Interesting thread on the success of British TERFs in shaping the debate: "The TERFs have been more successful in rolling back Le Woke than pretty much every other right-wing grifter combined."
"TERFS" have the advantage that they are (mostly) not right wing, despite efforts to brand them as such. They are speaking to centre left folks in terms that the latter sympathise with.
I should add that with enemies like their opponents, who needs friends?
Doing things like dumping bottles of urine outside the offices of the ECHR, accusing JK Rowling of "genocide", posting death and rape threats online, make the "TERS'" case far more eloquently than they ever could.
The question is why it's a UK-specific phenomenon.
English language means that the hysteria from the US on some subjects is imported?
I mean why is it that "TERFs" have been much more successful in pushing back in the UK than the US? In the US, the mainstream left is much more in thrall to gender ideology.
...Partly because the UK is doing what it did in the pandemic - analysing data to clarify evidence - something much more easily done with a unified health system, unlike the US, for example. The profit motive is also largely absent from much UK healthcare...
analysing data to clarify evidence...
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
We both know that's not entirely true. There are very many poor quality journals that will publish pretty mich anything.*
*Mainly in the sovial sciences, especially if put in enough fancy sounding words, like hermenuetics...
That are poor quality journals, but no-one serious is reading them. Medical regulators or people doing systematic reviews to be published in reputable medical journals are going to ignore crap in predatory journals.
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
Indeed. And it's not obvious to me that that's any better or worse than the implied 'approved' metric of being good-looking.
Well, exactly
Evolutionary Psychology says every human (beyond the non-sexual etc) is generally looking for a mate and a potential co-parent, even if the drive is only subconscious. It's why beauty standards tend to be universal: men in particular like youth, nubility, symmetry, well shaped limbs, evidence of good health (clear skin, good hair, white teeth). There are variations but they aren't that various. Youth is especially prized as that means fertility in women
This is less true of female attitudes to men, as women take into account other factors. An older man might be a little less fertile, but he's still fertile, and on the upside he is likely to be richer, more powerful, able to deliver a better start in life to any child. Wit is a sign of high intelligence, and arousing in itself, which is why a funny guy can make up for dowdy looks
A rich, funny, powerful guy like Boris will be attractive for a lot of women, hence the long list of conquests and kids
Some people are born funny, some smart, some good-looking, or indeed the opposite - I'm not sure why any is considered morally superior to the other
This wit and charm thing seems to be quite male, or at least something that males tell themselves. Have you ever succumbed to a plain, fat lass because of her wit and charm?
Maybe once or twice, but - to be honest - not often
As I say, men are much more simplistic and visual - they want youth, fertility and beauty (because beauty signals good reproductive health = clear skin equals no diseases etc)
That said, women can be pretty simplistic and brutal as well. Try asking women if they would ever date someone shorter than themselves
Someone please explain Sally and John Bercow.
He's not known as 'tripod' for nothing...
So, it's true what they say about short men being compensated in other ways then?
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
Not necessarily. It is possible to be fattish and fit. I remember an ex-army friend of mine who was at least 2 stone overweight going for a "bit of a run" with a chap who fancied himself as a fitness freak. About 10Ks later the latter was half dead. The ex-Army fatty was a little sweaty but hardly out of breath.
That said, I think Johnson is almost certainly obese. He is heading for serious hypertension and type 2 diabetes if he doesn't have both already
Interesting thread on the success of British TERFs in shaping the debate: "The TERFs have been more successful in rolling back Le Woke than pretty much every other right-wing grifter combined."
"TERFS" have the advantage that they are (mostly) not right wing, despite efforts to brand them as such. They are speaking to centre left folks in terms that the latter sympathise with.
I should add that with enemies like their opponents, who needs friends?
Doing things like dumping bottles of urine outside the offices of the ECHR, accusing JK Rowling of "genocide", posting death and rape threats online, make the "TERS'" case far more eloquently than they ever could.
The question is why it's a UK-specific phenomenon.
English language means that the hysteria from the US on some subjects is imported?
I mean why is it that "TERFs" have been much more successful in pushing back in the UK than the US? In the US, the mainstream left is much more in thrall to gender ideology.
...Partly because the UK is doing what it did in the pandemic - analysing data to clarify evidence - something much more easily done with a unified health system, unlike the US, for example. The profit motive is also largely absent from much UK healthcare...
analysing data to clarify evidence...
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
We both know that's not entirely true. There are very many poor quality journals that will publish pretty mich anything.*
*Mainly in the sovial sciences, especially if put in enough fancy sounding words, like hermenuetics...
That are poor quality journals, but no-one serious is reading them. Medical regulators or people doing systematic reviews to be published in reputable medical journals are going to ignore crap in predatory journals.
I agree, but this is a route to 'publish' studies etc and have them enter the, largely scientifically illiterate, media and thus gain currency.
Interesting thread on the success of British TERFs in shaping the debate: "The TERFs have been more successful in rolling back Le Woke than pretty much every other right-wing grifter combined."
"TERFS" have the advantage that they are (mostly) not right wing, despite efforts to brand them as such. They are speaking to centre left folks in terms that the latter sympathise with.
I should add that with enemies like their opponents, who needs friends?
Doing things like dumping bottles of urine outside the offices of the ECHR, accusing JK Rowling of "genocide", posting death and rape threats online, make the "TERS'" case far more eloquently than they ever could.
The question is why it's a UK-specific phenomenon.
English language means that the hysteria from the US on some subjects is imported?
I mean why is it that "TERFs" have been much more successful in pushing back in the UK than the US? In the US, the mainstream left is much more in thrall to gender ideology.
...Partly because the UK is doing what it did in the pandemic - analysing data to clarify evidence - something much more easily done with a unified health system, unlike the US, for example. The profit motive is also largely absent from much UK healthcare...
analysing data to clarify evidence...
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
We both know that's not entirely true. There are very many poor quality journals that will publish pretty mich anything.*
*Mainly in the sovial sciences, especially if put in enough fancy sounding words, like hermenuetics...
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
I disagree. I'm 16 stone and in the past week I've done an 11 mile circuit taking in the Old Man of Coniston, cycled 60 miles and had a productive session in a climbing centre. I don't run much any more after my knee operation, but I'm pretty fit. I carry a bit of timber - I always have done, and I've probably put on a stone and a half since turning 18 30 years ago, but I'm still pretty fit.
Interesting thread on the success of British TERFs in shaping the debate: "The TERFs have been more successful in rolling back Le Woke than pretty much every other right-wing grifter combined."
"TERFS" have the advantage that they are (mostly) not right wing, despite efforts to brand them as such. They are speaking to centre left folks in terms that the latter sympathise with.
I should add that with enemies like their opponents, who needs friends?
Doing things like dumping bottles of urine outside the offices of the ECHR, accusing JK Rowling of "genocide", posting death and rape threats online, make the "TERS'" case far more eloquently than they ever could.
The question is why it's a UK-specific phenomenon.
English language means that the hysteria from the US on some subjects is imported?
I mean why is it that "TERFs" have been much more successful in pushing back in the UK than the US? In the US, the mainstream left is much more in thrall to gender ideology.
...Partly because the UK is doing what it did in the pandemic - analysing data to clarify evidence - something much more easily done with a unified health system, unlike the US, for example. The profit motive is also largely absent from much UK healthcare...
analysing data to clarify evidence...
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
We both know that's not entirely true. There are very many poor quality journals that will publish pretty mich anything.*
*Mainly in the sovial sciences, especially if put in enough fancy sounding words, like hermenuetics...
That are poor quality journals, but no-one serious is reading them. Medical regulators or people doing systematic reviews to be published in reputable medical journals are going to ignore crap in predatory journals.
I agree, but this is a route to 'publish' studies etc and have them enter the, largely scientifically illiterate, media and thus gain currency.
Yes, agreed. There is a problem with nonsense coming out with a veneer of science, almost cargo cult like, and that being taken up and championed by the scientifically illiterate. We still have a huge problem, for example, with COVID-19 conspiracy theories or people going nuts about AI because they’re so gullible.
But in the context of “analysing data to clarify evidence”, as per above, we know what’s proper peer-reviewed science and what isn’t.
"Given the lengths that appear to be being taken not to release certain information about the Johnson’s government handling of COVID the assumption must be that there is something very big that ministers are trying to cover up."
On the other hand, it may be something very small.
Are we sure that the ex-prime minister wasn't sending out pictures of his genitalia to female admirers (possibly in mental health facilities)?
Black people were three times more likely to receive Covid fines in England and Wales
Exclusive: those in poorest areas were seven times more likely to be fined, says research into how police used emergency pandemic powers
Fines during the pandemic were three times more likely to be given to black people and seven times more likely to be issued in the poorest areas, research commissioned for Britain’s police chiefs has revealed.
The study covering England and Wales showed racial disparity for every single force. In one area, ethnic minorities were up to eight times more likely to be fined. It presents further evidence of ethnic disparity in the use of police powers. Most forces deny they are institutionally racist, as does the government.
The report was commissioned by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and conducted by academics at the University of Edinburgh. The NPPC did not publish the findings, to the surprise of those who produced it....
..The study looked at the period from 27 March 2020 to 31 May 2021, when 122,506 fines were issued. In England, ethnic minority people were on average more than twice as likely than white people to be fined, with the rate even higher for black people. .
