycontin here too, but the scale is completely different in the US.
(MS Contin is morphine sulphate slow release. Different drug, although very similar in action.)
Oxycontin of itself wasn’t a problem. Handing it out like smarties was. Which was systemically pushed by Perdue.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
Mate, this is the stupidest thing you have ever said on PB. It is also factually untrue. GPT4 is now passing multiple tests (like the American bar for lawyers) with ease and grace
"We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
TLDR: lawyers like you are fucked. But so are dildo knappers like me. We're all fucked
The mass shooting at a Nashville Covenant School today was apparently carried out by a he/him-identifying trans man, although it's being reported as being done by a 28-year-old woman.
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
No, they do not
Newton, Einstein and Clerk Maxwell (among others) think you're wrong
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
Western liberal democracies have not flourished since the GFC, but the world’s dictatorships have done worse.
Russia is vanishing down the plug hole, China got old before it got rich, and the rest of them are hellholes.
According to a new poll in WSJ, the total percentage of Americans who believe patriotism, religion, having children, and community involvement are important values each fell by around 10–30% since the response to COVID began.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
Mate, this is the stupidest thing you have ever said on PB. It is also factually untrue. GPT4 is now passing multiple tests (like the American bar for lawyers) with ease and grace
"We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
TLDR: lawyers like you are fucked. But so are dildo knappers like me. We're all fucked
What you're seeing from AI is a load of 2:2 material, at degree level, C grade at A Level. It's impressive that it can be produced by a non-human, and impressive that it's produced so quickly, but that's what it is.
To complete your analogy, we're neantherals round the camp fire, being imitated by parrots.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
India at ease with itself? Ruled by a fascist who gets opposition politicians locked up on trumped up charges.
Thank goodness that this country is not in a similar state of ease.
Think back into the depths of your memories for the endless debates between Truss and Sunak. What exactly in that campaign marked him out as a winner in a two horse race? Because I didn’t see it.
I believe he is genuinely clever. He is clever in a Macron-esque, Enarquiste, rich boy merchant banker sense - so quite narrow - he's not clever socially or artistically or emotionally - but nonetheless he is properly clever. And works hard. And doesn't drink. He lives for the job. You can see it
There are worse fates if you seek a national leader. Macron has been a pretty good leader for France, and the French are twats for not realising this
Thing I've noticed about Rishi is how comfortable he is with himself and with being PM. Blair and Cameron had that quality. Winners both. Losers like Brown and May didn't - seemed to be in gurning agony most of the time, as was late Major. Not sure about Sir Keir.
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
No, they do not
Newton, Einstein and Clerk Maxwell (among others) think you're wrong
To be fair to them, their perspective is somewhat...out of date.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
No, they do not
Newton, Einstein and Clerk Maxwell (among others) think you're wrong
Where did they get this incredible insight, if not from drawing on the wisdom of previous humans?
Did God grant one single bipedal ape species on one planet in one corner of one galaxy the gift of intelligence (why didn't He choose shrews? Or shrimps? Or trees on Mars? Or bits of stone on Betelgeuse?), or is intelligence actually a thing that naturally evolves given enough information put into a system which can usefully employ this information?
My bet is the latter. TBH. Computers are not like us. We are like computers. We process information and adapt as it changes. All else is ghosts and mirrors
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden, just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US, ridden with Woke, self doubt, lack of ambition, declining faith and birth rate and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Community involvement was declining long before covid but after the lockdowns it fell off a cliff.
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
No, they do not
Newton, Einstein and Clerk Maxwell (among others) think you're wrong
Where did they get this incredible insight, if not from drawing on the wisdom of previous humans?
Ummm, that's exactly the point.
How many millions of humans saw apples fall to Earth?
Precisely 1 person realised the Earth also moved up to meet the apple.
That's a new idea, not synthesized from existing data.
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
No, they do not
Newton, Einstein and Clerk Maxwell (among others) think you're wrong
Where did they get this incredible insight, if not from drawing on the wisdom of previous humans?
