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This looks worrying for Number 10 and the Tories – politicalbetting.com

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  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 39,652

    Those who have been briefing the Tory press this week either knew Gray hadn't engaged with the enquiry and didn't share that info; or they didn't know, so had no serious knowledge of what was going on. Either way, the Tory press has been made to look spectacularly stupid. Such is client journalism.

    I know, all those gullible PBers who fell for the spin as well.

    They really shouldn't be allowed out of the house.

    Gray would have taken legal advice and clearly had no confidence in the enquiry. The highly selective leaks to the Tory press over recent days, that have turned out to be - surprise, surprise - massively misleading, totally vindicate her decision.

  • DriverDriver Posts: 4,963

    Final poll averages pre-2019 local elections
    Lab/LD/Green/ChUK: 49%
    Con/UKIP: 45%

    2023 polling (adjusted for last week's polls)
    Lab/LD/Green: 59.8%
    Con/Reform: 34.2%

    That's one hell of a swing if it happens that way.

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653442329246564378

    What percentage did UKIP actually get? Reform are going to get close to zero because they're standing in so few places.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 9,139
    edited May 2023
    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hand , there's always struck me as being some sort of streak of proud plainness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit and soul of the midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like famously plain-speaking, Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 39,652
    Ha, ha - more client journalism exposed ...

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653450888936030232
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647

    felix said:

    Taz said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall should be levelled, not levelled up.
    Why ?

    Many parts of it are very pleasant. Certainly in the North East.
    Punishment for voting for Brexit.

    Would anybody really miss places like Stoke?
    That's a pretty shite comment, even as a joke.
    You've never been to Stoke based on your comment.
    I often used to go out in Stoke, with a girlfriend who lived amongst the Potters while working at Keele Uni. We always had a good night out.
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,679
    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    IBM haven't sacked 7,800 people. They are just mulling over a recruitment pause.

    International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday.

    Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.


    https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-pause-hiring-plans-replace-7800-jobs-with-ai-bloomberg-news-2023-05-01/

    So basically they're going to slim down their (presumably already bloated) HR department. Or it might just be a load of bollox.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,585
    Sunset. Galata Bridge.


  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,219

    Ha, ha - more client journalism exposed ...

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653450888936030232

    Odd.

    Whatever you think of The Sun, they have always known which side their bread is buttered. Work out what the public think and feed it back to them loudly.

    Right now, that means "oh well, it'll have to be Starmer I suppose, God help us all."

    Instead of which we get this desperate twisting of the figures.

    Odd.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,164

    felix said:

    Taz said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall should be levelled, not levelled up.
    Why ?

    Many parts of it are very pleasant. Certainly in the North East.
    Punishment for voting for Brexit.

    Would anybody really miss places like Stoke?
    That's a pretty shite comment, even as a joke.
    You've never been to Stoke based on your comment.
    No just helps add to the understanding of why so many there and in other places gave you the massive finger in 2016. But of course you act just like Roger - understand nothing and learn nothing.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 9,139
    Sandpit said:

    Sunset. Galata Bridge.


    Istanbul is an incredible city. Eis Tin Poli, as the Byzantines called it.

    With those kind of vistas and names like Galata, no wonder the Greek nationalists end of the political spectrum can never get over the loss of the old imperial capital.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,994
    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
  • mwadamsmwadams Posts: 3,593
    Driver said:

    Final poll averages pre-2019 local elections
    Lab/LD/Green/ChUK: 49%
    Con/UKIP: 45%

    2023 polling (adjusted for last week's polls)
    Lab/LD/Green: 59.8%
    Con/Reform: 34.2%

    That's one hell of a swing if it happens that way.

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653442329246564378

    What percentage did UKIP actually get? Reform are going to get close to zero because they're standing in so few places.
    It's worth noting that LD/Green took a significant chunk more of that "leftish" share in 2019 (LDs were 5% up on current polling).

    But not enough to compensate for the increase in Labour's polling. So there must be some Con/Brexit to Labour direct swing.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,994
    Driver said:

    Final poll averages pre-2019 local elections
    Lab/LD/Green/ChUK: 49%
    Con/UKIP: 45%

    2023 polling (adjusted for last week's polls)
    Lab/LD/Green: 59.8%
    Con/Reform: 34.2%

    That's one hell of a swing if it happens that way.

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653442329246564378

    What percentage did UKIP actually get? Reform are going to get close to zero because they're standing in so few places.
    4.5% (on NEVS I think) which was way below polls but not that bad.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.
    I'm reminded of David Lodge's novel Nice work - a culture clash between academia and metalbashing factory director in a fictional Brummagem. I never did see the BBC adaptation with Haydn Gwynne and Warren Clarke though.
  • No_Offence_AlanNo_Offence_Alan Posts: 4,515

    This is interesting. Further indications of potential tactical voting to come ...

    Comparing polls from the last week (n=6) to the same firms' polls at the end of Feb (before the polls started narrowing), we find:

    LAB: 43.8% (-3.7)
    CON: 28.0% (+1.5)
    LDM: 10.5% (+1.7)
    GRN: 5.5% (+0.5)

    Lead down to 15.8 pts (-5.2 pts), but LD/GRN now benefiting more than Con.

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653437319066599425

    I would surmise the movement from Lab to LD/Green may be to due to THAT poster putting LDs/Greens off their tactical support for Labour.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 49,862
    A rare day when, thanks to the weather, we really did have the whole mountain to ourselves
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 9,139
    edited May 2023
    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.
    Interesting. That makes a lot of sense. I know that the heyday of British audio engineering and things like speakers was often based on a patchwork of small companies based in the midlands, for instance.

    50 years later, and a lot of those products are still considered some of the best of their type made anywhere. But I must also say, the potential damage to the cause of small, and often export-led manafacturing, makes the craze, or popularity for Brexit in the midlands, appear even more bizarre, to me.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631

    Ha, ha - more client journalism exposed ...

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653450888936030232

    Odd.

    Whatever you think of The Sun, they have always known which side their bread is buttered. Work out what the public think and feed it back to them loudly.

    Right now, that means "oh well, it'll have to be Starmer I suppose, God help us all."

    Instead of which we get this desperate twisting of the figures.