The study said: “In England, the rate of FPNs per 10,000 people from an ethnic minority background was 46.1, compared to 19.9 for white individuals, reflecting an ethnic disparity rate of 2.3.
“The ethnic disparity rate in England was highest for people from a black ethnic background, who were 3.2 times more likely to be issued with an FPN.”
In Wales the ethnic disparity was 2.8 times for ethnic minorities, and virtually identical for black people.
The report’s co-author Prof Susan McVie said: “There was not a single force area that did not have a higher disparity rate for ethnic minority groups.”
If they were seven times more likely to be given in the poorest areas, the fact that black people were only three times more likely to be fined suggests that adjusting for social class, black people were probably no more fined than anyone else, I think - i.e. any racial disparity is simply a product of social disparity. Which may be a problem of poor people being less able to cheerfully work from home and take their exercise on their lawn.
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
You're just begging to be contradicted by a load of fat guys.
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
And yet plain fat lasses (speaking as someone who would never win an award for Sylph-Like Beauty of the Year) do manage to acquire wonderful lovers and handsome husbands. So I will put it down to extensive legal knowledge then ..... not my creamy Irish skin and dark hair.
You win the 2023 PB title of Excessively Modest Poster of the Year (previous holder TSE.)
I have seen a photo of cyclefree and she is pretty fine indeed; certainly neither plain nor fat. But her point stands nevertheless. Personality is way more important, especially if you are intending to spend any particular time with the woman. Give me an ugly woman who is a joy to be around over a beauty who is a pain in the arse.
And I would suggest the evidence that men are particularly choosy if there is a woman who is indicating she might put out, is scant.
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Bah, doesn't sound that hard.
I could easily do the run a mile, stop, run another mile part in under 40 minutes. And that's with me carrying 30 pounds of excess weight around my midriff.
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
I could beat that! That time is in weeks isn't it?
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
I could beat that! That time is in weeks isn't it?
I'm sure I've managed much more than that in my slightly over 39.58 years.
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
PART 1: “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study”
I would use a phrase like "oh, you sweet summer child", but it's too serious for that. Since WWII journals have gone like this
A real journal publishes a paper after rigid peer review
A real journal publishes a paper after some peer review
A real journal publishes a paper after minimal peer review
You probably already know that. But it gets worse. Journals start to be produced that have no tangible existence, existing only online to publish papers
A nominal journal publishes a paper after minimal peer review
A nominal journal publishes a paper after no peer review
But then it gets worser. Middlemen start to generate virtual papers and submit them, with the middleman selling the slot to the researcher
A nominal journal publishes a virtual paper by a middleman after minimal peer review
A nominal journal publishes a virtual paper by a middleman after no peer review
But then it gets worser. The middleman cuts out the researcher and generates the text using an algorithm
A nominal journal publishes an algorithmic paper by a middleman after minimal peer review
A nominal journal publishes an algorithmic paper by a middleman after no peer review
And that's where we were last year. Where do you think we are now that you can download an AI to your laptop (ish?)
See also Cabanac, G., & Labbé, C. (2021). Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72( 12), 1461– 1476. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24495
Wagner chief says 'crimes' committed by Russian officials before and during invasion should be investigated
The head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has said he has asked prosecutors to investigate “crimes” committed by senior Russian defence officials before and during the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin openly feuded with the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and other top officials for month, accusing them of sabotaging Russia’s military by incompetence.
“Today I have sent letters to the investigative committee and the prosecutor’s office of the Russian Federation with a request to check on the fact of the commission of a crime during the preparation and during the conduct of the SMO [special military operation] by a host of senior functionaries of the defence ministry,” Reuters quoted Prigozhin as saying.
“These letters will not be published due to the fact that the investigative authorities will deal with this.”
It's interesting that both he and Strelkov/Girkin have a level of respect for the Ukrainians that is lacking in Russian warmongers who live in luxury in Moscow and have never been near the front line.
The same is true of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Those who spent time in the IDF, particularly those who actually fought, are usually of the view that for the conflict to end, the Palestinians need to be given something.
The biggest warmongers are the ultra-religious who are exempt from military service, or those who grew up or live outside Israel*.
* Like Melanie Philips
Just to add, this is a major cause of internal division in Israel. As the ultra-Religious make up a greater share of the population (thanks to both demographics and immigration), Israel is becoming more belligerent.
But it's not this group that is bearing the brunt of the fighting.
Black people were three times more likely to receive Covid fines in England and Wales
Exclusive: those in poorest areas were seven times more likely to be fined, says research into how police used emergency pandemic powers
Fines during the pandemic were three times more likely to be given to black people and seven times more likely to be issued in the poorest areas, research commissioned for Britain’s police chiefs has revealed.
The study covering England and Wales showed racial disparity for every single force. In one area, ethnic minorities were up to eight times more likely to be fined. It presents further evidence of ethnic disparity in the use of police powers. Most forces deny they are institutionally racist, as does the government.
The report was commissioned by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and conducted by academics at the University of Edinburgh. The NPPC did not publish the findings, to the surprise of those who produced it....
..The study looked at the period from 27 March 2020 to 31 May 2021, when 122,506 fines were issued. In England, ethnic minority people were on average more than twice as likely than white people to be fined, with the rate even higher for black people. .
The study said: “In England, the rate of FPNs per 10,000 people from an ethnic minority background was 46.1, compared to 19.9 for white individuals, reflecting an ethnic disparity rate of 2.3.
“The ethnic disparity rate in England was highest for people from a black ethnic background, who were 3.2 times more likely to be issued with an FPN.”
In Wales the ethnic disparity was 2.8 times for ethnic minorities, and virtually identical for black people.
The report’s co-author Prof Susan McVie said: “There was not a single force area that did not have a higher disparity rate for ethnic minority groups.”
Surely this lacks context? What is the rate of issuing fines for exhibiting the same behaviour? I.e. if two white people were sat closer than 2 m on a bench what was the chance of getting a fine vs the same situation for two people of colour? Otherwise what are we measuring? Its not impossible that certain sectors ignored rules and regs more than others.*
*Members of the government for one.
I don't really agree with (my understanding of) your statement (that ethnic group is likely to predict breaching of Covid rules?) as I don't see why that would be likely to be true. I mean, split a population any way and there will be differences, but I find it hard to believe it's a strong predictor in every force area.
But there is a need, in this type of analysis, to consider some other factors, such as rural/urban split, age group etc. Much less likely to get your collar felt out in the sticks, I would guess, than in the city. Also I would have thought that younger people, out and about (particularly those living with parents, meeting up elsewhere, students etc) would be more likely to be caught than older people. Rural/urban correlates with ethnic group and so does age, to some extent. I would hazard a guess that more white people per 10k white people than black people/10k black people get convicted of driving tractors while under the influence of alcohol, for example, but I wouldn't assume that white tractor drivers are more drunk than black tractor drivers.
That said, it would be no great surprise if the police were treating people from different ethnic groups differently. With differences also likely by age and social class.
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
I would use a phrase like "oh, you sweet summer child", but it's too serious for that. Since WWII journals have gone like this
A real journal publishes a paper after rigid peer review
A real journal publishes a paper after some peer review
A real journal publishes a paper after minimal peer review
You probably already know that. But it gets worse. Journals start to be produced that have no tangible existence, existing only online to publish papers
A nominal journal publishes a paper after minimal peer review
A nominal journal publishes a paper after no peer review
But then it gets worser. Middlemen start to generate virtual papers and submit them, with the middleman selling the slot to the researcher
A nominal journal publishes a virtual paper by a middleman after minimal peer review
A nominal journal publishes a virtual paper by a middleman after no peer review
But then it gets worser. The middleman cuts out the researcher and generates the text using an algorithm
A nominal journal publishes an algorithmic paper by a middleman after minimal peer review
A nominal journal publishes an algorithmic paper by a middleman after no peer review
And that's where we were last year. Where do you think we are now that you can download an AI to your laptop (ish?)
See also Cabanac, G., & Labbé, C. (2021). Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72( 12), 1461– 1476. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24495
I read a paper about this, but I'm not sure how well peer reviewed it was, so I don't know whether I should believe it.
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Tbh that's a strength rather than fitness workout. You'd need some serious weight training first to do 100 pull ups. Even without a weighted pack. I doubt your average marathon runner could do it. Indeed. I doubt most Olympic marathon runners could.
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
I have a friend who is distinctly rotund. But he also runs marathons - in his late 40s - in 3h30, and cycles upwards of 150 miles every week.
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Tbh that's a strength rather than fitness workout. You'd need some serious weight training first to do 100 pull ups. Even without a weighted pack. I doubt your average marathon runner could do it.
I imagine he's also doing them cross-fit style which relies a lot on momentum rather than being a pure lift (and has a great risk of torn shoulder muscles).
The day after labour pledges to export our emissions to the Qatari's and the Saudi's
SKS fans please explain ?
Given how extraordinarily expensive storing natural gas is, spot natural gas prices are nothing more than a snapshot of supply and demand in a particular region at a particular time. I wouldn't read too much into them.
Black people were three times more likely to receive Covid fines in England and Wales
Exclusive: those in poorest areas were seven times more likely to be fined, says research into how police used emergency pandemic powers
Fines during the pandemic were three times more likely to be given to black people and seven times more likely to be issued in the poorest areas, research commissioned for Britain’s police chiefs has revealed.