Did God grant one single bipedal ape species on one planet in one corner of one galaxy the gift of intelligence (why didn't He choose shrews? Or shrimps? Or trees on Mars? Or bits of stone on Betelgeuse?), or is intelligence actually a thing that naturally evolves given enough information put into a system which can usefully employ this information?
My bet is the latter. TBH. Computers are not like us. We are like computers. We process information and adapt as it changes. All else is ghosts and mirrors
What makes you think that all human brain activity is just data processing?
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
No, just a sign of the defeatism and weakness of today's West. The global energy however is in the likes of India and Africa and Dubai or Brazil, areas with faith still for most and with healthy birth rates
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
Mate, this is the stupidest thing you have ever said on PB. It is also factually untrue. GPT4 is now passing multiple tests (like the American bar for lawyers) with ease and grace
"We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
TLDR: lawyers like you are fucked. But so are dildo knappers like me. We're all fucked
What you're seeing from AI is a load of 2:2 material, at degree level, C grade at A Level. It's impressive that it can be produced by a non-human, and impressive that it's produced so quickly, but that's what it is.
To complete your analogy, we're neantherals round the camp fire, being imitated by parrots.
You are wrong is a trillion ways, but you are also specifically wrong in how well GPT4 is passing these tests
"GPT-5 will by end of 2023 hit the 95-99th percentile on every single one of these metrics. Unfucking real how fast and exponential probably even logarithmic at this point the growth is astounding. Buckle up for a strange and intense ride."
Apparently inflation has been caused by all the people retiring early according to andrew bailey.
Andrew Bailey has blamed a wave of early retirement for forcing up interest rates and inflation as Britain battles the steepest price rises of any large rich country.
The Governor of the Bank of England said that a sharp decline in the number of people in the workforce was “part of the reason why we have had to raise Bank Rate by as much as we have”.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria
Not so sure of that. Modi's India is sliding towards dictatorship with suppression of minorities and opposition politicians. Nigeria is a fascinating and culturally vibrant place, but mired in corruption and violence. All countries have their problems.
@Leon , you’re a man of the world. I need some advice.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
And....what do you think young humans do? As they grow up? Do they source ideas and words from a divine, extra-terrestrial source unavailable to computers, thereby evolving their minds?
Some of them do, yes.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
No, they do not
Newton, Einstein and Clerk Maxwell (among others) think you're wrong
Where did they get this incredible insight, if not from drawing on the wisdom of previous humans?
Ummm, that's exactly the point.
How many millions of humans saw apples fall to Earth?
Precisely 1 person realised the Earth also moved up to meet the apple.
That's a new idea, not synthesized from existing data.
OK, you have a religious belief that humans, unlike any other entity in the entire universe, have been gifted a divine spark of intelligence. Because, reasons
I don't agree, but I respect your personal faith; I have never previously seen you as particularly spiritual
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
Mate, this is the stupidest thing you have ever said on PB. It is also factually untrue. GPT4 is now passing multiple tests (like the American bar for lawyers) with ease and grace
"We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
TLDR: lawyers like you are fucked. But so are dildo knappers like me. We're all fucked
What you're seeing from AI is a load of 2:2 material, at degree level, C grade at A Level. It's impressive that it can be produced by a non-human, and impressive that it's produced so quickly, but that's what it is.
To complete your analogy, we're neantherals round the camp fire, being imitated by parrots.
You are wrong is a trillion ways, but you are also specifically wrong in how well GPT4 is passing these tests
"GPT-5 will by end of 2023 hit the 95-99th percentile on every single one of these metrics. Unfucking real how fast and exponential probably even logarithmic at this point the growth is astounding. Buckle up for a strange and intense ride."
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
No, just a sign of the defeatism and weakness of today's West. The global energy however is in the likes of India and Africa and Dubai or Brazil, areas with faith still for most and with healthy birth rates
Nothing healthy about the human infestation of the planet.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
And there we have the left in all its weak, spineless, miserable, self hating, pathetic defeatism. And it wonders why it loses so often?