    Odd.
    Starmer prosecuted journalists over phone hacking, The Sun will never forgive him for that, even if he were on course for a Blair sized landslide.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631
    IanB2 said:

    A rare day when, thanks to the weather, we really did have the whole mountain to ourselves

    How easy was it to import a koala bear to the UK?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 28,368
    ...
    Surely Rishi Rich has played this like the god he is. Kick the enquiry down the road until after the next GE so Gray can't work for Sir Softie prior to the next GE, which if King Charles gives Rishi Rich the Royal Prerogative extension he so richly deserves, I make that a starting date of January 2027. She could have starved to death by then!
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 10,759
    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
    I'm in a dwindling minority, I know, but AI really isn't the threat you think it is. In my view (again this is held by fewer and fewer) there is no chance at all that what is called AI now will get close to being sentient. Thus pretty much anything that something called AI does is going to need someone looking over its shoulder. Admittedly the need for sentience might be overplayed - I'd prefer intelligence rather than sentience where landing my plane is concerned for example. It's just a little sentience can add a lot.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,994
    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.
    Yes, the mid west of the UK with Birmingham being Chicago / Minneapolis and particularly the East Midlands being our flyover (drive over) states. There was a feature on Northants years ago on R4 titled the British Kansas. Highest rate of personalised number plates in the country.

    Bristol is Northern California, Essex the New Jersey, the Blue Wall Home Counties New England etc.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,439
    Thanks Prince Harry (you fucking dick).

    Support for the Monarchy needs to be up at 75-80% not 60-65%:

    https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2023/05/the-monarchy-has-to-change-but-the-king-has-time-and-goodwill-on-his-side/#more-17007
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    IBM haven't sacked 7,800 people. They are just mulling over a recruitment pause.

    International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday.

    Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.


    https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-pause-hiring-plans-replace-7800-jobs-with-ai-bloomberg-news-2023-05-01/

    So basically they're going to slim down their (presumably already bloated) HR department. Or it might just be a load of bollox.
    Really? Even at this stage you think “it’s a load of bollox”

    You’re beyond help


    I remember when I first realised how this was going to hit us. It was on PB in mid 2020 when the much missed @FrancisUrquhart pointed me to this thing called GPT3

    I did a lot of reading and I extrapolated, and I realised: this is it. This is true AI, this is AGI, on the horizon, and heading towards us and it is the end of human society as we have known it (certainly in terms of employment, but also probably creativity etc)

    Every accelerating step since then, Dall-e, Dalle-2, GPT3.5, Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude, StableDiffusion, GPT4, and so on, has only proven me right. It’s not going away. The tech is speeding up. IBM are not going to change their minds and hire those 7800 people when they can use machines for pennies
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647
    Omnium said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
    I'm in a dwindling minority, I know, but AI really isn't the threat you think it is. In my view (again this is held by fewer and fewer) there is no chance at all that what is called AI now will get close to being sentient. Thus pretty much anything that something called AI does is going to need someone looking over its shoulder. Admittedly the need for sentience might be overplayed - I'd prefer intelligence rather than sentience where landing my plane is concerned for example. It's just a little sentience can add a lot.
    Technological development is driven by bored people wanting new ways to waste their time. AI won't reach lift off until it too can experience boredom.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/ai-technology-productivity-time-wasting/673880/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

  • lintolinto Posts: 38
    Rishi will be in trouble, Black Sheep brewery has gone into administration, in his patch too. You can here the wails of all ale drinking Yorkshiremen over here on the west coast.

    https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/business/the-black-sheep-brewery-announces-intention-to-appoint-administrators-after-facing-perfect-storm-4126880
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
    Son (9) wants to be a YouTuber

    Daughter (5) wants to be a teacher.

    I’ve told Son he’s probably not going to be a YouTuber (nor is it a particularly good way to make a living outside of the top 0.000000001%).

    Daughter tbh will do what she likes and I’m not going to argue with her.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647

    Thanks Prince Harry (you fucking dick).

    Support for the Monarchy needs to be up at 75-80% not 60-65%:

    https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2023/05/the-monarchy-has-to-change-but-the-king-has-time-and-goodwill-on-his-side/#more-17007

    "From our polling, we identified five distinct types. Only 7% of Brits are Committed Royalists, who are essentially uncritical in their support, and one third are Mainstream Monarchists who back the institution but recognise the need to change with the times. Just under a quarter are Neutral Pragmatists, who lean towards the status quo largely because they think the alternative would be worse. Nearly one in five are Modern Republicans, who see the monarchy as divisive, worry about its colonial legacy, and tend to side with Harry and Meghan over the rest of the family. The remaining 18% are Angry Abolitionists, who think the royals care little for the country and believe the institution has no place in the modern world."

    Put me down as a Neutral Pragmatist, but with even a substantial majority of Royalists favouring "change with the times", KC3 might do better talking to Harry than ostracised him.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631

    Thanks Prince Harry (you fucking dick).

    Support for the Monarchy needs to be up at 75-80% not 60-65%:

    https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2023/05/the-monarchy-has-to-change-but-the-king-has-time-and-goodwill-on-his-side/#more-17007

    Hurrah, I’m a modern republican according to Lord Ashcroft.

    PS - I think it is Prince Andrew who has damaged the Royals more than Harry.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    TimS said:

    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.
    Yes, the mid west of the UK with Birmingham being Chicago / Minneapolis and particularly the East Midlands being our flyover (drive over) states. There was a feature on Northants years ago on R4 titled the British Kansas. Highest rate of personalised number plates in the country.

    Bristol is Northern California, Essex the New Jersey, the Blue Wall Home Counties New England etc.
    Yorkshire is Texas obvs but what about the rest of the north? Is Cleveland… Cleveland?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277

    Sandpit said:

    Sunset. Galata Bridge.


    Istanbul is an incredible city. Eis Tin Poli, as the Byzantines called it.

    With those kind of vistas and names like Galata, no wonder the Greek nationalists end of the political spectrum can never get over the loss of the old imperial capital.
    Weirdly disappointing climate tho. Much more Black Sea than Med. So much colder, wetter, danker, even snowier, than you expect
  • ClippPClippP Posts: 1,904
    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    If it is a good urban planning course, it will also take in some sociology, economics, politics, laaw.... Much more complicated and interesting than can be done by machines. A good choice on her part.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,786
    edited May 2023
    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    Hopefully she is sensible enough not to panic about everything, like you, and will be just fine.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631
    edited May 2023
    Lord Ashcroft is using such pejorative terms for some republicans, ‘Angry Abolitionists’ but neutral terms for the cucks who support the monarchy.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,587
    Ghedebrav said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
    Son (9) wants to be a YouTuber

    Daughter (5) wants to be a teacher.

    I’ve told Son he’s probably not going to be a YouTuber (nor is it a particularly good way to make a living outside of the top 0.000000001%).