The study covering England and Wales showed racial disparity for every single force. In one area, ethnic minorities were up to eight times more likely to be fined. It presents further evidence of ethnic disparity in the use of police powers. Most forces deny they are institutionally racist, as does the government.
The report was commissioned by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and conducted by academics at the University of Edinburgh. The NPPC did not publish the findings, to the surprise of those who produced it....
..The study looked at the period from 27 March 2020 to 31 May 2021, when 122,506 fines were issued. In England, ethnic minority people were on average more than twice as likely than white people to be fined, with the rate even higher for black people. .
The study said: “In England, the rate of FPNs per 10,000 people from an ethnic minority background was 46.1, compared to 19.9 for white individuals, reflecting an ethnic disparity rate of 2.3.
“The ethnic disparity rate in England was highest for people from a black ethnic background, who were 3.2 times more likely to be issued with an FPN.”
In Wales the ethnic disparity was 2.8 times for ethnic minorities, and virtually identical for black people.
The report’s co-author Prof Susan McVie said: “There was not a single force area that did not have a higher disparity rate for ethnic minority groups.”
Surely this lacks context? What is the rate of issuing fines for exhibiting the same behaviour? I.e. if two white people were sat closer than 2 m on a bench what was the chance of getting a fine vs the same situation for two people of colour? Otherwise what are we measuring? Its not impossible that certain sectors ignored rules and regs more than others.*
*Members of the government for one.
I don't really agree with (my understanding of) your statement (that ethnic group is likely to predict breaching of Covid rules?) as I don't see why that would be likely to be true. I mean, split a population any way and there will be differences, but I find it hard to believe it's a strong predictor in every force area.
But there is a need, in this type of analysis, to consider some other factors, such as rural/urban split, age group etc. Much less likely to get your collar felt out in the sticks, I would guess, than in the city. Also I would have thought that younger people, out and about (particularly those living with parents, meeting up elsewhere, students etc) would be more likely to be caught than older people. Rural/urban correlates with ethnic group and so does age, to some extent. I would hazard a guess that more white people per 10k white people than black people/10k black people get convicted of driving tractors while under the influence of alcohol, for example, but I wouldn't assume that white tractor drivers are more drunk than black tractor drivers.
That said, it would be no great surprise if the police were treating people from different ethnic groups differently. With differences also likely by age and social class.
Yep, I think I didn't write very clearly. Someone else has suggested an urban vs rural split, which would favour more ethnic groups being fined. This is why the data lacks context.
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
PART 2: “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review"
A systematic review is a review that's done systematically (duh). But the term is more properly used for a review adhering to certain predefined standards. Those standards are various and include things like a Cochrane review, which is very formal and precise and lengthy. They may be augmented by things like PRISMA standards and others[1]. But a person who does a review may not use all the Cochrane steps, instead just one or two, and omit some of the safeguards (independent reviews being the obvious one). there is consequently a sliding scale between a full review, a good-faith attempt by a small team to do some of the steps, a poor-faith attempt by a individual to do some of the steps (and messing it up), a bad-faith attempt by malevolent actors to omit steps deliberately, and a good faith attempt that is totally fucked-up. And it is difficult to distinguish these
[1] I don't know if CONSORT applies so I'll just throw it in and hope
Black people were three times more likely to receive Covid fines in England and Wales
Exclusive: those in poorest areas were seven times more likely to be fined, says research into how police used emergency pandemic powers
Fines during the pandemic were three times more likely to be given to black people and seven times more likely to be issued in the poorest areas, research commissioned for Britain’s police chiefs has revealed.
The study covering England and Wales showed racial disparity for every single force. In one area, ethnic minorities were up to eight times more likely to be fined. It presents further evidence of ethnic disparity in the use of police powers. Most forces deny they are institutionally racist, as does the government.
The report was commissioned by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and conducted by academics at the University of Edinburgh. The NPPC did not publish the findings, to the surprise of those who produced it....
..The study looked at the period from 27 March 2020 to 31 May 2021, when 122,506 fines were issued. In England, ethnic minority people were on average more than twice as likely than white people to be fined, with the rate even higher for black people. .
The study said: “In England, the rate of FPNs per 10,000 people from an ethnic minority background was 46.1, compared to 19.9 for white individuals, reflecting an ethnic disparity rate of 2.3.
“The ethnic disparity rate in England was highest for people from a black ethnic background, who were 3.2 times more likely to be issued with an FPN.”
In Wales the ethnic disparity was 2.8 times for ethnic minorities, and virtually identical for black people.
The report’s co-author Prof Susan McVie said: “There was not a single force area that did not have a higher disparity rate for ethnic minority groups.”
If they were seven times more likely to be given in the poorest areas, the fact that black people were only three times more likely to be fined suggests that adjusting for social class, black people were probably no more fined than anyone else, I think - i.e. any racial disparity is simply a product of social disparity. Which may be a problem of poor people being less able to cheerfully work from home and take their exercise on their lawn.
I would really hope these are odds ratios from a mutivariable regression, not bivariable comparisons.
Otherwise, fairly nonsensical, as you say.
ETA: Aargh! They do seem to be simply dividing the number of people fined (or fines) by the number of people in a group. So while the numbers are indeed numbers, interpretation needs a hell of a lot of caution, preferably running from the room shouting "I want nothing to do with this until you get someone with stats knowledge on board" Report: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/edinburghlawschool/wp-content/uploads/sites/8261/2023/03/NPCC-Report-March-2023-final-1.pdf
AETA: Shame, as this would actually be fascinating if confounders were taken into account.
Black people were three times more likely to receive Covid fines in England and Wales
Exclusive: those in poorest areas were seven times more likely to be fined, says research into how police used emergency pandemic powers
Fines during the pandemic were three times more likely to be given to black people and seven times more likely to be issued in the poorest areas, research commissioned for Britain’s police chiefs has revealed.
The study covering England and Wales showed racial disparity for every single force. In one area, ethnic minorities were up to eight times more likely to be fined. It presents further evidence of ethnic disparity in the use of police powers. Most forces deny they are institutionally racist, as does the government.
The report was commissioned by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and conducted by academics at the University of Edinburgh. The NPPC did not publish the findings, to the surprise of those who produced it....
..The study looked at the period from 27 March 2020 to 31 May 2021, when 122,506 fines were issued. In England, ethnic minority people were on average more than twice as likely than white people to be fined, with the rate even higher for black people. .
The study said: “In England, the rate of FPNs per 10,000 people from an ethnic minority background was 46.1, compared to 19.9 for white individuals, reflecting an ethnic disparity rate of 2.3.
“The ethnic disparity rate in England was highest for people from a black ethnic background, who were 3.2 times more likely to be issued with an FPN.”
In Wales the ethnic disparity was 2.8 times for ethnic minorities, and virtually identical for black people.
The report’s co-author Prof Susan McVie said: “There was not a single force area that did not have a higher disparity rate for ethnic minority groups.”
Isn't this along the same lines of ethnic minorities are more likely to get COVID type stories. When the reality is to do with location / jobs.
PC Plod isn't heading out into the sticks to check if Riz Possnett of this world are keeping their social distant at their Cotwolds second home, they are in towns and cities, particularly big densely populated cities like London, where they wandered around nabbing people having parties in town blocks etc. And ethnic minorities are far more likely a) to live there and b) be doing jobs where they have to be out and about, c) don't own a car, so will be out on foot / public transport.
As an aside, I don't know if anyone's noticed, but the European natural gas situation continues to improve.
Prices are now heading towards the €20/MWh basis, and storage is so full that it is looking like day ahead prices might actually go negative on sunny days in the Summer*.
This is exceptionally good news for UK gas and electricity prices next year.
It's also a sign of what an incredible failure Putin's energy blackmail was. Europe's gas and electricity prices are going to be back where they were before the supplies were cut off, the only difference is that Russia won't be getting a penny of natural gas pipeline export revenue.
* Prices can go negative when there's an LNG cargo or two arriving, demand is modest, and storage is full.
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
I have a friend who is distinctly rotund. But he also runs marathons - in his late 40s - in 3h30, and cycles upwards of 150 miles every week.
This brings us back to where we started. Johnson is overweight because he is muscular and muscle mass is heavier than fat.
It would suggest your friend is much like the PB fanboi analysis of Johnson, muscular and super fit, as opposed to "fat".
At 61 I look reasonably slim (by its broadest definition) for my age, but I don't do enough exercise, my diet is s**te, I have that dangerous visceral fat around my midriff and although I don't smoke, need a fag after running for the train . I am the opposite of your friend and according to his PB fanbois, Johnson.
I fear this covid inquiry is going to be a massive ****-up. Too many people have already made up their minds either way, and will spend months and years examining in minute details decisions that ministers and others had hours or days to reach on imperfect data.
And whilst it will be used as a way to get at those who had to make decisions (rightly or wrongly), it will end up doing f-all to what we need it to do: to ensure we can improve our decision-making process if faced with such a situation in the future.
Yes. I think the problem is how on earth is a government supposed to speak to each other informally and off the record if things like WhatsApp are going to be examined in this way. In times past most of such conversations would have been on the phone or in person but now there is an electronic trail that can be followed to see what Ministers "really" thought.