Minor point: It's Purdue Pharma, not Perdue Pharm -- for which former senator David Perdue is probably grateful. (And it will soon disappear, for which we may all be grateful.)
@Leon , you’re a man of the world. I need some advice.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
Oof, sorry to hear that. In my view, the best balm for a broken heart - for anything really - is exercise; a good walk somewhere new, with views and some good company; whether that's his Dad or his mates. All the best to him. I have no insight I'm sure you haven't already imparted, but I'm sure a son of yours will be fine.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
What evidence do you have that other species are more benevolent than we are?
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria
Not so sure of that. Modi's India is sliding towards dictatorship with suppression of minorities and opposition politicians. Nigeria is a fascinating and culturally vibrant place, but mired in corruption and violence. All countries have their problems.
Indian growth rate 5.5%, Nigerian growth rate 3.5% 2023. Global growth rate 2.9% so far this year.
Neither are perfect but they have competitive elections and are much more free for most than the likes of Putin's Russia. Xi's China or North Korea
@Leon , you’re a man of the world. I need some advice.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
I'm genuinely honoured to be asked
TBH at 19 there isn't much you can do. Weirdly, I too was broken hearted at 19 - dumped by my then GF - and it was harrowingly nasty. It REALLY hurts
Best things: proper sympathy, good friends, fresh air, and a new flirtation? Ideally you have sex with someone else ASAP - that is without doubt the best remedy possible - but of course that is not always feasible. But finding a new pleasure - kite surfing, butterfly collecting, mountaineering, reading the history of Cadiz, traveling through Mongolia, croquet - can be a big consolation
It shows you that there are different kinds of happiness, and sadness is not forever, and it distracts. And time heals as you are distracted
Think back into the depths of your memories for the endless debates between Truss and Sunak. What exactly in that campaign marked him out as a winner in a two horse race? Because I didn’t see it.
I believe he is genuinely clever. He is clever in a Macron-esque, Enarquiste, rich boy merchant banker sense - so quite narrow - he's not clever socially or artistically or emotionally - but nonetheless he is properly clever. And works hard. And doesn't drink. He lives for the job. You can see it
There are worse fates if you seek a national leader. Macron has been a pretty good leader for France, and the French are twats for not realising this
Thing I've noticed about Rishi is how comfortable he is with himself and with being PM. Blair and Cameron had that quality. Winners both. Losers like Brown and May didn't - seemed to be in gurning agony most of the time, as was late Major. Not sure about Sir Keir.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
Mate, this is the stupidest thing you have ever said on PB. It is also factually untrue. GPT4 is now passing multiple tests (like the American bar for lawyers) with ease and grace
"We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
TLDR: lawyers like you are fucked. But so are dildo knappers like me. We're all fucked
What you're seeing from AI is a load of 2:2 material, at degree level, C grade at A Level. It's impressive that it can be produced by a non-human, and impressive that it's produced so quickly, but that's what it is.
To complete your analogy, we're neantherals round the camp fire, being imitated by parrots.
You are wrong is a trillion ways, but you are also specifically wrong in how well GPT4 is passing these tests
"GPT-5 will by end of 2023 hit the 95-99th percentile on every single one of these metrics. Unfucking real how fast and exponential probably even logarithmic at this point the growth is astounding. Buckle up for a strange and intense ride."
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
OK, you have a religious belief that humans, unlike any other entity in the entire universe, have been gifted a divine spark of intelligence. Because, reasons
I don't agree, but I respect your personal faith; I have never previously seen you as particularly spiritual
I never said any of that.
Humans are capable of original thought. The key word is original, meaning new, novel, previously unknown or imagined. Computers are not (yet)
There are circumstances in which systems display emergent properties, and computers might be good at finding them. I don't think that is the same.
For example, a computer can drive a car. That requires a lot of data analysis and computation, but i don't think it requires imagination. There are a limited number of changes in direction of velocity the computer can make that doesn't cause a crash. The computer can find that set and optimise it.
The same computer can't theorise adding propellers to the car and levitating it.