    Daughter tbh will do what she likes and I’m not going to argue with her.
    This evening, son (8) said he wants to be a builder. Or a scientist (chemistry). Or a potter. Or a Youtuber as a last resort. ;)

    I'll just be happy if he's happy and healthy.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 9,139
    Leon said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sunset. Galata Bridge.


    Istanbul is an incredible city. Eis Tin Poli, as the Byzantines called it.

    With those kind of vistas and names like Galata, no wonder the Greek nationalists end of the political spectrum can never get over the loss of the old imperial capital.
    Weirdly disappointing climate tho. Much more Black Sea than Med. So much colder, wetter, danker, even snowier, than you expect
    Maybe it's the Bosphorous ? The same thing, and huge "river" giving it those glorious views, also affecting the climate.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    edited May 2023


    Istanbul is an incredible city. Eis Tin Poli, as the Byzantines called it.

    With those kind of vistas and names like Galata, no wonder the Greek nationalists end of the political spectrum can never get over the loss of the old imperial capital.

    Weirdly disappointing climate tho. Much more Black Sea than Med. So much colder, wetter, danker, even snowier, than you expect

    The one time I went to Istanbul it had a proper covering of snow! Gave it quite a romantic feel though.

    Edit: vanilla quirks
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647
    Ghedebrav said:

    TimS said:

    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.
    Yes, the mid west of the UK with Birmingham being Chicago / Minneapolis and particularly the East Midlands being our flyover (drive over) states. There was a feature on Northants years ago on R4 titled the British Kansas. Highest rate of personalised number plates in the country.

    Bristol is Northern California, Essex the New Jersey, the Blue Wall Home Counties New England etc.
    Yorkshire is Texas obvs but what about the rest of the north? Is Cleveland… Cleveland?
    Northern Ireland is Alabama.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    Hopefully she is sensible enough not to panic about everything like you and will be just fine.
    Anyone who is a parent of a child under 18 who is not mildly panicked about their career options, in the face of AI, is not sentient, and deserves to be overtaken by AI

    It is a genuinely fearful moment for humankind
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,901
    Have thought of another idea for Saturday.

    Can I pledge allegiance to Ming the Merciless?
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,945
    Leon said:

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    Hopefully she is sensible enough not to panic about everything like you and will be just fine.
    Anyone who is a parent of a child under 18 who is not mildly panicked about their career options, in the face of AI, is not sentient, and deserves to be overtaken by AI

    It is a genuinely fearful moment for humankind
    It is a genuinely fearful moment for all those corporate lawyers and accountants and other similar middle class paper pushing professions whose job can genuinely be done better by AI - they have little Cressida and Giles' school fees (+20% VAT soon) to pay. ChatGPT doesn't.

    It's a less worrying moment for brickies, plasterers and plumbers. Though Boston Dynamics is waiting in the wings...
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 14,310
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    IBM haven't sacked 7,800 people. They are just mulling over a recruitment pause.

    International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday.

    Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.


    https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-pause-hiring-plans-replace-7800-jobs-with-ai-bloomberg-news-2023-05-01/

    So basically they're going to slim down their (presumably already bloated) HR department. Or it might just be a load of bollox.
    Really? Even at this stage you think “it’s a load of bollox”

    You’re beyond help


    I remember when I first realised how this was going to hit us. It was on PB in mid 2020 when the much missed @FrancisUrquhart pointed me to this thing called GPT3

    I did a lot of reading and I extrapolated, and I realised: this is it. This is true AI, this is AGI, on the horizon, and heading towards us and it is the end of human society as we have known it (certainly in terms of employment, but also probably creativity etc)

    Every accelerating step since then, Dall-e, Dalle-2, GPT3.5, Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude, StableDiffusion, GPT4, and so on, has only proven me right. It’s not going away. The tech is speeding up. IBM are not going to change their minds and hire those 7800 people when they can use machines for pennies
    Hi @Leon . Do you recall when you also predicted the end of the world through nuclear Armageddon by last February? You warned me not to book my skiing hols back in December. I've had two since then I am pleased to say. You were also convinced that aliens were about to land and that various strange things were happening. Oh, and then there was Covid. It was, according to Leonadamis,certain to mutate into much worse variants and we were all going to die.

    You don't understand AI, and I suspect you probably struggle with the "on" button on your PC. You are a journalist and novel writer. You have zero understanding of science and technology. Stop the alarmism it is just silly.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277
    Omnium said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
    I'm in a dwindling minority, I know, but AI really isn't the threat you think it is. In my view (again this is held by fewer and fewer) there is no chance at all that what is called AI now will get close to being sentient. Thus pretty much anything that something called AI does is going to need someone looking over its shoulder. Admittedly the need for sentience might be overplayed - I'd prefer intelligence rather than sentience where landing my plane is concerned for example. It's just a little sentience can add a lot.
    Even the most technophobic critics of AI (like Gary Marcus) who basically think it can NEVER be sentient, also accept that it can take hundreds of millions of jobs. Without necessarily creating new ones

    Cars aren’t sentient but they sure put paid to horse-drawn transport
  • El_CapitanoEl_Capitano Posts: 4,239

    Have thought of another idea for Saturday.

    Can I pledge allegiance to Ming the Merciless?

    Campbell?
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 10,759
    Foxy said:

    Omnium said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
    I'm in a dwindling minority, I know, but AI really isn't the threat you think it is. In my view (again this is held by fewer and fewer) there is no chance at all that what is called AI now will get close to being sentient. Thus pretty much anything that something called AI does is going to need someone looking over its shoulder. Admittedly the need for sentience might be overplayed - I'd prefer intelligence rather than sentience where landing my plane is concerned for example. It's just a little sentience can add a lot.
    Technological development is driven by bored people wanting new ways to waste their time. AI won't reach lift off until it too can experience boredom.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/ai-technology-productivity-time-wasting/673880/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

    Boredom surely has a big element of 'I can't be arsed to'. Somehow as biological intelligences we want not to wear ourselves out on insufficiently interesting and exciting stuff. Real AI won't have that problem, but what humans do when bored is explore 'pipe-dreams' - crazy stuff. So perhaps any real AI might get trapped in rabbit holes. Perhaps that's why we become bored?
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,630
    timple said:

    timple said:

    Leon said:

    Scott_xP said:

    has been mythologised as *nobody* saying that we would leave the single market, even though both Leave and Remain campaigns were clear before the referendum that this is what would happen.

    It's not mythology, it's cold, hard fact

    https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/open-britain-video-single-market-nigel-farage-anna-soubry_uk_582ce0a0e4b09025ba310fce
    Thank you for illustrating my point.