My guess is that there will be a lot of sarcasm, black humour, raw politics, profound ignorance and idiotic questions in this material. I can fully see why there is some apprehension about this going to an independent inquiry and depending on them to redact the embarrassing but irrelevant stuff.
One consequence of this is that government communications will lose some of the efficiencies that come with more modern technologies as they revert to less recoverable methods of speaking to each other.
If you were prosecuting senior figures in an imaginary political party in Scotland, say for example, massive financial impropriety, wouldn't you as prosecutor expect to see all channels of communication that bolster your case to have been reviewed? You would ignore the gossip and tittle tattle, but be more than interested in the "I've syphoned off the cash I need to buy the motor cruiser (to exclusively use for party events) and it's squirrelled away in my sock drawer".
Now I understand my scenario is pure fiction but you can understand why I am suggesting viewing the electronic "paper" trail is pertinent to any review of facts. Perhaps logging events on WhatsApp isn't ideal as a tool of government.
I bet Rishi wishes he had a Lady Dorrian in charge who would exclude loads of WhatsApp and email messages suggesting semi-official conspiracies and shady groupings.
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Its a really famous crossfit WoD....its an absolute bastard.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
PART 3: “where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published"
In the corner there are stacks of papers. You pick them up and extract a certain datum and sets of datums (ouch) from them. You build a model on those datums and produce a new datum. You submit it for publication.
Now you are the peer reviewer. You need to check this. You check to see if the papers exist. There will probably have been some quality assessment, but it's kind of subjective. they mention a model but don't give the params, they mention calcs but dont give screenshots. The result produces a new datum but the original range was very wide. Is hypothesizing a single output datum valid at all? What happens if the underlying values were from different populations. The online calculator they used has vanished. Aaargh!
The further away you get from a patient, the more tenuous the conclusion. metaanalyses just magnify this and they are difficult to check ("show me your model, goddammit).
As an aside, I don't know if anyone's noticed, but the European natural gas situation continues to improve.
Prices are now heading towards the €20/MWh basis, and storage is so full that it is looking like day ahead prices might actually go negative on sunny days in the Summer*.
This is exceptionally good news for UK gas and electricity prices next year.
It's also a sign of what an incredible failure Putin's energy blackmail was. Europe's gas and electricity prices are going to be back where they were before the supplies were cut off, the only difference is that Russia won't be getting a penny of natural gas pipeline export revenue.
* Prices can go negative when there's an LNG cargo or two arriving, demand is modest, and storage is full.
Yes, I have been watching this. It should be a very nice windfall in provision for the Treasury when the cost of "further support" on gas prices is going to come in at next to nothing. Of course a sensible Treasury would bank this against other contingencies like higher gilt rates or inflationary wage settlements but since there is an election coming up...
As an aside, I don't know if anyone's noticed, but the European natural gas situation continues to improve.
Prices are now heading towards the €20/MWh basis, and storage is so full that it is looking like day ahead prices might actually go negative on sunny days in the Summer*.
This is exceptionally good news for UK gas and electricity prices next year.
It's also a sign of what an incredible failure Putin's energy blackmail was. Europe's gas and electricity prices are going to be back where they were before the supplies were cut off, the only difference is that Russia won't be getting a penny of natural gas pipeline export revenue.
* Prices can go negative when there's an LNG cargo or two arriving, demand is modest, and storage is full.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
All these geniuses coming out and saying "I never would have done it if I hadn't been so clueless" is one of the more bizarre phenomena of modern life.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Isn't this rather a common occurrence among academics who get hailed as the top of their field, then the field moves on rapidly bypassing them. Einstein spent half his life trying to do down lots of other academics who had the cheek to possibly suggest other theories and very worried about dangers of what was being undertaken.
Hinton (another one of the "godfathers") until his recent retirement had been ploughing the field of totally new architectures of NNs, because he believed the back-prop auto-diff that all modern NN utilise could never produce the level of models required.
Yann LeCun (the third godfather) appears to spend a huge amount of time these days trying to prove that LLM are actually dumb and that again all these models won't actually work and that people are barking up the wrong tree.
Its got to really hurt when you go from the top to claiming that we have reached impasse with current models and they are the great thinkers to come up with new models, only to find a fairly simple trick has allowed a massive leap forward.
Talking of famed beauties, Today I Learned that the Russians did a genocide on the Circassians (a north Caucasian tribe renowned for their beauty - esp the women)
It was said of the Circassians that had they not supplied thousands of girls to Egyptian kings and sultans as concubines, then the Egyptian regime would have died out, due to native Egyptian women being too ugly. Seems a bit harsh on the Egyptians
...which in turn leads into problems in interpreting large masses of publicly accessible and updatable data. In a field where any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study, where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published, where more and more papers are more and more distanced from the actual patients, where even honest analyses are done using black boxes sourced from elsewhere, where even the definition of a "study" is moot, checking and visualising this will take years.
How is it that “any interest group can publish a paper and call it a study” or “where anybody can do a review and call it a systematic review, where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published”? You’re not going to get anything published without it going through peer review.
PART 3: “where anybody can do a metaanalysis and get it published"
In the corner there are stacks of papers. You pick them up and extract a certain datum and sets of datums (ouch) from them. You build a model on those datums and produce a new datum. You submit it for publication.
Now you are the peer reviewer. You need to check this. You check to see if the papers exist. There will probably have been some quality assessment, but it's kind of subjective. they mention a model but don't give the params, they mention calcs but dont give screenshots. The result produces a new datum but the original range was very wide. Is hypothesizing a single output datum valid at all? What happens if the underlying values were from different populations. The online calculator they used has vanished. Aaargh!
The further away you get from a patient, the more tenuous the conclusion. metaanalyses just magnify this and they are difficult to check ("show me your model, goddammit).
When I review a meta analysis, if there isn't sufficient data in the paper to enable me to replicate it then I'll be raising that as an issue.
I don't actually replicate it (unless it looks from eyeballing e.g. the forest plot) that they've cocked up, but I require it to be there.
Of course, I'm obviously an above average peer reviewer
There clearly are crap reviews, but the thing about reviews that gain any traction is that the authors of papers in the field check (a) is their paper included (and if not, why not) and (b) has it had the results correctly extracted and treated, quality assessed fairly etc.
I know this, as I and colleagues have been harassed contacted more than once by authors whose papers were/were not included in reviews we've authored.
Bad reviews exist, for sure. But I agree with bondegezou that health authorities here (at least) are capable of assessing them and commissioning/doing their own if required.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Isn't this rather a common occurrence among academics who get hailed as the top of their field, then the field moves on rapidly bypassing them. Einstein spent half his life trying to do down lots of other academics who had the cheek to possibly suggest other theories and very worried about dangers of what was being undertaken.
Hinton (another one of the "godfathers") until his recent retirement had been ploughing the field of totally new architectures of NNs, because he believed the back-prop auto-diff that all modern NN utilise could never produce the level of models required.
Yann LeCun (the third godfather) appears to spend a huge amount of time these days trying to prove that LLM are actually dumb and that again all these models won't actually work and that people are barking up the wrong tree.
I am hoping that Ben Goertzel was right when he characterised it as the wrong tree in the wrong forest on the wrong continent.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Isn't this rather a common occurrence among academics who get hailed as the top of their field, then the field moves on rapidly bypassing them. Einstein spent half his life trying to do down lots of other academics who had the cheek to possibly suggest other theories and very worried about dangers of what was being undertaken.
Hinton (another one of the "godfathers") until his recent retirement had been ploughing the field of totally new architectures of NNs, because he believed the back-prop auto-diff that all modern NN utilise could never produce the level of models required.
Yann LeCun (the third godfather) appears to spend a huge amount of time these days trying to prove that LLM are actually dumb and that again all these models won't actually work and that people are barking up the wrong tree.
I am hoping that Ben Goertzel was right when he characterised it as the wrong tree in the wrong forest on the wrong continent.
I don't think it really matters if LLM aren't the solution to AGI*, they are powerful enough to cause significant disruption to jobs across pretty much every industry. The same way as machines in the industrial revolution are nothing like the machines used today for the same processes, but they were a large enough leap forward to disturb everything.
* and I don't think the people in the know really think they are (despite what they might be saying). They are instead playing politics to get ahead of politicians and inevitable regulations.
I think what has taken aback a lot of people is ML models were getting more and more complicated 2010-2020, then in the past 2-3 years we have incredible improvements using very simple ML models (some of which have been about from the very earliest days) but quite a change in what function they are being asked to learn.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Isn't this rather a common occurrence among academics who get hailed as the top of their field, then the field moves on rapidly bypassing them. Einstein spent half his life trying to do down lots of other academics who had the cheek to possibly suggest other theories and very worried about dangers of what was being undertaken.
Hinton (another one of the "godfathers") until his recent retirement had been ploughing the field of totally new architectures of NNs, because he believed the back-prop auto-diff that all modern NN utilise could never produce the level of models required.
Yann LeCun (the third godfather) appears to spend a huge amount of time these days trying to prove that LLM are actually dumb and that again all these models won't actually work and that people are barking up the wrong tree.
I am hoping that Ben Goertzel was right when he characterised it as the wrong tree in the wrong forest on the wrong continent.