@Leon , you’re a man of the world. I need some advice.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
And there we have the left in all its weak, spineless, miserable, self hating, pathetic defeatism. And it wonders why it loses so often?
Far from defeatism. I seek victory. Victory for the planet. Victory for every species that lives as part of the natural balance.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
Nah. Ultimately people across the world will look at China, Russia and their congeners and think: would we really rather live there than the good ole USA (or UK)? Have faith.
AI changes everything. It really does
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
AI is a mediocre student, who can just about scrape a pass. What is produces is banal, bland, parroting the received wisdom of its times.
Mate, this is the stupidest thing you have ever said on PB. It is also factually untrue. GPT4 is now passing multiple tests (like the American bar for lawyers) with ease and grace
"We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
TLDR: lawyers like you are fucked. But so are dildo knappers like me. We're all fucked
What you're seeing from AI is a load of 2:2 material, at degree level, C grade at A Level. It's impressive that it can be produced by a non-human, and impressive that it's produced so quickly, but that's what it is.
To complete your analogy, we're neantherals round the camp fire, being imitated by parrots.
You are wrong is a trillion ways, but you are also specifically wrong in how well GPT4 is passing these tests
"GPT-5 will by end of 2023 hit the 95-99th percentile on every single one of these metrics. Unfucking real how fast and exponential probably even logarithmic at this point the growth is astounding. Buckle up for a strange and intense ride."
In terms of capacity, you’re perhaps correct. But we still don’t have a good grasp on what they are in terms of ‘intelligence’, let alone intentionality (if that’s even relevant ).
OK, you have a religious belief that humans, unlike any other entity in the entire universe, have been gifted a divine spark of intelligence. Because, reasons
I don't agree, but I respect your personal faith; I have never previously seen you as particularly spiritual
I never said any of that.
Humans are capable of original thought. The key word is original, meaning new, novel, previously unknown or imagined. Computers are not (yet)
There are circumstances in which systems display emergent properties, and computers might be good at finding them. I don't think that is the same.
For example, a computer can drive a car. That requires a lot of data analysis and computation, but i don't think it requires imagination. There are a limited number of changes in direction of velocity the computer can make that doesn't cause a crash. The computer can find that set and optimise it.
The same computer can't theorise adding propellers to the car and levitating it.
The irony is that you are one of THE most robotic and unimaginative posters on PB. It's either a warmed over anti Brexit retweet, or some facile bilge like this, An unguarded GPT4 would outdo you in a minute, and be far more entertaining. Sorry
@Leon , you’re a man of the world. I need some advice.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
I'm genuinely honoured to be asked
TBH at 19 there isn't much you can do. Weirdly, I too was broken hearted at 19 - dumped by my then GF - and it was harrowingly nasty. It REALLY hurts
Best things: proper sympathy, good friends, fresh air, and a new flirtation? Ideally you have sex with someone else ASAP - that is without doubt the best remedy possible - but of course that is not always feasible. But finding a new pleasure - kite surfing, butterfly collecting, mountaineering, reading the history of Cadiz, traveling through Mongolia, croquet - can be a big consolation
It shows you that there are different kinds of happiness, and sadness is not forever, and it distracts. And time heals as you are distracted
Does it get less painful as you get older? If so, why is that?
The cynic is me suggests it's because we care less and bonds weaken as we age. Though I'm sure there are plenty of people devastated by divorce.
A word of advice to fellow denizens of this board: if your toilet is backing up, and you own a jet washer, yuo can save yourself the quite considerable cost of getting dynorod or their local equivalents out by removing the inspection hatch and pointing your jet wash up the blocked drain until the foul effluent emerges. It may also help to flush some hot water through from the top end. It's not a pleasant job - you stand a good chance of finishing the job encrusted in a fine miasma of shit - and the sight of the unpleasant sludge eventually emerging, bubbling up and disappearing into the drain under the direction of your spray is one you won't shift for a few days - but I confess it's weirdly satisfying. There's not many jobs I can do myself but drains is one.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria
Not so sure of that. Modi's India is sliding towards dictatorship with suppression of minorities and opposition politicians. Nigeria is a fascinating and culturally vibrant place, but mired in corruption and violence. All countries have their problems.