    Michael Gove says leaving EU would mean quitting single market
    - https://www.ft.com/content/0c5c74bc-151e-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e

    Cameron: ‘I’ll pull UK out of the single market after Brexit’
    - https://www.politico.eu/article/david-cameron-bbc-andrew-marr-ill-pull-uk-out-of-the-single-market-after-brexit-eu-referendum-vote-june-23-consequences-news/
    Cameron knew he would have to resign, immediately, if he lost the Brexit vote (tho he denied it for obvious reasons) so I don’t think his stupid opinion counts for much, as to what he would have done “after Brexit”

    Senior Brexiteers like Hannah DID say we would stay in the Single Market. I can’t remember Boris’s position, I imagine it was constructively ambiguous

    On this point we disagree. Leavers knew that the vaguer they were, the more votes they would get

    But Remainers also told terrible lies: Turkey’s accession was always out of the question, etc etc, and of course the europhiles had to overcome three decades of CONSTANT lies (there is no loss of sovereignty, it’s all a tidying up exercise, we will give you a vote on the Constitution etc)
    Below is a great twitter thread from 2019 documenting how the debate moved from membership or not of the SM if we chose to leave the EU being an active issue before the referendum and immediately afterwards to becoming "Both sides said" by January 2017.

    https://twitter.com/EmporersNewC/status/1143227136985260039

    The video showing David Davies position developing from "its a negotiation" to "both sides said" is probably enough , but there is loads more contemporary evidence besides.

    https://twitter.com/EmporersNewC/status/1143227211375362048

    Sorry to impose cognitive dissonance on anyone who has "remembered" differently!
    The person behind that account is another example of someone who has radicalised themselves beyond recognition. He started out as a Eurosceptic Tory.
    So he's made up those videos?
    He's made up the narrative which he's using the videos to support and he's not being honest about the fact that what people understood by the term 'single market' was not always very precise.

    If you're in the single market, you can't end the free movement of people, and I don't think there's much doubt that this was a centrepiece of the campaign. Those who favoured staying in the single market had to couch their arguments in terms of respecting the 48%. Watch this interview with Daniel Hannan from a few days after the vote:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivOOM0PbNps
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    edited May 2023
    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    Hopefully she is sensible enough not to panic about everything like you and will be just fine.
    Anyone who is a parent of a child under 18 who is not mildly panicked about their career options, in the face of AI, is not sentient, and deserves to be overtaken by AI

    It is a genuinely fearful moment for humankind
    It is a genuinely fearful moment for all those corporate lawyers and accountants and other similar middle class paper pushing professions whose job can genuinely be done better by AI - they have little Cressida and Giles' school fees (+20% VAT soon) to pay. ChatGPT doesn't.

    It's a less worrying moment for brickies, plasterers and plumbers. Though Boston Dynamics is waiting in the wings...
    Here’s some research on which jobs will be safest from AI. Stonemasons, roustabouts and bartenders, among others.

    Edit: Link!
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631
    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,277

    Leon said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sunset. Galata Bridge.


    Istanbul is an incredible city. Eis Tin Poli, as the Byzantines called it.

    With those kind of vistas and names like Galata, no wonder the Greek nationalists end of the political spectrum can never get over the loss of the old imperial capital.
    Weirdly disappointing climate tho. Much more Black Sea than Med. So much colder, wetter, danker, even snowier, than you expect
    Maybe it's the Bosphorous ? The same thing, and huge "river" giving it those glorious views, also affecting the climate.
    It’s the Black Sea - it gets cold currents and winds from Russia and the Ukraine, which prevent it being Mediterranean

    If it had a Med climate it would be close to the perfect city, certainly in terms of its pivotal location

    It is still marvelous, of course. The cisterns alone give me the Golden Horn
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,630
    edited May 2023
    Istanbul is the least pedestrian-friendly city I've ever been to. It's worse than America.
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 10,759
    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    My son wants to be a paramedic, so he’ll be safe there for a while (if rather poorly paid).

    Daughter just wants to be rich and famous.
    I'm in a dwindling minority, I know, but AI really isn't the threat you think it is. In my view (again this is held by fewer and fewer) there is no chance at all that what is called AI now will get close to being sentient. Thus pretty much anything that something called AI does is going to need someone looking over its shoulder. Admittedly the need for sentience might be overplayed - I'd prefer intelligence rather than sentience where landing my plane is concerned for example. It's just a little sentience can add a lot.
    Even the most technophobic critics of AI (like Gary Marcus) who basically think it can NEVER be sentient, also accept that it can take hundreds of millions of jobs. Without necessarily creating new ones

    Cars aren’t sentient but they sure put paid to horse-drawn transport
    The horse parallel is very good - and alarming! Whilst AIs are non-sentient though they are tools, and they will massively expand the economy - way beyond the industrial revolution or the internet. But the economy exists for us, and it can't expand beyond that. Sentient AI is a very different matter.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,354
    Driver said:

    Final poll averages pre-2019 local elections
    Lab/LD/Green/ChUK: 49%
    Con/UKIP: 45%

    2023 polling (adjusted for last week's polls)
    Lab/LD/Green: 59.8%
    Con/Reform: 34.2%

    That's one hell of a swing if it happens that way.

    https://twitter.com/Beyond_Topline/status/1653442329246564378

    What percentage did UKIP actually get? Reform are going to get close to zero because they're standing in so few places.
    UKIP stood in far too few places to trouble the scorers in 2019.

    In terms of NEV, Labour, Lib Dem’s, and Greens won 57% between them on 2019..
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 39,652
    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.

    Yep, having lived there for 20 years I can pretty confidently say that the Midlands is the least known part of the UK - at least as far as the media is concerned. It's not even the Midlands, really. East and West are very different to each other, then you have North Staffs, which is very different again. And where on earth does Shropshire fit in, if at all? . The accent changes, along with the place name etymologies, as soon as you cross Watling Street.

  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631
    edited May 2023
    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,901

    Istanbul is the least pedestrian-friendly city I've ever been to. It's worse than America.

    Is it as bad as Rome? I assume that in Rome the red light means drive as fast as you can towards the tourists crossing the road on a green man.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,354

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    He’d probably meet a bad accident.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631
    edited May 2023
    Sean_F said:

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    He’d probably meet a bad accident.
    Like Princess Diana?
  • Daveyboy1961Daveyboy1961 Posts: 3,883
    Sean_F said:

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    He’d probably meet a bad accident.
    A car accident in a French road tunnel perhaps?...
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 10,759

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    Then he'd be King and you'd be trying to work out if you could delete your post from the server.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,354
    Ghedebrav said:

    kyf_100 said:

    Leon said:

    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    700 at Dropbox too.