I don't know much about the issue, which won't stop me spouting off on PB about it, naturally. However from what I've seen LLM are a bit of a dead end for serious academic use - the limitations become clear when it tries to generate references to the material it discusses, and just produces things that look like references, but are not. This has been seen in a legal case, I believe. I'm not sure LLM will overcome this.
I'm also not sure the LLM is a valid model for AGI in any case, but as I say, I know little about this...
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Isn't this rather a common occurrence among academics who get hailed as the top of their field, then the field moves on rapidly bypassing them. Einstein spent half his life trying to do down lots of other academics who had the cheek to possibly suggest other theories and very worried about dangers of what was being undertaken.
Hinton (another one of the "godfathers") until his recent retirement had been ploughing the field of totally new architectures of NNs, because he believed the back-prop auto-diff that all modern NN utilise could never produce the level of models required.
Yann LeCun (the third godfather) appears to spend a huge amount of time these days trying to prove that LLM are actually dumb and that again all these models won't actually work and that people are barking up the wrong tree.
I am hoping that Ben Goertzel was right when he characterised it as the wrong tree in the wrong forest on the wrong continent.
I don't think it really matters if LLM aren't the solution to AGI*, they are powerful enough to cause significant disruption to jobs across pretty much every industry.
But that's _probably_ the distinction that's relevant to the concerns about human extinction.
As an aside, I don't know if anyone's noticed, but the European natural gas situation continues to improve.
Prices are now heading towards the €20/MWh basis, and storage is so full that it is looking like day ahead prices might actually go negative on sunny days in the Summer*.
This is exceptionally good news for UK gas and electricity prices next year.
It's also a sign of what an incredible failure Putin's energy blackmail was. Europe's gas and electricity prices are going to be back where they were before the supplies were cut off, the only difference is that Russia won't be getting a penny of natural gas pipeline export revenue.
* Prices can go negative when there's an LNG cargo or two arriving, demand is modest, and storage is full.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Isn't this rather a common occurrence among academics who get hailed as the top of their field, then the field moves on rapidly bypassing them. Einstein spent half his life trying to do down lots of other academics who had the cheek to possibly suggest other theories and very worried about dangers of what was being undertaken.
Hinton (another one of the "godfathers") until his recent retirement had been ploughing the field of totally new architectures of NNs, because he believed the back-prop auto-diff that all modern NN utilise could never produce the level of models required.
Yann LeCun (the third godfather) appears to spend a huge amount of time these days trying to prove that LLM are actually dumb and that again all these models won't actually work and that people are barking up the wrong tree.
I am hoping that Ben Goertzel was right when he characterised it as the wrong tree in the wrong forest on the wrong continent.
I don't know much about the issue, which won't stop me spouting off on PB about it, naturally. However from what I've seen LLM are a bit of a dead end for serious academic use - the limitations become clear when it tries to generate references to the material it discusses, and just produces things that look like references, but are not. This has been seen in a legal case, I believe. I'm not sure LLM will overcome this.
I'm also not sure the LLM is a valid model for AGI in any case, but as I say, I know little about this...
Andrej Karpathy gave a good talk about LLM last week, including what I don't think people really realise about how they change when you start to fine tune and how people aren't really thinking about them correctly.
Talking of famed beauties, Today I Learned that the Russians did a genocide on the Circassians (a north Caucasian tribe renowned for their beauty - esp the women)
It was said of the Circassians that had they not supplied thousands of girls to Egyptian kings and sultans as concubines, then the Egyptian regime would have died out, due to native Egyptian women being too ugly. Seems a bit harsh on the Egyptians
Circassians, especially the beautiful girls, were often sold as slaves well into the post-mediaeval period - see for example the wonderful Datini papers:
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
If the spokesperson is to be believed*, then that is fascinating. Suggests it is the current PM, or someone very close who is nervous of their contents...Boris is done for. Maybe he'll take someone with him?
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Disingenuous. He was one of the, what, 100 people in the world best placed to assess the pace? He may have got it badly wrong, or he may have realised that developing it leads to academic superstardom, urging caution does not. Now he is a mafia godfather retiring from a life of crime to "make his soul".
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Disingenuous. He was one of the, what, 100 people in the world best placed to assess the pace? He may have got it badly wrong, or he may have realised that developing it leads to academic superstardom, urging caution does not. Now he is a mafia godfather retiring from a life of crime to "make his soul".
Geoffrey Hinton gave a talk last week at Cambridge, he was totally out of the loop of what state of the art is. He admitted he hadn't even really considered a lot of what people were working on until very recently, because he believed it was a totally flawed endeavour and a completely new architecture was required.
Bad reviews exist, for sure. But I agree with bondegezou that health authorities here (at least) are capable of assessing them and commissioning/doing their own if required.
The ones I am more familiar with are the private ones. The teams doing them tend to be smaller: small groups, individuals. They're keen, they're experts in their field, but small teams aren't independent of each other and they reinforce themselves. Also now they've gotten their hands on statistical software you can't stop them, producing models willy-nilly ("The test you did doesn't work! BUT I DID 200,000 ITERATIONS. The test requires that the residuals are normally distributed and they aren't! BUT I DID 200,000 ITERATIONS!!! Oh, for fuck's sake..."). So although you are correct (by defintion) that UK health authorities are nominally capable of assessing and commissioning, I think our actual capacity to review and assess is deteriorating over time.
Talking of famed beauties, Today I Learned that the Russians did a genocide on the Circassians (a north Caucasian tribe renowned for their beauty - esp the women)
It was said of the Circassians that had they not supplied thousands of girls to Egyptian kings and sultans as concubines, then the Egyptian regime would have died out, due to native Egyptian women being too ugly. Seems a bit harsh on the Egyptians
Circassians, especially the beautiful girls, were often sold as slaves well into the post-mediaeval period - see for example the wonderful Datini papers:
If you look at photos of "modern" Circassian girls, you do get an echo of what everyone raved about. Some are blonde or red haired, but most have lush dark hair BUT very pale skin with blue or green eyes. And fine bone structure
Quite an intoxicating mix
When I was in the Caucasus last year I was struck by how unbeautiful Georgian girls are (sorry to be ungallant, but there it is). I was expecting Circassians, I did not get that
The women in neighbouring Armenia are sensational in comparison. I wonder how much of the Armenian genocide was driven by sexual envy (Cf Circassia, Rwanda and anti-Chinese pogroms in Java)
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
I have a friend who is distinctly rotund. But he also runs marathons - in his late 40s - in 3h30, and cycles upwards of 150 miles every week.
This brings us back to where we started. Johnson is overweight because he is muscular and muscle mass is heavier than fat.
It would suggest your friend is much like the PB fanboi analysis of Johnson, muscular and super fit, as opposed to "fat".
At 61 I look reasonably slim (by its broadest definition) for my age, but I don't do enough exercise, my diet is s**te, I have that dangerous visceral fat around my midriff and although I don't smoke, need a fag after running for the train . I am the opposite of your friend and according to his PB fanbois, Johnson.
Re AI. Caught a 9 year old using it to do classwork last week. Took it to the Deputy Head. She'd never heard of it. Consulted the media team as to why it hadn't been blocked. They "thought it might be very useful!" The 9 year old obviously agreed... Finally got it blocked as me and my boss patiently explained to a frankly gobsmacked Senior Leadership Team just what it was capable of.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
If the spokesperson is to be believed*, then that is fascinating. Suggests it is the current PM, or someone very close who is nervous of their contents...Boris is done for. Maybe he'll take someone with him?
As an aside, I don't know if anyone's noticed, but the European natural gas situation continues to improve.
Prices are now heading towards the €20/MWh basis, and storage is so full that it is looking like day ahead prices might actually go negative on sunny days in the Summer*.
This is exceptionally good news for UK gas and electricity prices next year.
It's also a sign of what an incredible failure Putin's energy blackmail was. Europe's gas and electricity prices are going to be back where they were before the supplies were cut off, the only difference is that Russia won't be getting a penny of natural gas pipeline export revenue.
* Prices can go negative when there's an LNG cargo or two arriving, demand is modest, and storage is full.
Can someone explain the contradiction here?!
There is no contradiction.
Natural gas prices dropped from north of €300/MWh last August/Sept, to €100-150 in late Autumn, to €50 through much of the Spring, to around €24 yesterday.
They then jumped 12% in a day.
But that jump took them all the way back to where they were... ooohhh... last Friday. Since the beginning of May, prices have fallen almost 40%.
Are the risks worth us continually feeding it data?
Seems to me an assumption everyone’s making is that the benefit to society - and the economy - in terms of efficiency etc is worth the risks.
Is that so?
Maybe it’ll take some catastrophe before we conclude that banning the sensor and turning off the internet is the best option.
Or just very heavily regulate it.
If it really is like the atom bomb, then a tech-npt may be where we end up.
Hmm.
Trouble is, I just can't see the corporations stopping development of AI, no matter what they say in public, or sign up to
The first tech megacorp to reach AGI will wipe out its competitors
This is even truer of nations. Will America really voluntarily cease development of AGI, just trusting the Chinese to do the same? This isn't like nukes when you can monitor things, to an extent. This can all be done in small rooms with computers, you cannot check
The military potential of AGI is world changing. The West cannot afford to let China seize a crucial lead, but nor can China do the same in return
We are hurtling towards Real AGI whether we like it or not.