Indian growth rate 5.5%, Nigerian growth rate 3.5% 2023. Global growth rate 2.9% so far this year.
Neither are perfect but they have competitive elections and are much more free for most than the likes of Putin's Russia. Xi's China or North Korea
Yes, but that is not the question at issue. What makes you think these countries are "self confident and at ease with themselves"?
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
And there we have the left in all its weak, spineless, miserable, self hating, pathetic defeatism. And it wonders why it loses so often?
Far from defeatism. I seek victory. Victory for the planet. Victory for every species that lives as part of the natural balance.
I wonder if you are interested in Peter Singer's idea of speciesism?
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
What evidence do you have that other species are more benevolent than we are?
Well the earth wasn't fucked up until we came along.
@Leon , you’re a man of the world. I need some advice.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
I'm genuinely honoured to be asked
TBH at 19 there isn't much you can do. Weirdly, I too was broken hearted at 19 - dumped by my then GF - and it was harrowingly nasty. It REALLY hurts
Best things: proper sympathy, good friends, fresh air, and a new flirtation? Ideally you have sex with someone else ASAP - that is without doubt the best remedy possible - but of course that is not always feasible. But finding a new pleasure - kite surfing, butterfly collecting, mountaineering, reading the history of Cadiz, traveling through Mongolia, croquet - can be a big consolation
It shows you that there are different kinds of happiness, and sadness is not forever, and it distracts. And time heals as you are distracted
Does it get less painful as you get older? If so, why is that?
The cynic is me suggests it's because we care less and bonds weaken as we age. Though I'm sure there are plenty of people devastated by divorce.
No, no, it's just down to the perspective of age. Even if you haven't lived the experience yourself, you know plenty who have. That said, as you say, I know people who have split in their 30s and never properly got over it over a decade later.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
What evidence do you have that other species are more benevolent than we are?
Well the earth wasn't fucked up until we came along.
To be honest there are arguments its better to be a lion basking in the sun all day than a human being working in an office.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
What evidence do you have that other species are more benevolent than we are?
Well the earth wasn't fucked up until we came along.
I think that we have far exceeded other species in the extinction of other species.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and has a similar life expectancy ahead. I don't believe there will be any humans left by then, or perhaps even in a millionth of that time. The world will be populated by species as yet unknown, but the equals in splendour of anything the world has ever seen. I am an optimist.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
What evidence do you have that other species are more benevolent than we are?
Well the earth wasn't fucked up until we came along.
I think that's just because humans are uniquely successful, by the narrow but important measure of redproducing themsleves and occupying habitable landscapes. I am 100% sure if ants or parakeets or earthworms had been as successful they would have spared no more thought for other species than we do.
@Leon , you’re a man of the world. I need some advice.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
I'm genuinely honoured to be asked
TBH at 19 there isn't much you can do. Weirdly, I too was broken hearted at 19 - dumped by my then GF - and it was harrowingly nasty. It REALLY hurts
Best things: proper sympathy, good friends, fresh air, and a new flirtation? Ideally you have sex with someone else ASAP - that is without doubt the best remedy possible - but of course that is not always feasible. But finding a new pleasure - kite surfing, butterfly collecting, mountaineering, reading the history of Cadiz, traveling through Mongolia, croquet - can be a big consolation
It shows you that there are different kinds of happiness, and sadness is not forever, and it distracts. And time heals as you are distracted
Thanks @Leon . He is truly suffering. Personally, I managed to escape that fate at his age, which means I’m woefully underprepared as a parent. I appreciate the advice.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
What evidence do you have that other species are more benevolent than we are?
Well the earth wasn't fucked up until we came along.
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
And there we have the left in all its weak, spineless, miserable, self hating, pathetic defeatism. And it wonders why it loses so often?
Far from defeatism. I seek victory. Victory for the planet. Victory for every species that lives as part of the natural balance.