    This is going to be huge.

    Doctors, teachers, lecturers, accountants, this will taken large swathes of middle class jobs.

    Kids today. Get a trade. Become a plumber or a brickie or a sparkle.
    It is truly scary

    My older daughter - nearly 17 - is set on becoming an “urban planner”. She loves everything about it - architecture, design, topography - she’s very bright, and she’s lining up the universities where she might study Geography. (UCL, Manchester etc)

    I’m really pleased she has this passion and this conduit for her intelligence. But inside I am thinking: Oh God darling that will all be done by machine, and done better than by humans, there probably is no career there

    WTF do we tell our kids???
    Hopefully she is sensible enough not to panic about everything like you and will be just fine.
    Anyone who is a parent of a child under 18 who is not mildly panicked about their career options, in the face of AI, is not sentient, and deserves to be overtaken by AI

    It is a genuinely fearful moment for humankind
    It is a genuinely fearful moment for all those corporate lawyers and accountants and other similar middle class paper pushing professions whose job can genuinely be done better by AI - they have little Cressida and Giles' school fees (+20% VAT soon) to pay. ChatGPT doesn't.

    It's a less worrying moment for brickies, plasterers and plumbers. Though Boston Dynamics is waiting in the wings...
    Here’s some research on which jobs will be safest from AI. Stonemasons, roustabouts and bartenders, among others.

    Edit: Link!
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf
    Military historians will be okay, as AI has no access to unpublished primary sources.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,630

    Istanbul is the least pedestrian-friendly city I've ever been to. It's worse than America.

    Is it as bad as Rome? I assume that in Rome the red light means drive as fast as you can towards the tourists crossing the road on a green man.
    Many streets in Istanbul don't even have pavements so you don't cross the road so much as walk down the middle of it. Where there are pavements they will randomly terminate.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 14,310
    Sean_F said:

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    He’d probably meet a bad accident.
    Yes but Prince Philip is no longer around to instruct the deed
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,092
    Speaking of local elections, I stumbled across this fabulous Canadian provincial election from just last year

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ontario_general_election

    That'll teach the NDP and Liberals to split the vote.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,092

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    That's easy - republican sentiment in mainstream political parties would skyrocket. He'd either quit or we'd become a republic.
  • nico679nico679 Posts: 6,275

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    I love the Italian national anthem and they need to ditch the current UK one and replace it with something similarly uplifting .
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,630

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    If Prince Andrew had been first in line to the throne, he wouldn't have become the person he is.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,901

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    Tubthumping is close. I was thinking Born Slippy.

    Lager lager lager feels appropriate.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,994
    edited May 2023

    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.

    Yep, having lived there for 20 years I can pretty confidently say that the Midlands is the least known part of the UK - at least as far as the media is concerned. It's not even the Midlands, really. East and West are very different to each other, then you have North Staffs, which is very different again. And where on earth does Shropshire fit in, if at all? . The accent changes, along with the place name etymologies, as soon as you cross Watling Street.

    I don’t see the marches as being part of the midlands really, except perhaps parts of the North Shropshire plain. Just culturally very different, more like a blend of Wessex and Wales.

    Your area (I assume you live in or near Southam) is particularly hard to pin down. It’s not Oxfordshire or the Cotswolds, not yet, but it’s also not really the West Midlands and quite distinct from the more Kansas-like East Mids. It’s just south of the Watford gap but definitely not the SE. My parents are 15 minutes up the road and very much in that kind of no man’s land.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    If Prince Andrew had been first in line to the throne, he wouldn't have become the person he is.
    Missing the point, say a terrorist attack took out, Charles, his boys and their families in 2019 we'd have King Andrew, the same person he is today.
  • eekeek Posts: 28,370
    edited May 2023
    Ghedebrav said:




    The one time I went to Istanbul it had a proper covering of snow! Gave it quite a romantic feel though.

    Edit: vanilla quirks

    Yep - only time I remember an actual white Christmas was when my parents were living in Moda and I couldn't see across the Bosporus to the Blue Mosque etc because of a full on snow shower.

    I also remember it snowing as we walked past the (fully open) shops as we walked back from the Four Seasons hotel where we had lunch,

    That hotel was previously the prison for political prisoners btw.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 14,310
    Foxy said:

    Ghedebrav said:

    TimS said:

    Foxy said:

    TimS said:

    Well.

    Somebody please explain.

    Labour leads by 18% in the Red Wall.

    Red Wall VI (30 April):

    Labour 48% (+1)
    Conservative 30% (-1)
    Liberal Democrat 8% (+1)
    Reform UK 6% (-1)
    Green 5% (–)
    Plaid Cymru 2% (+1)
    Other 1% (-1)


    Starmer leads Sunak by 7%.

    At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (30 April)

    Starmer 39% (+2)
    Sunak 32% (-4)
    Don't Know 29% (+2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Rishi Sunak's approval rating in the Red Wall is -9%.

    Rishi Sunak Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Disapprove: 39% (+1)
    Approve: 30% (-1)
    Net: -9% (-2)

    Changes +/- 16 April

    Keir Starmer's approval rating in the Red Wall is +4%.

    Keir Starmer Red Wall Net Approval Rating (30 April):

    Approve: 35% (+1)
    Disapprove: 31% (–)
    Net: +4% (+1)

    Changes +/- 16 April


    https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton

    The Red Wall seems a dated concept now - all very Brexit, Boris and Farage. I wonder if the Tories will come to regret diverting such a large amount of political capital to it. Matthew Parris made a similar point with his (what became) notorious article about the Tories getting too hung up over Clacton-on-Sea.
    The Red Wall seems to be outperforming national polling for Labour. As, now, is Scotland. So this implies somewhere else the Tories are hanging on. My fear is the blue wall where they're up against Lib Dems, but my guess is that new Tory heartland the Midlands.
    Yes, I've never quite understood the extreme neo-Brexitism in the midlands.

    On the other hands, there's always struck me as being a streak of proud plain-ness and anti-intellectualism somewhere in the spirit of midlands, much more than some of the big cities further north, or even places like Yorkshire ; why is this, exactly ?
    The Midlands is different to both the effete South-East and the North with its heavy industry. It has a long tradition of smaller enterprises, often engineering managed by people in touch with life on the shop floor. There is little of the pretension of more fashionable parts of the country and often naked materialism.

    It is more like 20th century America in attitudes, hence Peaky Blinders, our own version of 1920s Chicago.
    Yes, the mid west of the UK with Birmingham being Chicago / Minneapolis and particularly the East Midlands being our flyover (drive over) states. There was a feature on Northants years ago on R4 titled the British Kansas. Highest rate of personalised number plates in the country.