Re AI. Caught a 9 year old using it to do classwork last week. Took it to the Deputy Head. She'd never heard of it. Consulted the media team as to why it hadn't been blocked. They "thought it might be very useful!" The 9 year old obviously agreed... Finally got it blocked as me and my boss patiently explained to a frankly gobsmacked Senior Leadership Team just what it was capable of.
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
I disagree. I'm 16 stone and in the past week I've done an 11 mile circuit taking in the Old Man of Coniston, cycled 60 miles and had a productive session in a climbing centre. I don't run much any more after my knee operation, but I'm pretty fit. I carry a bit of timber - I always have done, and I've probably put on a stone and a half since turning 18 30 years ago, but I'm still pretty fit.
I'm 6'2" and 93 kg (14st9lb). According to the NHS BMI calculator, I'm classed as overweight, and to be a 'healthy' weight I'd have to lose 5kg.
On Monday I ran a marathon distance and walked another two or three miles on top of that. Yesterday, I walked about fifteen miles, then went for a swim at a lanes session for the first time in decades. I managed 525 metres with no problem. Today I'm at 20,000 steps, despite having driven for four hours to get home.
BMI - and its concept of 'overweight' is a very, very loose measure, and I fear it causes a lot of heartache. It can be useful - but only with care.
And according to Garmin, my VO2 max is 43 (good), and my fitness age is 28. I am actually 50.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
I wonder how Mr Brand keeps getting all these stories?
He must have an excellent source....
Seems it is a press release and Sky just led on it
Sky suggesting civil servants are very concerned about the whats app messages compromising them but as I said earlier it is upto the judge to dismiss the irrelevant
It is politics of course that some suggest Sunak is wanting to hide something but from the Sky report it seems it is more likely the cabinet office itself
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
The enquiry is taking evidence over the next 3 years and then has to compile the report which may be available in 2007 or 2008
All the main players including Johnson, Sunak, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster will be long gone
Penny will only win the leadership after the next GE in October 24 as Wallace wants the NATO position
Why do women find Boris sexy, is the question I can see no answer to?
He's rich and powerful. There's a Kissinger quote about it.
Kissinger, though, was interesting, intelligent, and witty.
Arguably Boris is all of those three. Unfortunately he is also physically repellent, lazy, continously unfaithful, ungroomed, bad-teethed, and a liar. The only thing that gets him laid is the cash and the power.
I would imagine it starts with feeling a bit sorry for him, and then finding him a bit funny, and before they know it they're dreaming of being the woman who turned the unkempt frog into the Prince.
If you're meeting in person - and sometimes not even then - shortcomings in physical appearance can be overcome quite easily. Confidence is key - and Boris has that.
"Wilkes was notoriously ugly, being called the ugliest man in England at the time. He possessed an unsightly squint and protruding jaw, but he had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it "took him only half an hour to talk away his face", though the duration required changed on the several occasions Wilkes repeated the claim. He also declared that "a month's start of his rival on account of his face" would secure him the conquest in any love affair.
He was well known for his verbal wit and his snappy responses to insults. For instance, when told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: "Naturally." He then added: "And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?"
Boris is funny and rich. That'll do for a lot of women. Power helps, too
I am sure it works for some, while quite a large number would recognise him for what he is - an extremely overweight bullshitting twat
It is all muscle.
I'm now nostalgic for the Johnson/muscle-to-fat threads...
There seems to be a Twitter belief that he wasn't ever that ill with covid. I have no way of knowing, but I think he was probably ill enough to need oxygen, which in my eyes is pretty ill. Not sure why some refuse to belief that he could have been properly ill.
I am feeling your love for Johnson.
It has never dawned on me to doubt Johnson was knocking on Heaven's door during COVID. In fact he was so cavalier I would have been more doubtful if he claimed to never have caught COVID.
Nonetheless as someone of a similar age to Johnson, I can tell the difference between fat and muscle. Johnson is thus certified (by me) as dangerously obese. The seriously obese were also susceptible to dangerous COVID symptom elevation.
If merely sloth and gluttony were Johnson's only deadly sins.
I have no love for Johnson. He is also clearly carrying rather a lot of fat. Much debate in recent years over the possibility of being fat and fit, but the outcome seems to be, you can be relatively fit whilst overweight, but you would always be better off if you lost the weight as well.
"You can be relatively fit whilst overweight".
"Fat and fit" is an oxymoron.
I disagree. I'm 16 stone and in the past week I've done an 11 mile circuit taking in the Old Man of Coniston, cycled 60 miles and had a productive session in a climbing centre. I don't run much any more after my knee operation, but I'm pretty fit. I carry a bit of timber - I always have done, and I've probably put on a stone and a half since turning 18 30 years ago, but I'm still pretty fit.
I'm 6'2" and 93 kg (14st9lb). According to the NHS BMI calculator, I'm classed as overweight, and to be a 'healthy' weight I'd have to lose 5kg.
On Monday I ran a marathon distance and walked another two or three miles on top of that. Yesterday, I walked about fifteen miles, then went for a swim at a lanes session for the first time in decades. I managed 525 metres with no problem. Today I'm at 20,000 steps, despite having driven for four hours to get home.
BMI - and its concept of 'overweight' is a very, very loose measure, and I fear it causes a lot of heartache. It can be useful - but only with care.
And according to Garmin, my VO2 max is 43 (good), and my fitness age is 28. I am actually 50.
Yet I am classed as overweight...
As are almost all professional rugby players of both codes.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
I wonder how Mr Brand keeps getting all these stories?
He must have an excellent source....
Seems it is a press release and Sky just led on it
Sky suggesting civil servants are very concerned about the whats app messages compromising them but as I said earlier it is upto the judge to dismiss the irrelevant
It is politics of course that some suggest Sunak is wanting to hide something but from the Sky report it seems it is more likely the cabinet office itself
Given what came out of the “Parties” enquiry, it would be expected for the civil servants to be nervous about their communications being made public.
"AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
Disingenuous. He was one of the, what, 100 people in the world best placed to assess the pace? He may have got it badly wrong, or he may have realised that developing it leads to academic superstardom, urging caution does not. Now he is a mafia godfather retiring from a life of crime to "make his soul".
Geoffrey Hinton gave a talk last week at Cambridge, he was totally out of the loop of what state of the art is. He admitted he hadn't even really considered a lot of what people were working on until very recently, because he believed it was a totally flawed endeavour and a completely new architecture was required.
The number of unforced errors and own goals scored by Starmer is mounting up now, in my opinion - Sue Gray, Dale Vince, no new contracts in North Sea, no new money for NHS - if this was the frenzy of a general election campaign right now, Labour would be getting shredded in the media narrative.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
I wonder how Mr Brand keeps getting all these stories?
He must have an excellent source....
Seems it is a press release and Sky just led on it
Sky suggesting civil servants are very concerned about the whats app messages compromising them but as I said earlier it is upto the judge to dismiss the irrelevant
It is politics of course that some suggest Sunak is wanting to hide something but from the Sky report it seems it is more likely the cabinet office itself
Given what came out of the “Parties” enquiry, it would be expected for the civil servants to be nervous about their communications being made public.
It will be interesting how their union reacts to the disclosures
Re AI. Caught a 9 year old using it to do classwork last week. Took it to the Deputy Head. She'd never heard of it. Consulted the media team as to why it hadn't been blocked. They "thought it might be very useful!" The 9 year old obviously agreed... Finally got it blocked as me and my boss patiently explained to a frankly gobsmacked Senior Leadership Team just what it was capable of.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
The enquiry is taking evidence over the next 3 years and then has to compile the report which may be available in 2007 or 2008
All the main players including Johnson, Sunak, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster will be long gone
Penny will only win the leadership after the next GE in October 24 as Wallace wants the NATO position
No Big G, you are missing something here. Whatever Sunak is going to such lengths to hide is going to become public knowledge soon.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
Sunak actually polls better than his party, especially with under 50s and urban professionals.
Mordaunt is too woke for the party membership as leader.
I doubt the whatsapp messages will make the slightest difference to Sunak's position, indeed Tory and RefUK voters think we locked down too early and too long if anything
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
The enquiry is taking evidence over the next 3 years and then has to compile the report which may be available in 2007 or 2008
All the main players including Johnson, Sunak, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster will be long gone
Penny will only win the leadership after the next GE in October 24 as Wallace wants the NATO position
No Big G, you are missing something here. Whatever Sunak is going to such lengths to hide is going to become public knowledge soon.
Anyone breaching the confidentiality of a judge led public enquiry is going to be in serious trouble
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
The Post Office is finally paying compensation to the thousands of postmasters who it falsely accused of theft in the 2000s. 90% of these postmasters don’t have legal representation, and many believe they were pushed into accepting settlement offers that were insultingly low.
We can reveal today that the Post Office falsely asserted that its settlement offers were confidential. They weren’t. But that falsehood intimidated postmasters into not comparing offers with each other, not speaking to friends and family, and not going public. 90% never even spoke to a lawyer.
And yet plain fat lasses (speaking as someone who would never win an award for Sylph-Like Beauty of the Year) do manage to acquire wonderful lovers and handsome husbands. So I will put it down to extensive legal knowledge then ..... not my creamy Irish skin and dark hair.