No you seek the end of humanity out of pure self hatred of your own species
"Richard Bilton investigates the problems Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy policy is causing 40 years later, including the return of slum landlords"
Thatcher's legacy. Slums to slums in a lifetime.
Too easy just to blame Thatcher. An entire generation is complicit.
House prices started going mental from the late 90s onwards.
Oh absolutely, the Boomers got lucky pretty much all the way through life: a comprehensive welfare state when they were young, a mass giveaway of council housing at knockdown prices when they were having their families, a massive escalation in asset values, and now the ridiculous and seemingly immovable triple lock. This, from a piece decrying the latter (which is well worth reading right through BTW):
It’s important, of course, to take care of the vulnerable. But the triple lock hasn’t just insulated pensioners from the economic realities of austerity and Covid. It has actually made them measurably richer. Far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, the triple lock is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. One in four pensioners is a millionaire, whilst the median pensioner, as John Oxley writes, ‘already has more disposable income than the median worker, and is likely to have greater wealth’.
...
The sheer weight of benefits directed to today’s pensioners is scarcely creditable. Older generations have more or less mortgaged the welfare state to the hilt. As Duncan Robinson notes in The Economist:
On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term ‘welfare state’ was first popularised.
Practically everything is rigged in favour of the huge cohort of well-to-do elderly homeowners. And a prediction: Labour will leave things exactly as they are in this respect. Watch.
On your last point/prediction, absolutely.
The entire British system, highly centralised of course, is utterly in hock to “well-to-do, elderly homeowners”. Labour can’t address that without electoral annihilation.
The USA, which faces similar demographics, has the saving grace of not being so centralised. If San Francisco nimbyises itself into stagnation, there is always Austin etc.
I am very dismal on British prospects.
But America is fucked in a way Britain does not even comprehend, in multiple ways. From drugs to guns to race
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The whole West is in relative decline, the biggest growing economies and populations and nations self confident and at ease with themselves are the likes of India and Nigeria in Africa.
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
Solid enough big picture punditry but I don't think nations can be 'self confident and at ease with themselves'.
They can, see the US under Reagan, religious, patriotic, family oriented, self confident, hard working and entrepreneurial believing it was utopia against the evil Communist empires. in the 1980s there is no doubt the US was the dominant superpower.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important. https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Declining faith and birth rates sound like two big positives to me.
Not if one wants one's society to endure.
I don't. I want our species to become extinct. And leave the world a better place.
What evidence do you have that other species are more benevolent than we are?
Well the earth wasn't fucked up until we came along.
I think that we have far exceeded other species in the extinction of other species.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and has a similar life expectancy ahead. I don't believe there will be any humans left by then, or perhaps even in a millionth of that time. The world will be populated by species as yet unknown, but the equals in splendour of anything the world has ever seen. I am an optimist.
It all went wrong when we stopped being hunter gatherers.
Comments
But MS Contin was largely restricted to hospital prescription
One branch of the family sold their shares in Purdue and moved to the UK long before OxyContin was approved and launched
It's like listening to people blaming the Jews.
It is like a very good Mafioso slowly and silently eliminating all his rivals, while seeming quite boring and scholastic, and going to church a lot
It's the one thing that gives me hope for the next government. Starmer is a c*nt, like, say, Mandelson
C*nts can make brilliant leaders. Rather that than a pious dim fool like Corbyn, or a pathetic vain posho like Cameron
"Leon May Vote Tory, Shocker"
I am pessimistic about the West in general, but America is right down there with the UK
The first of the new tanks - including Challenger 2 and Leopard 2 - have arrived in Ukraine. Still far too few, mind.
If not for Trevor Noah pretending there was a big reaction against Rishi because of his race and then disingenuously claim that's not what he was doing, I'm surprised they even picked up on the story at all.
IDS, Truss, Ed Miliband, Corbyn. Their names are legion.
The unusual thing about Yousaf is that he was not voted in by the members against the better judgement of the parliamentarians. So he's worth a special chapter on his own.