    Bristol is Northern California, Essex the New Jersey, the Blue Wall Home Counties New England etc.
    Yorkshire is Texas obvs but what about the rest of the north? Is Cleveland… Cleveland?
    Northern Ireland is Alabama.
    I think rural Lincolnshire has greater claim on that comparison.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 9,139
    edited May 2023

    Istanbul is the least pedestrian-friendly city I've ever been to. It's worse than America.

    Is it as bad as Rome? I assume that in Rome the red light means drive as fast as you can towards the tourists crossing the road on a green man.
    Same in Athens, although Athens has a different problem - pavements that suddenly slide down into the road ;.) These sort of things have improved in the recent years, though.

    The Italians are actually proud of their bad driving, though. Istanbul is more like the middle eastern cities in that respect of it just being life, and Athens predictably and by geography, has a little bit of both, while trying to become more like a typical bad-tempered Southern French city for driving and pedestrians, and gradually getting there.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,092

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    Tubthumping is close. I was thinking Born Slippy.

    Lager lager lager feels appropriate.
    Vindaloo would be more appropriate, just needs a few changes.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631
    Oh my.

    Allardyce has asked the former MK Dons and Oxford United manager Karl Robinson to join him as his assistant at Elland Road. The former Newcastle United and Bolton Wanderers manager was also hoping that Sammy Lee would rejoin his backroom team, but the former Liverpool player is on jury service.
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    Big political story from the great Beaver State of Oregon

    Willamette Week - Secretary of State Shemia Fagan Is Working as Private Consultant to Troubled Cannabis Couple - Fagan took on the work even as her auditors were examining the OLCC’s handling of the cannabis industry.

    https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/04/27/secretary-of-state-shemia-fagan-is-working-as-private-consultant-to-troubled-cannabis-couple/

    In a remarkable turn of events, Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan confirms in response to questions from WW that she entered into an agreement in February to provide consulting services to an affiliate of the troubled La Mota cannabis dispensary chain.

    As WW has previously reported, the owners of La Mota were also major donors to Fagan’s election campaign and have been under the scrutiny of at least two state agencies, the Oregon Department of Revenue and the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission. . . .

    On April 28, the Audits Division, which reports to Fagan, will release an audit of the OLCC’s regulation of the cannabis industry. Some companies have bristled at the agency’s regulation.

    Fagan’s office says she recused herself from any involvement in that audit.

    La Mota appears to be in financial trouble. In recent years, the Department of Revenue and the federal Internal Revenue Service have filed more than $7 million in liens against La Mota owners Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell, and the companies they control, for failing to pay taxes in full. . . .

    Fagan makes $77,000 annually as secretary of state.

    Oregon ethics laws permit public officials to take outside employment so long as they don’t use their public position, public resources or insider knowledge obtained from their position to aid their outside work. . . .

    It is common for public officials seeking an interpretation of ethics laws so seek a written opinion from the [state ethics] commission. In this case, that did not happen . . .

    . . . [F]or a statewide elected official to moonlight is exceedingly rare. . . .

    Willamette Week - Before Fagan’s Puzzling Decision to Moonlight, She Faced Personal Financial Challenges - Court filings show the secretary of state faced debts and negative cash flow.

    https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/04/27/secretary-of-state-shemia-fagan-is-working-as-private-consultant-to-troubled-cannabis-couple/

    OR Public Radio - Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan cancels lucrative consulting contract, apologizes for harming public trust

    https://www.opb.org/article/2023/05/01/oregon-secretary-state-shemia-fagan-cancels-cannabis-consulting-contract-apologizes/

    SSI - Bottom line, at least for me is - this stinks to high heavens. Looks and smells like influence peddling to me.

    AND as a Democrat, also Pacific Northwesterner, personally want Fagan OUT and ASAP, preferably by her own resignation.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,092

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    If Prince Andrew had been first in line to the throne, he wouldn't have become the person he is.
    Missing the point, say a terrorist attack took out, Charles, his boys and their families in 2019 we'd have King Andrew, the same person he is today.
    And the situation would be dealt with at the time - places can become republics at the drop of a hat (or swing of the axe), it wouldn't take long if there was a surge of republican sentiment in such a situation.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,630
    nico679 said:

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    I love the Italian national anthem and they need to ditch the current UK one and replace it with something similarly uplifting .
    I wouldn't have thought you'd go in for that kind of thing.

    We are ready for death
    Italy has called!
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,822

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    I think somehow Liz would've fixed it.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,994

    Big political story from the great Beaver State of Oregon

    Willamette Week - Secretary of State Shemia Fagan Is Working as Private Consultant to Troubled Cannabis Couple - Fagan took on the work even as her auditors were examining the OLCC’s handling of the cannabis industry.

    https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/04/27/secretary-of-state-shemia-fagan-is-working-as-private-consultant-to-troubled-cannabis-couple/

    In a remarkable turn of events, Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan confirms in response to questions from WW that she entered into an agreement in February to provide consulting services to an affiliate of the troubled La Mota cannabis dispensary chain.

    As WW has previously reported, the owners of La Mota were also major donors to Fagan’s election campaign and have been under the scrutiny of at least two state agencies, the Oregon Department of Revenue and the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission. . . .

    On April 28, the Audits Division, which reports to Fagan, will release an audit of the OLCC’s regulation of the cannabis industry. Some companies have bristled at the agency’s regulation.

    Fagan’s office says she recused herself from any involvement in that audit.

    La Mota appears to be in financial trouble. In recent years, the Department of Revenue and the federal Internal Revenue Service have filed more than $7 million in liens against La Mota owners Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell, and the companies they control, for failing to pay taxes in full. . . .

    Fagan makes $77,000 annually as secretary of state.

    Oregon ethics laws permit public officials to take outside employment so long as they don’t use their public position, public resources or insider knowledge obtained from their position to aid their outside work. . . .

    It is common for public officials seeking an interpretation of ethics laws so seek a written opinion from the [state ethics] commission. In this case, that did not happen . . .

    . . . [F]or a statewide elected official to moonlight is exceedingly rare. . . .

    Willamette Week - Before Fagan’s Puzzling Decision to Moonlight, She Faced Personal Financial Challenges - Court filings show the secretary of state faced debts and negative cash flow.

    https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2023/04/27/secretary-of-state-shemia-fagan-is-working-as-private-consultant-to-troubled-cannabis-couple/

    OR Public Radio - Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan cancels lucrative consulting contract, apologizes for harming public trust

    https://www.opb.org/article/2023/05/01/oregon-secretary-state-shemia-fagan-cancels-cannabis-consulting-contract-apologizes/

    SSI - Bottom line, at least for me is - this stinks to high heavens. Looks and smells like influence peddling to me.