You win the 2023 PB title of Excessively Modest Poster of the Year (previous holder TSE.)
I have seen a photo of cyclefree and she is pretty fine indeed; certainly neither plain nor fat. But her point stands nevertheless. Personality is way more important, especially if you are intending to spend any particular time with the woman. Give me an ugly woman who is a joy to be around over a beauty who is a pain in the arse.
And I would suggest the evidence that men are particularly choosy if there is a woman who is indicating she might put out, is scant.
And also, some of us quite like a fat lass.
Based upon the ugliness, boorishness and lack of means of many fathers I think that while beauty, charm and wealth are all worth having, they are by no means an absolute requirement to perpetuate the species.
The Post Office is finally paying compensation to the thousands of postmasters who it falsely accused of theft in the 2000s. 90% of these postmasters don’t have legal representation, and many believe they were pushed into accepting settlement offers that were insultingly low.
We can reveal today that the Post Office falsely asserted that its settlement offers were confidential. They weren’t. But that falsehood intimidated postmasters into not comparing offers with each other, not speaking to friends and family, and not going public. 90% never even spoke to a lawyer.
The number of unforced errors and own goals scored by Starmer is mounting up now, in my opinion - Sue Gray, Dale Vince, no new contracts in North Sea, no new money for NHS - if this was the frenzy of a general election campaign right now, Labour would be getting shredded in the media narrative.
It's almost as if Starmer would prefer a coalition with the LDs to winning an overall majority.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
Sunak actually polls better than his party, especially with under 50s and urban professionals.
Mordaunt is too woke for the party membership as leader.
I doubt the whatsapp messages will make the slightest difference to Sunak's position, indeed Tory and RefUK voters think we locked down too early and too long if anything
indeed I am more likely to vote for him if he was revealed to be more anti-lockdown.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
Sunak actually polls better than his party, especially with under 50s and urban professionals.
Mordaunt is too woke for the party membership as leader.
I doubt the whatsapp messages will make the slightest difference to Sunak's position, indeed Tory and RefUK voters think we locked down too early and too long if anything
With the benefit of hindsight, which I fully accept was not available at the time and the risks were very difficult to calculate, I think it is far from clear that we should ever have locked down at all. Protected vulnerable groups, certainly. Ensured proper protection for medical and care staff beyond doubt. But closing schools, factories, pubs, restaurants, etc. I think it was a mistake now.
The Post Office is finally paying compensation to the thousands of postmasters who it falsely accused of theft in the 2000s. 90% of these postmasters don’t have legal representation, and many believe they were pushed into accepting settlement offers that were insultingly low.
We can reveal today that the Post Office falsely asserted that its settlement offers were confidential. They weren’t. But that falsehood intimidated postmasters into not comparing offers with each other, not speaking to friends and family, and not going public. 90% never even spoke to a lawyer.
It is, although it's been known for some years that they told each accused person that they were the only one in order to intimidate them into pleading guilty.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
I can see it now:
A Russian bomber is shot down after veering into British airspace. Wallace or Mordaunt get elected unopposed by Tory MPs and immediately start leading in the polls as we prepare for direct engagement in Ukraine.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
Sunak actually polls better than his party, especially with under 50s and urban professionals.
Mordaunt is too woke for the party membership as leader.
I doubt the whatsapp messages will make the slightest difference to Sunak's position, indeed Tory and RefUK voters think we locked down too early and too long if anything
indeed I am more likely to vote for him if he was revealed to be more anti-lockdown.
Given the role he played in EOTHO I think it is safe to assume he was. He may have made some less than tactful comments about setting off the economic damage with a limited number of deaths though.
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
The enquiry is taking evidence over the next 3 years and then has to compile the report which may be available in 2007 or 2008
All the main players including Johnson, Sunak, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster will be long gone
Penny will only win the leadership after the next GE in October 24 as Wallace wants the NATO position
No Big G, you are missing something here. Whatever Sunak is going to such lengths to hide is going to become public knowledge soon.
Anyone breaching the confidentiality of a judge led public enquiry is going to be in serious trouble
You mean a civil service leak?
After this afternoons developments, is it not clearly obvious Boris and his supporters know what is in the WhatsApp’s Sunak is trying to suppress?
BREAKING: Boris Johnson’s spokesperson says all of the former PM’s WhatsApps and notebooks requested by Covid Inquiry have been handed to Cabinet Office in full.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
From a political betting view point, Primeminister Wallace or Mourdant might be close now.
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
Sunak actually polls better than his party, especially with under 50s and urban professionals.
Mordaunt is too woke for the party membership as leader.
I doubt the whatsapp messages will make the slightest difference to Sunak's position, indeed Tory and RefUK voters think we locked down too early and too long if anything
With the benefit of hindsight, which I fully accept was not available at the time and the risks were very difficult to calculate, I think it is far from clear that we should ever have locked down at all. Protected vulnerable groups, certainly. Ensured proper protection for medical and care staff beyond doubt. But closing schools, factories, pubs, restaurants, etc. I think it was a mistake now.
Protected over 70s and vulnerable groups certainly pre vaccine but yes beyond that maybe it did go too far given the economic cost of lost production and extra furlough spending we were left with
Comments
That said, I think Johnson is almost certainly obese. He is heading for serious hypertension and type 2 diabetes if he doesn't have both already
By 46% to 33% the public think it is unlikely the UK will rejoin the EU within the next 20 years
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1663914041922707458?t=u0yQYphDFc5GHl1nmVkXNQ&s=19
But in the context of “analysing data to clarify evidence”, as per above, we know what’s proper peer-reviewed science and what isn’t.
On the other hand, it may be something very small.
Are we sure that the ex-prime minister wasn't sending out pictures of his genitalia to female admirers (possibly in mental health facilities)?
The day after labour pledges to export our emissions to the Qatari's and the Saudi's
SKS fans please explain ?
https://nypost.com/2023/05/30/mark-zuckerberg-marks-memorial-day-with-murph-challenge/
“One of Lt Murphy’s favorite workouts was running a mile, then doing 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, and then running another mile — all while wearing a 20lb weighted pack."
“This year I got it done in 39:58,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Aside from anything else, the EU would take a huge amount of persuasion to have us back.
And I would suggest the evidence that men are particularly choosy if there is a woman who is indicating she might put out, is scant.
And also, some of us quite like a fat lass.
I could easily do the run a mile, stop, run another mile part in under 40 minutes. And that's with me carrying 30 pounds of excess weight around my midriff.
That time is in weeks isn't it?
I would use a phrase like "oh, you sweet summer child", but it's too serious for that. Since WWII journals have gone like this
- A real journal publishes a paper after rigid peer review
- A real journal publishes a paper after some peer review
- A real journal publishes a paper after minimal peer review
You probably already know that. But it gets worse. Journals start to be produced that have no tangible existence, existing only online to publish papers- A nominal journal publishes a paper after minimal peer review
- A nominal journal publishes a paper after no peer review
But then it gets worser. Middlemen start to generate virtual papers and submit them, with the middleman selling the slot to the researcher- A nominal journal publishes a virtual paper by a middleman after minimal peer review
- A nominal journal publishes a virtual paper by a middleman after no peer review
But then it gets worser. The middleman cuts out the researcher and generates the text using an algorithm- A nominal journal publishes an algorithmic paper by a middleman after minimal peer review
- A nominal journal publishes an algorithmic paper by a middleman after no peer review
And that's where we were last year. Where do you think we are now that you can download an AI to your laptop (ish?)Link: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/library/news/library-blog-paper-mills-profits-and-perverse-incentives
See also
Cabanac, G., & Labbé, C. (2021). Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72( 12), 1461– 1476. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24495
But it's not this group that is bearing the brunt of the fighting.
But there is a need, in this type of analysis, to consider some other factors, such as rural/urban split, age group etc. Much less likely to get your collar felt out in the sticks, I would guess, than in the city. Also I would have thought that younger people, out and about (particularly those living with parents, meeting up elsewhere, students etc) would be more likely to be caught than older people. Rural/urban correlates with ethnic group and so does age, to some extent. I would hazard a guess that more white people per 10k white people than black people/10k black people get convicted of driving tractors while under the influence of alcohol, for example, but I wouldn't assume that white tractor drivers are more drunk than black tractor drivers.
That said, it would be no great surprise if the police were treating people from different ethnic groups differently. With differences also likely by age and social class.
You'd need some serious weight training first to do 100 pull ups. Even without a weighted pack.
I doubt your average marathon runner could do it.
Indeed. I doubt most Olympic marathon runners could.
Once you've done that I'm happy to explain - although I'm not really a SKS fan...
A systematic review is a review that's done systematically (duh). But the term is more properly used for a review adhering to certain predefined standards. Those standards are various and include things like a Cochrane review, which is very formal and precise and lengthy. They may be augmented by things like PRISMA standards and others[1]. But a person who does a review may not use all the Cochrane steps, instead just one or two, and omit some of the safeguards (independent reviews being the obvious one). there is consequently a sliding scale between a full review, a good-faith attempt by a small team to do some of the steps, a poor-faith attempt by a individual to do some of the steps (and messing it up), a bad-faith attempt by malevolent actors to omit steps deliberately, and a good faith attempt that is totally fucked-up. And it is difficult to distinguish these
[1] I don't know if CONSORT applies so I'll just throw it in and hope
Otherwise, fairly nonsensical, as you say.