There are worse fates if you seek a national leader. Macron has been a pretty good leader for France, and the French are twats for not realising this
Oxycontin is available on prescription in the UK & we haven’t entirely escaped: there have been deaths due to overdoses of Oxycontin here too, but the scale is completely different in the US.
(MS Contin is morphine sulphate slow release. Different drug, although very similar in action.)
Plus, people are about to face April bills. That’ll be a fascinating reaction
The West will still be relatively a much more prosperous place to live than most of the world, have some top universities still and big financial centres. However it can no longer run the world, we are in a multipolar world in which the USA will not be sole economic or even cultural superpower but will have to share it with China and India in particular
People just don't realise yet. We are now living on a planet with a non human intelligence, which will only grow in power and will transform all of human life
Our political discussions are like blacksmiths discussing new kinds of horseshoe even as they are making the first cars a mile down the road. Only much much more so. Maybe we are like apes grunting about food source as the nearby homo sapiens are purposefully using fire for the first time, and soaking in the light and warmth
I simply don't bang on about it, because it is boring and repetitive. But it is nonetheless true
Russia is vanishing down the plug hole, China got old before it got rich, and the rest of them are hellholes.
Perhaps you DO believe that, You are quite orthodox religious. I do not believe that (and I am spiritually inclined)
Humans grow mentally by reading and copying and gathering influences from their surroundings, by seeing and reading what other humans do. Specifically, they use language, the operating system of the human mind. That is exactly what Large Language Model computers do. They learn like us, only on a much bigger, more powerful scale
Netanyahu is a c*nt.
Starmer showed c*ntish tendencies, sitting in Corbyn's shadow cabinet as the party was full of anti-semites running riot in order to get the job of top c*nt.
But mostly, I think he's just a fanny.
They intuit previously unimagined things, not simply synthesize previously known data.
I recommend a proper read of this paper
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
Crucial passage:
"We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
TLDR: lawyers like you are fucked. But so are dildo knappers like me. We're all fucked
https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/nashville-shooting-covenant-school-03-27-23/index.html
https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1640445620380139522?s=20
To complete your analogy, we're neantherals round the camp fire, being imitated by parrots.
Thank goodness that this country is not in a similar state of ease.
Now look at the US of Biden. Just 38% of Americans say they are very patriotic, just 39% very religious, just 30% say having children is very important to them, only 27% think community involvement very important, even only 43% see making money as very important.
https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1640321461972877312?s=20
The above is the recipe for today's US and most of the West, ridden with Woke, self doubt, ashamed of its past, lacking ambition, declining faith and birth rates and increasing isolationism. No wonder it is no longer the dominant superpower, it doesn't even deserve to be!
Did God grant one single bipedal ape species on one planet in one corner of one galaxy the gift of intelligence (why didn't He choose shrews? Or shrimps? Or trees on Mars? Or bits of stone on Betelgeuse?), or is intelligence actually a thing that naturally evolves given enough information put into a system which can usefully employ this information?
My bet is the latter. TBH. Computers are not like us. We are like computers. We process information and adapt as it changes. All else is ghosts and mirrors
I think Foxy has mentioned this band, but I happened on them separately to that and this one hits the mark.
https://youtu.be/HXnjO394r4M
Of course, "Take it from their cold, dead hands" is HYs oft stated view of how the system should work.
EDIT: Autocorrect nearly as, entertainingly catastrophically messy as the middle 8.
How many millions of humans saw apples fall to Earth?
Precisely 1 person realised the Earth also moved up to meet the apple.
That's a new idea, not synthesized from existing data.
eg it is now acing the law exams
"OpenAI announces GPT-4 here:
https://openai.com/research/gpt-4
Performance on human-benchmarks is rather remarkable.
GPT-3.5 scored 10th percentile on the bar exam, GPT-4 hits the 90th percentile.
On BC calculus it got the equivalent of a 4, good for college credit at 99% of colleges."
"And poof 💨 ... An entire industry and careers vanishes 💥 just like that!!
Goosebumps.
We just changed the color of the ink we write humanity's history in.
This is unprecedented.