    AND as a Democrat, also Pacific Northwesterner, personally want Fagan OUT and ASAP, preferably by her own resignation.

    Oregon = Ceredigion
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 17,219

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    IBM haven't sacked 7,800 people. They are just mulling over a recruitment pause.

    International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday.

    Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.


    https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-pause-hiring-plans-replace-7800-jobs-with-ai-bloomberg-news-2023-05-01/

    So basically they're going to slim down their (presumably already bloated) HR department. Or it might just be a load of bollox.
    Really? Even at this stage you think “it’s a load of bollox”

    You’re beyond help


    I remember when I first realised how this was going to hit us. It was on PB in mid 2020 when the much missed @FrancisUrquhart pointed me to this thing called GPT3

    I did a lot of reading and I extrapolated, and I realised: this is it. This is true AI, this is AGI, on the horizon, and heading towards us and it is the end of human society as we have known it (certainly in terms of employment, but also probably creativity etc)

    Every accelerating step since then, Dall-e, Dalle-2, GPT3.5, Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude, StableDiffusion, GPT4, and so on, has only proven me right. It’s not going away. The tech is speeding up. IBM are not going to change their minds and hire those 7800 people when they can use machines for pennies
    Hi @Leon . Do you recall when you also predicted the end of the world through nuclear Armageddon by last February? You warned me not to book my skiing hols back in December. I've had two since then I am pleased to say. You were also convinced that aliens were about to land and that various strange things were happening. Oh, and then there was Covid. It was, according to Leonadamis,certain to mutate into much worse variants and we were all going to die.

    You don't understand AI, and I suspect you probably struggle with the "on" button on your PC. You are a journalist and novel writer. You have zero understanding of science and technology. Stop the alarmism it is just silly.
    To be fair, current AI is very good at stringing words together with little regard for overall accuracy or meaning. If I were a journalist concerned for the welfare of a journalist who stalked me, I'd worry too.

    (Yes, there's a job issue. But it starts not AI as such, more that perfect digital reproduction means there are lots of things, books, pictures, pieces of music, where we don't really need any more new ones, thanks.)
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,631

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    I think somehow Liz would've fixed it.
    But Andrew was her favourite.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,630

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    I think somehow Liz would've fixed it.
    I thought you meant Liz "the assassin" Truss for a moment.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 14,310
    kle4 said:

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    If Prince Andrew had been first in line to the throne, he wouldn't have become the person he is.
    Missing the point, say a terrorist attack took out, Charles, his boys and their families in 2019 we'd have King Andrew, the same person he is today.
    And the situation would be dealt with at the time - places can become republics at the drop of a hat (or swing of the axe), it wouldn't take long if there was a surge of republican sentiment in such a situation.
    I am still of the belief that there should be a "head of state" election every 10 years. If the monarchists are right and the British people love them they will vote for King Charles. If they don't they will vote for Tony Blair or Screaming Lord Sutch or whoever
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    Could be political smart, to drag the whole thing out as long as possible?

    Seeing as how it's a load of caterpillar poop anyway, and ultimate ruling likely to reflect that?
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,431
    nico679 said:

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    I love the Italian national anthem and they need to ditch the current UK one and replace it with something similarly uplifting .
    Nothing gets close to the Cymru National Anthem. Mae hen wlad fy nhadau.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 12,994

    nico679 said:

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    I love the Italian national anthem and they need to ditch the current UK one and replace it with something similarly uplifting .
    Nothing gets close to the Cymru National Anthem. Mae hen wlad fy nhadau.
    I think we’ve had this discussion before and the leading ones were Wales, Russia, France and Germany.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,258

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    The big difference between Leavers and Remainers is that Leavers are stupid and Remainers are just as stupid - see @TOPPING et al - but Remainers are haughtily convinced they are much cleverer. This, in a weird way, makes Remainers even stupider - in practise - than Leavers, who are genuinely stupid

    Once you understand that, the entire farcical madness of Brexit is explicable, right down to the daily debates on here, still ongoing

    Leavers or remainers may or may not be stupid.

    People who don't understand that it is perfectly democratic to ask the people about a decision that you previously asked them, nor that parliaments cannot bind successive parliaments, nor that parliament is sovereign are, however, very, very stupid indeed.
    You can't step into the same river twice.

    2016 was a one-off fork in the road. We can't go back and change our minds, and the previous status quo isn't on offer anyway.

    Any new attempt to join the EU needs to start with a party winning an election with a commitment to negotiate accession and everything that comes with it. It doesn't start with rerunning the 2016 vote.
    Another Referendum is all it takes.

    "Should the United Kingdom remain in no man's land or leave to join every other European country in the European Union?

    Tick one box only:

    Leave
    Remain

    The government will implement whatever the majority decide."
    You sound like the people who were eagerly waiting for Nicola Sturgeon to give them another referendum on Scottish independence and thought that's all it would take.
    I'm saying there's no need to overthink it. Party wins a GE promising an In/Out referendum. Same as last time. The only difference is it's the insurgent IN that triggers the EU negotiation process rather than the status quo of OUT. Instead of an exit deal the mandate is to agree an entry deal. This will happen in the medium term and IN will win comfortably as the country collectively screws its head back on.
    Issue one in the campaign: is a vote to rejoin a mandate to join the Euro?

    Rejoin would have to say "no" in order to avoid holing their campaign below the waterline, but what if the EU doesn't recreate our opt-outs?
    It's Leave (no man's land) not Rejoin. That's number 1. Then to the substantive point. So, fine, just as in all campaigns there'll be issues, questions, truth and lies. It will be for Leave to make their case and Remain (in no man's land) to make theirs.

    The bottom line is as before. If the 'change' proposition prevails it then falls on the government to negotiate the best deal with the EU that it can. An entry deal this time rather than an exit one.

    Will the details of the deal have to be known before the vote? Nope. Of course not. Did the details of the deal last time have to be known before the vote? I should cocoa.

    The lesson of Brexit - to be taken to heart for any other EU referendum or indeed for the Sindy one when it comes - is that for the change campaign to win they must AVOID SPECIFICS.
    That would be the big problem for the Rejoin campaign. It would be open to their opponents to pin all manner of charges on the Rejoiners.

    And, you'd have a very bemused EU leadership thinking "Why the hell do we want to go through this, all over again?" with perhaps a very fractious set of negotiations to follow a Rejoin vote in the referendum, with the possibility of a change of government in the intervening years.