ETA: Aargh! They do seem to be simply dividing the number of people fined (or fines) by the number of people in a group. So while the numbers are indeed numbers, interpretation needs a hell of a lot of caution, preferably running from the room shouting "I want nothing to do with this until you get someone with stats knowledge on board"
Report: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/edinburghlawschool/wp-content/uploads/sites/8261/2023/03/NPCC-Report-March-2023-final-1.pdf
AETA: Shame, as this would actually be fascinating if confounders were taken into account.
PC Plod isn't heading out into the sticks to check if Riz Possnett of this world are keeping their social distant at their Cotwolds second home, they are in towns and cities, particularly big densely populated cities like London, where they wandered around nabbing people having parties in town blocks etc. And ethnic minorities are far more likely a) to live there and b) be doing jobs where they have to be out and about, c) don't own a car, so will be out on foot / public transport.
Prices are now heading towards the €20/MWh basis, and storage is so full that it is looking like day ahead prices might actually go negative on sunny days in the Summer*.
This is exceptionally good news for UK gas and electricity prices next year.
It's also a sign of what an incredible failure Putin's energy blackmail was. Europe's gas and electricity prices are going to be back where they were before the supplies were cut off, the only difference is that Russia won't be getting a penny of natural gas pipeline export revenue.
* Prices can go negative when there's an LNG cargo or two arriving, demand is modest, and storage is full.
It would suggest your friend is much like the PB fanboi analysis of Johnson, muscular and super fit, as opposed to "fat".
At 61 I look reasonably slim (by its broadest definition) for my age, but I don't do enough exercise, my diet is s**te, I have that dangerous visceral fat around my midriff and although I don't smoke, need a fag after running for the train . I am the opposite of your friend and according to his PB fanbois, Johnson.
One of the so-called "godfathers" of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has said he would have prioritised safety over usefulness had he realised the pace at which it would evolve. Prof Yoshua Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65760449
In the corner there are stacks of papers. You pick them up and extract a certain datum and sets of datums (ouch) from them. You build a model on those datums and produce a new datum. You submit it for publication.
Now you are the peer reviewer. You need to check this. You check to see if the papers exist. There will probably have been some quality assessment, but it's kind of subjective. they mention a model but don't give the params, they mention calcs but dont give screenshots. The result produces a new datum but the original range was very wide. Is hypothesizing a single output datum valid at all? What happens if the underlying values were from different populations. The online calculator they used has vanished. Aaargh!
The further away you get from a patient, the more tenuous the conclusion. metaanalyses just magnify this and they are difficult to check ("show me your model, goddammit).
Hinton (another one of the "godfathers") until his recent retirement had been ploughing the field of totally new architectures of NNs, because he believed the back-prop auto-diff that all modern NN utilise could never produce the level of models required.
Yann LeCun (the third godfather) appears to spend a huge amount of time these days trying to prove that LLM are actually dumb and that again all these models won't actually work and that people are barking up the wrong tree.
Its got to really hurt when you go from the top to claiming that we have reached impasse with current models and they are the great thinkers to come up with new models, only to find a fairly simple trick has allowed a massive leap forward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide
It was said of the Circassians that had they not supplied thousands of girls to Egyptian kings and sultans as concubines, then the Egyptian regime would have died out, due to native Egyptian women being too ugly. Seems a bit harsh on the Egyptians
I don't actually replicate it (unless it looks from eyeballing e.g. the forest plot) that they've cocked up, but I require it to be there.
Of course, I'm obviously an above average peer reviewer
There clearly are crap reviews, but the thing about reviews that gain any traction is that the authors of papers in the field check (a) is their paper included (and if not, why not) and (b) has it had the results correctly extracted and treated, quality assessed fairly etc.
I know this, as I and colleagues have been harassed contacted more than once by authors whose papers were/were not included in reviews we've authored.
Bad reviews exist, for sure. But I agree with bondegezou that health authorities here (at least) are capable of assessing them and commissioning/doing their own if required.
One of the most intrinsically interesting parts of the world
* and I don't think the people in the know really think they are (despite what they might be saying). They are instead playing politics to get ahead of politicians and inevitable regulations.
I think what has taken aback a lot of people is ML models were getting more and more complicated 2010-2020, then in the past 2-3 years we have incredible improvements using very simple ML models (some of which have been about from the very earliest days) but quite a change in what function they are being asked to learn.
Now up to Cabinet Office to hand them over to Inquiry or not. Johnson urges them to do so. Deadline 4pm tomorrow.
https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1663934293498908672
I'm also not sure the LLM is a valid model for AGI in any case, but as I say, I know little about this...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Merchant-Prato-Francesco-Medieval-Italian/dp/0140172181
Suggests it is the current PM, or someone very close who is nervous of their contents...Boris is done for. Maybe he'll take someone with him?
*That if is an extremely big one of course.
He must have an excellent source....
Has anyone asked the obvious question?
Are the risks worth us continually feeding it data?
Seems to me an assumption everyone’s making is that the benefit to society - and the economy - in terms of efficiency etc is worth the risks.
Is that so?
Maybe it’ll take some catastrophe before we conclude that banning the sensor and turning off the internet is the best option.
Or just very heavily regulate it.
If it really is like the atom bomb, then a tech-npt may be where we end up.
Hmm.
You're Cornish, right?
Quite an intoxicating mix
When I was in the Caucasus last year I was struck by how unbeautiful Georgian girls are (sorry to be ungallant, but there it is). I was expecting Circassians, I did not get that
The women in neighbouring Armenia are sensational in comparison. I wonder how much of the Armenian genocide was driven by sexual envy (Cf Circassia, Rwanda and anti-Chinese pogroms in Java)
https://twitter.com/EveryDoctorUK/status/1663547526417620993
Caught a 9 year old using it to do classwork last week.
Took it to the Deputy Head. She'd never heard of it.
Consulted the media team as to why it hadn't been blocked. They "thought it might be very useful!"
The 9 year old obviously agreed...
Finally got it blocked as me and my boss patiently explained to a frankly gobsmacked Senior Leadership Team just what it was capable of.
Natural gas prices dropped from north of €300/MWh last August/Sept, to €100-150 in late Autumn, to €50 through much of the Spring, to around €24 yesterday.
They then jumped 12% in a day.
But that jump took them all the way back to where they were... ooohhh... last Friday. Since the beginning of May, prices have fallen almost 40%.
The first tech megacorp to reach AGI will wipe out its competitors
This is even truer of nations. Will America really voluntarily cease development of AGI, just trusting the Chinese to do the same? This isn't like nukes when you can monitor things, to an extent. This can all be done in small rooms with computers, you cannot check
The military potential of AGI is world changing. The West cannot afford to let China seize a crucial lead, but nor can China do the same in return
We are hurtling towards Real AGI whether we like it or not.
Brace
https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/maps/choropleth
On Monday I ran a marathon distance and walked another two or three miles on top of that. Yesterday, I walked about fifteen miles, then went for a swim at a lanes session for the first time in decades. I managed 525 metres with no problem. Today I'm at 20,000 steps, despite having driven for four hours to get home.
BMI - and its concept of 'overweight' is a very, very loose measure, and I fear it causes a lot of heartache. It can be useful - but only with care.
And according to Garmin, my VO2 max is 43 (good), and my fitness age is 28. I am actually 50.
Yet I am classed as overweight...
Sunak might be toast. He is already in a very weak position. With Tories on 28% and slaughtered in the locals - Sunak’s WhatsAppGate could be about to finish him. The second Tory PM this parliament brought down by covid.
A worry for Labour as they clearly have Sunak beaten, sub 200 Tory seats even. But PM Penny might trump Labour appeals for a fresh change.
Penny will come across as more centre ground to voters than the increasingly right wing Starmer front bench.
Sky suggesting civil servants are very concerned about the whats app messages compromising them but as I said earlier it is upto the judge to dismiss the irrelevant
It is politics of course that some suggest Sunak is wanting to hide something but from the Sky report it seems it is more likely the cabinet office itself
Perhaps 6/4
All the main players including Johnson, Sunak, Sturgeon, Drakeford and Foster will be long gone
Penny will only win the leadership after the next GE in October 24 as Wallace wants the NATO position
Seems to be working for me.
Mordaunt is too woke for the party membership as leader.
I doubt the whatsapp messages will make the slightest difference to Sunak's position, indeed Tory and RefUK voters think we locked down too early and too long if anything
The Post Office is finally paying compensation to the thousands of postmasters who it falsely accused of theft in the 2000s. 90% of these postmasters don’t have legal representation, and many believe they were pushed into accepting settlement offers that were insultingly low.
We can reveal today that the Post Office falsely asserted that its settlement offers were confidential. They weren’t. But that falsehood intimidated postmasters into not comparing offers with each other, not speaking to friends and family, and not going public. 90% never even spoke to a lawyer.
https://www.taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/05/30/postoffice_silence/
A Russian bomber is shot down after veering into British airspace. Wallace or Mordaunt get elected unopposed by Tory MPs and immediately start leading in the polls as we prepare for direct engagement in Ukraine.
After this afternoons developments, is it not clearly obvious Boris and his supporters know what is in the WhatsApp’s Sunak is trying to suppress?