The pace of life has never been this fast. Its scary."
https://twitter.com/wintonARK/status/1635696087687364608?s=20
"GPT-5 will by end of 2023 hit the 95-99th percentile on every single one of these metrics. Unfucking real how fast and exponential probably even logarithmic at this point the growth is astounding. Buckle up for a strange and intense ride."
https://twitter.com/rajm2016/status/1635902121944948736?s=20
For lawyers this is particularly bad, Soz
Andrew Bailey has blamed a wave of early retirement for forcing up interest rates and inflation as Britain battles the steepest price rises of any large rich country.
The Governor of the Bank of England said that a sharp decline in the number of people in the workforce was “part of the reason why we have had to raise Bank Rate by as much as we have”.
My 19 year old son has been dumped by his girlfriend of 2.5 years. Seven days in and he’s still a mess . What’s the best recipe for a young broken heart? ChatGPT is not much use.
Anyone else with any tips would be much appreciated.
I don't agree, but I respect your personal faith; I have never previously seen you as particularly spiritual
Being a lawyer is an altogether different thing.
In my view, the best balm for a broken heart - for anything really - is exercise; a good walk somewhere new, with views and some good company; whether that's his Dad or his mates.
All the best to him. I have no insight I'm sure you haven't already imparted, but I'm sure a son of yours will be fine.
Neither are perfect but they have competitive elections and are much more free for most than the likes of Putin's Russia. Xi's China or North Korea
I'm genuinely honoured to be asked
TBH at 19 there isn't much you can do. Weirdly, I too was broken hearted at 19 - dumped by my then GF - and it was harrowingly nasty. It REALLY hurts
Best things: proper sympathy, good friends, fresh air, and a new flirtation? Ideally you have sex with someone else ASAP - that is without doubt the best remedy possible - but of course that is not always feasible. But finding a new pleasure - kite surfing, butterfly collecting, mountaineering, reading the history of Cadiz, traveling through Mongolia, croquet - can be a big consolation
It shows you that there are different kinds of happiness, and sadness is not forever, and it distracts. And time heals as you are distracted
Humans are capable of original thought. The key word is original, meaning new, novel, previously unknown or imagined. Computers are not (yet)
There are circumstances in which systems display emergent properties, and computers might be good at finding them. I don't think that is the same.
For example, a computer can drive a car. That requires a lot of data analysis and computation, but i don't think it requires imagination. There are a limited number of changes in direction of velocity the computer can make that doesn't cause a crash. The computer can find that set and optimise it.
The same computer can't theorise adding propellers to the car and levitating it.
But we still don’t have a good grasp on what they are in terms of ‘intelligence’, let alone intentionality (if that’s even relevant ).
This is an interesting thread.
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640122342570336267
The cynic is me suggests it's because we care less and bonds weaken as we age. Though I'm sure there are plenty of people devastated by divorce.
What Three Words...
A word of advice to fellow denizens of this board: if your toilet is backing up, and you own a jet washer, yuo can save yourself the quite considerable cost of getting dynorod or their local equivalents out by removing the inspection hatch and pointing your jet wash up the blocked drain until the foul effluent emerges. It may also help to flush some hot water through from the top end. It's not a pleasant job - you stand a good chance of finishing the job encrusted in a fine miasma of shit - and the sight of the unpleasant sludge eventually emerging, bubbling up and disappearing into the drain under the direction of your spray is one you won't shift for a few days - but I confess it's weirdly satisfying. There's not many jobs I can do myself but drains is one.
That said, as you say, I know people who have split in their 30s and never properly got over it over a decade later.
Then who will protect most other species from the asteroid? And one will come, eventually.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and has a similar life expectancy ahead. I don't believe there will be any humans left by then, or perhaps even in a millionth of that time. The world will be populated by species as yet unknown, but the equals in splendour of anything the world has ever seen. I am an optimist.
Former pupil at the school.
Gosh I moan about my school but.
I am 100% sure if ants or parakeets or earthworms had been as successful they would have spared no more thought for other species than we do.