    If Rejoin ever happens it will be as the result of bottom up pressure and it will be many years from now. I may be wrong, but I don't think the under-45 demographic on PB is in any way typical of that demographic generally. Attachment to the pound, dislike of freedom of movement, concerns about sovereignty and so on just do not resonate in the way they do, for perfectly understandable reasons, to older generations. That does not guarantee anything, of course, but in 10 years time the voting public will look and feel very different to the one we have now. If growth is sluggish, if living standards are not improving, if public services are not functioning and so on, EU membership on whatever terms may start to look like a solution to deep-seated problems - just as it did in the 1970s. Obviously, if the UK actually starts to move in the right direction, that is far less likely to be the case. In the meantime, we are clearly going to move closer to the EU.
    Again, the impending AI revolution renders all of this fairly meaningless, in an unusually profound way. Human life is about to change. A tsunami approaches which will upend EVERYTHING

    It’s like a squabble between pre-Colombian Mexican tribes even as Hernan Cortes marches towards Tenochtitlan

    AI will not stop the arguments on here. It will just make them a lot more confusing.

    Similarly, it will never be a substitute for live experience. AI can't sit on the beach for you, or stand on that mountain top, or eat that steak, or drink that bottle of wine. AI will never stop Spurs from being Spursy or an England batting collapse. Real life will still matter.

    Indeed. Actual reality beats virtual reality every time.

    Who wants to live plugged into The Matrix?
    You should tell that to the 7,800 people just sacked by IBM to be replaced by AI, I’m sure it will be a momentous consolation that “a a machine cannot drink that bottle of wine that they can no longer afford coz they’ve been sacked”
    IBM haven't sacked 7,800 people. They are just mulling over a recruitment pause.

    International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming years, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday.

    Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years.


    https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-pause-hiring-plans-replace-7800-jobs-with-ai-bloomberg-news-2023-05-01/

    So basically they're going to slim down their (presumably already bloated) HR department. Or it might just be a load of bollox.
    The AI bit is hype. Kinda. What is happening is that the computer revolution we were promised about 3 decades ago is finally arriving in the middle/back offices of many organisations. This means automating work flows so that the days of the guys who spend all day copy and pasting crap between systems is numbered.

    “AI” figures in this as the chat bots to act as first line customer support, assistants within the organisation to suggest courses of action and things like fraud detection.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,354
    nico679 said:

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    I love the Italian national anthem and they need to ditch the current UK one and replace it with something similarly uplifting .
    The Giovanezza.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    If Prince Andrew had been first in line to the throne, he wouldn't have become the person he is.
    Yes, and the same goes for Princess Margaret, or Harry.

    Of course the only "spare" to be needed in modern times was George VI, who started nervously but was well thought of overall as a monarch.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,354
    Garryowen would be a good anthem. “The best military tune in the world”, as Teddy Roosevelt put it.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 28,901

    Could be political smart, to drag the whole thing out as long as possible?

    Seeing as how it's a load of caterpillar poop anyway, and ultimate ruling likely to reflect that?
    Its amazing. They want to block the SueGray appointment to spite Starmer, and in Case's sake spite Gray.

    Except that if as they now suggest Gray is compromised and therefore the Johnson enquiry (which cleared him...) was a political smear job, then surely Johnson should still be PM?

    And the thing that really upsets civil servants who aren't Simon Case - a one year moratorium on their next job would rather screw up the career prospects of senior civil servants.

    So having got very excited and lined up their client Officially-Not-News channels to provide news entertainment reporting about it, they have to pack up their tents. As going through with it would be far worse than the quick knee-trembler in the lift they were all excited about.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,587
    In rather important but under-appreciated news:

    The other day, an empty oil tanker, the Pablo, exploded off the Malaysian coast. Because it was empty, the risks of pollution are relatively minor (though the damage to the ship was very extensive).The Pablo is part of the dark fleet, and was probably involved with ship-to-ship transfers for oil deliveries to China.

    Whether that oil came from Venezuela, Iran, or Russia, it highlights this trade, the sanctions-busting that is going on, and the generally lawlessness of much international shipping.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrkaCttQ7OE
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,432

    nico679 said:

    YouGov on the national anthem.

    However, a third of Britons now think the national anthem should be replaced. Its popularity has become divided along regional and generational lines, according a survey of modern listeners.

    About 33 per cent of the 2,000 respondents said they wanted the song to be consigned to history, while 83 per cent admitted to not knowing the lyrics beyond the first verse.

    The anthem’s “old-fashioned” and “militaristic” lyrics about the monarchy and its “religious tone” were cited as reasons for replacing it.

    Those who want it gone have suggested adopting alternatives including Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia, as well as modern classics such as Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall.

    The age group most opposed to the anthem was Generation Z, with 42 per cent of respondents aged 18-24 calling for it to be replaced.

    By comparison, just 27 per cent of their parents’ generation, aged 45-54, held the same view.

    The largest regional group who wanted the anthem changed were the Welsh, with 40 per cent backing a new anthem, followed by 38 per cent in Scotland and London.

    Residents in the East Midlands and North East of England have the lowest desire to scrap God Save the King, with 74 per cent voting for its retention.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-national-anthem-changed-replaced-god-save-king-2023-hqb6x78pw

    Honestly the national anthem should be Bohemian Rhapsody or Tubthumping.

    I love the Italian national anthem and they need to ditch the current UK one and replace it with something similarly uplifting .
    Nothing gets close to the Cymru National Anthem. Mae hen wlad fy nhadau.
    Guzundheit.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,439

    Thanks Prince Harry (you fucking dick).

    Support for the Monarchy needs to be up at 75-80% not 60-65%:

    https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2023/05/the-monarchy-has-to-change-but-the-king-has-time-and-goodwill-on-his-side/#more-17007

    Hurrah, I’m a modern republican according to Lord Ashcroft.

    PS - I think it is Prince Andrew who has damaged the Royals more than Harry.
    That said there are grounds for hope.

    "This was not the whole story, however – many welcomed the King’s stated intention to be “defender of faith”, upholding freedom of worship for all religions alongside his role as head of the Church of England, and we found that Muslims in particular saw the connection between church and Crown as a degree of protection in an increasingly secular society."
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559

    What monarchists need to explain is what would have happened if Prince Andrew was going to succeed Queen Elizabeth II.

    I think somehow Liz would've fixed it.
    Because she did such a splendid job with His Royal Lowness during her lifetime?

    QEII deserves plenty of credit for many things, but Randy Andy AIN'T one of 'em.
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